Artifact History:
| July '95 | The quest begins. All-nighters with Descent ][ getting a little old, needed something new. |
| Aug. '95 | Programming starts. XPL was the language in use at the time. Biggest question: can Shane make a 3D engine that is fast enough for real-time graphics? Shane learns Assembly language for speed. |
| Oct. '95 | 16 bit XPL gives way to 32 bit XPL. Artifact still more of a "Toy" idea than a serious enterprize. |
| Sept. '95 | Guess what? 32 bit XPL is too slow (can only use one pipe on Pentium chips). Needed something more substantial with a Dos extender. |
| Nov., Dec. '95 | Shane learns C then C++ using the best 32bit Dos compiler: Watcom 10.5., the only real choice for 32bit DOS. |
| Jan. '96 | By this point we had: A reasonable real-time graphics engine: texture mapping, gourad shading and specular highlights. A real-time windowing graphical interface still more dynamic than even Windows NT in several ways. Also, a 3D modeler for generating ships. |
| Feb. ' 96 - Jul, '96 | Further enhancments to the 3D modeler. Minor additions to 3D engine: transparencies, animated bitmaps. Initial versions of a flight engine. Initial experiements with a "Risk" style stratigic engine. |
| Aug. '96 | Shane starts college at CU Boulder. (not much gets done until Descember) |
| Dec, '96 | After four months of not programming, Shane was experiencing withdrawel symptoms. So... months of built up programming energies exploded in December: Major revisions to graphics engine (namely the long saught after: perspective texure mapping and z-buffering). Also, dithering and texture sprites. Major revisions to the 3D modeler. (Shane sometimes wonders weather he is making a 3D modeler for his game or a game for his 3D modeler). |
| Jan. '97 | Focusing back on the game: Customizable ship engine in good form (mid development). Things are looking good. |
| (school starts again mid-January) So far, it looks like Shane will be able to get more done on Artifact this semester. (He estimates that the work he has done during the first week of school is allready more than he got done during the entire first semester) | |
| ~2004 | School ended up consuming all my time and Artifact died. My experience writing Artifact (30k lines of code) together with my schooling suggested to me that programming should be much easier than it is. Hense, at about the time Artifact died, my next major project started, and is still going today: DRef - a programming language redesigned from the ground up to be simple, powerful, and fast. At this point I've been working on DRef full-time for 3+ years in addition to all the design work I've done since '97. -SBD |