I guess I should say something about this because Sky's not exactly around any more to kick my ass for spilling the beans. Epsilon was a hell of a project. Unfortunatly, we had a team of easily distracted graphic artists and only a single programmer (Who happened to be the main graphic artist as well). I dunno, sounds a bit crazy to me. Okay. Where to begin.
I'm sure a few of you know that Skyhawk hosted a hotline server for a LONG time. I was with him from the first days of FBII:Xenocide when he decided to recruit me up until almost the end (the battle of Skyhawk and Chad got pretty heated up there.) I wathced X evolve into Epsilon and then wither and die. (my AIM SN is still xenociddev).
Damn. I'm really having trouble finding the right words here.
I guess I'll start with the graphical side of Epsilon. We made some pretty pictures. Very pretty pictures. We dabbled in almost everything from wacky missile designs to crazy ship ideas. Sky, at one point, even created a ship with a fully modeled cockpit and pilot. Unfortunatly, in my opinion, the design, overall, was utter crap. We did come up with a few great looking ideas and some of them made it into Hazard! (another story. I'll get there in a few).
The programming side of things was handled entirely by Jos Delbar (?) and Skyhawk. Evan, at some point, decided that the EV engine just wasn't good enough. He went out and picked up a copy of the book, "The Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming." Using Jos's(?) Sprite Animation Master , SAM for short, He actually got a working graphics and control engine going. Quite honestly, he did a wonderful job too. He had a basic flight model, asteroids, planets with orbital gravitational pull (It was oh so much fun to slingshot yourself off a planet at incredible speed) and it's fair share of bugs. I think life just caught up with all of us at some point and we simply lost the will to work.
In the end, it fared no better than being a featureless asteroids clone with some decent graphics called Hazard!
Another person who can probably clear up this history lesson a little bit would be Regulus, if anybody can get a hold of him. He was there long than I and he seems to remember things more clearly.
That's about all I'm willing to type at the moment but maybe something else will pop into my head later about it.
-AJ
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0-60 3.0s...1320ft/9.2s...Head Gasket Bursts...
(This message has been edited by AJ (edited 09-21-2002).)
