Nah, Nova size stuff isn't so big that a team of one can't do it.
I have to say it looks like a lot when you first think about it, but is actually far less than was required back in the old EV days.
To create quite an advanced ship in Nova, you need just one model which you render four or five times with all its banking and animation. But even a big ship (say 160 pixels by 160) will only take a few minutes to render even on my lowly G3 500 with StrataPro 3.9 - even if you do it with maximum radiosity.
To create a simple ship in EV back in 1997, it took around 24 hours to 48 hours of rendering time - on my then brand new Powermac 4400 and StrataVision 4.
Then there's development. If you were using EV-Edit, you would probably lose all your work at least twice before you decided to make hourly backups. Then, if you were using Schmelta-V, the whole thing would crash once your file size got beyond a certain level - which is when you learned to separate out your file into different bits. Before Plugchecker (the Dynasystems classic) your only way of finding the things that would crash your game was to play exhaustively - and even then you wouldn't know why it crashed. The debug facility in Nova makes this much easier.
Then there's missions. No one can deny that missions are much, much easier to write in Nova. Clunky old mission bits meant that you had to use complicated logic strategies for even the simplest of non-linear missions. Then, if you were writing in EV-Edit you quickly discovered that everything you wrote was scrambled. Schmelta-V, on the other hand, didn't support all the features, and especially didn't support the features of Override.
Maps were a pain as well - it was a long time before Pontus Ilbring brought out his classic map software. Before that it was EV-Edit or nothing - but of course remember thatt EV-Edit corrupted the düdes if you reopened a previously saved system.
And, for those who swear by ResEdit, remember that R&Rs; templates make ResEdit pretty much as easy to use as EV-Edit was (but without the garbage). Prior to the R&R; templates, the only way to check if a spin was right was to get into the game and play.
Back to graphics for a second, remember that using 8-bit, you really couldn't tell whether your magnificent creation would look brilliant or stupid until you'd rendered it, converted it and tried it. Small details were inevitably corrupted in the pixelation, which is why weapons fire always looked stupid and realistic glow trails were impossible.
Times have changed. We do more, because we can.
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M A R T I N T U R N E R
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(This message has been edited by Martin Turner (edited 09-29-2003).)
