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| Interview with Mark Allender |
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Earlier this week I got in touch with Mark Allender, Lead Programmer on Summoner, and asked him if he'd answer some questions. He said yes, and so he did. These are his answers. Right below here. Under this line.
Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself. Who you are, some of the stuff you do in your free time, etc.
I'm Mark Allender, lead programmer on Summoner. I don't have any free time now, but if I did I'd probably be spending it with my kids.
What is it that you do at Volition?
That really depends on who you ask I think. Technically, I'm responsible for making sure that the code base for Summoner is stable and working across all of our platforms. Tim Borelli probably thinks that all I do is pester him about changing or modifying animations of the characters. Mainly though, I try to work on AI as well as a bunch of other smaller things.
Where did you go to college? How'd you end up at Volition?
I went to school at the Unversity of Illinois. I met Mike Kulas while working for SubLogic. I wound up at Volition while I was working at IBM in Tucson. I was looking for a new job and happened to see a post that Mike Kulas made looking for programmers on some game called Descent.
How much coffee do you drink in an average day?
1 cup -- of course I use the full pot of coffee for my cup.
How have you faired against the pirate raids from the V-North colony against the Mainland?
I was one of the orignal founders of the V-North colony, so I should really answer this question by saying that I think that the raids went quite well, aside from almost getting caught with all of the ice cream sandwiches that one time by James Agay.
Now c'mon, be honest, which side are you really fighting for, V-North or the Mainland?
V-North all the way, even though I'm back on the mainland. My heart will always be with the colonists.
Are j00 a l33t hax0r?
d00d! U 8357 Ch3/< mY L33T h4><0r 5P33/< N 5P311 5/<331Z!
I asked Dave Baranec this question as well - its fair game on all programmers. :) Why do programmers always have a messy desk?
That's a mighty fine question. I was just in John Slagel's office, and man, is his desk messy. Much messier than mine. Why are they messy? I have no idea -- I do know that I only have a fraction of the soda cans on my desk as opposed to Dave Baranec or Sandeep.
This has become a regular question - Halo or Tribes 2?
What are those?
How did you first get into programming?
I took a class in between my 6th and 7th grade school years at an education center where I grew up (in Albuquerque). It was all punch cards and other ancient computing machinery. I got and Apple ][ shortly after that and learned BASIC by typing in every single game from every single magazine that I could find. Wisely, I entered into the U of I in Electrical Engineering. I decided that wasn't challenging enough and went back to Computer Science.
How has Volition faired in the whole "Developing for the Playstation 2 is hard!" ordeal?
Developing a game for any platform is hard. It doesn't matter if it's the PS2 or the PC or the Macintosh. There are different challenges with different platforms. Working on the PS2 is far different than working on the PC. That's whats hard -- getting out of a PC-centric mode of programming and putting it into the PS2-centric mode.
I was going to ask an FSAA question here, but that's pretty much been covered out the behind, so I'll skip that. What do you think has been the greatest obstacle for getting Summoner running beautifully on the Playstation 2?
Probably the sheer amount of rendering features and effects that we added into the game. Everything looks really beautiful, but it takes a lot of time and work to get all of those things to look good and run fast. The artists have really created some pretty stunning visuals, both in level content and spell effects. It's sometimes pretty hard to get those translated into the game to have them look like the artists want them to.
If you could go back and add one feature or change one thing in Summoner, what would it be?
I would add real-time weather.
What do you think is the biggest advantage of programming for a console? Biggest disadvantage?
The biggest advantage is really the non-changing hardware. If your game works on one PS2, it will work on all of them. No driver updates, no patches, no other quircky problems with black market sound cards to deal with. One disadvantage I think is probably that the amound of memory (both VRAM and main RAM) is not as much as you would probably see in your average PC today. Many of the difficulties that we have faced on the PS2 would be much easier if we'd have had even 16M more memory, or some sort of virtual memory environment. So I guess I'm saying that the fixed memory size is a disadvantage when you compare it against the PC platform.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Yeah, that haxor speak above was from Nate. I'm a complete haxor idiot. [ed. Nate = Nathan Camarillo, Webmaster and fluent in hax0r sp33k.]
As usual, I got some reader submitted questions. He answered them. Too bad none of them were serious questions... although that probably would have been too much work. :)
How many cans of soda were abused in the making of this production?
Several truckloads I imagine.
Am I in the tavern getting drunk? Roll the dice!
Aren't you underage? [ed. Pff! Like that's ever stopped anyone before :)]
Can I cast an evil spell on you?
No. I've got Mordenkainen's Magical Watchdog cast. I totally do!
What about skills...I want to force jump over a canyon!
Try Jedi Knight.
If you were a SuperHero, what would your SuperHero name be?
Green Lantern.
Thanks again Mark!
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