As a hardware and platform engineer, I can relate to the very satisfying feeling that is making a tool that enable several projects beyond what you could do by yourself.
This is why a part of me dies everytime I read "full stack engineer". Not only it is imprecise, it sounds a little sad. I like being in the bottom layers of the stack, enabling several people in the others.
> I can relate to the very satisfying feeling that is making a tool that enable several projects beyond what you could do by yourself.
That is indeed a mark of good engineering.
Looking at ScummVM, I can only think that SCUMM must have been the product of truly great engineering. A single codebase, supporting dozens of games? The basic design of SCUMM has to be solid for that to be possible.
Compact, check. Extensible, check.
The other adventure powerhouse of the time, Sierra, apparently had at least two different engines. (I know there was AGI, and the last I tried, AGI-interpreters could not play all the Sierra games. Another kind of interpreter was needed for some titles.)
Now, if only Infocom had used bytecode for their games, instead of hard-wiring the game logic inside their executables. I still remember fondly their best titles: Spellcasting 101, Gateway, Eric the Unready, Super-hero league of Hoboken, ...
> Now, if only Infocom had used bytecode for their games, instead of hard-wiring the game logic inside their executables. I still remember fondly their best titles: Spellcasting 101, Gateway, Eric the Unready, Super-hero league of Hoboken, ...
Those are Legend Entertainment games. Infocom did use bytecode, and you can play their games on just about anything smarter than a toaster these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine
This is why a part of me dies everytime I read "full stack engineer". Not only it is imprecise, it sounds a little sad. I like being in the bottom layers of the stack, enabling several people in the others.