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[News] Coder wanted for professional game developmentANN.lu
Posted on 27-May-2003 20:42 GMT by Ben Yoris32 comments
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Dream On Studio SARL, a game development company working with Infogrames/Atari, is looking for an old school 3D software coder with good knowledge of the assembler language (preferably ARM or RISC). Demomakers are more than welcome.

We have a financial proposition to make for a freelance contract.
Please apply using this email : byoris@club-internet.fr
Regards,
Ben Yoris
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 1 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Darwing Duck on 27-May-2003 21:01 GMT
What the payment for the job?
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 2 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by - GALAXY - on 27-May-2003 21:26 GMT
I know of one

John Carmack <johnc@idsoftware.com>

Hope you are able to pay him :-)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 3 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 27-May-2003 21:28 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Darwing Duck):
I'm sure you'll know when you e-mail to: byoris@club-internet.fr ...

(If they wanted to discuss compensation in public, then I'm sure they would have submitted a suggestion allready ...)
;-)

BTW, please define "old school 3D software coder" ...?
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 4 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by T_Bone on 27-May-2003 21:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (takemehomegrandma):
> BTW, please define "old school 3D software coder" ...?

"Visual Basic doesn't qualify as a requirement"
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 5 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 27-May-2003 21:44 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (T_Bone):
:-)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 6 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Megol on 28-May-2003 03:12 GMT
"ARM or RISC"
How should this be interpreted? RISC is not a common architecture (PPC, MIPS, SPARC, ARM, ALPHA all have big differences compared to each other) and ARM a RISC...
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 7 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Ben Yoris on 28-May-2003 04:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (Megol):
Hi guys (and girls, why not ;),

compensation will be discussed only in private.
3D old school means a guy who can achieve miracles in 3D software on low powered CPU system (such as GBA, GP 32, mobiles etc...).
The CPU we're going to work on is the ARM.
Basicly we're looking for a demomaker, king of the optimisation, who already wrote some demoes running fast on 68k AGA Amiga. A clever knowledge of tips, tricks and algorythms that save CPU time is a major point here.

Bye,
Ben Yoris
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 8 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Darth_X on 28-May-2003 04:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Ben Yoris):
Where does one go to school to learn how to code like this?
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 9 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Mikael Burman on 28-May-2003 04:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Darth_X):
Well, you don´t learn such stuff at school. That´s why it´s so hard to get such coders. I know that Ericsson (you know, that big swedish company) announced that they were looking for "Amiga coders". What they meant was that they needed people that can optimize the code. "Only Amiga coders makes it possible" ;)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 10 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Darth_X on 28-May-2003 06:10 GMT
In reply to Comment 9 (Mikael Burman):
So where is the documentation to learn how to code like this?
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 11 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Darth_X on 28-May-2003 06:15 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (T_Bone):
LOL! Shame, as I'm a visual basic coder ;) HaHaHa!
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 12 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Jon on 28-May-2003 06:48 GMT
In reply to Comment 10 (Darth_X):
Well, there are some books for gamemakers, but I think that most of the guys are learnt most of the stuff by themselves.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 13 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 08:00 GMT
So basicallly you're posting a thread on Ann.lu to say you're looking for an ARM coder for a GBA/GP32 game ?Great...
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 14 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 08:13 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Darth_X):
I think old school here is a bit same as it is when we are talking about demo scne :) People who can write cool things with low memory and cpu power. And who have lot's of knowledge about those things :)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 15 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Phill on 28-May-2003 08:55 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (Megol):
>"ARM or RISC"
>How should this be interpreted? RISC is not a common architecture (PPC, MIPS,
>SPARC, ARM, ALPHA all have big differences compared to each other) and ARM a
>RISC...

I would interpret it as: Anyone that still wants to write optimised assembly language code. Learning a new language is alot easier than getting into the whole concept. If you've been doing PPC/MIPS recently, then picking up ARM isn't going to be that difficult.

You're probably not going to have to write the whole thing in assembler anyway, on average only 10% of the code in any project is speed critical. GCC is pretty good at optimising anyway.

Over the years I've migrated assembler modules to C, mainly where it was thought impossible to do it in C ( interrupt driven serial port etc ). Sometimes it even worked out quicker, because it was simpler to write a better algorithm in C & the optimiser can rewrite the assembler alot quicker than you can when things change.

Phill
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 16 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by alan buxey on 28-May-2003 09:19 GMT
unfortunately, the classic Amiga was 68K series CPU. therefore
all the assembly language and techniques learnt are for
CISC methods, rather than RISC. i guess the ideology might be the same
but unless theres folks here who have already done some serious stuff on low
level with the PowerPC, you're in the wrong forum.

online Acorn forums are the place to be going. theres some wierdos on those! ;-)
(sorry to handz_up, MrTickle, Team-Go! etc 8-) )

alan
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 17 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Henri on 28-May-2003 09:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Ben Yoris):
Laszlo Torok is an ASM-coder/optimizer and has done stuff for 68k/PPC and PalmOS.Maybe, he could help You: torokl@alpha.dfmk.NOSPA-M.huRegards
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 18 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Elwood on 28-May-2003 09:47 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (Henri):
Is he a demo coder ? He did one of the Amiga mpeg viewer, right ?
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 19 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Ben Yoris on 28-May-2003 10:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (Henri):
Thx I'll try.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 20 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by buzz on 28-May-2003 10:17 GMT
"such as GBA and GP32"?

The gp32 is not so low powered. GP32 is an ARM9 Clockable safely up to 133mhz.
The GBA is a 16mhz ARM7. having said that the gba does have some nifty graphics hardware. still in terms of cpu power the gp32 is in a different league!
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 21 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Peter Gordon on 28-May-2003 10:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (alan buxey):
3D techniques are 3D techniques, and if you can do 3D in 68k, you can apply similar techniques in ARM.

I've done some ARM assembly, and it seems very nice. I like the fact that almost all commands have conditional variant.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 22 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Peter Gordon on 28-May-2003 10:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 16 (alan buxey):
And besides, I would apply, but although i'm quite good at a variety of assembler variants, my 3D kung-fu is somewhat lacking.

I've written basic 3d engines with texture mapping and shading, but it wasn't particularily fast and it wasn't particularily brilliant.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 23 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Chain|Q on 28-May-2003 12:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (Phill):
If GCC generated code was faster than yours it doesn't mean GCC's code is fast, it means yours was slow! :PPP

Anyway, i did some GBA game developments approx. a year ago for a local company. But only for two months, and then i decided to quit. It was just not for me. (The style of work and etc.) And anyway it was a 2D shoot'm'up game, so no 3D... :P But i like the GBA hardware, it's so much like the old ones (for eg. SNES) from the golden age of Amiga. Too bad its buggy like hell... :/ For eg. the sprite handling of it is a complete mess, but rumours say they (Nintendo) fixed it in recent versions...
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 24 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 12:10 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Darth_X):
Yes you really shoud be ashamed :)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 25 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 12:15 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Chain|Q):
It was just discussed in another thread. but GCC is not slow. It can actually create quite well optimized code. You just need to know how to use optimizations and how to strip eg. debug information from the executable so that you can get more speed and a lot smaller executable.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 26 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Chain|Q on 28-May-2003 12:21 GMT
In reply to Comment 18 (Elwood):
Actually an AVI/MOV player... :) MooVid (or Action in OS3.9). And no MPEG support, since he doesn't wanted to compete with Riva which was done by Shephen Fellner, and also Laszlo did some code for it. But anyway i've doubts if he has any interrest in coding games for GBA in ARM assembly... (He's a good friend of mine, and we're in daily contact, so i know what i'm talking about...:) But well, maybe it still worth a try, you can never know... :P
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 27 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Chain|Q on 28-May-2003 12:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 25 (Anonymous):
Yes, please tell me what GCC is all about! I've never seen it before! :P (Anyway i was just kidding, check out the smiles after my words! :)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 28 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 12:45 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (Chain|Q):
there was only :P after where you talked about GCC. Is your smile like that :)
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 29 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 28-May-2003 12:47 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Chain|Q):
Whoa.. fixed it?
So you have a bug-ridden and a non-bug-ridden version of the GBA out
there?

Or is it just the SDK that's been fixed?

Hopefully the hardware should work the same on all models or it could
get nasty if they forget to test on older units.
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 30 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Chain|Q on 28-May-2003 13:49 GMT
In reply to Comment 29 (Anonymous):
No it was no SDK problem, but in the hardware itself. The sprite priorities somewhat conficts with the background layers, and you can get some nasty flickerings and display bugs. So instead of just setting sprite priorities you've to Z-sort your sprites, and things like that... :) Anyway i'm not sure they've really fixed it, but these are only rumours as i said, since i've never seen a fixed GBA unit... So yes, if the rumours are true, there should be fixed and non-fixed units on the market nowadays. Huh, hope i don't not break any NDA i signed by telling these... :)))
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 31 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Phill on 28-May-2003 14:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (Chain|Q):
> Yes, please tell me what GCC is all about! I've never seen it before! :P
> (Anyway i was just kidding, check out the smiles after my words! :)

http://gcc.gnu.org/

Everyone uses it for console development nowadays ( with the exception of the GBA ). Of course compiled code will usually miss a trick or two that you can pull in assembler, also most compilers are unable to do anything usable with MMX/SSE instructions ( GCC 3 claims to but it's quite new and is only just approaching stability ). I believe you have to drop back to assembly when programming the PSX GTE & the PS2 vector unit.

Quite often it takes a lot less time to write in C, so if you're struggling to get stable builds for E3 at the expense of a 20% speed improvement then you probably picked the wrong language. Console developers get really cool software/hardware that tells them what code to optimise anyway, so throw it together quickly and worry about the speed later.

There are situations where you need to optimise to hell, but they are decreasing to the point where not many people bother anyway & just live with the drop in frame rate.

Phill
Coder wanted for professional game development : Comment 32 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 29-May-2003 11:51 GMT
In reply to Comment 31 (Phill):
"GCC 3 claims to but it's quite new and is only just approaching stability"

Erm, GCC 3.0 was released 2 YEARS ago (18th June 2001) - that's not exactly "new".
Current release is GCC3.3, and the GCC3.4 branch is in active development.

And it most definitly supports SSE.
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