Another World: Genesis | Hacker News Reader

Another World: Genesis

anotherworld.fr

43 pointslow_tech_love19 comments

Another World is one of my fondest memories from my childhood videogaming. The animation was so smooth and realistic compared to other platform games of that era (at least on PC) that made it definetly stand aside.

> the first level was being created and I had no clue about the following events, and even less about how the game would end

I wonder if there is actual danger in this. Could you paint yourself into a corner and wind up in a situation in the story that just cannot be continued from?

Seems you could always come out of any situation, especially with sci-fi.

First, a disclaimer: I think Another World is a triumph, and one of my all-time favorites. I remain as impressed today as I was when I first played it, decades ago.

That said, I feel Chahi did paint himself into a corner: the ending of Another World is abrupt, and leaves things mostly unresolved, the fate of our hero uncertain, his story arc incomplete. I don't think Chahi even knew how to end it. I know there's an official sequel, Heart of the Alien (not on PC) but nowadays everyone agrees it's... less than good, and in any case, Chahi wasn't involved, so it's not his vision.

a few pages into the article link states that he was involved at least somewhat with the sequel

In this very detailed article it states that he was not involved: https://web.archive.org/web/20141013135226/https://sites.goo...

Oh. I stand corrected. Still not a very good game though!

Yes, that's a definite possibility. I feel like it's less of a risk with a videogame that's got scope limitations, especially in relations to the system it has to run on, but it happens regularly with all sorts of books, more so the ones published on a regular tight schedule (think weekly comic books or webnovels). But even publications without deadlines can get impacted if the author isn't disciplined. George R. R. Martin famously wrote himself into a corner around the time of A Dance with Dragons and nobody has any hope left he'll get around to finishing ASOIAF. He tried to get away with it by using a cathedral and bazaar metaphor.

> "nobody has any hope left he'll get around to finishing ASOIAF"

At this point I think he's fed up with the story and wants to move on to other things, as is his right (I would, too!), but there's no polite way of saying this without upsetting fans. In this day and age, you really don't want to upset fans and their accompanying hordes of vicious trolls.

I wonder if it's wise at all, art-wise, to embark on a decades long book series. Had this been one book or even a trilogy, we all would have moved to greener pastures by now, satisfied with its ending. I say this as a fan of both books and TV show!

*cough* JJ. Abrams *cough* Lost *cough* Star Wars sequels *cough*

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/jj-abrams-lack-of-pla...

Abrams does this in miniature constantly, in most of his films. The result is that they're heavily coincidence-driven (you don't have to plan a coincidence!) and he often has to invent a coincidence to fix a coincidence he just introduced[0]. He's good enough at keeping action flowing that one may only notice the most egregious cases at first, but it's the kind of thing that once you realize how he operates, you can't not notice it.

[0] My go-to example of this from Star Wars is the sequence in which Our Heroes just happen to find the Millennium Falcon, and Rey just happens to know how to fly it excellently, and then Han and Chewie just happen to show up on another ship with what can't conceivably have been more than 20 minutes' notice, assuming we want to be generous and grant that they were somehow notified—they show up because Abrams needs them there now, and so he just has them appear by whatever conveyance is convenient for him, that is, lets him keep flowing and not need to edit or re-arrange anything or operate under any constraints whatsoever—but now Abrams has written himself a second ship he doesn't need, so he... has another set of coincidences happen, for no plot reason aside from destroying the ship he just added but doesn't need anymore.

Or in Star Trek when Kirk is marooned on a planet at the exact same spot as Old Spock. How lucky was that?

Also, the planet case a very convenient view of a destroyed Vulkan up in the sky... Just like that rebel base in Ep. VII has a view of several destroyed planets in the central part of the galaxy. Ugh.

Got to admit that Lost is a great example of not resolving things properly. I wonder though if that's because it was impossible, or just the JJ. Abrams's style. He's said in an interview that he keeps an unopened box on his shelf that he never intends to open, just because he likes the feeling of a forever unresolved mystery.

I love this sidebar on conflict resolution:

> Interplay was in a strong position with the development of the game and did not want to back down. So I took drastic measures. I thought of creating an endless fax. A huge fax of a meter long in which I wrote in big letters "keep the original intro music". I would insert it in the fax, enter the number, and when the transmission started, I would tape both ends of the letter together, which would create a circle that went on and on until there was no paper left in the offices of Interplay, at the other end. Even so, all this paper coming out of their machine had little impact.

To me, a pretty sad sign of desperation.

Also check out Fabian Sanglard's articles [0] (there's a lot more on his article listings) about Another World if you haven't yet, also the author's GDC talk [1].

[0] https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.ph...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA

Fabian Sanglard (who is perhaps best known for his writing on wolfenstein/doom/quake and associated black books) also has a series of articles on another world, its bytecode interpreter and various ports to other hardware:

https://fabiensanglard.net/

For those interested it's currently available for €2.79 on PS4.

I have started to write some notes[1], and even some code to try to better understand how the game was created (I'm pretty sure I've made some mistakes though). I have listed some additional references there if you like this.

What prompted me to do so was that the Wikipedia page in french mentioned a VM running multiple threads, which I thought was very interesting for 1989.

[1]: https://github.com/noteed/exploring

While working on my own implementation of the bytecode interpreter last year I wrote a tool to inspect the polygon files [1]. It did help to find some bugs in my renderer code :) The tool needs unpacked data files like the ones found in the 20th Anniversary edition, but the files extracted from the BANK files works fine as well.

[1]: https://max-m.github.io/aworld/

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