About the time, um… maybe 2001, possibly 2002. Something like that anyway. The performance of it is probably ok-ish, but not on the old sun boxes we ran on, and not if you haven’t had more than 3 hours to set up your scene.

So in that way I guess the tradeoff was between setup time and render time — if we’d spent a week properly trying to learn to use povray, we could probably have rendered it a lot quicker.

Also, part of it was that the longer we worked on it, the less time we had to actually render it out. At some point you just had to stop trying to make it better and hit the big “Start” button.

When was this? On a course on Uppsala University I once did a ray tracer assignment with a friend where we were *supposed* to create movies and it didn’t take that long. Yes, it was our own little measly ray tracer, but on the other hand, POVRay must be pretty optimized. That was around 1995 I think.

Hmmm, maybe it *is* like comparing apples and oranges, though…

That gives me hope…I’ll continue striving towards getting experiences that’ll land me a job somewhere in games.

Thanks a lot for your comments, and I look forward to anything else you have to say on this subject. Great stuff on this blog.

So if you want a shot at actual game code (as opposed to toolchains or support code), you’ll need to get experience coding C++.

The other question is, as you say, a larger subject… maybe I can write a full post about that at some point. A short answer would be: it varies incredibly much between studios, and even between projects. Some studios do basically no crunching at all, some crunch all the time.

As studios learn development practices these things change as well… during Bad Company, we worked incredibly long hours for a range of demos and such, for BC2 we’ve had a much more sane development with almost no crunch at all.

I guess something you could factor in: You’d be surprised at how many people at DICE have families.

I graduated last year with a major in CS and a minor in math. I’ve moved to Silicon Valley, and am currently working at a large non-game company; however, my goal has always been to get into the games industry.

I recently got married and my perspective has shifted a bit (obviously). I’m concerned about how much time I will have to devote to my work if I do work in game development. I want to be able to have a rich life with my family and would sacrifice my dream job for that, if necessary.

With that in mind, could you comment more on the “harsh business” that leads to a high turnover rate? How many hours would you say a typical game programmer (or manager) works a week, in or out of crunch time? How often does a crunch time occur?

Maybe this would be a whole other post entirely, as it deals with “should I” rather than “how do I”, but if you could give me a high-level overview, I’d appreciate it. I want to align my goals correctly to either progress where I am currently or move towards a game company.

On another note, would you suggest steering clear of XNA as a way to gain experience and to demo in favor of something more low-level, like C++? My work experience consists mostly of C#.

Thanks

On the other hand I’ve gotten a lot of ideas for software I want to write the last week or so.