Jane's A-10 Warthog

The Pain of the Campaign
"Simply put, the mission builder was pretty lousy," says Pavloff. "The program was a Win32 GUI [graphical user interface] application written in C. If I knew then what I know now, I would have asked permission to rewrite the thing in C++ and MFC, or even in Visual Basic. The mission builder had originally been written by Tsuyoshi Kawahito, who had left Origin after Longbow 2 to go to work for Microprose on European Air War. Apparently, he was the master programmer. He'd work late, get his stuff done, but he didn't comment his code. Clark Janes, the guy who got to work on the mission builder for A-10, was constantly fixing bugs in the editor, and the real designers and I would sometimes get multiple builds in one day in an attempt to make the thing work. Sometimes, however, the missions that we had made wouldn't work anymore in new versions, leading to much repetitive work in an annoying GUI."

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While the team was working on the missions, the issue of the campaign structure came up. Because they were supposed to be based on the Longbow 2 code, the campaigns would be structured in the same way. This meant that they would have the "apparently dynamic" structure that Andy Hollis referred to repeatedly in the newsgroups as "smoke and mirrors." Pavloff explains: "The campaigns in Longbow 2, while seeming dynamic to the user, in fact, really weren't. The Longbow 2 campaign editor basically involved the designers creating multiple locations for the enemy troops on each phase line, and creating multiple paths and targets, and letting a random number generator create the missions. It became obvious that the mission builder had enough problems, and the programmers were slowly getting backed up to the point where the 'dynamic' campaign was going to have to be cut." So the A-10 programmers were faced with the possibility of having a game based on the Longbow 2 engine that actually had a less variable campaign than Longbow 2. This was an example of how, as code advanced from the Longbow 2 base, certain features either had to be left behind or made to work with the changing code. And this meant investing time. The "Longbow 2 shortcut" was already proving to be a false one.

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As such problems began to appear, it became apparent to the team that the game could not possibly meet its ship date of first quarter, 1999. There was simply too much uncommented and hard-to-follow code from Longbow 2 that had been written by people who had left the company. This code had to be changed.

And there were other problems afoot that were much more serious than campaign structure. One of them was that Origin had inadvertently stumbled onto a gold mine with its Ultima Online massively multiplayer franchise. When it was originally proposed, the Ultima Online was actually projected to have lower sales numbers than the final numbers proposed for A-10.

Next: Origin shifts focus