How much coding has David Braben done?
- Thread starter Oss133
- Start date
My guess? No coding what so ever. He is probably pretty good with the whip at this point though!
Judging from my friends, when you hit middle management you already do less coding that you actually want to. So my pick by theory he doesn't have to code at all. In practice I am ready to bet that during these years he has crunched lot of prototype code for ED features as he's seemingly interested in that from research POV. These days he probably browse trough code for critical features though when some important development decisions coming up.
A similar question was raised at LaveCon. I think the answer was that he doesn't do direct coding, and tends to keep an oversight of things, but on some areas he pays a huge attention to detail.
I would assume he drives the pseudo-coding as part of or during the brainstorming sessions.
What do we want it do do, so how do we do it, what should we see, etc, etc.
Yeah, speaking from experience the higher up the management levels you go, the less you get to do the techie stuff - unless he is really REALLY lucky...
What do we want it do do, so how do we do it, what should we see, etc, etc.
Yeah, speaking from experience the higher up the management levels you go, the less you get to do the techie stuff - unless he is really REALLY lucky...
What's it to you anyway? Does it make the game any less or more if he has or hasn't? Silly question really, all that matters is the game and how it turns out under his direction.
Think this was brought up in the early days of the DDF, or might have been the Kickstarter. The answer was something along the lines of:
David has final approval on all designs, and is involved in the day-to-day direction of the project, but doesn't actually do any coding himself these days. However, being a developer myself & having worked under a former-coder-now-manager a few times, it's quite good... first of all because he/she understands the development process a lot better, and secondly will never ask you to do anything completely unrealistic in a silly time frame.
Like for instance, model 100 billion star systems with a degree of scientific accuracy and deal with the hordes of rabid gamers trying to change & extend your design. In a single year.
Luckily, that can't happen here... because David is the boss.
I think its safe to say that David does all the coding, after a fashion. All the staff at FD are in fact AI's created by David, who then themselves do the ED coding... but it all goes back to David in the end
You callin the devs script bots?
You callin the devs script bots?
Everyone at Frontier is procedurally generated. As are we. Didn't you know?
Cheers,
Drew.
The clue to the answer to your question is in the opening four words in my OP.
I feel so much better knowing that everything I do wrong is down to FD's bad coding.
He may have done this bit ...
10 PRINT "WELCOME TO ELITE DANGEROUS"
20 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
30 INPUT A$
40 PRINT "HELLO ",A$,"!"
50 PRINT "IM DAVID AND YOU ARE NOW LOGGED IN"
Joking of course
10 PRINT "WELCOME TO ELITE DANGEROUS"
20 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
30 INPUT A$
40 PRINT "HELLO ",A$,"!"
50 PRINT "IM DAVID AND YOU ARE NOW LOGGED IN"
Joking of course
I think its safe to say that David does all the coding, after a fashion. All the staff at FD are in fact AI's created by David, who then themselves do the ED coding... but it all goes back to David in the end
Are you saying we actually crowd-funded the technological singularity, and as a bonus get an awesome space game?
*Pre-emptive bow to our new robot overlords.*
He is still doing all the coding in his bedroom.
He possibly only manages the architecture of the procedural generation, being the brains behind it so to speak, doing the math, while others implement it. He seems to have dealt with it for quite some time of his life, starting with Elite in 1984 and still continuing it obviously. He even talked about it in a TEDTalk.
