Re: short blurb on GOAL (Game Object Assembly Lisp)
- From: Ken Tilton <kennytilton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:15:38 -0400
Rainer Joswig wrote:
http://palgn.com.au/article.php?title=Naughty+Dog+Interview+Part+Two&id=9226
...
PALGN: Was it tough to make the transition from developing for the
PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3?
Evan Wells: It was extraordinarily difficult and I will be perfectly blunt and
honest. It was really really hard and I think a lot of that can be
attributed to the fact that on the PlayStation 2 we... I'm not trying to
make any commentary on the difficulty of development for the PlayStation 3
and I shouldn't be confused with that at all. On the PlayStation 2 we were
programming in our own unique language that we had developed at Naughty
Dog, it's called GOAL, Game Object Assembly Lisp. It was all lisp based and
the entire rest of the industry is working in C++, nobody I knew was
completely, off the wall doing this thing in Lisp. It was started with Andy
Gavin who was an MIT graduate, I'm probably showing too much of my geek
cred, MIT and Lisp are closely linked and that's where it all started from.
So we've been working in that language all through the PlayStation One and
the PlayStation Two, now coming to the PlayStation Three we realised these
projects are getting so much more complex and they just require so much
more effort that we realised across Sony that we'd have to start sharing
code. If we develop something we're going to have to make sure that Santa
Monica can borrow it if they want too or Insomniac or vice versa, things
should be interchangable. So we realised we'd have to...
"...teach other folks Lisp. One small hit while they got up to speed, pretty much compensated for by the excitement of learning a new language and the superiority of Lisp for development.
"We broached this idea to the team and it turned out we had more than a few closet Lispers on board already, and others had been doing Python and Ruby of course so they had a leg up on the process and had heard about Lisp and were eager to try it anyway. Hearing about the ease of development in GOAL just made them all the more interested.
"But then someone happened to check out comp.lang.lisp, seems there is some guy called kenny and he is a total PITA, so we had to...
...put this behind us
and adopt C++ like everyone. That meant when we started on the PlayStation
3 we had no code, if we wanted to print text on the screen we had to write
a font renderer, these are the things you take for granted, so we had to
start from square one and so it was a long process of building up. We were
so used to working with this language GOAL which was very flexible and the
whole purpose of it was so you could have your game running, you could
compile your code and you could update your game right away without
restarting the system, it's a really good environment and I miss it, you
can tell. So then we went to no code, so we had to build up slowly but...
....my boss might end up reading this so...
... i'm.
really really happy with the team and everybody pulled together and we
ended up accomplishing something we can all be proud of.
...
- References:
- short blurb on GOAL (Game Object Assembly Lisp)
- From: Rainer Joswig
- short blurb on GOAL (Game Object Assembly Lisp)
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