There is an old saying: “If your code can still be used, don’t touch it.” An “ancestral code” that has been in use for more than 20 years has made Valve Software the most faithful of this sentence. Practitioner.
On the Reddit forum, a player recently stumbled upon the flickering frequency of the lights in the “Shadow Time” series with a strange sense of sight:
Did you notice? The lights in the first generation of “Shirring Time” 23 years ago have the same flicker frequency as the “Shivering Time: Alex” born in 2020.
This veteran player immediately realized the interesting part of the matter. If this is not an Easter egg (it is not after verification), it can only be explained as an unintentional move by the producer. If it is an unintentional move, it means V society A piece of code that has been put for more than 20 years is moved to the new game.
Later, someone discovered something more dramatic: this string of code not only has a long history, it even witnessed the game history of V Club. Because in addition to being able to find the same lighting scenes in the entire series of Shocking Space, there are also many similar scenes in another well-known series of V agency “Portal”.
This player followed the vines and finally found the source of this scene-the classic FPS game “Thor’s Hammer” released in 1996.
Starting from the upper left corner, they are “Thor’s Hammer”, “Frightening Time and Space”, “Frightening Time and Space 2” and “Portal”. After putting the four scenes together, although the light-emitting devices are different, they can be clearly seen. Maintain the same flashing frequency.
After carefully studying the open source code of Shivering Space-Time, another player gave a relatively reasonable explanation. Since the birth of the original “Terror Time and Space”, V agency has always used 26 letters to indicate the brightness of the light. The letter “a” represents completely off, and “Z” represents the maximum brightness.
And in the source code of these games, you can find a “mmamammmmmammamamaaamammma” code, the comment also happens to be “light flashing”:
Therefore, in the 20-year development history, when it comes to scenes that require “flashing lights”, the V company basically copied and pasted from the original code database. This is the way to say “ancestral code”, but If you really need to look into it carefully, maybe this code can’t be counted on the head of V company.
This scene first appeared in “Quake”, which is an FPS game made by id Software’s founder John Carmack using the engine of the same name, Quake, and the subsequent first generation “Quake” was also developed based on an improved version of the engine. to make.
The programmer who wrote the engine at the time lay out a bunch of code responsible for the scene, and then it was copied intact by the V agency; and even in the “trembling time and space: Alex”, this game using a different engine, once Need to “flash the lights”, the production team will still subconsciously copy the code of the previous work.
So it is passed on from generation to generation, and finally a piece of “ancestral code” is created, which just confirms a famous saying in the field of programming: never repeat making wheels.
Thinking about it carefully, this can be regarded as an egg left by the production team inadvertently. The player who discovered the secret finally said with emotion: “Now when I see this irregular flashing light, I am curious about how many games I can watch. To this scene.”
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