Historical Q&A - frandallfarmer/neohabitat GitHub Wiki

Here are a selection of questions and answers from the Neohabitat slack, answered by the folks who were directly involved with the development of Habitat. If you would like to ask a question about how Habitat was made, join our Slack and head over to the #q_and_a channel.

What is the image from? A concept art picture? It's too high of a resolution to be from the C64.

Randy: This is a retouched screen shot, distributed as part of a press kit about Lucasfilm's Habitat. Chip might be able to provide details of exactly how it was created, but I do know we captured pixel-perfect images using our FastLink technology - there were screen dumps that were not distorted. I don't ever use this image. Though it is finer resolution, at least it is color-true. There are shots of shark-headed people in purple jumpsuits that we much more synthetic (and colorful).

Chip: The very sharp picture above was done to produce an illustration for the print version of The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat. It started out as a photograph shot off of a CRT of the live game, but going from CRT->photo->prepress resulted in a really crappy image. So I manually cleaned it up in Studio 8. I tried to preserve the pixel boundaries accurately, but since it was a manual edit this was less than perfect.

Randy: How was the tracksuit sharks image made? Do you recall?

Chip: I think the tracksuit sharks image was done by hand by Gary.

Did Habitat ever have a fully functioning Hatchery? I see mention of it in the code and definitely saw it in use for Caribe but no idea about Habitat

Chip: Yes. The Hatchery may actually have been the first thing that worked on the server side, because it was a prerequisite to having avatars to associate with Q-Link user accounts.

It was Janet Hunter, the lead developer on the Q-Link side, who on a whim named it the Hatchery, thus yielding the conceit that avatars are hatched rather than born. I regard this as a major creative contribution to the Habitat world’s backstory.

Was it always planned that the Ghost class would be so restrictive? Or was there ever a plan to add the ability to interact more as a ghost at a later date? (For example, the ability to send ESP as a Ghost)

Randy: They were originally intended only as a work around for traffic jams, hence the limited options. I revisited those choices when designing WorldsAway. Special consideration was given to Habitat beta feedback.

Following up on that, whose idea was it to base the Ghost design on the Eye of Horus?

Randy: I came up with the idea of the ghost/observer mode. Chip was the one that chose the eye, I think.

How were Habitat regions usually created back in development? Was Fred always the tool of choice or did some people write riddle/griddle by hand to build regions, upload and test?

Randy: FRED was the way - it let us move the objects around and change state in an entirely offline environment, then just suck the data (via fastlink) into griddle (I think it was griddle). Things like super_traps might have required more iteration, I'm not sure.

What region is this? It's from the archives and listed as "Hyway1".

Randy: That was a prototype region for the Long Road, which wrapped around the world at the N-S equator. It was meant to be mostly procedural, with periodic exits for other towns, area's of interest, etc.

This was before we'd worked out that there would be no "fast" per-region travel (aka vehicles). It was set aside early on - the Quantumgrad release would have provided a walkable path between towns, this might have been it.

Was Habitat developed entirely at Skywalker Ranch? Or was it also developed at the Kerner Company building (ILM).

Randy: In the late 1980s Lucasfilm offices were split between San Rafael (Aka the Kerner Complex) and Skywalker Ranch. I worked both places. :slightly_smiling_face: I'm pretty sure it was developed at both places. I remember being at Z bld (Kerner) when we started. Then we moved to the Carriage House out at "the Ranch".

Habitat took years longer than planned.

BTW, the Kerner office park was not marked as ILM or Lucasfilm with any signage. It was something like "The Kerner Company"

There were several building clusters. I recall one at a different address, and Z-building was stand-alone a block or so away from that. Kinda like the early days of Facebook strewn around Palo Alto, except higher ceilings, stealth naming, and of course being in Marin County.