Carrier Command - Memories

A major contributor to the original game design for Carrier Command was Ricardo Pinto, a Project Manager at Telecomsoft and a former 'Torus' programmer, (responsible for Gyron, the Z80 Elite conversions and Hive - all three published by Firebird). Ricardo was asked to come up with a design for Realtime Games to get their 3D teeth into after another project fell through.

Inspired by the Pacific War between the US and Japan, Ricardo came up with a design that involved an aircraft carrier fighting another across an archipelago. Thinking about the hardware limitations of the Amiga and ST, he suggested a small number of aircraft and amphibious tanks also be under the player's control. Realtime and Rainbird then embelished and augmented these initial improvised ideas into what ultimately became Carrier Command.

Not wishing to waste the work they had already put in, Realtime added the resource management features from the abandoned project into the Carrier game design. The icon system wasn't introduced until later in the development cycle. The game was a little rushed at the end, and a few bugettes did get left in (enemy carriers driving through islands is one example), but these were resolved and the AI for the Omega improved by the time the Mac and PC versions were published the following year.

The ST and Amiga versions of Carrier had already been released by the time I joined Telecomsoft in '88. My involvement was therefore concentrated on play testing the remaining versions. Andy Onions was the programmer of the Z80 versions (Spectrum 128k/+3 and Amstrad CPC) and unfortunately I was to become the bane of his life for the next 12 months or so!

The Spectrum version was developed for the +3 and then mastered to cassette and converted to the Amstrad CPC afterwards. The manual protection could only be added to the game near the end, once the manual had been finalised. I should say here and now that I was not at all happy with the quality of the printed screenshots in the final Spectrum manual. I re-edited the original manual to make it appropriate for the Spectrum version, and I also took the screenshots. However, only the production department at Microprose would know why the screenshots turned out so badly on the printed page.

Bug testing the Spectrum version of Carrier was a long and often torturous process. Each new version meant starting the game from scratch, and I can remember generating long and copious bug reports for Realtime that kept them busy for weeks! Back in those days, the quickest way to send bug reports was by fax. The developer would then phone up and go through the problems they couldn't replicate at their end, or seek clarification. I would spend hours talking through the bugs with Andy Onions - bugs like the resource network grinding to a halt, or the islands floating in mid air off the ocean, or the islands being completely invisible!

All other versions of Carrier were way behind schedule during 1988/89. The Telecomsoft marketing department were going through their phase of advertising everything that we had in development long before it was finished. The Spectrum Carrier conversion was advertised in the summer of 1988 in the computer mags (complete with prices), even though it was nowhere near finished, and didn't even exist on cassette at that point! Ultimately, all of the other versions weren't published for another twelve months.

As with the loading screen for Starglider 2, I also contributed some graphics to Carrier on the Spectrum. I can remember being a bit unimpressed with a few of the icon graphics that Realtime had come up with so, armed with a copy of Softek's The Artist, I contributed three or four of the icons myself. Unfortunately, I can't remember which icons I did looking back at it now. I think one of them was for 'damage status'.

Some of the island names in the Z80 versions (and probably the 16-bit versions as well) were a little 'interesting'. Names of note included "Taksaven" (Tax Haven!), "Traffic" (Traffic Island!), "Odracir" (Ricardo backwards, as in Ricardo Pinto), and "Edgeley" (Clare Edgeley).

I wasn't involved with bug testing the C64 conversion, coded by Source. Because the C64 wasn't really up to 3D, the game was turned into a flat 2D sprite based game. I thought it looked (and played) terrible in comparison to the Spectrum and CPC versions. I did get to test the PC version for a while before I left, and I was very impressed with it. It's very funny now to think that Realtime had to 'clamp the speed' of the PC version so it didn't run too fast on a 286 PC!

The enemy carrier was much more intelligent in the PC version compared to the ST and Amiga originals. Ian Oliver wrote nearly 5000 additional lines of code for the PC version, including code for navigating around islands and plotting routes of shortest distance - taking fuel needs and supply lines into account. The PC version also had a few extras that other versions didn't. For example, you could see the view from all your Mantas at the same time, something the ST and Amiga versions simply couldn't cope with!

Development versions of PC Carrier used the sixth edition of The Little Oxford Dictionary for temporary 'manual protection'. Nowhere in the code did it mention which manual to use, so if development versions got leaked, nobody would be able to easily gain entry to the unfinished game.

The Mac version was written on the PC using Snasm and sent to the Mac using a SCSI lead and some SCSI drivers written by Ian Oliver. This gave them high speed downloading and remote debugging. The first version that Realtime developed booted off a floppy disk and drove the Mac hardware directly. They even wrote their own screen, keyboard, mouse, floppy, sound and Apple Desktop Bus drivers, and had music playing directly off a floppy via the sound system. This version was scrapped once they learnt more about how the Mac OS actually worked.

Unlike their first attempt, the second Mac version ran as an officially legal Mac OS programme, running in a window, using desktop gadgets, multifinder and all the usual Mac menus and options. They even got the game running on the Mac 2 once they removed a small amount of self-modifying code. That version wasn't strictly 100% legal as far as Apple were concerned, as it did still fudge a few things to get over some technical issues.

Finally, Mac Carrier had the AI from the PC version ported over to 68000 code. I personally don't remember seeing much of the Mac version, except that it looked like I would have imagined a monochrome ST version to look. It would only run on 512k Mac machines using v6.0.7 of the Apple Mac OS. MicroProse in the US released the Mac version via their MicroPlay publishing label.

Thanks to Ian Oliver and Ricardo Pinto for their recollections!