I don’t know about other developers at the time, but we had quite a lot of hand-written assembly code in the Crash games. The background and foreground renderers were all written in assembly by hand, as was the octree-based collision detection system. (Source: me; I wrote them.)
And this thread comes full circle: Mark Cerny actually significantly improved the performance of my original version of the Crash collision detection R3000 code. His work on this code finally made it fast enough, so it’s a really good thing he was around to help out. Getting the collision detection code correct and fast enough took over 9 months —- it was very difficult on the PS1 hardware, and ended up requiring use of the weird 2K static RAM scratchpad Sony including in place of the (removed) floating point unit.
GOOL was mainly used for creature control logic and other stuff that didn’t have to be optimized so much to be feasible. Being able to use a lisp dialect for a bunch of the code in the game saved us a ton of time. The modern analogue would be writing most of the code in Python but incorporating C extensions when necessary for performance.
Andy made GOAL (the successor lisp to GOOL) much more low-level, and it indeed allowed coding essentially at the assembly level (albeit with lispy syntax). But GOOL wasn’t like this.
And this thread comes full circle: Mark Cerny actually significantly improved the performance of my original version of the Crash collision detection R3000 code. His work on this code finally made it fast enough, so it’s a really good thing he was around to help out. Getting the collision detection code correct and fast enough took over 9 months —- it was very difficult on the PS1 hardware, and ended up requiring use of the weird 2K static RAM scratchpad Sony including in place of the (removed) floating point unit.
GOOL was mainly used for creature control logic and other stuff that didn’t have to be optimized so much to be feasible. Being able to use a lisp dialect for a bunch of the code in the game saved us a ton of time. The modern analogue would be writing most of the code in Python but incorporating C extensions when necessary for performance.
Andy made GOAL (the successor lisp to GOOL) much more low-level, and it indeed allowed coding essentially at the assembly level (albeit with lispy syntax). But GOOL wasn’t like this.