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While discussing the latest and greatest
build, developer Howard Day and former Origin director Siobhan Beeman got into a
conversationabout how the WC1 VDUs were coded. It turns out there was a typographical error in the way "component" was spelled, but it became so widely entrenched that it propagated into Wing Commander 2! LOAF dug up a screenshot of some of this code and there it is! So next time you see a flash on your dashboard, it means a componeant is being triggered!
Siobhan: Speaking of the VDUs, fun story: The base class in the WC1 codebase for all those UI elements like missile icons and shield health bars is named Componeant. Yes, just like that. Drove me NUTS having to misspell it all the time, but changing it for WC2 was too much work. (facepalm)Howard: We're pretty spoilt nowadays - Visual Studio just lets you rename entire classes and everything...just works. And if you've got the right Git plugin, the source control updates painlessly. Wonderful story.
Siobahn: So spoiled! And yet we had the best tools available—Borland C++ was a great product for its time!
