Chapter 174: Creative Tools (bonus)

The Nova language was self-hosting. Ethan considered this his most brilliant achievement outside the field of game development. 

There was a fundamental truth in the world of computer languages: the first compiler for any language must always be written using another language. 

Even the C language, which was developing rapidly at the time, had itself been developed on the foundation of B. 

And to make the Nova language completely self-contained, allowing it to function independently without relying on another language, Ethan had put a tremendous amount of thought into its development. 1

Its first compiler was written in C. Ethan then used that C-based compiler to write the code for a new compiler and used that compiler to compile it. The process seemed rather convoluted, but everything was ultimately done to achieve independence. 

And he had indeed succeeded. To this day, Ethan no longer needed to spend large amounts of time and effort every day maintaining the Nova language compiler. He had completely achieved the goal of using itself to write itself. 1

With this, engineers like Gerald and Carmack could participate in maintaining Nova language without any barriers at all and continuously improve its functionality. 

This allowed Nova to have unrivaled efficiency in game development. No other company was qualified to even attempt to compare with it. 

Its only problem was perhaps that it could not control everything on the motherboard as freely as directly using assembly language. Even after the three of them had optimized it several times, it was still difficult to completely match assembly in terms of optimization. 

But after the emergence of 16-bit consoles, this point seemed to have become much less important. 

Mike's gaze swept across the dazzling shelves, searching for what he wanted. It did not take long for him to find that floppy disk in GAMENOVA's dedicated section. 

This was not a game, but a piece of software, a development tool. An Nova language development tool, containing its complete standard library, integrated development environment, compiler, and other modules. 

It was priced at only $39.99. Compared with other companies that often charged $50 or even over $100, Nova's price was extremely affordable. 

Even if you couldn't get an NX console through the usual retail channels, getting your hands on a floppy disk containing the Nova language development tools was hardly a challenge. Just pay, pick up the disk, and head home! 

When Mike inserted the ROM into his burner, the contents inside were finally displayed completely in front of the three of them. 

"Let me see, wait, what?!" 

Instead of the mess he had imagined, the file structure of this demonstration Mod was incredibly simple and could even be considered elegant.  

There was a core header file used to describe the information of the Mod itself. Mike tapped away on the keyboard and tried opening the file. Several lines of text, completely identical to what was displayed inside the game, appeared on the screen. 

ModID = "Mod Template" 

Author = GAMENOVA — Ethan 

This… how could this even be considered programming? It was basically no different from simply writing plain text directly. 

Even a complete beginner with zero experience could look at this and immediately understand how to modify the Mod name. For people like them, who were accustomed to reverse-engineering PC games, this was simply unbelievable. 

After all, no matter what programming language was used, even assembly, the final output would inevitably be bytecode that the device could understand. That was a true machine language, consisting entirely of pure data represented by binary 1s and 0s. It was simply not something humans could read. 

Even though they already had access to a number of decompilation tools that could painstakingly convert binary data into something more readable, none of them could compare to what they were seeing now. 

Everything was laid out in plain text, completely unobfuscated and exposed for anyone to read. Even the ID was simply labeled "ID," rather than being buried beneath some incomprehensible string of gibberish. 

Mike immediately replaced the ID with "Blizzard," the name they had agreed on earlier. It just had a fierce, powerful ring to it and sounded undeniably cool. 2

After changing that, naturally the author had to be changed to Mike's own name as well. Then, after casually scribbling a few things into the description, Mike directly ran the compiler and burned it into the officially provided EPROM. 

Then he inserted it into the machine and powered it on. The familiar "Dream of Flight," already firmly engraved in their minds, rang out once again, announcing that the game had loaded successfully. 

Frank hesitated slightly before slowly opening the Additional Content option. He was genuinely afraid that this thing might somehow ruin the NX he had gone through so much trouble to obtain, or damage Civilization's program. 

If that happened, they would be screwed. But perhaps Mike's skills were reliable enough, or perhaps it was simply the excellent quality of Nova language itself. The disaster they had anticipated did not happen. 

[Blizzard] 

[Author]: [UCLA Mike] 

[Description]: [I'm just writing some random stuff. This is still under development, work in progress] 

They were completely stunned. It had actually worked! 

Mike was the most shocked of all. Because no one understood better than he did just how ridiculously simple what he had just done actually was. 

He had merely opened the existing content inside and modified a few plainly written entries. And with that, the content in the game had actually changed accordingly. 

Mike picked up the Mod development guidebook and began following its instructions, attempting to modify the most important part. That was, developing his own leader and civilization! 

"To implement more functions, we need to write programs. Let's not be too aggressive for now. We can try replacing some graphics and changing some names first." 

Inside the file group, under a file tree called "Resources," there were several files in special formats. 

When opened using the Nova language editor, they turned out to be nothing more than simple pixel art. One of them was the familiar stick-figure portrait. 

In other words, if this file were replaced or modified into something else, it might directly change the leader portrait in the game. 

At GAMENOVA headquarters, Ethan and Carmack stood before Gerald, watching as he worked on two enormous machines. They were so massive that they towered over him, standing side by side in the middle of the room like a solid wall. 

And the price was just as staggering. One of the machines alone had a price tag of several hundred thousand dollars. 

After adding peripheral equipment, engineers, and other one-time expenses, the estimated total cost had already reached the million-dollar range. And this did not even include the hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual maintenance costs. 

For the sake of these two treasures, Ethan and the others had even specially renovated a server room.  

Temperature and humidity-controlled air conditioning, backup power, and a fire suppression system. These two machines were not both intended for the development department. One of them also had an even more important responsibility. 

The central server! 

Even now, GAMENOVA's games that allowed players to upload their scores still hosted their data with a third-party hosting company. 

Of course, part of the reason was that they had not had a suitable server environment. But now, this gap had finally been filled. 

Besides storing the players' scores and records, it would take on an entirely new task. A resource server, or as Ethan called it, the "Steam Workshop." 17

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