Worked fine on the target machines and the "0.5x programmer" got to see their family for winter holiday. Or are you saying they should have defensively programmed around a bug manifesting 21 years later and skip seeing their family during crunch time?
To be honest, I just don't like how you disparaged the programmer out-of-context. Talk is cheap.
Well-written 3rd party serialization libraries weren't exactly easy to come by 20 years ago, at least from what I can recall. Your best bet was using an XML library, but XML parsing was quite resource heavy. Many that seemed well designed turned out to be a security nightmare (Java serialization).
I disagree. JSON is 25 years old, and SAX parsers are 22. A SAX parser is the opposite of “resource heavy”, since it is event driven. The parser does not maintain complex state, although you might have to manage some state in order to correctly extract your objects from the XML. Granted, it wouldn’t have integrated nicely with C to generate the parser code from your struct definition back then, but the basics were there.
But it is even more important for today’s game studios to see and understand the mistakes that yesterday’s studios made. That’s the only way to avoid making them all over again.
> JSON is 25 years old
And in 2004, didn't have a published specification, or much use outside of webdev (which hadn't eaten the world yet).
> and SAX parsers are 22
And, especially at the time, pretty much exclusive to Java, right?
Put another way, which are the high-quality open-source implementations of those formats that the developers should've considered while working on SA in 2003 and 2004? Or for that matter, in the 2001-2002 timeframe, when the parsing code was probably actually written for use in VC?
Using a well–written third–party library would not increase the development time; it would in fact reduce it. No risk of missing Christmas there.