For those not familiar with "Burger" Rebecca Heineman, she has a game programming resume stretching way back to the 80s at Interplay and elsewhere. Truly old-school.

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,34...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman

Burger Bill (as this person was known back then) is mentioned in 'Masters of Doom' as offering to do the Wolfenstein 3D port to SNES for id, then revealing (after months went by) that they were still under contract at Interplay, and everything they did would be owned by Interplay. Everyone at id was furious they had to drop working on DOOM and hack on SNES Wolfenstein instead, to the point they had an icon of BB on the wall to throw knives at: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,450432,00.html

Interestingly, they obviously got over it as BB was used for 3DO DOOM.

Kind of out of topic, but when one changes gender at some point in their life, do you rewrite their whole wiki page saying "she" instead of "he", or should you mark the transition after the official change of name/gender only ?

Good question! Short answer: generally you refer to them as if they have always publicly identified with their current gender.

Longer answer: The overarching idea is to respect the person's wishes and stated identity. In most cases, and certainly in Rebecca Heineman's case from what I've read, she always identified as female even when she was known as Bill Heineman. So out of respect we would typically refer to her as Rebecca (or with female pronouns) no matter which part of her life we're referring to.

There could be exceptions. In some cases, a person's former gender might be directly relevant to a story. (Imagine you're writing about a person, now female, who was sent to a boy's boarding school as a child. I think, at the least, you'd perhaps need to clarify that she identified as male at that point in her life...)

Thanks for the answer ! I'm asking because the change of gender also associates with a change of name, and it kind of seems like rewriting History if ex-colleagues talk about X-woman as X-woman in the past when she was not yet X-woman but Y-guy instead. How about legal documents ? How do they handle the change of gender ? Do they do it like "X-person, Born Y-person" ?

There are usually procedures for that; varies a lot from place to place.

Here in the UK, you can go before a sort of judicial committee to do it, the Gender Recognition Panel; costs like £140ish. It's kind of a pain; you need to be at least 2 years in full-time, it does help if you've had SRS or at the very least are going to (and they're going to want medical reports), and you'll need two medical practitioners (one of which must be recognised in a list as a psychiatrist or psychologist specialising in gender dysphoria) to testify that yes, you are trans, yes, really you're not going to change your mind, and this is what you've done/are going to do about it. If you pass (and it's a little bizarre and intimidating that they're judging this), you get a new short birth certificate (and can apply for a long one, and thereafter a passport under your new official identity); you then have two proper birth certificates, the historical document you were born with, and a brand new one listing only your target gender (and name). The fact that you have done all this is confidential (unless you tell someone, obviously).

Your mileage will vary, naturally.

Thanks for the very complete answer. I had no idea there was such a procedure. Now I wonder how it works in Japan where I live, since such minorities are far from being commonly accepted here and they may have more hurdles to get to the same point.

  and it kind of seems like rewriting History if ex-colleagues talk about X-woman as X-woman in the past when she was not yet X-woman but Y-guy instead

Yeah, it is rewriting history in a way, and it can be tricky to navigate! I'm far from an authority.

I'm a 38 year-old male who has never had gender identity issues so here's what I do to empathize. I imagine that I was forced to dress like a woman and given a female name for the first 20 or 30 years of my life. That would have been a painful time. Additionally, I imagine that a lot of people think that I'm a freak for wanting to be treated as a man today.

When I put myself into those shoes... I can imagine how it would be incredibly reassuring/reaffirming just to hear people refer to me as "John" whenever possible, even when referring to times when I was forced to dress like a woman, since I was really "John" inside all that time anyway.

Randomly I came across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:IDENTITY

2nd bullet point

How do they deal with name changes after marriage? same thing.

I saw that she is married to Jenell Jaquays, which made me think immediately of Paul Jaquays (who worked at iD during the Quake days). Sure enough, Jenell Jaquays is Paul Jaquays.

Gamedev is a small world. I wonder if they met around that time?

This is apparently based on the Jaguar port that id Software did in-house.

Interestingly, it seems to include a translation of Carmack's Jaguar rendering engine into C. The original was implemented in assembly for the Jaguar's proprietary RISC coprocessor. The processor's tiny instruction memory required that the renderer be split into 9 independent "phases", and that organization is preserved in the 3DO code.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4215&cid=1225529

Digging through the github org a bit:

"The library builds and runs for the Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, nVidia Shield, iOS, Mac OSX, MacOS, Android, OpenWatcom for MSDOS, OpenWatcom for Windows, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2013, Codewarrior for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for MacOSX, OUYA, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DSi and Linux." - Burgerlib[0]

I don't know why, but I find that immensely satisfying.

[0]: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/burgerlib

Some funny things in there:

    switch (gamemap) {
        case 24: /* Secret level? */
		nextmap = 4;
		break;

Source: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do/blob/master/source/gam...

Odd... was this developed on a Mac?

I'm seeing QuickDraw PICT files, the make files seems to use Classic Mac-style file paths (Disk:Directory:File), and there's even an AppleScript in there referencing DeBabelizer 1.6 (who else remembers THAT app?)

edit: looks like the official 3DO development kit was Mac-based, and there was even a NuBus card with 3DO hardware on it for debugging

I'm not nearly as proficient in C/C++ as I would care to be (I work with Java web apps by trade), but when I come across these source dumps that I would be interested in exploring, I seem to fumble while getting started.

So I apologize for posting this and being a little off topic, but how do people disect these effectively?

I think there are a lot of approaches, and I haven't started on this one yet, but here's my approach, roughly:

- clone it so I can read the code in emacs, and use cscope or similar tools on it

- try to figure out the build system and the directory structure: how is the main program built? are there libraries or tools that are also built? where do their sources live? (so, here, I'd start with source/doom.make and look at the things it references)

- if my primary interest is the main program, I would then try to track down main() and jump through the functions that look interesting with ctags or similar code navigation tools;

- usually it makes sense to jump back and forth to the header files that are being referenced, not only to understand what the types and globals are, but also because they tend to reveal information about how the code is organized.

I usually focus on an area I'm especially curious about if I'm not trying to understand the whole program. For example, in games like this, I'll try to find assembly files or places with inline assembler, because it's usually interesting to see what the developer felt was performance-critical or hard to achieve from C. Then I'd find the functions that call those assembly routines and read them, et cetera.

Taking notes can help, like sketching the module structure or the major data structures on a whiteboard and trying to fill out how they interact. These days I use org-mode for taking notes about code I'm reading, because it makes it very convenient to capture links to specific sections of code (or specific commits, with org-magit) and make notes about them.

If I really have to understand it, I try to get it to build, add tests to the codebase, and maybe try adding a specific feature. But that would apply more to something like the Doom codebases that still build on modern platforms rather than a retro artifact like this.

I did not know Burger Heineman did this port.