"We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail."
I'd say Ray is right, not lacking the skill, but lacking the time
Raymond's comment about not being able to find the collision code is a bit absurd. I can't recall if Danny or I named the top-level collision detection function, but it was just named 'pb_collide'.
To be fair it's a huge undertaking to port any code of that size to 64 bits, be it fully commented or not. He probably remembers it vaguely and it might be a different function they had problems finding the exact location in the source code.
I'm curious, didn't they just call you or Danny (I believe that's Danny Thorpe, who is currently working for Microsoft) for assistance?
Ray wasn't about only to find the collision, but porting or not the game, meaning going through entire uncommented code of the game. And he said they made the executive decision not to port it.
> [...] we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!