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Palettes were a struggle in early versions of Encarta, and when Bert joined the team, he tackled it head-on and rewrote all our palette code, largely fixing the issues - although whenever a new palette bug showed up, he’d grumble. Raby: “Palettes! The word will be forever linked in my brain to Bert Kleewein. We also had an in-house cartographer, Whit Alexander (he would go on to co-create the board game Cranium), who created our maps.” Q: Can you talk about the color palette that Encarta used? I read that it provided optimal image quality with minimal palette flashing. An internal tool linked media to articles. “Editorial requested media for their articles, and then we had a team of media producers who created and/or acquired what the editors wanted. That missing image would have to wait for the next build.” Creating that file was a long, slow process, so if anything was wrong - say, a media file was missing - we couldn’t just quickly re-run it to fix the problem. A big piece of Encarta was the two internal engines, Shadowfax and Media View, which together took all the media files, as well as the text, and compressed them as tightly as possible into a single file that had to fit on the CD. Our editorial team always wanted more media than we had room for. Raby: “The multimedia part of the encyclopedia - maps, images, illustrations, videos - presented unique challenges. It was contracted out, but I think this time it was written in C++ or at least something with better performance than before.” Q: Encarta’s designed with illustrations, animations, & maps in mind. We still didn’t have the programming resources.
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“So MindMaze got a rewrite! However, it still was not done in-house. Bill Gates’s singling out that problem meant that in the next version, we would have to fix it, and that was something we on the dev team had desperately wanted to do.” But instead, we were dancing in the aisles. He complained about MindMaze’s performance, saying something like, “This is the slowest thing I have ever seen!!” You’d think we on the development team would be mortified. Most of the contents of this email I have forgotten, but I remember one part clearly. “After the original Encarta came out (1993 version), Bill Gates spent some time trying it out and sent us an in-house email with his critiques.
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But at the time, our development team (programmers) was just a handful of people, and we didn’t have the resources to write MindMaze in-house. We on the development team were dissatisfied with MindMaze’s performance, which did not meet the standard of the rest of the product. All the rest of Encarta was written in C++, with some small portions written in assembly to make them a little extra zippy. The original version was written, I believe, in Visual Basic or some other interpreted language. Raby: “MindMaze was always contracted out. Source: Brian Manthos Q: Who came up with the dialogue in MindMaze? An original photo of the Encarta team from 1998.