Yeah, I was looking at infantry.cpp, and the quality is actually very good for 90s game code. The documentation is good, it's decently well-formatted, and there are assertions. Nice counterexample to the "all successful games have terrible code" conventional wisdom.
> Nice counterexample to the "all successful games have terrible code" conventional wisdom.
That's a modern wisdom from the last 15-ish years when people started to have good enough internet connections that you can get away with publishing a dozens gigabytes patch on launch day.
In ye olde times, it was prohibitively expensive (or in the case of console ROM cartridges, impossible) to distribute patches, so projects were usually planned with plenty of buffer time and plenty human testers. These days it's rush to not collide with the releases of other AAA studios, and human paid-for testers have been replaced by free (or, sometimes, paying) early-access players.
I think survivor bias is at play here. C&C had many sequels, ports, expansion packs that helped make it popular. So of course it had nice code, otherwise we wouldn't have seen such a wide berth of reuse for that code.
