I found this story in my journey, and it’s a familiar thing, so I thought I’d repost the guts of it here. The original article is at Tales of the Rampant Coyote
Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.
“It’s a black triangle,†she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?â€
What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete – the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.
They apparently referred to these kinds of advancements as a Black Triangle, a metaphor indicating possibly massive progress, but in a framework or engine or supporting code, such that the current results give you (or rather, people looking at it) no sense of progress. For me, it was usually a white triangle (on a black background) when dealing with 3d graphics, but similar events have occurred, like when I got a tile displaying in one of my 2D games, or when working on an automated script for work creating many large templates and supporting code when the test itself is actually not that long or complex, or Curtis’ graphics project, that had all sorts of physical simulations going on with real-world formulas being applied… but for a long time all he had was a text console spitting out numbers.
I like the Black Triangle metaphor, I will try to remember to use it in future, even if no one knows what the hell I’m talking about.
