You worked on Commandos? Holy crap. I'm mid way in to my game development career and played that to death before I even started. Plus 70 hours on Steam as an adult...
If you wanna make me feel old, just consider that Commandos was released 10 years after my first commercial game, so I'm even older. :D Fun bit: I never ever finished a single mission in a Commandos game.
Yeah I did code architecture work on Commandos 1, then led the tech & tools for the expansion and Commandos 2. A lot of the C1 work was related to this topic, actually: when I arrived at the project, it was hard inheritance-based with a fixed set of subcomponents, and I shifted it to a common base for gameobjects (the class "Bicho", really odd name) which contained a collection of arbitrary components that communicated via messages. It was more extensible that inheritance, but very messy - too many assumptions and typecasts. First steps... The Commandos 1 codebase was thrown away and restarted from scratch for Commandos 2.
If you ever get around to writing up a technical post mortem I'm sure it would be super interesting. The simulation seemed quite advanced for the low end hardware the game ran on, with view cones, pseudo height, physical objects, footprints, and pretty good AI.
The Commandos series dying out is a great shame, although of course Kalypso is staffing up to attempt a sequel.
Heh I was officially the last Pyro employee before it was folded, and my last task was to prepare and package up all backups when the IPs (rights, licenses, whatever it actually was) were sold to Kalypso. I not-so-secretly wished there would be a way for the Shadow Tactics team to make the next Commandos, but it wasn't to be (and Desperados 3 is awesome!).
For the past 2.5 years I've been at Lingokids, a mobile service filled with fun and educational content for kids in English. The tech challenge here is balancing constant forward movement with new games, while keeping all the previous ones working. But using my kids as testers beats anything else I've ever done in the fun-at-work department.
