-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel
- Thread starter Goral
- Start date
__scribbles__
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Nobody will be surprised that Cain prefers fun over balance in any of his games. Nosferatu is harder than the other clans, some people consider magic easier than gunslinging in Arcanum, but those are difficulty, not (un)fun.
Balance is very important in PvP and PvE multiplayer games. In PvE, not fun if another build can have more fun than another because their abilities are more broadly useful or their class is more important. Balance is probably the most important aspect of PvP. In singleplayer, not so much.
People will find ways to be OP and min max their characters, Cain considers that fine. if you can make a character that can kill everything in one hit, cool. Cain finds it cool when people build glass cannons that could do lots of damage but are frail, some people like that challenge. Cain used to play what they called Johnny One Spells in GURPS, a mage who put all of his points into one spell. Maybe you can call an ice explosion spells or Flamejet, but you put all your points into it so it was an excellent spell, never missed, lots of power. Works great until you run into something like a flame elemental, now it's useless.
Gets why people talk about fun vs. balance, but doesn't want to dictate fun to players of single player games. Have fun playing the game, and playing the game is not just exploring the world, it's exploring the mechanics.
On the subject of forcing the fun way, there are some games where a designer thought there was a particular best/fun way to play and they obligated the player to play that way. Hates that of course, does not like forcing the player to play anyway. Why he tries pacifist playthrough, kill everyone even without talking to the, try and make sure you can finish the game no matter your character build. May not be easy, but maybe you find some strange way to have fun, not Cain's purpose to stop you. Can do many things at ToEE, kill Zuggtmoy, team up with her, maybe you were good or you were evil. If you joined Zuggtmoy, and they made a sequel where she was a party member, it would have been unbalanced, but fun and a neat way to end the game.
Back to quest markers, some people hate them, Cain gets that. Some people require them, will move onto the next game if it doesn't have them. Cain also gets that. Cain thinks the best way is to make it optional, some people pointed out that this (And Cain thought this was good to point out) would be harder to playtest (Cain agrees) because now it has to be able to be solved without quest markers, you need information on where to go and have that information logged so you can go back to it. Some games just archive all of the past dialogue and you can go back to that. Cain likes that, but also prefers directly linking the dialogue relevant to the quest like they did in Arcanum. Optional quest markers and very well defined quests seems to be the best solution to be Cain, other solutions are the developer telling the player how to have fun.
What is fun? Hard to define fun, like defining happy. You ask some kids why they are happy, they probably won't know. You ask someone why they are having fun playing a game, they don't know, it's just fun. Cain likes to fall back to the porn definition- Can't define it, knows it when he sees it. Recaps the Supreme Court story where that came from.
Cain has played many games, knows what fun is. Can tell when game is fun, can tell when game is not fun. But he cannot give a shorthand description of fun that the channel's viewers couldn't rip apart. Whatever the lead designer or game director thinks is fun is what is fun in a game. Sometimes fun is from emergent gameplay, where nobody saw it coming.
Balance is very important in PvP and PvE multiplayer games. In PvE, not fun if another build can have more fun than another because their abilities are more broadly useful or their class is more important. Balance is probably the most important aspect of PvP. In singleplayer, not so much.
People will find ways to be OP and min max their characters, Cain considers that fine. if you can make a character that can kill everything in one hit, cool. Cain finds it cool when people build glass cannons that could do lots of damage but are frail, some people like that challenge. Cain used to play what they called Johnny One Spells in GURPS, a mage who put all of his points into one spell. Maybe you can call an ice explosion spells or Flamejet, but you put all your points into it so it was an excellent spell, never missed, lots of power. Works great until you run into something like a flame elemental, now it's useless.
Gets why people talk about fun vs. balance, but doesn't want to dictate fun to players of single player games. Have fun playing the game, and playing the game is not just exploring the world, it's exploring the mechanics.
On the subject of forcing the fun way, there are some games where a designer thought there was a particular best/fun way to play and they obligated the player to play that way. Hates that of course, does not like forcing the player to play anyway. Why he tries pacifist playthrough, kill everyone even without talking to the, try and make sure you can finish the game no matter your character build. May not be easy, but maybe you find some strange way to have fun, not Cain's purpose to stop you. Can do many things at ToEE, kill Zuggtmoy, team up with her, maybe you were good or you were evil. If you joined Zuggtmoy, and they made a sequel where she was a party member, it would have been unbalanced, but fun and a neat way to end the game.
Back to quest markers, some people hate them, Cain gets that. Some people require them, will move onto the next game if it doesn't have them. Cain also gets that. Cain thinks the best way is to make it optional, some people pointed out that this (And Cain thought this was good to point out) would be harder to playtest (Cain agrees) because now it has to be able to be solved without quest markers, you need information on where to go and have that information logged so you can go back to it. Some games just archive all of the past dialogue and you can go back to that. Cain likes that, but also prefers directly linking the dialogue relevant to the quest like they did in Arcanum. Optional quest markers and very well defined quests seems to be the best solution to be Cain, other solutions are the developer telling the player how to have fun.
What is fun? Hard to define fun, like defining happy. You ask some kids why they are happy, they probably won't know. You ask someone why they are having fun playing a game, they don't know, it's just fun. Cain likes to fall back to the porn definition- Can't define it, knows it when he sees it. Recaps the Supreme Court story where that came from.
Cain has played many games, knows what fun is. Can tell when game is fun, can tell when game is not fun. But he cannot give a shorthand description of fun that the channel's viewers couldn't rip apart. Whatever the lead designer or game director thinks is fun is what is fun in a game. Sometimes fun is from emergent gameplay, where nobody saw it coming.
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 14,832
Zuggtmoy is a Chaotic Evil Demon Prince of the Abyss...
I don't see how that would've worked out.
Would she honestly team up with a bunch of (admittedly) powerful mortals?
More likely she would turn on them.
ColonelMace
Educated
Sounds fun. Sign me up.
Hellraiser
Arcane
Nah.Just on time before Real World's Fallout
Fallout is way classier and awesome.
Real world Fallout will be just shit and Hell on Earth, but arguably better than the current Satanic systems and rulers...
I would argue it is the other way around, Fallout is quite bleak regarding the scale of the death toll, ecological collapse and how long it takes to rebuild governments and how long anarchy reigns supreme. There's not even a single surviving bumfuck nowhere pre-war town in the first game, it's all "new" built on the ashes of the old world, often by vault dwellers who seem to make up most of the survivors. Hub and Junktown are kind of ambigous on whether vault or non-vault survivors founded/populated them, so it's kind of 50/50, except vaults were not that common in the region so it seems other surivivors needed to be extremely lucky to survive outside of a vault when the bombs fell.
After the early post-nuclear part that will most likely kill you with nukes, radiation, collapse of the medical system, shitty sanitation availability *badum tish*, lack of clean water, famine and the roaming machete rape gangs, IRL Fallout would stabilize into some scavenger steampunk or dieselpunk reality within a decade after famines stop being an issue. To some extent a smaller scale version of that is visible in war-torn or post-war countries, and that's a good source for research both on the technical side and on the social side (I remember reading somewhere that cities are actually the first place to stabilize after ITZ or some other bout of anarchy, it's the sticks where gangs and anarchy last the longest, but of course the city would need to dodge a nuke first in this scenario...).
How long it would take for industry as such to drop the "scavenger" part and be able to build new cars or planes by itself is another topic, but if you consider the timescale of even the first Fallout realistically by that time either almost everyone would be dead from hunger or they would be closer to what the NCR was in Fallout 2 rather than existing as the Junktown/Boneyard/Shady Sands type of early settlement. You would need a very long lasting apocalypse (nuclear mini-ice age lasting decades for instance) and thus a late start of the stabilization period for something like that to happen IRL, and long lasting apocalypse, by which I mean no possibility of growing food, means a likely death-spiral for pockets of survivors (how many decades can you keep scavenging cans of food?).
While there is no 1 right way to make rpg, i think quest markers just deconstruct whole roleplaying and game design on fundamental way. World designer doesn't have to make world believable, think how people and things move around, put hints of people activity at places (visually show that is mine, miners live here, goods stored here, etc.) cause jut follow quest marker. No need to think up landmarks and stuff, questmarker. No need to raise questions and make npcs talk about world and directions, just questmarker. No reason to look at world carefully, exercise your perception like real adventurer would, just guestmarjhherrr. No detective work or trying to bridge gaps in quests with your brainmarkerrrrr.
I just played some old average quest in tamriel rebuilt. Find staff for thiaf. I go where it should be but find a guy he says staff moved to city mage guild. I ask city they say caravan with it never arrived. Quest doesn't saywhat do next. So i backtrack and using signposts from ruins to city follow road caravan probably followed and find its remains. With questmarker there would be no need for signposts. And no need for player to come up with their own decisions.
I just played some old average quest in tamriel rebuilt. Find staff for thiaf. I go where it should be but find a guy he says staff moved to city mage guild. I ask city they say caravan with it never arrived. Quest doesn't saywhat do next. So i backtrack and using signposts from ruins to city follow road caravan probably followed and find its remains. With questmarker there would be no need for signposts. And no need for player to come up with their own decisions.
Wesp5
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2007
- Messages
- 1,947
Not really. If the game offers an option to turn the questmarker off, like Tim suggested, you still need to have these!
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,708
You can beat her into submission.
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 14,832
Sure.
But demons are Chaotic Evil by nature.
It's easier to just kill them.
Do you honestly wanna trust a Tanar'ri?
Drakortha
Liturgist
He's suffering from what's called Youtuber "content creator" syndrome.
Basically people make a channel and set out to put their thoughts and experiences out there, and hopefully be able to share some knowledge. It's noble enough. But then for some unknown reason once the deed is already done and all personal knowledge has been exhausted they become compelled to keep making more videos. Even if it means regurgitating shit they've already done, or twist it in some way. Or sometimes they just start making shit up to justify making more "content".
Cunts just don't know when enough is enough. The Simpsons was a funny enough show. But we didn't need fucking 36 seasons of it.
__scribbles__
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Technological change was excited and stressful.
When Cain was a kid, they would get little handheld games like Calico Football, then pong unit you hooked up to your TV, and the year after that the first console. Things kept coming and coming. Fun for a consumer, but you could buy something and a few months later it was obsolete. Really hit it's stride with PCs, you buy a PC a few months something comes out better in all aspects.
Cain will discuss his experience since 1981 of trying to make games for a constnatly shifting technology target.
The difference between making a game and writing a book or making TV/Movies is that the pace of technological change in those don't hold a candle to the pace of change in gaming. They've made better microphones, better cameras, figured out ways to light the movies better, but speaking broadly, directing is the same as it was say 20/40 years or so. Every time something in gaming changed technologically, it would make old games not work and add so many other options for future games. You can do realistic graphics now, how many? You can do cutscenes now, how many? Felt like an exponential expansion where you had to keep up or die.
Grand Slam Bridge may look graphical, but it is all text based. Used ASCII characters they didn't need to define and put in a text mode. This meant it works on any PC, and still works. Very interesting way of doing a game.
After grad school and diving back into games with Bard's Tale, now Cain was doing games in VGA. It was the new hotness, had to put in support for EGA and even older CGA. VGA gave them 256 colours at 32200 resolution, EGA only gave 16, and CGA gave them 4, and those 4 were predefined black white magenta and a purple color Cain can't name. Good luck making graphics in that resolution when you can't even pick your colors.
By the time he started Fallout in early 94 (Had to work out exactly when he started, probably January), but the very first meeting with Steve Jackson Games was March 94. Nobody besides Cain would be assigned until August. Fallout was 640x480 resolution with 256 colors, between four to five times the resolution of 32200. But to use this mode, called Super VGA, you had to bank switch, as the computer just couldn't access all the memory it needed. First few scan lines would be on one bank, next lines on another bank, had to tell the video card when to switch. When they did Fallout, every video card bank switched in a different way, and you had to learn that and do it in Assembly. No alternatives. You also had to ask the consumer what video card they were using, and that is assuming the consumer even knew what their card is. Sometimes it was different, do you have a Trident 9600 chipset A? Chipset B? Chipset C? They all bank switched differently. You can try auto detecting (not reliable) or ask them to guess by displaying a picture(pray they don't crash) and if they see something you could move on. Thankfully, VESA came out, but it did not come out in time for Fallout to take full advantage of it. Worked better than trying to guess. They discovered that Mac kept breaking all of the old software, and Apple cared very little about games (Could do a video about that, cares too little about Apple to bother.) Fallout would get invalidated by every new Mac update. Easier to play Windows Fallout in an emulator/partition on Mac than playing the actual Mac version.
Arcanum comes out, 800x600, still 256 colors, VESA now made everything easier. Cards shipped with VESA compliant driver. Just tell the card through a set of VESA interrupts and your resolution and colors and it would set it up. VESA would supply your bank switching routines and figure it out for you. Cain had dropped mac versions, but the windows and directx versions kept coming out while they were making the game, hard to keep up. Yes, Windows had backwards compatibility, and that helped and still helps. But not perfect, can be janky, cause issues in HUD and framerate. But when they were making Arcanum in Windows 95 and Windows NT, but then Windows 98 came out, then Windows 98 Second Edition, then Windows 2000, then Windows ME, and finally Windows XP. Had to make sure the game worked on all of these, did your operating system calls suddenly stop working? Windows cycled a new version every year, the rest of the time they ran Troika a new XP version came every year. Hard to keep up with.
All of this is just for 2d, Temple was the first use of 3D video graphics usage. The backgrounds were still 2d, but they had 3D collision mesh and 3D characters. They had to go through the 3D API from the card, and the cards all went 3D a bit differently. When they did Vampire, it was totally 3D. Learning a new way to make games, worry about polygon count and texture sizes. Math became very important for level designers and programmers. You could have gotten by in the video game industry back then in art or narrative with limited/no math. Not that they went 3D, had to know linear algebra, had to know vectors, had to know matrices. Huge shift in the industry. Cain's engineering school helped a lot here, Cain knew programmers that stayed 2D. Knew one that stayed 2D programming for the next 20 years of his career.
Hasn't even touched on languages, every game was C until Vampire, which was C++. Cain kept with C++ until Pillars which was C#, and then went back to C++ for Outer Worlds.
Made his own engines from the very beginning up to 2011, with the exception of Bloodlines being on the source. Obsidian had Onyx for South Park, then switched to Unity for Pillars. Unity didn't give you source code, you did what they told you you could do, if you couldn't you asked them, who knows if they would do anything. On Outer Worlds they had Unreal, had to learn new way of doing things, but you had access to the engine and could change things you needed to. But you were responsible for that change, whenever you updated Unreal you had to fold your changes back into it.
TL;DR Technological change never ends in gaming, get used to it. Unreal will not be around forever. New engines will come out, they will get displaced or change so dramatically you have to relearn everything. Exciting to learn something new every time, stressful because you must learn something new every time. Embrace it and love it.
When Cain was a kid, they would get little handheld games like Calico Football, then pong unit you hooked up to your TV, and the year after that the first console. Things kept coming and coming. Fun for a consumer, but you could buy something and a few months later it was obsolete. Really hit it's stride with PCs, you buy a PC a few months something comes out better in all aspects.
Cain will discuss his experience since 1981 of trying to make games for a constnatly shifting technology target.
The difference between making a game and writing a book or making TV/Movies is that the pace of technological change in those don't hold a candle to the pace of change in gaming. They've made better microphones, better cameras, figured out ways to light the movies better, but speaking broadly, directing is the same as it was say 20/40 years or so. Every time something in gaming changed technologically, it would make old games not work and add so many other options for future games. You can do realistic graphics now, how many? You can do cutscenes now, how many? Felt like an exponential expansion where you had to keep up or die.
Grand Slam Bridge may look graphical, but it is all text based. Used ASCII characters they didn't need to define and put in a text mode. This meant it works on any PC, and still works. Very interesting way of doing a game.
After grad school and diving back into games with Bard's Tale, now Cain was doing games in VGA. It was the new hotness, had to put in support for EGA and even older CGA. VGA gave them 256 colours at 32200 resolution, EGA only gave 16, and CGA gave them 4, and those 4 were predefined black white magenta and a purple color Cain can't name. Good luck making graphics in that resolution when you can't even pick your colors.
By the time he started Fallout in early 94 (Had to work out exactly when he started, probably January), but the very first meeting with Steve Jackson Games was March 94. Nobody besides Cain would be assigned until August. Fallout was 640x480 resolution with 256 colors, between four to five times the resolution of 32200. But to use this mode, called Super VGA, you had to bank switch, as the computer just couldn't access all the memory it needed. First few scan lines would be on one bank, next lines on another bank, had to tell the video card when to switch. When they did Fallout, every video card bank switched in a different way, and you had to learn that and do it in Assembly. No alternatives. You also had to ask the consumer what video card they were using, and that is assuming the consumer even knew what their card is. Sometimes it was different, do you have a Trident 9600 chipset A? Chipset B? Chipset C? They all bank switched differently. You can try auto detecting (not reliable) or ask them to guess by displaying a picture(pray they don't crash) and if they see something you could move on. Thankfully, VESA came out, but it did not come out in time for Fallout to take full advantage of it. Worked better than trying to guess. They discovered that Mac kept breaking all of the old software, and Apple cared very little about games (Could do a video about that, cares too little about Apple to bother.) Fallout would get invalidated by every new Mac update. Easier to play Windows Fallout in an emulator/partition on Mac than playing the actual Mac version.
Arcanum comes out, 800x600, still 256 colors, VESA now made everything easier. Cards shipped with VESA compliant driver. Just tell the card through a set of VESA interrupts and your resolution and colors and it would set it up. VESA would supply your bank switching routines and figure it out for you. Cain had dropped mac versions, but the windows and directx versions kept coming out while they were making the game, hard to keep up. Yes, Windows had backwards compatibility, and that helped and still helps. But not perfect, can be janky, cause issues in HUD and framerate. But when they were making Arcanum in Windows 95 and Windows NT, but then Windows 98 came out, then Windows 98 Second Edition, then Windows 2000, then Windows ME, and finally Windows XP. Had to make sure the game worked on all of these, did your operating system calls suddenly stop working? Windows cycled a new version every year, the rest of the time they ran Troika a new XP version came every year. Hard to keep up with.
All of this is just for 2d, Temple was the first use of 3D video graphics usage. The backgrounds were still 2d, but they had 3D collision mesh and 3D characters. They had to go through the 3D API from the card, and the cards all went 3D a bit differently. When they did Vampire, it was totally 3D. Learning a new way to make games, worry about polygon count and texture sizes. Math became very important for level designers and programmers. You could have gotten by in the video game industry back then in art or narrative with limited/no math. Not that they went 3D, had to know linear algebra, had to know vectors, had to know matrices. Huge shift in the industry. Cain's engineering school helped a lot here, Cain knew programmers that stayed 2D. Knew one that stayed 2D programming for the next 20 years of his career.
Hasn't even touched on languages, every game was C until Vampire, which was C++. Cain kept with C++ until Pillars which was C#, and then went back to C++ for Outer Worlds.
Made his own engines from the very beginning up to 2011, with the exception of Bloodlines being on the source. Obsidian had Onyx for South Park, then switched to Unity for Pillars. Unity didn't give you source code, you did what they told you you could do, if you couldn't you asked them, who knows if they would do anything. On Outer Worlds they had Unreal, had to learn new way of doing things, but you had access to the engine and could change things you needed to. But you were responsible for that change, whenever you updated Unreal you had to fold your changes back into it.
TL;DR Technological change never ends in gaming, get used to it. Unreal will not be around forever. New engines will come out, they will get displaced or change so dramatically you have to relearn everything. Exciting to learn something new every time, stressful because you must learn something new every time. Embrace it and love it.
Last edited:
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,708
He's answering questions people ask him. You can always just stop watching.
Stella Brando
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2005
- Messages
- 9,500
In the games, about 20.Hellraiser said:
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,624
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Started with BASIC on the Atari 800, leading into assembly. Pascal was first compiled language, write code, run it through compiler, get executable. BASIC was interpreted, relatively easy compared to compiled language, but Pascal was a lot faster and had more features.
Had to learn a lot of languages for his degree, first exposed to C and C++ academically. Learned C academically in last year of UVA, but had an overview class in '84, year before that in 1983 was when he started working on Grand Slam Bridge, written in C. As doing a lot of work in C both academically and professionally, sort of became his go to language and picked up the tricks. Recursion, making structures with pointers, arrays, etc.
From Grand Slam Bridge all the way up to Bloodlines, Cain used C. Very good grounding in how to use it for games. However, the Source Engine for Bloodlines was in C++, so they switched.
Has been asked why he didn't change from C to C++ sooner, including a potential publisher very directly and very rudely saying Cain was basically an idiot for not making the change while they were shopping around Arcanum. Cain looked at C++ and C, usually the same compiler could do both, and compared their output. He found that optimization throughout the 90s worked better on C, and the executables were smaller. That combination led him to work with C. Bloodlines comes along, they don't have a choice, but Cain is pleasantly surprised to find optimization had much improved in C++. But Cain would still find issues. Even in the 2000s, Cain would compile his code with optimization flags and it wouldn't work, then he would switch off the optimization flags and it would work fine. He'd look at the Assembly and find it was rolled out a loop incorrectly or put in an incorrect jump and then fix that. Shocked Cain to the core in the 2010s to learn there were professional programmers who did know not you could do that. If they ran into a problem, they would switch off all of the optimization and then switch them on one by one until they broke and then avoid using whatever one caused the problem, or they'd use pragmas to switch off optimization in certain parts of the code, but they never tried to figure out what exactly was causing the problem.
Started using C++ a lot from Bloodlines onwards, except for Unity games. C++, to Cain, felt like C but with classes. Yes it has more features, but in Cain's experience other programmers want to use those features when they aren't needed and they lead to overly complex hard to read code. They'd dent it's a problem, but six months later there would be a bug, they'd be looking at the programmer's code asking what they were thinking, and the programmer can't remember what they were doing because the code was so obtuse. In Cain's experience, inheritance and operator overloading are the prime causes of code being hard to go back to and read. What happens is you end up looking at code that you think is calling a function but it's actually overloading or inheriting something else. These are great techniques, but in the wrong hands they are abused.
As an example of where two excellent programmers would argue about C++, at Carbine two programmers Cain thought very highly of were arguing about whether or not they should use the standard library. One said they were wasting time and reinventing the wheel, they should just use STL. Another programmer said they should not use STL as many of them did not come with source code, making them hard to debug. Both of them made an excellent case and Cain found it hard to decide. Thinks what they eventually did was find a very plain language STL with source code and told people to use that.
Source was the first engine Cain ever used that wasn't one made in house but they went back to in-house for Wildstar at Carbine. Game was coded in C++, Cain experimented in C# for the tools. Faster to develop for, easier to do UI. However, it's optimization was terrible. Wrote the same programs in C#, C, and C++. The C# was an order of magnitude slower than the other two, the other two would do something in a second, C# would take 30 seconds to a minute to do the same thing. C# of an image processing program he made was extremely unimpressive in it's speed.
Going to Obsidian at 2011, Onyx was all in C++, but Cain still had to learn it because it was made at first for Dungeon Siege III and they were repurposing it for South Park. Figured it out, but the next project was Pillars and Cain realized he'd really have to use C#.
For Pillars, The Unity engine is either java or C#, engine was opaque so you couldn't really code it, but you get calls out. When your class starts or there is a tick, you can call out. If you needed to apply a status effect you can call a status effect event. Turns out, you had to do things like that, because they had optimization issues where people tried to do everything on the update. It's easy to wait until the tick update and then check if you have any status effects. To know that, you'd have to keep a list of old status effects or put a flag on some status effects. People were doing stuff like that in Unity's update function instead of what they should have been doing, listening for an event and have the class that has the required thing make an event. C# was not only slow, it was being heavily abused to become even slower. Used for Pillars and Tyranny, but jumped back to C++ for Outer Worlds.
C++ and Unreal were not only faster, but you could go into the source to fix issues.
If Cain had to pick a language today, he would go C++ with C as a close second. C++ is very powerful, compilers and optimization are very good now. Easy to abuse it, but if you are careful you can write really good code. Would pick C second because of his familiarity with it, compilers for it were very good but he wonders if that levelled out. C is very close to the metal, if you have to write out memory locations, C is great and let's you do that. Compiled code is 1:1 to assembly so you can see how it would be done if you wrote it by hand.
After that, C# would be his third one with a caveat. By far the easiest to learn, but may have been because he learned C and C++ first. But he also saw students and other programmers taking to C# very easily.
If you were to start now, grab C#, grab Unity, learn how to code that way, but you should eventually move onto C++.
Had to learn a lot of languages for his degree, first exposed to C and C++ academically. Learned C academically in last year of UVA, but had an overview class in '84, year before that in 1983 was when he started working on Grand Slam Bridge, written in C. As doing a lot of work in C both academically and professionally, sort of became his go to language and picked up the tricks. Recursion, making structures with pointers, arrays, etc.
From Grand Slam Bridge all the way up to Bloodlines, Cain used C. Very good grounding in how to use it for games. However, the Source Engine for Bloodlines was in C++, so they switched.
Has been asked why he didn't change from C to C++ sooner, including a potential publisher very directly and very rudely saying Cain was basically an idiot for not making the change while they were shopping around Arcanum. Cain looked at C++ and C, usually the same compiler could do both, and compared their output. He found that optimization throughout the 90s worked better on C, and the executables were smaller. That combination led him to work with C. Bloodlines comes along, they don't have a choice, but Cain is pleasantly surprised to find optimization had much improved in C++. But Cain would still find issues. Even in the 2000s, Cain would compile his code with optimization flags and it wouldn't work, then he would switch off the optimization flags and it would work fine. He'd look at the Assembly and find it was rolled out a loop incorrectly or put in an incorrect jump and then fix that. Shocked Cain to the core in the 2010s to learn there were professional programmers who did know not you could do that. If they ran into a problem, they would switch off all of the optimization and then switch them on one by one until they broke and then avoid using whatever one caused the problem, or they'd use pragmas to switch off optimization in certain parts of the code, but they never tried to figure out what exactly was causing the problem.
Started using C++ a lot from Bloodlines onwards, except for Unity games. C++, to Cain, felt like C but with classes. Yes it has more features, but in Cain's experience other programmers want to use those features when they aren't needed and they lead to overly complex hard to read code. They'd dent it's a problem, but six months later there would be a bug, they'd be looking at the programmer's code asking what they were thinking, and the programmer can't remember what they were doing because the code was so obtuse. In Cain's experience, inheritance and operator overloading are the prime causes of code being hard to go back to and read. What happens is you end up looking at code that you think is calling a function but it's actually overloading or inheriting something else. These are great techniques, but in the wrong hands they are abused.
As an example of where two excellent programmers would argue about C++, at Carbine two programmers Cain thought very highly of were arguing about whether or not they should use the standard library. One said they were wasting time and reinventing the wheel, they should just use STL. Another programmer said they should not use STL as many of them did not come with source code, making them hard to debug. Both of them made an excellent case and Cain found it hard to decide. Thinks what they eventually did was find a very plain language STL with source code and told people to use that.
Source was the first engine Cain ever used that wasn't one made in house but they went back to in-house for Wildstar at Carbine. Game was coded in C++, Cain experimented in C# for the tools. Faster to develop for, easier to do UI. However, it's optimization was terrible. Wrote the same programs in C#, C, and C++. The C# was an order of magnitude slower than the other two, the other two would do something in a second, C# would take 30 seconds to a minute to do the same thing. C# of an image processing program he made was extremely unimpressive in it's speed.
Going to Obsidian at 2011, Onyx was all in C++, but Cain still had to learn it because it was made at first for Dungeon Siege III and they were repurposing it for South Park. Figured it out, but the next project was Pillars and Cain realized he'd really have to use C#.
For Pillars, The Unity engine is either java or C#, engine was opaque so you couldn't really code it, but you get calls out. When your class starts or there is a tick, you can call out. If you needed to apply a status effect you can call a status effect event. Turns out, you had to do things like that, because they had optimization issues where people tried to do everything on the update. It's easy to wait until the tick update and then check if you have any status effects. To know that, you'd have to keep a list of old status effects or put a flag on some status effects. People were doing stuff like that in Unity's update function instead of what they should have been doing, listening for an event and have the class that has the required thing make an event. C# was not only slow, it was being heavily abused to become even slower. Used for Pillars and Tyranny, but jumped back to C++ for Outer Worlds.
C++ and Unreal were not only faster, but you could go into the source to fix issues.
If Cain had to pick a language today, he would go C++ with C as a close second. C++ is very powerful, compilers and optimization are very good now. Easy to abuse it, but if you are careful you can write really good code. Would pick C second because of his familiarity with it, compilers for it were very good but he wonders if that levelled out. C is very close to the metal, if you have to write out memory locations, C is great and let's you do that. Compiled code is 1:1 to assembly so you can see how it would be done if you wrote it by hand.
After that, C# would be his third one with a caveat. By far the easiest to learn, but may have been because he learned C and C++ first. But he also saw students and other programmers taking to C# very easily.
If you were to start now, grab C#, grab Unity, learn how to code that way, but you should eventually move onto C++.
__scribbles__
Educated
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Obviously, Cain prefers the choice of ending the game because all of his games have done that. Part of the reason is that when you have an ending, that is when you can do the reactivity that you can't do in game. Some reactions have immediate reaction (shop keeper doesn't like you, companions leave the group), but end game slides are more distant. Towns become major political players, villages fade away as people leave them, etc. Telling the player some of their consequences aren't immediate.
Also, having a game end encourages replayability. Witnessing your choice and consequences and outcome of your build is fun and makes you want to play again.
Occasionally leans towards the idea of playing a game where you can keep playing after the main quest, but there are two big caveats. Have to bear in mind that if you have content past the main questline ending, and you want to show reactivity for that, that is going to be money. Whoever that is, publisher, kickstarter, someone else, you should get that agreed on with them. It's going to affect everything you do in production/bug fixing/polishing/ and beyond. Second caveat, in pre production, you need to have planned for the player continuing afterwards from the very start. Going back to Cain's Setting------>Story---->Mechanics, you are basically saying you want the story to end outside of some side quests, which will affect your mechanics. If you don't plan to have people continuing your game and then later in development someone decides to ditch the level cap and let people keep playing, the player is going to travel to places that have no reaction to them defeating the main villain. Level design probably has to be changed, now that the villain is gone maybe some areas may need to be altered.
System Mechanics need to be changed or people will keep buying levels and gaining perks until they run out of things to buy. Walking gods that have every ability at max, going to get ridiculous. Some people suggest diminishing returns, say after 100 in a skill you can keep increasing it, but in the example of Archery it gives 1% more hit chance every five points instead of 1% every 1 point and eventually that goes up and up. At some point it will top out within a reasonable few thousand hours, maybe it goes to about 200% hit chance and getting above that isn't practical. Maybe once someone gets to 200% to hit chance, it goes to the critical hit chance ahead. Just has to be accounted for it at the start.
Also questioned about New Game Plus, feels like it is in the same area of design. Caveat he has never done that, but finds the idea interesting. If you don't reset everything on the player, you can also not resetting all of the world. Maybe change the location of some items, or characteristics of the villain. Different ways to handle partial return of skills, maybe the player can just reallocate it, or just restore their XP. Usually achievements aren't reset and he's seen achievements for doing New Game Plus.
Sometimes he sees features locked behind new game plus, maybe you can't play a particular class or race that is locked behind it. Doesn't really like the player not having the choice at the beginning, but if you really like new game plus as an element of your game he can see doing this. Could also see using New Game Plus to call out to the player about skills or features you put in that weren't strictly important. Wonders if he should have kept the crazy encounters in Fallout like UFOs and Time Lords to some form of new game plus, otherwise people wonder if they are canon. Considers something like New Vegas's Wild Wasteland trait.
Also, having a game end encourages replayability. Witnessing your choice and consequences and outcome of your build is fun and makes you want to play again.
Occasionally leans towards the idea of playing a game where you can keep playing after the main quest, but there are two big caveats. Have to bear in mind that if you have content past the main questline ending, and you want to show reactivity for that, that is going to be money. Whoever that is, publisher, kickstarter, someone else, you should get that agreed on with them. It's going to affect everything you do in production/bug fixing/polishing/ and beyond. Second caveat, in pre production, you need to have planned for the player continuing afterwards from the very start. Going back to Cain's Setting------>Story---->Mechanics, you are basically saying you want the story to end outside of some side quests, which will affect your mechanics. If you don't plan to have people continuing your game and then later in development someone decides to ditch the level cap and let people keep playing, the player is going to travel to places that have no reaction to them defeating the main villain. Level design probably has to be changed, now that the villain is gone maybe some areas may need to be altered.
System Mechanics need to be changed or people will keep buying levels and gaining perks until they run out of things to buy. Walking gods that have every ability at max, going to get ridiculous. Some people suggest diminishing returns, say after 100 in a skill you can keep increasing it, but in the example of Archery it gives 1% more hit chance every five points instead of 1% every 1 point and eventually that goes up and up. At some point it will top out within a reasonable few thousand hours, maybe it goes to about 200% hit chance and getting above that isn't practical. Maybe once someone gets to 200% to hit chance, it goes to the critical hit chance ahead. Just has to be accounted for it at the start.
Also questioned about New Game Plus, feels like it is in the same area of design. Caveat he has never done that, but finds the idea interesting. If you don't reset everything on the player, you can also not resetting all of the world. Maybe change the location of some items, or characteristics of the villain. Different ways to handle partial return of skills, maybe the player can just reallocate it, or just restore their XP. Usually achievements aren't reset and he's seen achievements for doing New Game Plus.
Sometimes he sees features locked behind new game plus, maybe you can't play a particular class or race that is locked behind it. Doesn't really like the player not having the choice at the beginning, but if you really like new game plus as an element of your game he can see doing this. Could also see using New Game Plus to call out to the player about skills or features you put in that weren't strictly important. Wonders if he should have kept the crazy encounters in Fallout like UFOs and Time Lords to some form of new game plus, otherwise people wonder if they are canon. Considers something like New Vegas's Wild Wasteland trait.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2015
- Messages
- 517
Do not underestimate how much Cain is into chocolate.
Links his chocolate blog, thousands of entries. At one point Cain could eat a bite of chocolate and and tell you within 5% what the kcal percentage was and could sometimes tell you the country of origin if it was single country.
When he was in grad school one of his roommates said he should keep the label of a particularly delicious chocolate. Filled six albums before he went all digital, hence there being there thousands of entries on the blog.
Once Cain hit his 40s, he couldn't eat all that chocolate, plus his doctor told him to cut back on it. Still wanted to try new chocolate, so at Carbine he started the chocolate eating meeting. 15 minute meeting at 3 o clock every day. He'd send an email out, he'd break up a chocolate bar and have it on his desk showing the label. Don't leave any meetings your in, but if you are free feel free to come on over. Some people came every day, some people came every now and then. Some people switched to dark chocolate from white chocolate, some got really good at judging chocolate. It was a nice mental break in the middle of the day, and Cain had noticed that back at Interplay that there were people who seemed to know each other despite not sitting at lunch together, not working on the same projects, or sit near each other. Cain found out this was from smoke breaks, a lot of connections being made there. At Cain's chocolate meetings, the same thing would happen. People would talk about new movies, what games they were playing, what places in the area they should check out. People realized there were people from every department coming in;' programmers, designers, sound guys, QA, etc. They'd ask how new tools were working, if a feature went in, recommend a cool song to the audio team, complain about getting stuck in geometry to the level designers. Probably one of the most productive 15 minutes of the day, someone always seemed to get something out of it. Another programmer would let someone know a feature they were planning to spend the day on was already implemented in another module, probably saving a great deal of work.
Cain would meet coworkers at chocolate store, a new store would open up and they would plan an afternoon around it. Take pictures, take pictures inside, go to lunch afterwards and talk about the chocolate they bought.
Took a trip to Paris in 2006, and went to La Maison Du Chocolat, a shop he always wanted to see. During his 2016 Sydney conference, worked in an entire afternoon to go to five different chocolate shops. Took pictures at all of them, employees might have thought he was a little weird but he was so excited to go to a store that he ate chocolate from half a decade ago.
People at work would come back from vacation excited to bring Cain chocolate. They would check Cain's blog and if it was new they would buy it and bring it to Cain's next chocolate meeting. Probably extended the chocolate meeting for years. When new people joined Cain's team he would invite them to attend the chocolate meetings. Some of them were pretty young, they'd think the director inviting them to their office was a little weird, but they'd see everyone hanging out, maybe up to 12 people, and they'd learn a lot.
Cain reads about onboarding of new employees and sometimes it feels very sterile. They buy them donuts or take them to lunch, nice, but feels forced and fabricated. At the chocolate meetings, a new employee would get comfortable, ask a question(i.e not understanding Perforce) and probably save a lot of time that would have been spent fumbling.
Was short, but a good mental break and tended to stimulate the team. They'd go back to work on some feature that wasn't checked in yet.
By the time he got to Obsidian he knew the meetings would have this side effect. Enjoying chocolate was still important but it was very useful. People who went through normal onboarding practices would never open up, but a few minutes in the chocolate meetings would start chatting about their family and background.
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 14,832
Tim doing the down low...
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.