Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Roguey]

First mention of Avellone: Tim says he was responsible for creating Tyranny's setting. That's funny, considering how Avellone later distanced himself from the project (By choice? Not by choice? Either way it led to trouble when he told mindx2 Tyranny wasn't his project which made Paradox irate because they had agreed to pay Feargus extra to have Avellone as a lead and Feargus never bothered to tell Chris this).

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about how we created procedural dialog in Arcanum, to add variety and extra reactivity to conversations.

 

[Roguey]

That procedural dialogue didn't always work out for the best.

http://www.ataniel.org/arcreview.htm

Arcanum is also heavily, heavily geared towards men. Female players should brace themselves for the tired old gaming experience of watching women in this game give you the same flirtatious lines they give the male characters and accidentally call you "him" periodically; the only time the game seems to remember female PC's might exist is in bars and whorehouses, where you sometimes get groped or propositioned by ugly gnomes. You definitely get the feeling that no one at Troika bothered to playtest this thing with a female PC, much less a female player.

Much like Vavra, Cain's on the AI-train for a more robust-version of this.

 

[Hagashager]

"Ugly Gnomes"

Well we certainly know where that author's prejudices lie. Which real-world analogue are Gnomes coded by modern critics? Jews? I think it's Jews.

That author is anti-semitic.

 

[Goral]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

I talk about game engines, including the pros and cons of making your own versus using third party ones.

 

[PapaPetro]

The more these come out, the more Tim looks like a neurotic pain in the ass to work with.

Seems like a cool guy to spitball ideas around at a high concept level.
But yeah I wouldn't want to get dicked down at work by him over some petty nuanced design decision/flex (I bet he has a very effective passive-aggressive way of making you feel dumb if he wants).
Though, I get the stresses of trying to jigsaw something like a game ex nihilo and make sure all the pieces fit/make sense.

Really interesting talk about game engines:

Every video he's cranked out has been

I'd like to see more of these industry figures start doing casual wisdom dumps on the reg rather than wait for their irregular TED talks at GDC once a decade or so.
Like MCA's got the time and fuck-you-money now from the settlement to do vlogs like Timmy here. I'd like to hear his takes.
Plus let's be honest, this is free marketing influence for himself or others who want to cash out their venerable past for a second future in this industry (NG+ with the Zoomers)

"Retirement" my shiny black ass

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Shiny? That’s sone skin treatment.

 

[Bad Sector]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

Having worked on a bunch of games, including a few AAA games, as an engine and tools programmer i personally by far prefer custom engines even if i wasn't the one making them (actually in all the AAA cases i wasn't :-P). No real technical reason aside from the control he mentioned (which is a *HUGE* *GARGANTUAN* *GINORMOUS* pro), i just personally like seeing how different programmers handle similar issues in real games - one engine using a pure OOP approach for entities, another using components, another using a hierarchy of nodes, another using all of them because the codebase is old and they wanted to modernize it but there is still code from the 90s :-P, one using macros for its RTTI, another using custom registration code, another using an external parser and code generator, another being "what is RTTI?", one using a scripting language for gameplay customization, another using visual scripting in the world editor, another using a node-based system, etc.

I've also used Unreal and the flip side of "knowing the engine" is that feeling that "i have already addressed that exact issue in this engine in my last company" so now you have to redo all that exact same work which is kinda mind-numbingly dull. Unreal's State UI being at best half-baked and a toy when compared to most existing GUI toolkits (including wxWidgets that UE3 used) and lacking (or lacked when i used it) features you'd find even in Windows 3.1 doesn't help (e.g. you can't have a scrollbox that can scroll both vertically and horizontally at the same time, you need to put one scrollbox inside another and connect the scrollbar of the inner one to a scrollbar you made yourself and have placed next to the outer one... it is a hacky mess).

TBH at this point in my life if i am to join a studio i'd rather join a studio with a custom engine (and preferably a smaller studio as with a bigger studio you're just getting lost in the human sea) rather than a studio with an off-the-shelf engine even if theoretically i'd be able to use my off-the-shelf engine knowledge (and TBH i don't think that is that much of a benefit as even the first time i used Unreal i already had a decent idea of where things would be because of my experience with custom engines - even if the details are different, at a high level most engines are somewhat similar). It is just more interesting to me that way.

Of course ideally i'd rather be making my living from my own games made using my own engine :-P

 

[PapaPetro]

Shiny? That’s sone skin treatment.

Polished from past kisses

 

[Roguey]

That's So Random


The masses yearn for karmic dice and shuffled permutations.

 

[scytheavatar]

Really interesting talk about game engines:

I talk about game engines, including the pros and cons of making your own versus using third party ones.

He does bring up a surprising disadvantage in using Unreal/Unity: you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas. While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

 

[pickmeister]

He does bring up a surprising disadvantage in using Unreal/Unity: you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas. While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

That or health insurance. God bless America.

EDIT: Harthwain, I'd really like to know why you retardoed my post. Are you unaware of the corporate practice of keeping employees in the company by leveraging the obscenely high cost of American healthcare system and offering them a better health insurance they're unlikely to get somewhere else?

 

[Bad Sector]

you are encouraging your competitors to poach your talent and make it easy for them to steal your tech and ideas.

The last time that had been a concern was when Atari in the late 70s tried to hide who made the games for their console so that they wont be poached by other companies, which led to the creation of Activision that credited the developers.

The games industry doesn't really work like that, proof is all the conferences like GDC and SIGGRAPH where developers go to share their tech and ideas before even the games they work on are out.

While by using your own engine you make it hard for your employees to leave you cause the experience they gain from making your game is harder to be transferred to other studios.

This isn't really that much of a problem, most people get up to speed in a week or two.

Also these arguments can work both ways: by using Unity/Unreal you can easily poach talents from your competitors whereas by using your own custom engine you make it hard to gain experienced employees. However in practice none of these are a concern as people's valuable experience isn't on how to make an engine move some avatar or how to set up properties in the world editor, these are things one can learn very fast (especially when they have coworkers to help them - and often with a custom engine not only you have coworkers to help you but also the programmer who made those features in the first place), the valuable experience is on things that transfer between engines like gameplay systems (not their implementation but the ideas), level/quest/encounter/etc design, story/dialogs/writing, etc.

 

[Goral]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

I talk about the six different demos we made for Fallout, starting almost two years before the game shipped.To fully understand the context of this video, I recommend you watch these three videos before watching it, since I reference concepts in them:GNW & TIG: • GNW & TIG, My OS Abstraction Libraries Implementing Randomness: • Implementing Randomness Crunch: • Crunch

 

[Infinitron]

That's not really true, plenty of games have demos these days because of Steam's game festivals. Also Early Access is a form of demo.

But you don't need to have "six demos" nowadays anyway. You just release a continuously updated demo build on Steam.

 

[Goral]

Also Early Access is a form of demo.

It's not free though, you either pay the full price or close to it so it's not a demo. Demo is free and it is rare considering the numbers of games that are produced (and most of the games with demo are indies).

 

[Geomancer86]

Also Early Access is a form of demo.

It's not free though, you either pay the full price or close to it so it's not a demo. Demo is free and it is rare considering the numbers of games that are produced (and most of the games with demo are indies).

You can play for a short time and request a refund, shady practice for some people, a demo for others. (never done it)

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

I think that the fact Tim has been keeping a detailed notes from development is a blessing for keeping OG Fallout as a part of culture. Historians are always restricted by their sources and Tim writing ensures that when writing about the 90s, Fallout would be referenced often.

 

[Roguey]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

 

[Modron]

To be fair I had never heard of Fallout 1 until I played the demo of it included on a PCgamer demo disk and was immediately hooked. It did its job well in my opinion.

 

[PapaPetro]

You just release a continuously updated demo build on Steam

Also Early Access is a form of demo.

aka Eternal Early Access

 

[Harthwain]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

I still love demo of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It's a fresh experience compared to the actual game in terms of content.

 

[Volrath]

The decade when Tim Cain made Fallout, Arcanum and TToEE was a "lost decade" for him. The price of your hobby, Codex!

I talk about my lost decade, from 1993 to 2003, where I worked so much that I barely was home and knew almost nothing going on outside of work. Consider this a cautionary tale of work-life imbalance.

Why should I feel sorry for him doing his job?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

It's hard to keep up with Uncle Tim. I take a short break from his channel, come back a week or two later, and he's got 14 new videos! It's a good thing he's the most entertaining, watchable and genuinely informative of the old time game developers with YT channels. I tried to watch Josh Sawyer's YT channel once. I lasted about 5 minutes. I did last 10 minutes with Chris Avellone's channel tho. He was doing a quirky playthrough of Arcanum.

 

[Kedar]

lol, six demos when nowadays almost no games have demos.

Fallout would have been a better, longer, less buggy game if they didn't spend so much time doing demos. The reason demos became less frequent is opportunity cost which Tim himself outright talks about near the end of the video. He was forced to do these, he didn't want to do them.

I still love demo of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It's a fresh experience compared to the actual game in terms of content.

Fallout's demo is the same, it's a unique location with an exclusive quest.