Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[NecroLord]

Top five games, but going by chronology, not order.
1)Star Raiders, Atari 800 version, amazed by the game being full 3d on such a small size, the clone of the game he made in Unity is eighty times bigger just from the executable.
Uses sprites, but the game has proper 3d location tracking and rotates properly. So amazed by the game he figured out how to extract the assembly code the game was made on and studied it. His research of it probably led to him getting his first job.
2)Ultima III: Exodus. Didn't play it until 1987, didn't play the first two. First RPG love. Loved the party control and puzzles, particularly Moongates. Praises the final encounter. Liked that there was level scaling on the outside but that the dungeons had fixed levels that could be quite high. Spent a whole summer playing it. Cain has played RPGs with better graphics/stories/characters/mechanics, but Ultima III lit the cRPG spark.
3) Star Control II. Played the first star control, but mainly just messing with the two player combat mode with a friend. Loved the nonlinear, open world, excellent narrative and characters. Appreciated the dark storyline despite the funny characters, major influence for Fallout. Loved the combat. Still hums the music from time to time. Considers Star Control II an RPG, if you consider your character the ship, everything about it makes it a CRPG. Reference to writing about it in felipepepe's book.
4) Star Wars X Wing. Played Wing Commander, but loved (original trilogy) star wars and preferred this game. Bought a joystick just to play it. Loved the game being true 3d compared to Wing Commander and Star Trek 25th Anniversary's sprites. Liked power control. Played it to the point he wore out his joystick, won another joystick at a Logitech booth at the first GDC, but can't remember what for.
5) Everquest. Got addicted to it. Appreciated differences between singleplayer and multiplayer games in terms of difficulty and storytelling. Goes over the spice girls/necromancer/all hobbit groups he built that he previously mentioned. Directly led to him wanting to make an MMO which lead to him working at Carbine.

Is Everquest that good?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

It was good at the time, like Ultima 3. A very niche thing to enjoy in today's reality.

 

[Roguey]

Is Everquest that good?

People used to jokingly refer to it as "Evercrack," created a ton of MMO addicts. Feargus successfully fought for the privilege of Black Isle employees being able to play it at work.

Feargus Urquhart’s primary job was making sure Black Isle’s wants and needs were met. If his developers needed new software or equipment to make more or better games, they got it. If they wanted to play games to unwind from the rigors of making their own, Urquhart made it happen. Once, Interplay’s IT department blocked all online RPGs after management—not Brian Fargo—decreed that Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, and EverQuest were crimping productivity. Urquhart could have gone above IT’s head and complained to Fargo, but he didn’t. There was no need. Reason, and the reminder of the power Black Isle wielded, were his weapons.

“This is generally how the conversation went with IT,” Urquhart said, launching into a summary: “‘Look, this is what I want. It is not unreasonable, and you know that if you just say no, I’m going to see Brian, and Brian's going to call you into his office, and you're going to have to explain to Brian why you don't want to give me this very reasonable thing.’

A very niche thing to enjoy in today's reality.

Especially since the devs recently broke it https://www.mmorpg.com/news/everque...f-communication-from-darkpaw-games-2000129581 (yes that is Rusty formerly of RPG Codex)

 

[Infinitron]

I talk about what a typical work day is like for a game designer.

 

[Butter]

"Muh crunch!"
*rolls into work at 10 AM every day.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

His pattern is not useful for others. It's just for people who are curious about his persona.

E.g. he says he knocks out easy tasks in the morning, then gets in the zone, and can take on harder tasks later in the day.

I do the exact opposite. I start with the hard stuff early, because my brain is fresh. As I get more tired towards the end of the day, I'm only capable of taking on easy tasks. Hard ones are just impossible.
I have these things I call midichlorians. They allow you to program in the short term. And once you exhaust them, you can't solve shit. Your brain doesn't work. Easy tasks that require low amount of midichlorians are doable. Midichlorians are restored after a night's sleep.
Then I have this thing I call tachyons. If you run out of tachyons, you're toast, you can't approach a PC. They're not restored after sleep, but after a month's rest (sometimes 3-4 months). Pacing oneself is important. It's possible to work 14h/day for a month and completely run out of tachyons. It often happens when you get over-enthusiastic about a project.

These are made-up names, but I'm sure they're a quantifiable matter. If we could do a chemical analysis of the brain in the morning and in the evening, compare, figure out what is actually midichlorians and just take them as a pill, productivity would become insane. Unfortunately, our tech level is primitive.

 

[Roguey]

"Muh crunch!"
*rolls into work at 10 AM every day.

Well they tend to roll out at 10 PM or later so that seems fair enough. If you have to stay late, then you should be able to come in late.

 

[Nano]

Not a lot of things I hate more than going to work in the morning. Where I work now I come in the afternoon and leave at midnight, which is a lot more preferable IMO.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

It's long established that Programmers' Hours are noon to midnight.

 

[antimeridian]

Yeah if you're a programmer like Tim, AKA someone who actually gets shit done, the smartest thing to do is reduce office hours overlap with HR, marketing, managers, and any other retards who are going to waste your time.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

noon to midnight.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Picture is probably from early '97
Cain was working 10/14 every day near the end of Fallout
Cain never recalls being alone at the Interplay office even at 3/4AM, but it was sometimes gaming meetings and not work.
Came into work one day and it felt like everyone was interrupting him. May have talked to almost everyone on the team. Cain believes he had 15 of his 'zzz' interruption code comments before lunch.
Someone went to get Burger King for lunch, he put the Burger King bag on his head and sent out an email saying no one was to interrupt him while he had the bag on and if they had to interrupt him they were to refer to him as Your Highness.
That worked for an hour before Jesse Reynolds interrupted. Very nice guy, showed up to his interview in a three piece suit. He had traced a crash bug to code that his Highness had submitted the last night.
Cain was lucky to get that monitor arm, the CRTs were heavy, Cain knew that couldn't go on much longer and a few years later LCDs came around.
Watched the Tick every Thursday night, can't remember where he got the figure but it could jump.
The Fallout shirts they had at the time said Team GURPs but by that point they had lost the license so he generally wore the Bomberman shirt at the time. Would get corrected Fallout shirts later on.
Cain told himself he would drink that bottle of Tequila once they shipped.
Wishes he could read the board in the picture behind him, it was generally a list of simple things to start the day with.

 

[Gandalf]

Watched the Tick every Thursday night

I watched that cartoon too. Anybody else from here? Maybe rate yes or no to let me know, so the thread won't be spammed.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

If anyone here thinks Tim is some kind of genius programmer, I invite you to take a look at his navmesh implementation for the world map in Fallout 1.
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fall...b9ca76a43a404f4c/src/game/worldmap_walkmask.c

 

[Bulo]

If anyone here thinks Tim is some kind of genius programmer, I invite you to take a look at his navmesh implementation for the world map in Fallout 1.
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fall...b9ca76a43a404f4c/src/game/worldmap_walkmask.c

Looks good to me. The game, that is

 

[Jaesun]

When ever I see someone make a post like that to discredit a programmer (especially in a completely meaningless way) I see their post as this:

I have an incredibly small micro penis.

And then I just ignore the post.

On topic, that paper bag hat thing was hilarious.

 

[ds]

If anyone here thinks Tim is some kind of genius programmer, I invite you to take a look at his navmesh implementation for the world map in Fallout 1.
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fall...b9ca76a43a404f4c/src/game/worldmap_walkmask.c

Would be interesting to learn what reason if any there was for embedding this data directly in the executable when most other assets seem to be in external files. Perhaps it was just a quick hack that never got cleaned up but it's also possible that this choice was deliberate.

Note also that the linked source code is reverse engineered so there is no guarantee that the data originally existed in the form of a C or even assembler source file and even if it did that file could be auto-generated. Embedding binary data this way is not that uncommon when targeting non-Windows platforms which don't have an equivalent of PE resources and there are many ways to accomplish that. In fact, this is common enough that C23 finally added support for doing it without additional tools to generate a source or object file from binary data.

 

[std::namespace]

If anyone here thinks Tim is some kind of genius programmer, I invite you to take a look at his navmesh implementation for the world map in Fallout 1.
https://github.com/alexbatalov/fall...b9ca76a43a404f4c/src/game/worldmap_walkmask.c

absolutely nothing wrong with this
in fact its the best solution possible!
its not a navmesh either, its a ...mask
instant lookup for the low price of 1500*133 chars

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

absolutely nothing wrong with this

https://github.com/AceLewis/my_first_calculator.py/blob/master/my_first_calculator.py

 

[std::namespace]

u r just a retarded .net hack, u have no fucking idea

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

and even if it did that file could be auto-generated

Unlikely. If he had the time to write an auto-generator, he had the time to write a mask file generator.
They rewrote that part in Fallout 2 to read a mask file like normal people, once Tim was gone. https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

When ever I see someone make a post like that to discredit a programmer (especially in a completely meaningless way) I see their post as this:

Nobody's trying to discredit anyone. It's just Cain is not some Carmack as people seem to think sometimes in this thread. Read his Fallout 1 code, the repo is available. He seems to be on the level of Swen Vincke. He can script things, he's okay. If asked about how virtual or atomics work under the hood, he'd draw a blank.

 

[ds]

and even if it did that file could be auto-generated

Unlikely. If he had the time to write an auto-generator, he had the time to write a mask file generator.

There were pre-existing tools even back then, for example Vim's `xxd -i` (added in 1994).

They rewrote that part in Fallout 2 to read a mask file like normal people, once Tim was gone. https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-re

I doubt this was a pressing issue for Fallout 1 so why waste time on it if they were busy fixing critical bugs close to release (as seems to be always the case for game development).

 

[0sacred]

 

[Roguey]

It's just Cain is not some Carmack as people seem to think sometimes in this thread.

I've written about this kind of thing in this very thread in response to you https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/cain-on-games-tim-cains-new-youtube-channel.147060/post-8498467