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Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
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The list:
  • minor cosmetic reactivity (floats that comment on your appearance for example)
  • themed skeuomorphic mini maps
  • inventories that allow you to mark items as junk and then sell all
  • environmental storytelling (for some reason he didn't know the term for this)
  • being able to delay leveling and bank skillpoints for later (Rusty disapproves)
  • perks that broaden the effects of an ability instead of being straight upgrades of what they already do

He also talks in the beginning how he hates unskippable cutscenes and will put off playing games if he knows they're there. It's unpausable cutscenes that annoy me more. A lack of a pause is even more inconsiderate.
 

StrongBelwas

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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.
 
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NecroLord

Dumbfuck!
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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?
 

Roguey

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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)
 
Vatnik
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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.
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
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.
 

antimeridian

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Codex Year of the Donut
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.
 
Vatnik
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noon to midnight. :M
ff16cbe6c6b0a05f7ffed80d8937c830.png
 

StrongBelwas

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Joined
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Messages
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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.
 
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Jaesun

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MCA Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech
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

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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.
 

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