Cain on Games - Tim Cain's new YouTube channel

[Roguey]

I understand that, but it comes off as Tim had no vision at all. I find this particular thing an oddity when you are creating a setting.

A vision doesn't have to include every aspect of it. He wanted a post-apocalyptic setting and wasn't all that concerned about what it would look like.

 

[Bad Sector]

You are told to kill a guy, yeah you can just walk in and kill him, but what if you snuck into his house while he was out and poisoned all the food? You just walk out of town and sometime later get a message saying he is dead. He's done stuff sort of like this, but it was always expected ahead of time and used scripting, this would just emerge from the mechanics of NPCs eating in their house and the player being able to poison.

Jank aside, isn't this basically Oblivion? :-P

When Ken Levine was making Bioshock Infinite he was a wasteful perfectionist when it came to art because he cares a lot about it.

Though on the other hand, IMO if there is one thing the Kenshock games did right, that was art direction (despite some weird details like the flat vegetable texture or whatever).

 

[Alienman]

I understand that, but it comes off as Tim had no vision at all. I find this particular thing an oddity when you are creating a setting.

A vision doesn't have to include every aspect of it. He wanted a post-apocalyptic setting and wasn't all that concerned about what it would look like.

I guess. Maybe Boyarsky should start a Youtube channel too

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about morality systems in RPGs, often called alignment or karma meters. I talk about how I used to do them, and what my thoughts are now about how they should be implemented.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Back in Fallout, they just did overall reputation, positive rep vs negative rep, done via script and it turned out to be very varied. What one group of people on the team thought was a good thing another group on the team thought it was bad. What was good for one group in the game would be bad for another group in the game, Cain ended up not happy with it, mish mash of different ideas, including the reputation titles.
When it came to Arcanum, Cain wanted to systemize those things, which it turned out they couldn't really do that, so they went for a script command so that quests could or actions were taken the alignment of the player could be changed. They had Good and Evil, up to person scripting quest/action if something was good or evil. Still very subjective, wanted something systemic. Cain wrote that whenever the player kills a good aligned character, it should be an evil action that pushes the player towards evil based on how good the thing you killed was. The other side was more complicated, if you kill an evil creature, it was an good action if it was less good, but if you were more evil it was an evil action. The assumption was good or lesser evil characters were reducing the evil in the world by eliminating more evil creatures, but a more evil character killing lesser evils was reducing the amount of the good in the world. There was a cap on how far the shift could happen, so you couldn't become more evil/good than your target was good/evil via klilling them. This was how they kept it from 1998 until February 2nd, 2001. Cain has a note saying as per Jason Anderson, only allow negative alignment changes from actions, can only become good through quests. The systemic stuff allowed you to get evil, but the good changes do not occur anymore. The reason they did that was a balance issue as they fixed up the world. When you're walking along, you tend to be attacked by evil things. When you are fighting in caves, you are generally being attacked by evil things. When you go into a town mixed with good and evil things, you are rarely attacked. Generally, you were killing a lot more evil things than good things. Very easy to become good and stay good just by running around and killing monsters. Jason brought it up with Cain, they agreed it was becoming too easy, they decided to remove it. Cain was sad because he really wanted a systemic good and evil system, but they learned a lot.
Hard to define good and evil, the team doesn't really agree, philosophers don't really agree. Haven't done meters like that in a while, closest he got was reputation was by faction in Pillars. Good and Evil was played down for Like/Dislike by respective factions. The thieves guild in a game with faction reputation would like you stealing quite a bit, the town you stole things from wouldn't like that at all, and many people uninvolved with the town probably don't care. Seemed to be pretty good at tracking things, and a bonus is that the way work tends to get broken down in games, there is a particular person who made that faction and their quests, there can be a designer who is the final word on what each faction likes/dislikes. Knows many games do this for companions, knows there is some debate about this, but for Cain this at least gives you good feedback and let's you know what will happen in the future if you continue those actions, instead of having consequences to your actions you couldn't foresee. Lack of ability to predict results leads to people looking up everything.
Cain has reached the point in his career he doesn't like morality system at all, and prefers reputation by factions. Every faction (sometimes a companion can be its own faction) can have their own likes/dislikes and reactions towards the player. Once you go down the path of defining a morality, you are going to find situations you can't figure out, situations your team disagrees on, and situations where your players can't understand why certain actions had particular consequences.
TL;DR : Keeping it to faction reputation gets you what you want (the world reacting to the player) while being easy for the players to understand.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, killing the gnome in Arcanum who tells you that there's nothing you can do about their rape rooms is considered an evil action by the game, which is why that whole system is bunk. No judgment calls, just consequences.

 

[REhorror]

Actually agree with the whole faction reputation and NO morality system thing.

Faction reputation = you do things to please other people/beings, they support you, it makes sense.

Morality system = an invisible god (the game's author) judges you for your actions, it makes no sense.

 

[agris]

A scripted system of factional, local and regional reputations is obviously the way to handle it, assuming you’ve got a proper cRPG and not a “press X to paragon” game

 

[NecroLord]

Yeah, killing the gnome in Arcanum who tells you that there's nothing you can do about their rape rooms is considered an evil action by the game, which is why that whole system is bunk. No judgment calls, just consequences.

In my current Arcanum run, I just disintegrated that little fuck.
It's a Barbarian/Magick build. Barbarian background, barbarian armor (dark barbarian clothes), focus on glorious melee combat and buffs - Temporal, Teleport and Disintegrate to deal with the more pesky and troublesome enemies, namely Fire Elementals.

 

[NecroLord]

I find the morality system of Arcanum to be a little quirky...
Very difficult to maintain an Evil playthrough without accidentally gaining good reputation by either completing quests or slaying evil enemies.
I remember certain things like killing Bates and butchering the people of Stillwater that contribute to evil reputation, but not much else.
Very hard to be the Bad Guy, no?

 

[__scribbles__]

I tell some stories about Castles and Stonekeep, two games developed at Interplay in the early 90s.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Had a little bit of code in Stonekeep, was asked if he had any stories about Castles and Stonekeep, didn't think he did, then thought about it, and realized he did have some stories.

Castles came out in 1991, didn't start at Interplay until 1991 and was only a contractor at that time, would come in every few weeks and drop off code for Bard's Tale Construction Set, chat with his producer. Would occasionally have small chats with other people.

Met Scott Benny and Chris Taylor (Chris Taylor was a bit of an accident because he was there in the room watching while Tim was talking to his producer and Tim introduced himself), Scott Benny was producer and lead designer on Castles (Passed away 2022, Cain says last year), did some design on the second one but Vince DeNardo would be the person to ask about Castles nowadays , was a designer on Castles and a designer/producer on Castles 2. There is a sort of cameo in Fallout, Vince loved dogs and would bring his dog Sasha to work. Sasha appears in Fallout at the Cathedral, and Cain heard there is a NPC in Fallout 2 that calls out for Sasha but isn't sure about it (There is.)

Has more stories about Stonekeep, came out in 1995, very big game for Interplay at the time because they were doing 3D rendering of the dungeons and full motion video on most of the creatures. Huge game for Interplay, very secret, people weren't supposed to know about it. There was a hallway to get to the Stonekeep development area, there was a sign that said Restricted Access and another that said Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter here, Cain would go back to look at it. Rob Nesler, 3D art director at Interplay and now at Obsidian, was showing him the game one day and it looked amazing. When they were recruiting people to appear in the game, Cain kind of wanted to do it, so he went to one of the recruitment sessions. You didn't pick who you were, they took a look at you and had you say some things. They considered him for Wahooka (Little magic goblin guy), Cain would wave his arms in rehearsal. He didn't get it , Wesley Yanagi did, and Cain admits he was probably a better Wahooka than Cain would have been. The other role he was just too short to be (He is 6'1') was the Ettin. To be specific, they wanted the Ettin to be two very tall people of roughly equal height. They strapped Tom Decker (6'3'') and another producer Bill Dugan (About the same height) together around their chest and legs and put a cloth over that so it looked like they had two arms and two heads. Apparently, this was a miserable way to spend hours doing FMV recording, particularly when one of the producers was making sarcastic comments the whole time. Cain thinks he might have dodged a bullet with the Ettin.

Producer on Stonekeep was Michael Quarles, Cain admired him quite a bit, thought he was a great producer, asked him a lot of production questions, he and Tom Decker were probably Cain's biggest influences production wise. They disagreed on many things, including what makes an RPG, Cain really disliked that you were handed a premade character in Stonekeep, but their disagreements were always on a friendly and professional level. Micheal Quarles was the one who convinced the executive producer to pay Tim Cain more when he was considering leaving. Should probably thank him for Fallout.

Did some code for Stonekeep, did their critical error handling. Back when games were read off of CD ROM, there were many manufactures, and CD ROMs would fail to read a sector that was perfectly good. Cain knew assembly, they asked him to make a handler that would ask the CD ROM to try and read a supposed bad sector again. There were some CD ROMs so bad they would error out 100 times and then give you a good reading. Stonekeep had so much data they filled the disk near the edge, and the speed wasn't consistent on some of the cheaper devices. They had the exact same problem with Fallout, so Cain doing this was helpful. Despite shipping with a big reread number, they still got people sending their copies back saying their CD-ROM couldn't read it, and Interplay would go through their offices trying it out and find it running fine on every CD-ROM they had, which shows how bad some of those cheaper manufacturers were.

But Cain liked Interplay because everyone helped each other out, Cain wasn't on the Stonekeep team, but when they needed a guy who knew Assembly to create the system, he went and did it. When Fallout was close to shipping, people that didn't have to went and helped them when they ran into problems. People came to help even if it meant working after hours, nowadays people would say those poor individuals were crunching and being taken advantage of, back then they didn't think they were being taken advantage of and they offered to help. You see far less of that nowadays. People nowadays would prioritize their work life balance over helping another team or say your team should have planned/budgeted better. Cain thinks this is true, but it is also true Cain found people way more willing to lend a hand back then. It mattered, helped those games ship in a better state or ship at all.

Chris Taylor was the lead designer on Stonekeep and they talked all the time, they played tabletop together. He came over to Fallout when Scott Campbell left the company. When Cain was in a lurch, Chris Taylor kept to help.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

nowadays people would say those poor individuals were crunching and being taken advantage of, back then they didn't think they were being taken advantage of and they offered to help. You see far less of that nowadays. People nowadays would prioritize their work life balance over helping another team or say your team should have planned/budgeted better. Cain thinks this is true, but it is also true Cain found people way more willing to lend a hand back then.

You wanna know what's changed Tim? It's one thing to lend a hand to Fallout, it's another to do it for some sjw puke (like outer worlds) that nobody gives two shits about.

Another thing that's changed? Teams were made up of guys. Guys tend to care about games, plus tend to help their own. Women are selfish by nature, can't fathom doing it. You hired women in droves, enjoy the consequences.

Teams were smaller, it was more personal. Now your input doesn't matter, you don't see yourself in the final product.

 

[__scribbles__]

I was asked what I enjoyed more, the game development process or the end result? And I realized it was neither. It was the people I made the games with.

 

[Cologno]

We know you're gay, Tim.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Cain would say in interviews during the 90s that he and his team made their games for each other. If the game is liked, that's good, but they weren't putting in things they didn't care for just to pander to certain demographics. Fallout and Arcanum came from that, but now he thinks probably should have held back a little on Arcanum, tried to squeeze too much in.

Reminded of what Jay Patel (Tech director at Interplay) told him when Cain had a game going out (Probably Rags to Riches) and Cain said he didn't feel like he was done, Patel said 'Games are never done, only shipped'. Probably told him that in 1993, Cain still remembers that, he's right. You never really finished with the game, you are out of time/money or you have already done everything that can be implemented in a reasonable timeframe. Ideally this is how you ship, other times you're just out of money and there are features you don't like that ship.

Thinking on it Cain, feels that the best experience for him was the team he made the games with. Cain isn't a good writer and he finds it hard to explain the feeling. If you watch the video about him talking about the Fallout team, most of it is about their day to day life. Cain feels a little bad for people who go into the industry just planning to make a lot of money or make some particular game, just focused on the end result without thinking about who they make it with or how they make it. Understand it, but it's not really for Cain.

Cain has lost touch with people over the 42 years he's spent making games, generally feels bad about it. Regrets some of the people he lost touch with, but people he knows are starting to pass away. That's end of it, nobody will be able to work with them again or enjoy that spark they had.
Scott Benny (the lead producer of Castles mentioned in the last video) did writing for Fallout, came up with Dogmeat's name. He died in 2022, they won't get anything more from him.

Got to meet Jennell Jaquays once at GDC 2012 when he did his Fallout post mortem, hopes he didn't fanboy too much. Was very excited to meet Jennell, doesn't think she realized how influential she was on him. Goes through some of his favorite Judges Guild modules, which were created by Jennell. Used them in his high school D&D group. Used Heroes of Legend and Heroes of Tomorrow in his GURPs campaign. Lot of Judges Guild influences on Arcanum.

Don't wait until people are gone to tell them how much they mean to you, Cain knows people say this a lot, but it gets more true as he gets older.

Doesn't want to end on that note , so he is going to tell you a story he has told nobody, doesn't even think he told it to people he worked with like Leonard Boyarsky. It may seem inconsequential, but it stuck with him. In the final year/year and half on Fallout, Cain's office was at a T intersection where the team was. It's the one where he is wearing the bag on his head. Cain gets up one day to do something, doesn't even remember what, stepped into the doorway of his office and paused. Was trying to think of something, but then he started listening. On his right, he hears Leonard and Jason trying to get something to render correctly, playing with settings to get it to come out just right. Probably something most players would never notice, but they noticed, and they wanted to get it right. On his left, he hears Jason Suinn, who did lip syncing and thought of the SPECIAL name. Straight ahead on the left was Jesse Reynolds and Chris Jones doing programming, on the right there was Fred Hatch and Nick Kesting, and beyond that was Scotty and Chris Taylor, and there was somebody in the doorway of Chris and Jesse's office. They were talking about code, something about C language, Cain wasn't sure what exactly it was. Cain just stopped there, stopped thinking about what he was thinking about, took it in and realized he really liked this experience. Was probably too young at that time to really appreciate it. Looking back at it 28 years later, he realized he was really happy and content, not because anything special was happening, but because was Fallout was this group working with him and working very hard and well to create a game they all liked. They laughed at things that happened in it every day, everyone got to put their stuff in. Stood there for a few minutes, was taken out of it by whoever was in Chris and Jesse's office finishing what they were talking about and walked off. Cain would think about this moment every now and then. Would not have been able to explain why it was so memorable back then, but now he knows it was the people he was making Fallout with.

Hopes you get to experience something like this in game development one day.

 

[Roguey]

"Maybe the real Fallout was the friends we made along the way," - Tim Cain

 

[std::namespace]

Teams were made up of guys.

and thats how tim loved it

 

[NecroLord]

"Maybe the real Fallout was the friends we made along the way," - Tim Cain

Dogmeat is a good doggie.

 

[Saldrone]

"Maybe the real Fallout was the friends we made along the way," - Tim Cain

Dogmeat is a good doggie.

Indeed. And the only companion in the game whose death is almost unavoidable

 

[NecroLord]

"Maybe the real Fallout was the friends we made along the way," - Tim Cain

Dogmeat is a good doggie.

Indeed. And the only companion in the game whose death is almost unavoidable

In my last run he got gibbed by a Super Mutant minigun.
My mistake for forgetting to let him wait for me (I play with Fixt and its companion mod).

 

[__scribbles__]

I talk about the best operating system to make games for (not necessarily the best one to work in or even the best one overall).

I reference my OS abstraction libraries, which I discuss here:
GNW & TIG, My OS Abstraction Libraries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZEos...

 

[StrongBelwas]

Was asked about best OS for programming/designing, won't be talking about the best one to do that work in, that's subjective and there are so many OSes out there. Will speak from pure practicality, what you should know what to program in. You should know Windows programming. You know Windows programming, that gets you the PC market, and the similar Xbox market. Just learn PlayStation after that and you have most of the market. This presupposes you know some form of C language but Cain will just talk about OSes.
Started on Atari in the late 70s, couldn't remember the operating system, looked it up and it was listed as Default OS, they either didn't call it anything or called it DOS. Learned how to program Basic and assembly, which let him do a lot.
Very shortly after that, jumped into DOS because he got a job for a game company where he was making tools for them on Atari but they were going to make Grand Slam Bridge in DOS so he learned it. They made Grand Slam Bridge, and in making that he learned that with DOS it lets you do anything you want, but you have to do everything, it doesn't really give you much. If you want a pop up window, code everything yourself, want a new font, draw it yourself. It's a thin layer over what the chips on that motherboard provide to you.
In college while working on Grand Slam Bridge, University of Virginia used an OS called PRIMOS. Learned a lot of different flavors of Unix, PRIMOS was kind of a mix of DOS and Unix. University tried to teach a wide variety of languages. Learned C(Sort of already knew that, has a story about something that happened to him in a C class there he will save for another time, Pascal(kind of already learned), Prologue, Snowball, Fortran, etc. Different languages for different purposes, snowball for string, Fortran for Scientific calculations.

Went straight to grad school, they were all Unix. Already a bit used to it thanks to PRIMOS, loved it. Unix provided many useful accessors and functionality, supported Cain's inner hacker, could make his messages to his friends look like he sent him a message From God in Heaven and his friend could reply From Satan in Hell. Had features you don't see in modern OSes. As an example is how they handled files and directories, a directory was just a collection of files, but files weren't just a bunch of labeled data, they pointed to internal nodes and the i-node contained all the information about the file and it's sectors of stored data. That was important because you could have two folders in two different directories that pointed to the same i-node. You could open one, edit it, close it, and go to the other one and it has the edits. Sort of like Windows Shortcut, but not quite the same because both of those files are really the file. Delete one, the other remains. The i-node knows who is pointing to it, and as long as one point it remains it won't be deleted. As an example if you wanted to save a family photo, he can store it in Cain Family, but since it has his siblings, he may want the image also in his photo folders for his siblings. In Windows, he would have to make six copies of the image (1 for Family, 5 for each siblings folder) or use shortcuts, which aren't really the photo. Under this alternate system, it would be five files, same photo. Edit one, they all get edited at once. Try and delete one, you don't lose the ones in the other folder. Got used to this method, got annoyed going back to the traditional system in DOS and Windows.

Going to Interplay meant going back to DOS.
Interplay often bought computers early on to do 3D rendering from Sun , these ran Irix, very strongly flavored version of Unix. When the 3D artists had a problem, Cain would often be brought in to help given he knew Unix.
Cain will not defend Windows, it is sometimes very hard to use and to code for. Two nice things are, like DOS, if you can conceive of what to do, you can probably do it. Also, excellent backwards compatibility, Cain is still playing Windows games from 30 years ago. Can't do that with Apple.

On the subject of Apple, Cain only made one game for it, Fallout, and that was technically just GNW having a MacOS version. In Cain's career, Cain has not seen much indication Apple cares much for games. They occasionally make a half hearted effort like Game Sprockets, but then they disappear. Not even sure they care about gaming on iPhone. Have to do everything Apple's ways, or no way. Fallout had thousands of art files to process, and they were processed separately for DOS/Windows PC. For Windows, they could run a simple batch file that could grab the extensions for the art file and process them through another application. That was way more difficult on Mac, they had to use a third party batch file system and find something that accepted commands. Had to rope the files together in chunks. Mac guy complained they had thousands of art files in one folder, Cain said it was supposed to be like that. Apple people would say if it's something they don't support, you are doing it wrong. Cain's first apple phone couldn't send text messages to multiple people, friend of his who was a big Apple guy said that wasn't a big deal. When Cain tried to figure out how to send a group message to a 12 person dinner group, he suggested sending each message out individually. Never did anything on Apple past Fallout, can't speak much for coding for it.
Tl;DR: Windows won. Cain used it the most, still would probably use it the most, has the most games for it. Runner up would be Unix or some flavor. Gotta go Windows if you want the most options.




(As an aside, will be out for most of the day around the time Cain would post a video tomorrow, so don't expect a summary.)

 

[agris]

I play with Fixt and its companion mod

brother, fixt is fanfic-tier. either play OG, or Fallout Et Tu (F1 in F2 engines w/ optional tweaks).

Fixt changes the difficulty curve by giving you more powerful gear at the start (skill selection dependent), adds unbalanced vendor to Shady shands, includes a lot of mod content like new NPCs and poorly written dialogue, and other stuff. there's no reason to play it unless you want to debase yourself.

 

[Saldrone]

I play with Fixt and its companion mod

brother, fixt is fanfic-tier. either play OG, or Fallout Et Tu (F1 in F2 engines w/ optional tweaks).

Fixt changes the difficulty curve by giving you more powerful gear at the start (skill selection dependent), adds unbalanced vendor to Shady shands, includes a lot of mod content like new NPCs and poorly written dialogue, and other stuff. there's no reason to play it unless you want to debase yourself.

Is it? i've been planing installing since it restores crucial cut content such as Follower's spy quest and iguana bob script without mention it also restores the violence level which is censored in the EU/GOG realase