3 ms·
THE LEGENDARY GAME PROGRAMMER
by kshallvari 1mo ago
THE LEGENDARY GAME PROGRAMMER
- nchmy 1mo agoIsn't that Jonathan blow? (to be clear, I'm a big fan of Casey)
- dgellow 1mo agoThey are both legendary game programmers
- inigyou 1mo agoAre they? Casey programmed the walk monster for Jon's game, a brute force tester to make sure you could always walk both ways and never get stuck, instead of building the walking system using a nav mesh. There was one place you could walk where you weren't supposed to, despite the walk monster, that would have been obvious if it was a nav mesh.
- dgellow 1mo agoHe’s known for his Handmade hero series (unfortunately archived now) where he developed his game over 500+ episodes: https://hero.handmade.network/ https://hero.handmade.network/ I’m sure you can find bugs in the work of any game dev you would consider legendary, game implementation is generally very messy
- bena 1mo ago660+ and the game was never finished
- inigyou 1mo agoDoesn't mean you can't learn a lot from the attempt. Technical craftsmanship and project management skill are two completely separate skills. Definitely don't learn project management from Casey.
- tialaramex 1mo agoSure, but the biggest reason to direct anybody to these videos is that they should actually make that video game they want to make, not just think about it - and so the fact that Handmade Hero just trails off and doesn't end up producing a finished video game is a problem. The craftsmanship is dubious. I think it's a problem that people assume Casey knows what he's doing when so often he's like "We're doing it live" and Casey's hand coded solution is pretty bad whereas the thing which came in the box is very good. Casey understands Casey's version, and that's an upside if you are Casey but you are not. If the result was a finished game then hey, whatever, the game was finished and that matters. But that part didn't happen either, so then it's just like watching Tsoding or something.
- ahaferburg 1mo agoAt some point I stopped caring about Handmade Hero because he just never got out of the global illumination rabbit hole. He should have followed that as a side quest, behind a feature flag. Maybe one week for progress on the game, one week for rendering experiments. He didn't seem to make much progress, and it just fizzled out as he ran out of steam. Finishing should have been a bit higher on the priority list. It was just not setting a good example from a project or self management perspective.
- guitarlimeo 1mo agoWell Billy Basso was hugely inspired by the Handmade Hero series and went on to make the critically acclaimed Animal Well because of it. That's enough of a win for that series in my eyes.
- andersonpico 1mo agoanimal well is such an incredible game and it shows how talented Billy Basso is in multiple disciplines
- tialaramex 1mo agoAnimal Well is a great game, there's a lot in there and I appreciate it when a game is deep rather than big but I don't see much connection there. Maybe it's like how "Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle" (a book I disliked immensely) inspired Tonda Ros to make "Blue Prince" a game which I enjoyed tremendously.
- squh 1mo agoYou have to consider that each episode is only ~2 hours and every line of code was written on stream. That's about 7 months or so of full-time work. Within that time a lot of the hours was spent teaching instead of coding, too. There is massive amount of knowledge in there for anyone bothering to actually learn something and it was all provided free of charge. Hats off to Casey for sticking to it as long as he did.
- 3eb7988a1663 1mo agoJohn Carmack is a legendary game programmer. If I can identify a superior algorithmic approach to something in Doom, does that disqualify Carmack's credentials?
- tialaramex 1mo agoFirst I think I'd want to see you identify a superior algorithm known when Doom shipped and then we can have that discussion about who's credentials should be disqualified.
- dgellow 1mo agoI think you’re both saying the same thing
- 3eb7988a1663 1mo agoI never made claims to be any kind of game programmer, but sure. Fine, as I recall, Doom data assets are searched linearly whenever they need to pull new data. So if you switch to the chainsaw, and need to rev, the game does a linear scan of all graphics, maps, and sounds looking for the vroom noise. There are many different data structures that could perform this lookup faster. These have been known since the earliest days of computing. Does it matter? No. Engineering is all about trade-offs. A linear scan was obviously fast enough and simple to implement. Similarly, if walk monster manually trolls the map, that does not say anything about Casey in isolation. I believe all of Blow's games use a custom game engine, so unless a nav mesh system was already implemented, that was going to take additional work. The walk monster may have been better bang-for-buck.
- tialaramex 1mo agoYou probably have a point on linear search for assets (I haven't checked but I've assumed you're right about how it works in the released source) There are some tradeoffs here, my instinct would be to bring hash tables into play and that's perhaps a mistake because it means you're doing fewer reads but more arithmetic and on some hardware that's a bad trade. But "linear search" is only the simplest and probably not the smartest option.
- arnorhs 1mo agoI believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast, where Casey is referred to as legendary while he feels undeserving of this title. Titles aside, his talk is really insightful and it is super interesting to do a deep dive on these old computer/programming topics as the modern concepts were being discovered
- nchmy 1mo agoHah, I wasn't aware of that. I was sort of referring to what seems to be not such a meme that jblow is always introduced like that. It just seems weird, even if true... Yeah Ive been meaning to watch that talk - I love listening to pretty much anything Casey says/does. He's extremely thoughtful and fair.
- kshallvari 1mo ago> I believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast Exactly!
- frou_dh 1mo ago[flagged]
- ModernMech 1mo ago> devfluencer Thank you for bringing a term to a thing that has been bugging me: people who purport to be devs but spend most of their time on podcasts and blogs talking and writing about being devs, rather than just being devs.
- miyoji 1mo agoYes, programmers are exactly like everyone else in this way.
- kshallvari 1mo agoOh really, just for a funny joke?
- dist-epoch 1mo agoNo, that would be John Carmack
- flumpcakes 1mo agoDeath-frightening scion capable of seeing beyond the illusionary world before our eyes John Carmack?