25 ms·

He is just legendary when it comes to game programming

• socalgal2 1mo ago
  What games has he shipped?
  • dundarious 1mo ago
    He did middleware at RAD, home of a lot of good stuff, and worked directly on at least The Witness
  • moefh 1mo ago
    He works in the engine/tool side of things. He worked on some widely used libraries, mainly Bink 2 (video codec) and Granny 3D (3D animation) used in a ton of shipped games.
  • singleshot_ 1mo ago
    Very interesting that the Christmas Disk still has not been released.
  • sirwhinesalot 1mo ago
    The legendary games programmer thing is a meme. Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed. What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professional success to a large extent. He did work on the video games Dungeon Siege and The Witness afaik, but that's not what he is known for. He also made one of the fastest terminal emulators (refterm), purely out of spite, to show Microsoft they were full of shit in their answer to an issue he posted to the Windows Terminal github. This directly led to performance improvements in Windows Terminal.
    • inigyou 1mo ago
      He mostly evangelizes non-pessimal software. He advocates that your program should only be a small factor like 3x slower than the hypothetical optimum - instead of 10000x slower as today's software often is. He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same project file and code files.
      • sirwhinesalot 1mo ago
        I have recently gotten a 45x on a shitty vibe coded Python project by using mypyc (2x), replacing datastructures with more CPU-friendly alternatives (15x) and using some smarter heuristics rather than just brute force on top of that (45x total). And I never left Python, the slowest language around. AI is only going to make the problem worse unless you know what to look for.
      • andersonpico 1mo ago
        > He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same project file and code files. this shouldn't be right, wtf
        • _dain_ 1mo ago
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U at 21:30 for modern Visual Studio and then 35:51 for Windows XP era Visual Studio.
          • guitarlimeo 1mo ago
            Wow, modern Visual Studio is unbelievable slop
        • fwlr 1mo ago
          Yes, it really shouldn’t, and so Casey goes to great and careful lengths to fully evidence these results. This is a nuance that’s easy to miss in evangelizing “Casey Muratori content” to others. It’s easy to gloss “abjectly unacceptable performance” as “bad performance”.
  • namuol 1mo ago
    He did some work for The Witness and wrote some nice technical blog posts about it [1]. I don’t know the extent to which he contributed beyond that, but he is therefore by some reasonable definition _a_ game developer. [1] the-witness.net/news/author/casey/