3 ms·

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”.
      - Jach 1mo ago
        And people still come out of the woodwork with a parade of excuses, and sometimes he addresses those too. But it's no wonder that he gets a bit brisk or blunt with people, and turns off others who haven't been following along.
- tancop 1mo ago
  "Highly successful middleware provider back in the day" is an understatement. Bink was the cutscene video codec for a long time and it's still the most popular option by far. Kraken compression is so good Sony worked with AMD to make a hardware decoder for the PS5 and paid for a general license that lets games use it for free. They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees.
  - georgemcbay 1mo ago
    > They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees. True, though they've been acquired by Epic since 2021. They keep the RAD Game Tools branding, but aren't their own separate company anymore. Oodle/Kraken is mostly the work of Charles Bloom and Fabian Giesen, a couple of other "legendary game programmers" at RAD, but who aren't quite as visibly prominent as Casey has been in the modern software developer mediasphere.
  - socalgal2 1mo ago
    Are you conflating what Casey worked on with what RadTools worked on?
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - DanielHB 1mo ago
    I remember using it to encode some videos for a school presentation. I think I needed to make it fit into a CD and play-on-double-click and Bink was the easiest tool to do it in.
  - pezezin 1mo ago
    Honest question, but what is the benefit of Bink over standard codecs like H.264/265 or AV1? Specially nowadays that every GPU provides hardware-accelerated video decoding...
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/

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”.
    - Jach 1mo ago
      And people still come out of the woodwork with a parade of excuses, and sometimes he addresses those too. But it's no wonder that he gets a bit brisk or blunt with people, and turns off others who haven't been following along.
tancop 1mo ago
"Highly successful middleware provider back in the day" is an understatement. Bink was the cutscene video codec for a long time and it's still the most popular option by far. Kraken compression is so good Sony worked with AMD to make a hardware decoder for the PS5 and paid for a general license that lets games use it for free. They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees.
- georgemcbay 1mo ago
  > They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees. True, though they've been acquired by Epic since 2021. They keep the RAD Game Tools branding, but aren't their own separate company anymore. Oodle/Kraken is mostly the work of Charles Bloom and Fabian Giesen, a couple of other "legendary game programmers" at RAD, but who aren't quite as visibly prominent as Casey has been in the modern software developer mediasphere.
- socalgal2 1mo ago
  Are you conflating what Casey worked on with what RadTools worked on?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- DanielHB 1mo ago
  I remember using it to encode some videos for a school presentation. I think I needed to make it fit into a CD and play-on-double-click and Bink was the easiest tool to do it in.
- pezezin 1mo ago
  Honest question, but what is the benefit of Bink over standard codecs like H.264/265 or AV1? Specially nowadays that every GPU provides hardware-accelerated video decoding...

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/