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Isn't that Jonathan blow? (to be clear, I'm a big fan of Casey)
by nchmy 17d ago
Isn't that Jonathan blow?
(to be clear, I'm a big fan of Casey)
- dgellow 17d agoThey are both legendary game programmers
- inigyou 17d 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 17d 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 17d ago660+ and the game was never finished
- inigyou 17d 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 17d 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 17d 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 17d 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 17d agoanimal well is such an incredible game and it shows how talented Billy Basso is in multiple disciplines
- tialaramex 17d 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 16d 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 17d 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 17d 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 17d agoI think you’re both saying the same thing
- 3eb7988a1663 17d 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.
- jodrellblank 8d ago> "if walk monster manually trolls the map" Casey Muratori has a 50 minute video on "Killing the Walk Monster" which is about how they started looking for glitchy game geometry by pretending to be a player walking around, then by a flood-fill ("walk monster") probing for barriers, then the video is explaining how they designed something "exponentially faster" (both demonstrated starting at time 38:33). The better version was realtime enough that level designers could use its overlays interactively while working on the level, and during test playthroughs. He describes it as "exponentially faster". It doesn't seem like the earlier poster calling it "brute force" is a reasonable description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE8MVNMzpbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE8MVNMzpbo And the place the player can walk but shouldn't be able to (off the boat), is not a fault in the walk system, as explained in that video near the end, it's a place where level designers made a mistake.
- arnorhs 17d 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 17d 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 17d ago> I believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast Exactly!
- frou_dh 17d ago[flagged]
- ModernMech 17d 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 17d agoYes, programmers are exactly like everyone else in this way.
- kshallvari 17d agoOh really, just for a funny joke?
- dist-epoch 17d agoNo, that would be John Carmack
- flumpcakes 17d agoDeath-frightening scion capable of seeing beyond the illusionary world before our eyes John Carmack?