Computer Games

Work

During that time period, I've worked on the following games:

• System Shock: This was in development when I interviewed, and between this and the Underworlds, I knew that LG was my game company of choice. It was nearly done when I signed on, but I did do extensive playtesting (although I was officially programming for another project), and wrote two of the minigames for the floppy version: Bot Bounce and Eel Zapper. The latter was our tour de force minigame at the time, but for the CD game I outdid myself with a relatively complete Wing Commander minigame, Wing 0--written just before Wing 3 was released, it's both an homage and a parody, featuring, for example, one pacifistic wingman who refuses to fight (and strangely never gets attacked either, because he's actually a traitor!!!), a mission where you get something like 8 wingmen, and a final "aww, what the heck, let's send you out by yourself to defeat their entire armada" mission. My voice can also be heard in the game reciting a laundry list of objects found tucked away somewhere on level 3.

• Flight Unlimited: I did a tiny bit of testing, a little bit of pyschological support, and I wrote the credits sequence around Seamus' pre-existing jello cube physics engine. (Most of the hard work of the rendering used existing LookingGlass libraries, though.) In fine minigame tradition, I also added code that actually let you play the Fight! machine, although admittedly it's lame, awkward, and not very fun.

• Terra Nova: This is a game I actually officialy worked on. Terra Nova had a long and checkered development history, and while very well-received by reviewers, it failed to sell very well. By the time I started working on it, the graphics engine was in its second version, and I revamped its appearance, tried to speed it up, and rewrote it again trying to speed it up more.

  Terra Nova was the first (and for at least two years, the only) game to do "rendering-to-the-horizon" without being a flight-sim, that is, while providing high detail close to the ground. And the Terra Nova graphics engine was running long before Magic Carpet and its "bullfog" shipped. Do I sound resentful? Well, if I see another game where a totally fogged-out mountain suddenly appears, hiding a sky bitmap, I think I will tear my eyes out. (Battlezone, anyone?) I mean, if it's that foggy, I don't think I'd be able to see the sky that was even further away than that mountain. Oh, I'm griping now.

  Anyway, I didn't write that system, although I tweaked it to look nicer (gouraud shading), and wrote most or all of the special effects (the 3d sky texture, reflective water, particle effects, etc). I also wrote and built the two training missions--unfortunately they were still too hard, and my estimated time for players to play them were off by a factor of 2 or 3. We desperately needed a third mission to train squadmate communication. Also I pretty much solely wrestled the game into submission to run in only 8 Meg (or at least I was the only one doing it on the programming side--designer mission tweaking also helped).

• Thief: The Dark Project: During Terra Nova, I did some rendering research for developing a next-generation indoor rendering engine that we could use for future System Shock sorts of games, and "invented" (re-discovered?) portal technology. (Of course, it turns out that Descent was using portals before anyone!) This got hashed and beaten around and turned into an engine called Portal, which is the renderer behind Thief and System Shock 2. Like everyone else, the editor uses a CSG technology for building, and I wrote the CSG-to-Portal-database converter, as well as a few other elements of the Dark Engine's editor.

  After Quake came out, the engine was revamped to do Quake-style light-mapping, since this was clearly the wave of the future. (Jedi Knight got by without.) Other people at Looking Glass have managed to convince the Portal engine to make use of hardware acceleration, and I later refined the technology for System Shock 2 to allow colored lighting.

  Mostly, though, I wish a game could have shipped with that technology a year or two earlier, and that's part of why I wasn't happy working for LookingGlass and quit in the middle of the project.

• Flight Unlimited 2: One weekend, for fun, I wrote a fast affine texture-mapper, focused on polygon-throughput, not fillrate (unlike all the texture-mappers I had written to that date). Then for fun FU2's lead programmer and I dropped it into FU2. We saw a major speedup, enough to allow twice as many polygons had been expected! Not bad for a weekend's work. Unfortunately, due to an inconsistentcy between the way it worked and LG's existing affine mapper, FU2 ended up not using it, and rather using an LG mapper which wasn't quite as throughput-oriented. Oh well.

  I also contracted during the last few weeks of FU2, optimizing the nightime runway strip lights, fixing up some object sorting problems, writing additive instead of alpha-blending support so lights could be on at night, and finally spending 60 or 70 hours non-stop right before cutting gold chasing a heinous multi-threading semaphore hang that turned out to be broken multi-threaded file I/O in our compiler vendor's libraries. At least they got us source code a few hours after we asked for it--although we had figured it all out by then.

  You can bet that at the end of those ~60 hours, Doug and I were not exactly coding competently (he tells me that we actually went home for about 4 or 6 hours at one point, but I don't remember if I napped or just, y'know, showered and suchlike), and the version we ended up with still had race conditions, but at least they were about 1/10000 as likely to occur.

• System Shock 2: I didn't do anything for SS2 beyond refining the engine as described above.

• Thief II: I didn't really do anything for Thief II. I playtested it a little, and it used the rendering engine I had written for Thief and revamped for Shock 2.

• Thief III: I was part of the engine team developing a next-generation engine for Thief III. After LGS shutdown, rights to Thief III went to Eidos, and eventually Ion Storm Austin, under Warren Spector, created a new Thief III, which was actually in some ways similar to the original one, since LGS's Thief III lead designer, Randy Smith, went to Ion Storm Austin and was the lead designer on that one, too. But it didn't share any code and it really was a ground-up redesign.

Not-Work

QMAP is a Quake terrain renderer with full source in only 2000 lines of code which I wrote one weekend (around March of 1997?) with the explicit purpose of providing as simple a complete terrain renderer as possible, in the hopes it might be as useful a tutorial as possible. At the time, only one other Quake-rendering engine on the 3d-engines-list had source, and that source was old, incomplete, and not very fast.

I have no clue how much attention it got (geocities' counters screwed up in the middle of its lifespan), or how much other free engines have chosen to build on it, but I have gotten lots of job offers as a result.

Historical

I used to be an active user of MUDs. In addition to helping to run the Darker Realms lpmud, I wrote my own mud system, Sludge, as well as SP, a simple LISP-like wrapper around TinyMUCK 2.0's MUF. I don't have source to SP anymore, and I have no desire to support Sludge, unless you are TEAM CTHULU.