also just wanted to thank you for this channel, i’m currently in college working in game development and i have learned so much from your channel thank you for making this info free, excited to go into the field for real!
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique" -Weird Al
Hey Tim, I would love to hear you talk about the "Use With" function from Fallout. You could click on any item on the map and just select "Use Boots on Cactus" although the odds of it saying "it does nothing" was very high. Its such a cool concept because it means you could have a opening for a secret door etc and have the correct item in your backpack but unless you knew about it you wouldn't try it obviously. It made all the gadgets in the world feel way more intractable for me. Why did this not carry on to any future games of yours? I loved it but it seems that this system was scrapped for some reason by the industry as a whole after the original Fallouts, any thought on why that is?
We saw the rise of so many settings!!! Like Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong (seriously from the nes arcade game to the donkey kong country in those years man what a time!!), Zelda, Warcraft, Street fighter, Final Fantasy (final fantasy 7 was a friggin revolution!!!!!), Fallout, Arcanum, Resident evil, jedi knight, metal gear solid, command and conquer, grand theft auto, mortal combat and a many many many more.
I cannot put what I’m saying fully into words, but I’ll give it a shot. Talking about the evolution of technology; it baffles me that I can watch the person that made one of if not the most influential franchise I’ve ever played, being fallout. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having these videos. As an admirer and an aspiring game developer in the future, I cannot stress how much your influence has had on me. I hope you’re doing well and also hope you know how helpful and insightful your thoughts and perceptions are. Thanks again!
Growing up with a PC in the late 80's and throughout the 90's was a wild time with the tech advances. It was so strange at times. From my perspective, whenever one aspect of PC tech stalled out a little, some other part would have a major leap. It's like some unseen force that drove evolution of tech was flowing to whatever route gave the least resistance, like water going around rocks in a stream. Sound card development was a crazy until CD audio showed up... Then video card development took off. The moment you thought things had reached a stable point, SOMETHING would appear out of nowhere. Exciting and exhausting at the same time.
6:48 Oh, jeez, I'd forgotten about those "did you see that?" type graphics setup options, but now you brought me back. Those sure were days of all time.
Great video Tim….as a kid growing up in the 90s, I was a major benefactor of the industry stress 😅 going from NES>Sega/SNES>N64/PS1>PS2 all before hitting high school lol. I was very privileged to be able to experience it, both timing and having parents that could afford it.
Same here. It was so epic! Started gaming in 1988-89 at 6 years old. Saw games and consoles rush forward. Tech and creativity was through the roof. We got settings like Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong (seriously from the nes arcade game to the donkey kong country in those years man what a time!!), Zelda, Warcraft, Street fighter, Final Fantasy (final fantasy 7 was a friggin revolution!!!!!), Fallout, Arcanum, Resident evil, jedi knight, metal gear solid, command and conquer, grand theft auto, mortal combat and a gazallion more. It truly was amazing to have seen the leaps and bounds!!
Heh - I remember those days. When I needed to buy a new computer for gaming, I would relegate my old previous windows machine to Linux and so wiped the disks and installed linux - omg it felt so good to do that; always doubled the speed of the older machine in the process.
Man, I'm so glad Tim has taken up UA-cam as a new hobby. He's got a veritable treasure trove of stories in his head being one of the most influential developers ever and being happy to share them (and his copious contemporaneous notes) with fans/enthusiasts like us. I mean, it's hard for me to explain to people outside of the milieu of video games how crazy it is that we get weekly videos of this stuff. Like, I was explaining to my non-gamer friend the other day how wild this is, and he really loves classic literature (as do I) and I was like "okay, imagine if Ernest Hemingway started a youtube channel to share personal and fun stories about when he was writing stuff like "The Sun Also Rises" and he wants to share stories and conversations he had with people like James Joyce and TS Elliott when they were all in Paris together, AND he happened to be taking extensive and detailed notes the ENTIRE TIME HE WAS IN PARIS which he's able to double check just in case he misremembers something and can correct himself. Now imagine all of those incredible primary resources are available to you 24/7 whenever you want it for absolutely free. That's basically what Tim Cain's UA-cam channel is for people interested in game-development and history."
Hi, Tim! You mentioned in the end of the video, that you can make a whole video about languages and I guess a lot of programmers here are really interested in it. Also it would be interesting to hear your opinion on making a game in C vs C++ vs C# and your impression on the evolution of C/C++ languages.
Oh gods the old games having to tell it your video card (and soundcard!) and little me having no idea what card I have and just picking them and hoping for the best (it usually did not go its best way). Thanks for the insight - I was thinking that hardware evolution has slowed considerably, but you're right that now engines are the currently evolving thing that'll be outdated soon enough.
Hey Tim, thanks for the video! All of these videos are a blessing to me, and to be honest, it really helps with my depression, as strange as that may sound. I just can't thank you enough for your work on the magnum opus - OG fallout.
I joke there are 5 levels of desperation when trying to run some old game on modern machine : - install and pray it just works ( wich rarely, but sometimes happen ) - run in compatibility mode - look online for comunity patches, fixes and workarounds - setup virtual machine with old operating system - buy some old hardwere and run it here
As always a great video and very on point descriptions of the technological steps taken back in the day. I would very much appreciate a video on languages, interaction with the chosen engine and what aspects to look at when choosing an engine. Thanks a lot for your content!
Great content as always Tim! It's interesting to know this from your perspective, from the crafter perspective. my humble exp as a consumer, I learned how to keyboard type before reading, I was 3-4y/o (1996) and we had an IBM 5150 at home , I knew how to type C:/accesories/start/etc etc but no idea of the how to read the letters or words, I just knew 'THIS key is for THIS letter' and then reach Chess, Pacman and some Adventure 2D adventure game prince of persia look alike. When I was 6 y/o at my grandmas job, her friends show me a PC and I saw Windows 98 for the first time, it was such a huge mindblowing! 'a tool that let me reach the screen?? a COURSOR??!!'
compared to 30 years ago, PC evolution really stalled. Now you can mostly play a current game with 5 year old hardware just fine. Not so in the mid 90s.
for dev, learning rabbit hole is endless though... hardware and software is out there bvut maan.... 3d games, someone has programmed games for 7+ years and still tons of things to learn, let alone do things better way. hardware just makes regular joe expect more and nitpick it. Software still evolves that pace.
@@Teeheehee093 Hardware longevity really is wild. I just upgraded last year from a 1060 6gb to a 4060 and I was STILL playing most AAA release games with high framerate. It gave me nearly 10 years of service, the vast majority of which I was playing games at high/ultra settings with 60fps. First game I played that the 1060 just flat out absolutely could NOT handle was the Dead Space remake, that's when I knew conclusively that it was time to upgrade, but man, what a life span that wonderful little card had.
Very true. I remember Comanche 3 coming out. If I remember correctly, there was no hardware available on the normal of market that could run the game in max settings. It took like a year to get to that :D
I remember a quote about the 1990s game dev was that "you could look at any game and say what year it came out immediately" what was it like for the 80s?
That was different, because - for PC - even VGA games needed to support CGA en EGA too for a couple of years, so it depended on which version you were looking at. Soundcards (as a common component) also didn't really take off in the 80s yet. For home computers and consoles, the hardware was usually stable for a couple of years and the quality of games differed a lot; so there were games from 1986 that looked worse than those from 1983 because they were low effort and/or skill games. For some type of games you could really see the gameplay evolution reflecting it's year a bit more, as with RPGs, or the type of game, space invaders clone were all the rage in the early 80s but mostly faded away later. So I would say, you could probably guess in a range of 2 to 3 years mostly.
lol i vaguely remember times when i had to tell the game what VGA i have. My dad put a sticky note on a monitor of the card so i knew what the name was and select the right one
Tim, wonderful video as always. I'd love to hear your thoughts on engine technology, specially what changed in your developmental approach after first using a licensed engine. How did it influence your tech approach going forward?
That was really interesting. I guess this is one of the reasons everyone wrote their own libraries - when things change so rapidly, it makes it worthwhile to maintain your own codebase than to rely on someone else. I also would like to add that this is a general problem in programming (as far as my limited experience is concerned). Just recently I updated a Python library and it broke absolutely everything - functions and variables were renamed, and the structure changed. So yes, I agree, no one is safe
It would be interesting to listen what kind of developer software, applications, tools you use nowadays and how much of it changed through the time since the 90s
I think this is the first time I've heard another developer talk about the pain of bank switching. I'm something bring up to my fellow devs when I start with "back in my day...", but I'm the only one I know that actually experienced it, and I didn't even release a game back then.
Great video as always! I'm curious about the other side of this coin -- are there any practices/tools/tropes/etc that you still see today in gaming which have been around forever? Would be curious about both old things that could use an update an those which have stood the test of time.
technological advancement made things a nightmare recently when I foolishly decided to dive into making a game from scratch with no engine. The amount of boilerplate required to render a handful of cubes with Vulkan is insane. And then it became way less of a nightmare once I started using Godot. I still wish it was FAR easier than it is to write something from scratch once and have it work on every major platform, but at least there are people out there doing that work so the rest of us don't have to.
For us income challenged people this is why consoles with relatively long life cycles have been a lifesaver. My Playstation 4 cost 400 dollars and I was still playing the latest AAA releases six or seven years after it came out. Was I getting all the hottest graphics? No, but I've never been super impressed by graphical fidelity as opposed to art style anyhow. Somewhere in the early to mid 2010's graphics got as realistic as I ever really needed them to be and anything beyond that doesn't do much since art style and direction will always trump realism. Pursuit of "realistic" graphics made sense in the 90's and 00's because they weren't really getting close to realism anyhow, but at this point I want strong and interesting art direction and value stylized art over anything trying to melt my computer with polygon counts. I think we've reached a point where not many games really justify how complex the graphics are with something that's actually cool to look at. Maybe the best example for me was World of Warcraft when it first came out and over the first expansion or so. At the time the graphics were far from top of the line, yet they captured the feel of the game wonderfully and made use of art style and direction to establish a feel for different zones, different enemies, different characters despite a deliberately somewhat cartoonish appearance. Was better off for it both in terms of not forcing people to buy entirely new rigs just to run the game and allowed the game a distinctly Warcraft feel visually. Things changed moving forward and I tend to think of Burning Crusade as the high point for that MMO but games like Doom3 were technically far more impressive yet graphically not memorable because they didn't do anything really interesting with that idtech engine which had every modern bell and whistle (as a Carmack engine would). Rage is another example. Technically extremely powerful and impressive engine, graphically not memorable at all. But I still remember specific zones in World of Warcraft 2 decades later because the graphics conveyed an atmosphere and a sense of place better despite a less advanced engine. This is of course looking at it as a consumer rather than a developer.
This is all very true but... If you're not after the latest graphics you don't need to upgrade much on your PC, plus the games are way cheaper. I've had the same video card for...8 years now
That's weird about the color capabilities because I remember writing demos in truecolor in the early '90s where we were already able to use RGB. XGA (a successor of SVGA) was as early as 1990.
Tim said he made his own game engines and then he worked on Source for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. I wonder how he felt when he was going through the engine for the first time. Wonder if he was surprised by how the Source engine might have done some things that maybe he never thought of before. I could listen to a video like this for hours.
This video status reminded me that there’s an upcoming fallout TV show coming out in April I believe. I think all of us would love simply to hear your thoughts about its direction, or homages, perhaps what you think of elements changed?
I recall I had to make DOS boot disks for different games. Had to use things like MemMaker for games like Wing Commander or X-Wing. I learned a lot about PCs because of that.
Hi Tim, What would be interesting to hear as you briefly mentioned it, what is it like to work with C,C++ and C#. If you imagine languages as tools, which one was best for which job? I presume C is better for 2D and C++ better for 3D due to the advanced memory management etc but I would be interested in your take on this. Also where does C# fit between the other two, being a higher level language. Is C#'s advantage being faster to develop compared to writing C and C++?
That one pretty much contradicts your previous "No excuses"-video, that states that game development is easier than ever before. It's as hard as it always was, because the technology and the frameworks become increasingly more complex. In fact, the easiest time for making games was during the homecomputer aera of the 80ies, when all the targeted models ran with the same CPU at the same clock-speed, the same graphics and sound capabilities, the same OS and the same I/O-ports. And they all came shipped with a build-in Basic Interpreter (or Compiler), that could access all hardware.
Currently playing Fallout 1 for the, technically, first time in my life. I was 15/16 when a friend introduced me to it, but the need to have AP to move turned me off very quickly (and I generally had a bad experience with rpgs, but that was another friends doing). I realize now how I didn't realize(then) the movement only relied on A.P during combat. I feel dumb for not realizing it, but it really doesn't matter because the same friend for me I to UO and it ruined my education. Seriously. I was hooked like heroine.
lol is that why Fallout blues out its entire install screen until you move your mouse around and also why it REALLY like to get in the wrong color space if you tab it out? I think Killap's patches fixed the latter
Now with the new generative model that can spew stock-quality video footage, that is going to replace shading for sure, and we wiil probably be talking about how to make the base 3D game be best converted by the TPUs into video, or even more, there will be no game engine other than a language model making stuff up in text format and a difussion model grabbing that text and turning into video. The engineering will be about making the LM not go on long diatribes about how someone didn't do anything wrong.
It's one of the gifts and curses of IT as a whole. Things are always changing, so there's always new things to learn. However, sometimes it would be nice if things could stand still for a bit so you could catch your metaphorical breath.
i think currently the technology is progressing kinda slower than it's 1990's golden age era's which i think helps software developers to make their game more sustainable than before ?
Hi Tim! Just curious about one aspect. Chatting with a good friend of mine, also a GD, we had a small disagreement about the next-gen in game mechanics. Some would argue that we haven't had a revolution in game mechanics since, let's say Half-Life 2? The point my friend was making is that for true next-gen mechanics we actually need a complete overhaul of our current hardware, or simply put, new accesible hardware as in VR for any wallet, or maybe new and different devices/platforms to interact with while effectively playing a game. That came after i complained that game mechanics over the years only suffered incremental changes and that mainly today games sure look prettier, play smoother but feel dated when it comes to the most important aspect - gameplay. Or somehow the fact that the industry today prefers going for the safe route (what works) instead of going for genuine inovation, even with the current available hardware. And yeah - taking 90s like risks. My question for you, (strictly from a consumer standpoint), goes like this: When do you think we will see the next big leap forward into the mechanics themselves and how do you think we can achieve that? I would love hearing your thoughts on this matter. Thank you very much for your time and for all the wonderful things that you do for us! 🙃
Hi Tim, could you please talk about mentorship? What makes a good mentor? What are the pros and cons of being a mentor? Is mentorship something that potential employers look for?
While technological progress nevers stops, it definietly slowed down a lot in this decade. I bought my current PC on a budget in 2015, and made literaly only two major changes to this day ( integrated grapfic card to GTX960 and Windows 7 into 10). I jumped several PC in my life, starting from lowly P200 😅in 1999 and none of them served me this well that long. Sure, it definietly starts to show its age, but it's still perfectly usable, as long as you don't mind not playing some of the newest games. Same goes for gapfics - bleeding edge game from 2000 would look dated and low res in 2010s. Bleeding edge game from 2015 is still looking well today ( like Arkham Knight for example ).
I usually don’t like GamePlus, but I did like what PoE: Deadfire did - unlocking various positive and negative modifiers which could be applied for 2nd playthrough. Firaxis did something similar with “2nd Wave” options in XCOM. I also quite appreciate when games finish. Post campaign roaming has sense, but I feel it tends to undercut the experience, or unnecessarily drag it out. I think it was Stravinsky who said: “To many piece continue for too long after they end”. I tend to feel that way about most post-end-games.
VGA that's the thing back then :) in 1996 my father bought first computer and got excited soo much ( It has Windows 95 in it ) one of my first games played back then GTA 1 game then and of course Fallout 1 - 2 .. etc . The funny thing is when GTA 2 released and bought the game and rushed into my room to play it , i even realized since today the computer gave me error on screen and the error message says something like your video card is not VGA Compatible :D and this was the first time i realized that my computer in 3 years becomes old to play new games :(
my first game i developed was Rock Paper Scissors in the 1.0 versiom the computer always said _"Rock!"_ so i needed to release a patch 5 minutes later and then the AI surprisingly said: _"Paper!Rock!Scissors!"_ ... we needed to wait until the DLC arrived to fix this bug. I was 7 and my dad showed me Turbo C.
I thought this would be about ingame technical evolution/changes of the societies in Interplay & Obsidian's Fallout world itself, juxtaposed to Bethesda's more static universe where outside of the Institute, populations and factions are stuck at the same state of progress they were at in Fallout1, and levels of industrialization and advancements. Even the Brotherhood for example under Bethesda is more or less technologically exactly where they were in F1. In Interplay's world we see A Vault advance into a Vault City & Shady Sands advance into NCR. Even Vault15 changed (but evolved into a tribal society). Van Buren was going to evolve the world further. You'd think mining & masonry would start coming back so that all Bethesda cities wouldn't be almost entirely reliant on lving in buildings built from the scraps & husks of the old world, unable to repair crumbling walls.
@@lrinfi Wow thank you for that fantastic, thoughtful and well researched response! Its better than any I could have hoped for. i'll write proper response when I have time this week! (hopefully my replies don't get shadowbanned by their spam filter)
As much as people resist it, we're gonna see a TON of change with the advent of AI. Dynamic dialog and storytelling, more elaborate worldgen, etc., all of which has to be regulated and tested during development. I love how quickly things change in the industry, but it can definitley be scary for someone trying to get into it
This was very interesting. I think Tim should have kept developing his own engines and never opted for UE for Vampire, he would have never stopped learning, and would have kept his math sharp to keep up with modern 3d graphics programming. Also I think he should have never joined Obsidian as a programmer, but rather pursued funds to or boot strapped himself yet a new game studio after Troika went bankrupt.
I never knew that about macs I had a friend who had a mac, and had warcraft 2 for it, so just by that alone, I never thought well macs can't play games at the time. (and my school growing up had apple 2s), and they had lots of floppy games (both the floppy floppy and hard disk floppy) for them, like oregon trail, carmen sandiego, cross country canada, etc) there was one computer that was only monochrome, and displayed green and black from what I remember I also had a friend that had a computer that had two floppy drives one was to boot the operating system, the other was to boot the game
I've had a steam deck for a while now and so far Fallout 1 has ran very well (with frame rate limit disabled, makes it smoooth), with the dock and mouse + keyboard. :D I'm torn on upscaling with FSR or not though.
Could you talk about using new AI systems in game making and where you see it going, if we might get games faster because of technologies like AI voice generation, AI 3d model creation, AI terrain generation, possibly AI generated path-finding and collision.
Damn didn’t know he was involved in the original fallout games AND vampire bloodlines (along with many others, but these 2 are amongst my all time fav RPGs). I havent finished Outerworlds yet as I started playing fallout NV instead as I never played the DLCs.
Was game development back then harder than today? I'd like to think things were less advanced back without photorealistic graphics, no ray tracing and so on, but at the same time I can imagine very basic things being much harder, you had to fiddle with assembly and so on... What is your take on this?
I'm curious if you will continue using UE going forward or maybe switch to something that is a bit better optimized for open worlds? (CryEngine or its derivatives would be the obvious one i think). Or make your own again and stick with it for awhile so it's worth it? I loved TOW, but the hitching was not ideal, not just your game either, most open world UE4 games do it. UE5 not so much, they just get ridiculously demanding for their size and scope instead. Rumor has it that Avowed had to shrink in scope a bit and my first thought was "UE5 problems".
Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress? If so, what are your thoughts? I often think of myself as an overseer while playing, you might like it. I'd love to see a fallout mod for it.
I wonder if a company could survive that was like. We update once every ten years. We churn out stuff for a thing we made for ten years, then update. IDK probably trash idea.
I think that the tech evolution doesn't mean much as long as there are people who grew up on classic games. maybe it used to be all about evolution, to make games more and more sophisticated. I believe that in our time game dev is so fragmented: you have pixels (even if it runs on Unity and requires 8 GB RAM and something from the i5 series), games for millenials, for zoomers, the list is goes on. but I can't even imagine what the game dev could look like in, let's say, 50 years. as for myself, I don't feel like spending money on a new PC... to run what exactly? the most 'technologically advanced' games I ever played was GTAV and F4. over the years I mostly play in Rimworld or some other indie games that still can offer a unique experience without asking too much
Minor quibble: try to avoid overlapping the screenshots with your face. It distracts a little from your presentation. Otherwise another excellent video 🙂
I wish so badly to know how to code and be able to build a game from the ground up to the degree where I could make my own game engine for a fallout game but it would not have that same look or feel that fallout 3 did for me back in the day, I have tonsa other ambitious projects so it’s too much to do rn but I’ll never give up on my fallout fan project I hope u know u put fallout into the right hands cuz we do have tools if we don’t like what’s on tv we can make our own story we have the tools. I hope going forward I can use the next fallouts engine because it has the same dynamic role playing mechanics of the old n graphics/grit but if not I can one day even make my own I love how technology is evolving to the point where my kids will one day be able to get into 3D art like have AI Write me a bed time story w using all my assets or any software we could dream of through learning to code & even if I don’t someone will make it a reality of course I will have put in the back bone to do everything n won’t have that luxury or even take the lazy way out but that’s where technology is evolution in its most concentrated form sometimes it’s always growing and man I couldn’t even imagine how it feels to have to go back from where u started and how that’ll feel when I’m ur age
also just wanted to thank you for this channel, i’m currently in college working in game development and i have learned so much from your channel thank you for making this info free, excited to go into the field for real!
Go get em tiger 🐅🐯
I hope you have an enjoyable time in game development when you graduate!
When you shall help work on a game that will be successful, I will not forget you
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique"
-Weird Al
Mans a genius I tell ya
If I could heart this I would! Epic!
It's all about Pentiums!
That Commodore must be really neato.
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
@@mattc7420 Probably my favorite Weird Al song. :D
"If I ever meet you, I'll CTRL ALT DEL you."
Hey Tim, I would love to hear you talk about the "Use With" function from Fallout. You could click on any item on the map and just select "Use Boots on Cactus" although the odds of it saying "it does nothing" was very high. Its such a cool concept because it means you could have a opening for a secret door etc and have the correct item in your backpack but unless you knew about it you wouldn't try it obviously. It made all the gadgets in the world feel way more intractable for me. Why did this not carry on to any future games of yours? I loved it but it seems that this system was scrapped for some reason by the industry as a whole after the original Fallouts, any thought on why that is?
Double down on that question
I suspect it was a hangover from text based adventure games.
@@gilgamecha Well, it adds huge numbers of degrees of freedom. I wouldn't call it a hangover.
BG3 brought this back.
So it went away and came back after 25 years, I wonder how they reasoned when adding it then
I am so glad i was there during that era (born 83). Started playing at age 6. Each year big strides were made. So much new stuff. So much creativity.
We saw the rise of so many settings!!! Like Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong (seriously from the nes arcade game to the donkey kong country in those years man what a time!!), Zelda, Warcraft, Street fighter, Final Fantasy (final fantasy 7 was a friggin revolution!!!!!), Fallout, Arcanum, Resident evil, jedi knight, metal gear solid, command and conquer, grand theft auto, mortal combat and a many many many more.
Sadly these days it’s all falling apart. Well save for indies on steam. And sometimes EA is a gamble.
I cannot put what I’m saying fully into words, but I’ll give it a shot.
Talking about the evolution of technology; it baffles me that I can watch the person that made one of if not the most influential franchise I’ve ever played, being fallout.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having these videos. As an admirer and an aspiring game developer in the future, I cannot stress how much your influence has had on me. I hope you’re doing well and also hope you know how helpful and insightful your thoughts and perceptions are. Thanks again!
Growing up with a PC in the late 80's and throughout the 90's was a wild time with the tech advances. It was so strange at times. From my perspective, whenever one aspect of PC tech stalled out a little, some other part would have a major leap. It's like some unseen force that drove evolution of tech was flowing to whatever route gave the least resistance, like water going around rocks in a stream. Sound card development was a crazy until CD audio showed up... Then video card development took off. The moment you thought things had reached a stable point, SOMETHING would appear out of nowhere. Exciting and exhausting at the same time.
Yess Tim, please make a vid of why u went back to C++!! These vids are so fascinating x)
Great video. I appreciate the photos you put on screen of what you're talking about, it makes it easier to follow
Your insights into the industry and fallout is golden. Thank you Tim
6:48 Oh, jeez, I'd forgotten about those "did you see that?" type graphics setup options, but now you brought me back.
Those sure were days of all time.
Also, I never knew what VESA meant.
"Today I Learned" moment, right there.
Great video Tim….as a kid growing up in the 90s, I was a major benefactor of the industry stress 😅 going from NES>Sega/SNES>N64/PS1>PS2 all before hitting high school lol. I was very privileged to be able to experience it, both timing and having parents that could afford it.
you're part of the problem
Same here. It was so epic! Started gaming in 1988-89 at 6 years old. Saw games and consoles rush forward. Tech and creativity was through the roof.
We got settings like Mario, Sonic, Donkey Kong (seriously from the nes arcade game to the donkey kong country in those years man what a time!!), Zelda, Warcraft, Street fighter, Final Fantasy (final fantasy 7 was a friggin revolution!!!!!), Fallout, Arcanum, Resident evil, jedi knight, metal gear solid, command and conquer, grand theft auto, mortal combat and a gazallion more.
It truly was amazing to have seen the leaps and bounds!!
@@lopa-u9f Not being poor makes them part of the problem?
I completely forgot Win ME existed lol Thanks for this trip down the memory lane and some juicy info too.
Heh - I remember those days. When I needed to buy a new computer for gaming, I would relegate my old previous windows machine to Linux and so wiped the disks and installed linux - omg it felt so good to do that; always doubled the speed of the older machine in the process.
Man, I'm so glad Tim has taken up UA-cam as a new hobby. He's got a veritable treasure trove of stories in his head being one of the most influential developers ever and being happy to share them (and his copious contemporaneous notes) with fans/enthusiasts like us. I mean, it's hard for me to explain to people outside of the milieu of video games how crazy it is that we get weekly videos of this stuff.
Like, I was explaining to my non-gamer friend the other day how wild this is, and he really loves classic literature (as do I) and I was like "okay, imagine if Ernest Hemingway started a youtube channel to share personal and fun stories about when he was writing stuff like "The Sun Also Rises" and he wants to share stories and conversations he had with people like James Joyce and TS Elliott when they were all in Paris together, AND he happened to be taking extensive and detailed notes the ENTIRE TIME HE WAS IN PARIS which he's able to double check just in case he misremembers something and can correct himself. Now imagine all of those incredible primary resources are available to you 24/7 whenever you want it for absolutely free. That's basically what Tim Cain's UA-cam channel is for people interested in game-development and history."
Hi, Tim! You mentioned in the end of the video, that you can make a whole video about languages and I guess a lot of programmers here are really interested in it. Also it would be interesting to hear your opinion on making a game in C vs C++ vs C# and your impression on the evolution of C/C++ languages.
Oh gods the old games having to tell it your video card (and soundcard!) and little me having no idea what card I have and just picking them and hoping for the best (it usually did not go its best way). Thanks for the insight - I was thinking that hardware evolution has slowed considerably, but you're right that now engines are the currently evolving thing that'll be outdated soon enough.
Hey Tim, thanks for the video! All of these videos are a blessing to me, and to be honest, it really helps with my depression, as strange as that may sound. I just can't thank you enough for your work on the magnum opus - OG fallout.
Fascinating history of game development, Tim! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Awesome. I could listen to these stories all day. Thanks a lot Tim!
Excited for this 'time line' you are putting together!
Hi Tim. Enjoy the channel. Its so funny I see the same events,issues, wins and losses in software development
Windows Compatibility Mode, Tries, and thats saying a lot when it comes to getting old software to run at all.
I joke there are 5 levels of desperation when trying to run some old game on modern machine :
- install and pray it just works ( wich rarely, but sometimes happen )
- run in compatibility mode
- look online for comunity patches, fixes and workarounds
- setup virtual machine with old operating system
- buy some old hardwere and run it here
As always a great video and very on point descriptions of the technological steps taken back in the day. I would very much appreciate a video on languages, interaction with the chosen engine and what aspects to look at when choosing an engine. Thanks a lot for your content!
Thanks for sharing, Tim.
Great content as always Tim! It's interesting to know this from your perspective, from the crafter perspective.
my humble exp as a consumer, I learned how to keyboard type before reading, I was 3-4y/o (1996) and we had an IBM 5150 at home , I knew how to type C:/accesories/start/etc etc but no idea of the how to read the letters or words, I just knew 'THIS key is for THIS letter' and then reach Chess, Pacman and some Adventure 2D adventure game prince of persia look alike. When I was 6 y/o at my grandmas job, her friends show me a PC and I saw Windows 98 for the first time, it was such a huge mindblowing! 'a tool that let me reach the screen?? a COURSOR??!!'
compared to 30 years ago, PC evolution really stalled. Now you can mostly play a current game with 5 year old hardware just fine. Not so in the mid 90s.
for dev, learning rabbit hole is endless though... hardware and software is out there bvut maan.... 3d games, someone has programmed games for 7+ years and still tons of things to learn, let alone do things better way. hardware just makes regular joe expect more and nitpick it. Software still evolves that pace.
Everything in my PC is over 5 years old except my 3080, but that's nearly 4 years old already
I recently fixed a PC I'd built a decade ago, and funny enough it can run Cyberpunk 2077 (at 1080p, low, 60fps) but not Windows 11.
@@Teeheehee093 Hardware longevity really is wild. I just upgraded last year from a 1060 6gb to a 4060 and I was STILL playing most AAA release games with high framerate. It gave me nearly 10 years of service, the vast majority of which I was playing games at high/ultra settings with 60fps. First game I played that the 1060 just flat out absolutely could NOT handle was the Dead Space remake, that's when I knew conclusively that it was time to upgrade, but man, what a life span that wonderful little card had.
Very true. I remember Comanche 3 coming out. If I remember correctly, there was no hardware available on the normal of market that could run the game in max settings. It took like a year to get to that :D
Tim I'm replaying Fallout 2 and a lot of NPCs are described as 'burly'
I have never seen a single piece of media use 'burly' so much
someone at the writing team had a habit
I remember a quote about the 1990s game dev was that "you could look at any game and say what year it came out immediately" what was it like for the 80s?
That was different, because - for PC - even VGA games needed to support CGA en EGA too for a couple of years, so it depended on which version you were looking at. Soundcards (as a common component) also didn't really take off in the 80s yet.
For home computers and consoles, the hardware was usually stable for a couple of years and the quality of games differed a lot; so there were games from 1986 that looked worse than those from 1983 because they were low effort and/or skill games.
For some type of games you could really see the gameplay evolution reflecting it's year a bit more, as with RPGs, or the type of game, space invaders clone were all the rage in the early 80s but mostly faded away later.
So I would say, you could probably guess in a range of 2 to 3 years mostly.
You could probably pinpoint the season or even month lol
I'm a programmer myself, and I learned something early on in life and my career: the only constant is change.
lol i vaguely remember times when i had to tell the game what VGA i have. My dad put a sticky note on a monitor of the card so i knew what the name was and select the right one
would love to see your video about languages throughout your career!
That’s tomorrow
Tim, wonderful video as always. I'd love to hear your thoughts on engine technology, specially what changed in your developmental approach after first using a licensed engine. How did it influence your tech approach going forward?
That's the neat part about making games. There is always something new to learn, even if you have developed games multiple times before
Awesome points. You are correct this industry is about technological change.
That was really interesting. I guess this is one of the reasons everyone wrote their own libraries - when things change so rapidly, it makes it worthwhile to maintain your own codebase than to rely on someone else.
I also would like to add that this is a general problem in programming (as far as my limited experience is concerned). Just recently I updated a Python library and it broke absolutely everything - functions and variables were renamed, and the structure changed. So yes, I agree, no one is safe
It would be interesting to listen what kind of developer software, applications, tools you use nowadays and how much of it changed through the time since the 90s
As just as end user I have given up trying to keep up with changes to the industry. :) It is nuts.
I think this is the first time I've heard another developer talk about the pain of bank switching. I'm something bring up to my fellow devs when I start with "back in my day...", but I'm the only one I know that actually experienced it, and I didn't even release a game back then.
Great video as always!
I'm curious about the other side of this coin -- are there any practices/tools/tropes/etc that you still see today in gaming which have been around forever? Would be curious about both old things that could use an update an those which have stood the test of time.
technological advancement made things a nightmare recently when I foolishly decided to dive into making a game from scratch with no engine. The amount of boilerplate required to render a handful of cubes with Vulkan is insane. And then it became way less of a nightmare once I started using Godot. I still wish it was FAR easier than it is to write something from scratch once and have it work on every major platform, but at least there are people out there doing that work so the rest of us don't have to.
For us income challenged people this is why consoles with relatively long life cycles have been a lifesaver. My Playstation 4 cost 400 dollars and I was still playing the latest AAA releases six or seven years after it came out. Was I getting all the hottest graphics? No, but I've never been super impressed by graphical fidelity as opposed to art style anyhow. Somewhere in the early to mid 2010's graphics got as realistic as I ever really needed them to be and anything beyond that doesn't do much since art style and direction will always trump realism. Pursuit of "realistic" graphics made sense in the 90's and 00's because they weren't really getting close to realism anyhow, but at this point I want strong and interesting art direction and value stylized art over anything trying to melt my computer with polygon counts. I think we've reached a point where not many games really justify how complex the graphics are with something that's actually cool to look at.
Maybe the best example for me was World of Warcraft when it first came out and over the first expansion or so. At the time the graphics were far from top of the line, yet they captured the feel of the game wonderfully and made use of art style and direction to establish a feel for different zones, different enemies, different characters despite a deliberately somewhat cartoonish appearance. Was better off for it both in terms of not forcing people to buy entirely new rigs just to run the game and allowed the game a distinctly Warcraft feel visually.
Things changed moving forward and I tend to think of Burning Crusade as the high point for that MMO but games like Doom3 were technically far more impressive yet graphically not memorable because they didn't do anything really interesting with that idtech engine which had every modern bell and whistle (as a Carmack engine would). Rage is another example. Technically extremely powerful and impressive engine, graphically not memorable at all. But I still remember specific zones in World of Warcraft 2 decades later because the graphics conveyed an atmosphere and a sense of place better despite a less advanced engine.
This is of course looking at it as a consumer rather than a developer.
This is all very true but... If you're not after the latest graphics you don't need to upgrade much on your PC, plus the games are way cheaper. I've had the same video card for...8 years now
PC tech does not advance at anywhere _near_ the same pace anymore. There's no comparison.
Thank you for these videos!
That's weird about the color capabilities because I remember writing demos in truecolor in the early '90s where we were already able to use RGB. XGA (a successor of SVGA) was as early as 1990.
Tim said he made his own game engines and then he worked on Source for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. I wonder how he felt when he was going through the engine for the first time. Wonder if he was surprised by how the Source engine might have done some things that maybe he never thought of before. I could listen to a video like this for hours.
This video status reminded me that there’s an upcoming fallout TV show coming out in April I believe.
I think all of us would love simply to hear your thoughts about its direction, or homages, perhaps what you think of elements changed?
I recall I had to make DOS boot disks for different games. Had to use things like MemMaker for games like Wing Commander or X-Wing. I learned a lot about PCs because of that.
Hi Tim,
What would be interesting to hear as you briefly mentioned it, what is it like to work with C,C++ and C#. If you imagine languages as tools, which one was best for which job?
I presume C is better for 2D and C++ better for 3D due to the advanced memory management etc but I would be interested in your take on this.
Also where does C# fit between the other two, being a higher level language. Is C#'s advantage being faster to develop compared to writing C and C++?
Tune in tomorrow!
That one pretty much contradicts your previous "No excuses"-video, that states that game development is easier than ever before. It's as hard as it always was, because the technology and the frameworks become increasingly more complex.
In fact, the easiest time for making games was during the homecomputer aera of the 80ies, when all the targeted models ran with the same CPU at the same clock-speed, the same graphics and sound capabilities, the same OS and the same I/O-ports. And they all came shipped with a build-in Basic Interpreter (or Compiler), that could access all hardware.
Currently playing Fallout 1 for the, technically, first time in my life. I was 15/16 when a friend introduced me to it, but the need to have AP to move turned me off very quickly (and I generally had a bad experience with rpgs, but that was another friends doing).
I realize now how I didn't realize(then) the movement only relied on A.P during combat. I feel dumb for not realizing it, but it really doesn't matter because the same friend for me I to UO and it ruined my education. Seriously. I was hooked like heroine.
Tim the best way to play your old games today is in a windows 98 virtual machine with light CRT monitor filters 😍
lol is that why Fallout blues out its entire install screen until you move your mouse around and also why it REALLY like to get in the wrong color space if you tab it out? I think Killap's patches fixed the latter
Now with the new generative model that can spew stock-quality video footage, that is going to replace shading for sure, and we wiil probably be talking about how to make the base 3D game be best converted by the TPUs into video, or even more, there will be no game engine other than a language model making stuff up in text format and a difussion model grabbing that text and turning into video. The engineering will be about making the LM not go on long diatribes about how someone didn't do anything wrong.
I love this! I agree that 3-D graphics require linear algebra, which is why I am still in 2-D :-D
It's one of the gifts and curses of IT as a whole. Things are always changing, so there's always new things to learn. However, sometimes it would be nice if things could stand still for a bit so you could catch your metaphorical breath.
i think currently the technology is progressing kinda slower than it's 1990's golden age era's which i think helps software developers to make their game more sustainable than before ?
This is fascinating.
Hi Tim! Just curious about one aspect. Chatting with a good friend of mine, also a GD, we had a small disagreement about the next-gen in game mechanics. Some would argue that we haven't had a revolution in game mechanics since, let's say Half-Life 2? The point my friend was making is that for true next-gen mechanics we actually need a complete overhaul of our current hardware, or simply put, new accesible hardware as in VR for any wallet, or maybe new and different devices/platforms to interact with while effectively playing a game. That came after i complained that game mechanics over the years only suffered incremental changes and that mainly today games sure look prettier, play smoother but feel dated when it comes to the most important aspect - gameplay. Or somehow the fact that the industry today prefers going for the safe route (what works) instead of going for genuine inovation, even with the current available hardware. And yeah - taking 90s like risks. My question for you, (strictly from a consumer standpoint), goes like this: When do you think we will see the next big leap forward into the mechanics themselves and how do you think we can achieve that? I would love hearing your thoughts on this matter. Thank you very much for your time and for all the wonderful things that you do for us! 🙃
Hi Tim, could you please talk about mentorship? What makes a good mentor? What are the pros and cons of being a mentor? Is mentorship something that potential employers look for?
I think he's got a video on that already. I might be confusing it with one of his other videos about workplace culture though.
While technological progress nevers stops, it definietly slowed down a lot in this decade. I bought my current PC on a budget in 2015, and made literaly only two major changes to this day ( integrated grapfic card to GTX960 and Windows 7 into 10). I jumped several PC in my life, starting from lowly P200 😅in 1999 and none of them served me this well that long. Sure, it definietly starts to show its age, but it's still perfectly usable, as long as you don't mind not playing some of the newest games.
Same goes for gapfics - bleeding edge game from 2000 would look dated and low res in 2010s. Bleeding edge game from 2015 is still looking well today ( like Arkham Knight for example ).
This stuff is invaluable.
I usually don’t like GamePlus, but I did like what PoE: Deadfire did - unlocking various positive and negative modifiers which could be applied for 2nd playthrough. Firaxis did something similar with “2nd Wave” options in XCOM.
I also quite appreciate when games finish. Post campaign roaming has sense, but I feel it tends to undercut the experience, or unnecessarily drag it out. I think it was Stravinsky who said: “To many piece continue for too long after they end”. I tend to feel that way about most post-end-games.
VGA that's the thing back then :) in 1996 my father bought first computer and got excited soo much ( It has Windows 95 in it )
one of my first games played back then GTA 1 game then and of course Fallout 1 - 2 .. etc . The funny thing is
when GTA 2 released and bought the game and rushed into my room to play it , i even realized since today the computer
gave me error on screen and the error message says something like your video card is not VGA Compatible :D and this was
the first time i realized that my computer in 3 years becomes old to play new games :(
It's so awesome to see the person behind some of legendary games i have played !
wild west .... absolute props to the people who legit had to build EVERYTHING
I’d love to hear about your experience with different languages!
That’s tomorrow’s video
I wonder if you've heard of what Ken Levine has been working on with Judas, and if you have any thoughts about his narrative legos concept.
You should write a memoir book on your amazing career. I’d buy it today!
My Memoirs
ua-cam.com/video/QvgttRI7oSU/v-deo.html
my first game i developed was Rock Paper Scissors in the 1.0 versiom the computer always said _"Rock!"_ so i needed to release a patch 5 minutes later and then the AI surprisingly said: _"Paper!Rock!Scissors!"_ ... we needed to wait until the DLC arrived to fix this bug.
I was 7 and my dad showed me Turbo C.
I thought this would be about ingame technical evolution/changes of the societies in Interplay & Obsidian's Fallout world itself, juxtaposed to Bethesda's more static universe where outside of the Institute, populations and factions are stuck at the same state of progress they were at in Fallout1, and levels of industrialization and advancements. Even the Brotherhood for example under Bethesda is more or less technologically exactly where they were in F1. In Interplay's world we see A Vault advance into a Vault City & Shady Sands advance into NCR. Even Vault15 changed (but evolved into a tribal society). Van Buren was going to evolve the world further. You'd think mining & masonry would start coming back so that all Bethesda cities wouldn't be almost entirely reliant on lving in buildings built from the scraps & husks of the old world, unable to repair crumbling walls.
fallout 3 and 4 are set 10 years apart. not much time for development.
@@lrinfi Wow thank you for that fantastic, thoughtful and well researched response! Its better than any I could have hoped for. i'll write proper response when I have time this week! (hopefully my replies don't get shadowbanned by their spam filter)
Is it possible for you to do a live stream or playthrough of Fallout 1 with director's commentary?
Did you watch Leonard Boyarsky and I play Fallout a few years ago?
m.twitch.tv/videos/334447208?desktop-redirect=true
@@CainOnGames no I hadn't! Now I definitely will! Thanks a ton! 😁
As much as people resist it, we're gonna see a TON of change with the advent of AI. Dynamic dialog and storytelling, more elaborate worldgen, etc., all of which has to be regulated and tested during development.
I love how quickly things change in the industry, but it can definitley be scary for someone trying to get into it
very interesting video it feels like this with current ai boom
Hi Tim! 😄👋
This was very interesting. I think Tim should have kept developing his own engines and never opted for UE for Vampire, he would have never stopped learning, and would have kept his math sharp to keep up with modern 3d graphics programming. Also I think he should have never joined Obsidian as a programmer, but rather pursued funds to or boot strapped himself yet a new game studio after Troika went bankrupt.
I never knew that about macs
I had a friend who had a mac, and had warcraft 2 for it, so just by that alone, I never thought well macs can't play games at the time. (and my school growing up had apple 2s), and they had lots of floppy games (both the floppy floppy and hard disk floppy) for them, like oregon trail, carmen sandiego, cross country canada, etc)
there was one computer that was only monochrome, and displayed green and black from what I remember
I also had a friend that had a computer that had two floppy drives
one was to boot the operating system, the other was to boot the game
I've had a steam deck for a while now and so far Fallout 1 has ran very well (with frame rate limit disabled, makes it smoooth), with the dock and mouse + keyboard. :D I'm torn on upscaling with FSR or not though.
Thats why consoles dominate gaming for many years. They have one system for many years.
Could you talk about using new AI systems in game making and where you see it going, if we might get games faster because of technologies like AI voice generation, AI 3d model creation, AI terrain generation, possibly AI generated path-finding and collision.
Artificial Intelligence
ua-cam.com/video/7MRx_i9gvWw/v-deo.html
Oh sorry I didn't realize you had a video already.
"You may think, oh, I'll do narrative design, well, you get more dialogue, now there's voice-over, now there's lip syncing"
Or LLMs 💀
Tim I want your thoughts on the fallout tv show trailer!
Damn didn’t know he was involved in the original fallout games AND vampire bloodlines (along with many others, but these 2 are amongst my all time fav RPGs). I havent finished Outerworlds yet as I started playing fallout NV instead as I never played the DLCs.
Was game development back then harder than today? I'd like to think things were less advanced back without photorealistic graphics, no ray tracing and so on, but at the same time I can imagine very basic things being much harder, you had to fiddle with assembly and so on... What is your take on this?
black, white, magenta and cyan... I remember sokoban... ... ... I feel old now...
I'm curious if you will continue using UE going forward or maybe switch to something that is a bit better optimized for open worlds? (CryEngine or its derivatives would be the obvious one i think). Or make your own again and stick with it for awhile so it's worth it? I loved TOW, but the hitching was not ideal, not just your game either, most open world UE4 games do it. UE5 not so much, they just get ridiculously demanding for their size and scope instead. Rumor has it that Avowed had to shrink in scope a bit and my first thought was "UE5 problems".
256 colors in Arcanum?
anti-aliasing is clearly supported there with smooth transitions to alpha, is this possible in 256 color mode?
Oh, I thought this was gonna be a question about a natural setting progression between sequels lol
Lol! I remember those engines!
And from what I remember Stick of Truth was built on the same game engine powering Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse.
Have you ever seen the demos Area 5150 or 8088 MPH? It turns out CGA was a lot more powerful than anyone understood at the time.
Hi Tim! Have you ever thought of writing a book about your experiences in game dev?
My Memoirs
ua-cam.com/video/QvgttRI7oSU/v-deo.html
@@CainOnGames awesome, thank you!
Good video
Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress? If so, what are your thoughts?
I often think of myself as an overseer while playing, you might like it. I'd love to see a fallout mod for it.
hey Tim, what would you say about making a new Arcanum game together with larian?
He's made a couple videos on that, they're really cool
I've got hundreds of messages from people demanding I port a free library to mac. 1. No thanks. 2. Do it yourself, it's open source.
I wonder if a company could survive that was like.
We update once every ten years.
We churn out stuff for a thing we made for ten years, then update.
IDK probably trash idea.
That's rad, comrade! 😂
Disco Elysium is awesome, tho 🕵️♂️🌟💯🤗
Gaaa, bank switching! Does anyone know CPR? Man that stuff was a pain! Also, linear algebra broke my brain. 🥴
14:38 "Let me explain. ... No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
Timeline for many reasons 😮😮😮😮
I think that the tech evolution doesn't mean much as long as there are people who grew up on classic games. maybe it used to be all about evolution, to make games more and more sophisticated. I believe that in our time game dev is so fragmented: you have pixels (even if it runs on Unity and requires 8 GB RAM and something from the i5 series), games for millenials, for zoomers, the list is goes on. but I can't even imagine what the game dev could look like in, let's say, 50 years. as for myself, I don't feel like spending money on a new PC... to run what exactly? the most 'technologically advanced' games I ever played was GTAV and F4. over the years I mostly play in Rimworld or some other indie games that still can offer a unique experience without asking too much
30 years ago, I am old 😞
Minor quibble: try to avoid overlapping the screenshots with your face. It distracts a little from your presentation.
Otherwise another excellent video 🙂
I wish so badly to know how to code and be able to build a game from the ground up to the degree where I could make my own game engine for a fallout game but it would not have that same look or feel that fallout 3 did for me back in the day, I have tonsa other ambitious projects so it’s too much to do rn but I’ll never give up on my fallout fan project I hope u know u put fallout into the right hands cuz we do have tools if we don’t like what’s on tv we can make our own story we have the tools. I hope going forward I can use the next fallouts engine because it has the same dynamic role playing mechanics of the old n graphics/grit but if not I can one day even make my own I love how technology is evolving to the point where my kids will one day be able to get into 3D art like have AI Write me a bed time story w using all my assets or any software we could dream of through learning to code & even if I don’t someone will make it a reality of course I will have put in the back bone to do everything n won’t have that luxury or even take the lazy way out but that’s where technology is evolution in its most concentrated form sometimes it’s always growing and man I couldn’t even imagine how it feels to have to go back from where u started and how that’ll feel when I’m ur age