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Any notable extremely skilled programmers in the gaming industry?
- Thread starter thequickandthedead
- Start date
More_Badass
Member
The guy working on Rain World is really talented. I've been following his progress for years and his main focus is AI. Enemies that can predict your movement, have their own intelligence, react and adapt to your actions.
Here's a recent post about the AI
He's also doing things like blending sprites with physics-based procedurally generated animations and crazy parallax effects like this
Here's a recent post about the AI
When reaching a road fork, where one option is considered ideal and the other slightly less so, a ghost is now able to clone itself. The clone gets a slightly lower score, which is accounted for in the eventual ghost ranking process.
Ghosts travel slowly, as we want creatures to assume that their prey is at least somewhere close to where they lost it. Over a large amount of time however, the ghosts will travel to pretty much all corners of the world, which means that a creature that has been long lost will be looked for in much more diverse locations than one that disappeared around a corner just two seconds ago. Each time a ghost travels, it will check if it is in the line of sight of the creature inside which's head it's living. If so, it'll freeze in place - it wouldn't make sense for the the creature to assume that the prey could have traversed any distance that is actually visible to it.
In this gif (trying yet another hosting service, hope this one will work for everyone!) you can see a (stuck) lizard lose track of a slugcat. Notice how after time has been sped up, the possible locations are scattered all over the lower left area, but also contained within the area which is not visible to the lizard. It knows the slugcat has to be in there somewhere, but becomes less and less sure of exactly where as time goes by. Here the ghost count is capped at 15, I think the actual game would generally use fewer.
When the slugcat is actually seen, all ghosts except one are removed. The ghost that's slightly larger and pulsating is the one that's considered the best guess for where the slugcat might be. This is where the ranking comes into play. The ghost score has several things feeding into it. Traveling in the same general direction as the tracked creature was last seen moving in is one, proximity to the last seen coordinate and the tracking creature are others, intended to make search behaviors look more reasonable. The search behavior will probably be mainly about going after this "best bet" ghost until all of them are gone.
When the lizard is moved close to the ghosts, they disappear. Note that they don't disappear as soon as the lizard is able to see them, but the lizard has to be somewhat close as well. This is for a few different reasons. One is that when the ghost cap is reached, and a ghost reaches a road fork, it won't pick one direction, but instead just freeze in place (seemed more reasonable to me to stop at the crossroads rather than picking an option at random that would take you even further away from where the creature was last spotted). Another is that the ghosts are not in every tile in the possible area, like an actual Occupancy Probability Grid. Both of these are generally the same concept; that these ghost coordinates are not strictly "places where I believe the creature to be", but rather "places that would be a good idea to go when searching for this creature" if you get the distinction. The latter can't just be dismissed at a glance, but takes some examination before its hypothesis can be falsified.
Many of the parameters for this whole thing can be customized, such as the max amount of ghosts per tracked creature, the speed of the ghosts (as a fraction of the tracked creature's average speed - I imagine I'll generally want the ghosts to move slower than the actual creatures as a conservative guess that's closer to the last seen coordinate is better than a wild guess) etc.
Ideally this system should also be inter-room, so that a ghost could pass through a shortcut into a neighboring room - this I haven't implemented yet. But generally I'm happy with the system. I will however add some functionality to dumb it down to work better for the slightly thicker creatures. An example would be that a dumb green lizard probably shouldn't be able to be too clever about how you're able to climb and it's not. Instead it should assume that you have the same limitations it has, and emulate your ghosts with its own terrain preferences. That way when you climb up and away from the area it's searching, the proper reaction should be confusion.
He's also doing things like blending sprites with physics-based procedurally generated animations and crazy parallax effects like this
Trigonometrize.
Member
So you're saying the only contribution worth something is the man that everyone already knows?
Seeing things like this is exactly what I wanted to see in this thread. I totally love those kinds of facts !
Messofanego
Banned
There is a wiki: List of notable video game industry programmers
Jonathan Blow
Renaud Bedard (Fez)
Thanks to the Double Fine Amnesia 2014 documentary, I've become known of Oliver Franzke, Anna Kipnis, and Brandon Dillon. Brad Muir, I knew before but he doesn't talk about his programming stuff as much as these others did in the documentaries. I think that's some of the best insight I've witnessed in video form because in a short amount of time, you're turning ideas into code and then into programming that into an actual game.
Jonathan Blow
Renaud Bedard (Fez)
Thanks to the Double Fine Amnesia 2014 documentary, I've become known of Oliver Franzke, Anna Kipnis, and Brandon Dillon. Brad Muir, I knew before but he doesn't talk about his programming stuff as much as these others did in the documentaries. I think that's some of the best insight I've witnessed in video form because in a short amount of time, you're turning ideas into code and then into programming that into an actual game.
Mixolydian
Member
I never actually knew in the first place. Total badass.
DOWN
Banned
This Milo guy who programmed Alice's hair in Alice: Madness Returns that is surpisingly low in resources and thus ran on last gen:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=123982400&postcount=35
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=123982400&postcount=35
Messofanego
Banned
The guy working on Rain World is really talented. I've been following his progress for years and his main focus is AI. Enemies that can predict your movement, have their own intelligence, react and adapt to your actions.
Here's a recent post about the AI
He's also doing things like blending sprites with physics-based procedurally generated animations and crazy parallax effects like this
This is some great stuff, been wanting to know a bit more in-depth stuff about this game.
MrCunningham
Member
The Future Crew guys from Finland had a lot of talented programmers as well. Though names escape me. Future Crew pretty well split up into Remedy and Futuremark and both teams were interchangeable at some point early on because they shared the same office building.
Fine Ham Abounds
Member
DonMigs85
Member
But the characters kept getting stuck behind things
He also overlooked the GAME BREAKING Potos Village reentry bug
Naka's work is sloppy, actually. A lot of the stuff he wrote was inefficient or redundant. It's not uncommon to see the exact same routine repeated multiple times in his code.
Yu Suzuki revolutionized 3d gaming on consoles. He's got a ton of accomplishments under his belt. He went over some of the tech they did in Shenmue during this past GDC and some of it was really friggen impressive. Of course that stuff was probably not his own, but the point is that the industry is full of prodigies and brilliant people.
Yuji Naka was awesome during the Sega days.
Yuji Naka was awesome during the Sega days.
Have you worked with his code?
It should be noted though that the cleanliness of code doesn't really matter at the end unless the code is meant to be distributed. This is probably even more true for games back them where there were just one or a few programmers on the team.
Also as someone noted, most programmers in the industry are very good. The kind of trickery and magic that happens in the coding arena for games is pretty amazing. But yea, most people don't become well known outside the industry itself.
Yup.
Like, I'm not saying the guy wasn't good. I just don't know if we should be comparing him to Carmack.
OccamsLightsaber
Regularly boosts GAF member count to cry about 'right wing gaf' - Voter #3923781
Pretty much every programmer that worked on the Uncharted series at ND
Yup. It is probably fair to say they're the reason PS3 found success.
Are Blizzard coders any good?
Diablo 3 is unnecessarily demanding for an isometric presentation and PS2-level model detail, Starcraft 2 can't multithread well to save its life, hearthstone has random pauses or jerks.
RedRooster
Member
This guy learned the entire Xbox architecture just by being in the same room as some MS people. Like crazy ESP or something.
Theognosis
Member
Iwata's a genius and that's the reason why the best programmers work for him. I myself am a programmer from the 80's and there's no way I'm bowing down to a marketing guy telling me what to do.
Much respect to all low level programmers out there! The world is our oyster.
Much respect to all low level programmers out there! The world is our oyster.
I'm quite positive, ask the 200 million player base if they've done a good job.
Uncle Rupee
Banned
Agreed, sad to see him relegated to the third page. His games were a huge part of my childhood.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
3 random ones:
Tim Lottes
Corinne Yu
Linus Torvalds
Tim Lottes
Corinne Yu
Linus Torvalds
wonderdung
Member
This thread is ridiculous but I'll throw one out anyway...
Never worked with him directly but I've heard a lot of residual respect for Ben Stragnell who was one of the main programmers of Excitebike 64. Apparently he also wrote a NES emulator in a weekend or two so they could throw a copy of the original Excitebike on the cart. As far as I know he spent some time at Naughty Dog after than and a few other places.
Really there are a ton of people deserving respect but we'll only ever get Carmack and the self-promoters mentioned in threads like these I guess.
Never worked with him directly but I've heard a lot of residual respect for Ben Stragnell who was one of the main programmers of Excitebike 64. Apparently he also wrote a NES emulator in a weekend or two so they could throw a copy of the original Excitebike on the cart. As far as I know he spent some time at Naughty Dog after than and a few other places.
Really there are a ton of people deserving respect but we'll only ever get Carmack and the self-promoters mentioned in threads like these I guess.
thoseAREmySHOES
Member
For the scope of all of their games, they are incredibly well done.
This guy gets it
firebricks3
Member
As someone who has written an NES emulator, writing one in a weekend or two on your own time is pretty incredible.
Also, this thread is pretty ridiculous. There are a plenty of very talented programmers who've somehow gotten rushed games to even function on the ridiculous deadline they had to do it in.
Sentenza
Member
Entered the thread just to name him.No one mentioned Abrash?
He's not just good, he's pretty much an authority in the field.
Prat
Member
Jonathan Blow, I've heard that he is a freaking genius at coding.
Yeah. These guys did things with the hardware that wasnt possible.
Playing samples on the c64 was possible cause they found a hardwarebug that you could use.
And like having sprites in the borders thanks to finding other possibilities in the hardware and machinecode programming.
MrCunningham
Member
If you are going to add skilled Linux programmers, then you really can't forget about Ryan "Icculus" Gordon.
He and his group Loki Software was responsible for porting Quake III, Unreal Tournament 99' and 2004, the Serious Sam games, early Civilization games, Medal of Honor games, America's Army, Prey, Red Orchestra, Second Life and was even contracted by Valve to help port Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux. He even did the Goat Simulator Linux port, as well as many of the Linux versions of games that were included in the Humble Bundle packages. And I think he was involved with the development of SDL at some point.
Icculus is the main reason why there were any AAA games at all on Linux before Valve stepped in. The man is a Linux porting machine.
I had no idea about Iwata. I knew he was involved in the games themselves before becoming head of the company, but I figured he just produced some games or something. Him programming Earthbound basically means he gets a pass on almost anything from me. But then he never greenlit Mother 3, so I take his pass back. 
Credit the design team instead?