I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
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The /grill-me skill from Matt Pocock is amazing. Excellent tool for specifying what you actually want from agents.
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Martin Scott retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of at the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of at the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
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Martin Scott retweeted
Tim is right. Steam's AI disclosure rule is abhorrent.
I recently shipped an AI-assisted game, and that label doesn't help anyone pick a game. It's a target. It tells the angry mob exactly where to send the review bombs.
Nobody discloses which engine, which brushes, or which plugins they used. AI gets singled out for one reason: so devs can be punished for using it.
I recently shipped an AI-assisted game, and that label doesn't help anyone pick a game. It's a target. It tells the angry mob exactly where to send the review bombs.
Nobody discloses which engine, which brushes, or which plugins they used. AI gets singled out for one reason: so devs can be punished for using it.
@mattworkman Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they’re helping organize is abhorrent.
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Martin Scott retweeted
Indeed Bernie. Bodies lying all over the place here in Europe.
No, wait. The 32,000 is not an actual body count. It’s the result of modelling by Imperial College on the basis of several dubious assumptions.
People did die of heat this summer. They usually do when it gets v hot e.g 1976, 2003. The exact number is not clear.
But even if 32,000 was a real figure we know for sure many, many more will die of cold this winter. They always do.
No, wait. The 32,000 is not an actual body count. It’s the result of modelling by Imperial College on the basis of several dubious assumptions.
People did die of heat this summer. They usually do when it gets v hot e.g 1976, 2003. The exact number is not clear.
But even if 32,000 was a real figure we know for sure many, many more will die of cold this winter. They always do.
Climate change killed 32,000+ people in Europe this summer.
Trump believes this crisis is a "hoax." Republicans in Congress are following their "Great Leader.”
NO to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. YES to creating millions of jobs by moving our energy system away from fossil fuels.
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At this point anyone looking anything up on the internet is using an AI agent. If in the making of a game I ask a coding question on Google or whatever is that game now AI-assisted ? Or is AI typing it in the issue ?
If the fear is digital shop fronts becoming awash with low quality software, that's on the shop owner to curate. The internet being full of garbage is not new.
AI assistance is unavoidable at this point. Virtually every piece of commercial software has AI assistance built in. I see this particular categorisation battle as futile.
Where I do see a battle is IP infringement due to reverse engineering. That will cause a significant problem for powerful vested interests. That particular battle will be fought by lawyers though, not gamers.
If the fear is digital shop fronts becoming awash with low quality software, that's on the shop owner to curate. The internet being full of garbage is not new.
AI assistance is unavoidable at this point. Virtually every piece of commercial software has AI assistance built in. I see this particular categorisation battle as futile.
Where I do see a battle is IP infringement due to reverse engineering. That will cause a significant problem for powerful vested interests. That particular battle will be fought by lawyers though, not gamers.
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Stores filling with low quality goods is the fault of the shop keeper, not the suppliers.
If your local 'quality' supermarket started filling up with poor quality goods would the answer be to mandate labels disclosing how the goods were manufactured ?
If your local 'quality' supermarket started filling up with poor quality goods would the answer be to mandate labels disclosing how the goods were manufactured ?
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Martin Scott retweeted
@fizzychicken basically we got a compiler for natural language and people are angry about it
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I'm old enough to remember when 'C++ slop' was the battle cry of 'real' coders.
Then it was 'Unity slop' and 'Unreal slop' from those who thought hand-rolled engines were superior in every way.
Now it's AI slop.
People draw a line on the abstraction hierarchy below which they are happy to automate the tedium. The line just moved... that's all.
Skilled people will still make superior software. We have been inundated with low quality slop since the birth of digital distribution decades ago. It's nothing new.
Then it was 'Unity slop' and 'Unreal slop' from those who thought hand-rolled engines were superior in every way.
Now it's AI slop.
People draw a line on the abstraction hierarchy below which they are happy to automate the tedium. The line just moved... that's all.
Skilled people will still make superior software. We have been inundated with low quality slop since the birth of digital distribution decades ago. It's nothing new.
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Martin Scott retweeted
Game developers: You are free to insert whatever political ideology you want into your games. But please try to understand, doing this in a clumsy and preachy way, with an obvious biased agenda, will automatically lose you a huge portion of your fanbase.
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Bioware disappeared years ago. All that was left was the name.
People make games, not companies. Those people move on and do other great things. Companies come and go...
Must have been amazing working there in the earlier days though... imagine being a part of that team.
People make games, not companies. Those people move on and do other great things. Companies come and go...
Must have been amazing working there in the earlier days though... imagine being a part of that team.
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Martin Scott retweeted
BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
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There is no virtue in being inefficient. Great programmers have a streak of laziness. They are driven to find the most efficient way to reach the goal.
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Outside of writing code for you, AI agents can be an incredible time saver when making a game. There are lots of non-coding tasks that agents are better at.
Some examples…
Crash dumps - give the log file to the agent. Let it work out what went wrong, or at least give you some firm pointers on where to look.
Tracking down bugs - describe the bug and let the agent analyse the code to try to work out the issue. Even better to connect the agent to the editor via MCP. Agents are indefatigable and don't lose focus waiting for the editor to boot. They can also inject debug code to help self-diagnose the problem.
Documenting unfamiliar code - let the agent analyse and document code that you're not familiar with. Architecture, classes, dependency diagrams... automate the lot with agents.
Implementation planning. Agents are really good at breaking down tasks and creating task lists. No coder enjoys that stuff.
Code review - Agent code reviews will pick up on stuff you miss. Even if you disagree with the conclusions, you have gone through the justification process.
Build configuration - If you need to change build config let the agent do that… there’s no glory in burning time fighting with cmake or UBT.
Test writing - let the agent go through the test coverage report - based on the coverage build it setup for you, right - and boost test coverage on poorly tested files.
If you still want to write all the code... cool... that's your decision. But do yourself a favour and get them to do all the tedious stuff for you.
Some examples…
Crash dumps - give the log file to the agent. Let it work out what went wrong, or at least give you some firm pointers on where to look.
Tracking down bugs - describe the bug and let the agent analyse the code to try to work out the issue. Even better to connect the agent to the editor via MCP. Agents are indefatigable and don't lose focus waiting for the editor to boot. They can also inject debug code to help self-diagnose the problem.
Documenting unfamiliar code - let the agent analyse and document code that you're not familiar with. Architecture, classes, dependency diagrams... automate the lot with agents.
Implementation planning. Agents are really good at breaking down tasks and creating task lists. No coder enjoys that stuff.
Code review - Agent code reviews will pick up on stuff you miss. Even if you disagree with the conclusions, you have gone through the justification process.
Build configuration - If you need to change build config let the agent do that… there’s no glory in burning time fighting with cmake or UBT.
Test writing - let the agent go through the test coverage report - based on the coverage build it setup for you, right - and boost test coverage on poorly tested files.
If you still want to write all the code... cool... that's your decision. But do yourself a favour and get them to do all the tedious stuff for you.
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Martin Scott retweeted
25 years ago, on October 22, 2001, Grand Theft Auto III was released.
This is the team that made it. (I'm second from the right)
Here's what I remember about making it.
For most of development, GTA3 was in a sorry state. It crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the Only in the last six months did everything come together.
For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30.
In 1999, DMA Design, based in Dundee, Scotland, was going through some changes. The company had recently been bought by Take-Two Interactive, and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh.
Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA3. Unprompted.
Meanwhile, the original GTA1 and GTA2 team had started work on GTA2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective.
In March 2000, the Dundee office was closed and GTA2.5 was cancelled. Take-Two/Rockstar gave GTA3 the green light.
Everything was written from scratch. Only two people worked on both GTA2 and GTA3, and no code or art from GTA2 was reused.
The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development.
Leslie Benzies (the producer) plastered a wall in the boardroom with Post-it notes. They were yellow, green and pink, representing missions, contacts and locations.
Missions were moved around all the time, often handed from one contact to another. Only once the voice acting was recorded were these things set in stone.
You sometimes come across locations on the map that are more detailed than you'd expect. Chances are there used to be a mission contact there that got moved elsewhere.
Working on GTA3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate.
Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage.
Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening.
I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office.
Although we liked the game, it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit.
GTA3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent.
It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off.
Our office was in Leith, Edinburgh. It was a fairly run-down neighbourhood at the time. Just a couple of years before we arrived, J.K. Rowling had been writing the first Harry Potter in that very same neighbourhood.
The thing I remember most is the camaraderie. In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together.
It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together.
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
This is the team that made it. (I'm second from the right)
Here's what I remember about making it.
For most of development, GTA3 was in a sorry state. It crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the Only in the last six months did everything come together.
For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30.
In 1999, DMA Design, based in Dundee, Scotland, was going through some changes. The company had recently been bought by Take-Two Interactive, and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh.
Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA3. Unprompted.
Meanwhile, the original GTA1 and GTA2 team had started work on GTA2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective.
In March 2000, the Dundee office was closed and GTA2.5 was cancelled. Take-Two/Rockstar gave GTA3 the green light.
Everything was written from scratch. Only two people worked on both GTA2 and GTA3, and no code or art from GTA2 was reused.
The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development.
Leslie Benzies (the producer) plastered a wall in the boardroom with Post-it notes. They were yellow, green and pink, representing missions, contacts and locations.
Missions were moved around all the time, often handed from one contact to another. Only once the voice acting was recorded were these things set in stone.
You sometimes come across locations on the map that are more detailed than you'd expect. Chances are there used to be a mission contact there that got moved elsewhere.
Working on GTA3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate.
Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage.
Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening.
I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office.
Although we liked the game, it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit.
GTA3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent.
It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off.
Our office was in Leith, Edinburgh. It was a fairly run-down neighbourhood at the time. Just a couple of years before we arrived, J.K. Rowling had been writing the first Harry Potter in that very same neighbourhood.
The thing I remember most is the camaraderie. In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together.
It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together.
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
x.com/ObbeVermeij/st…
For gta3, Vice and SA; Memory on the ps2 was tight. We had to limit the number of used vehicle models to 8.
My code would occasionally pick a car model to be phased out. Once there were none left on the map, this model would be removed and a new model could be loaded.
The code was appropriate for the area (sports cars in business district, old cars in run-down areas etc).
Most of the time this worked fine.
A few things could throw a spanner in the works:
If the player had gone up the wanted levels, some of the 8 slots would be taken up by police cars, FIB and swat vans and the police heli.
Level designers would sometimes load specific car models for missions. Often these were not appropriate to be used for ambient traffic.
Ambulance and firetrucks could be needed if there was an accident.
If the player travelled to a different area of the map; some of the loaded cars would look out of place and could not be used. It would take a while for replacement models to be loaded.
The game would keep the last player driven car, as it would be jarring if the player went back and it wasn’t there.
At times there would only be 1 or 2 cars models available for ambient traffic. This lack of variation was particularly noticeable if the player was driving the one car that had to be used.
To alleviate the problem, garages remove cars inside of them once the door has closed. This way the model could be removed. When the player opened the door, the cars were re-created in the same spot.
Npc models were loaded/removed the same way. It just wasn’t as noticeable if variety was lacking.
For each game we picked a generic looking character model that looked appropriate in each area of the map. This model was never removed and always ready to fill in.
Screenshot from this vid: youtube.com/watch?v=KWhjv4…
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