[immortan]

I was one the developers responsible for implementing the netcode on Serious Sam. We often slept under the desks in the offices at croteam after lurking usenet. One post in particular described the QuakeWorld prediction system which inspired us. That night we coded a simplistic mvp as a colleague (hi dan) tested it over an old 486 nix machine acting as a router that we could simulate lag with. This was well before the actual game was built around it

[robertlagrant]

Why did you make the guys with exploding heads who run at you and their scream gets louder as they approach? I can still hear them.

[Rinzler89]

Why wouldn't they? It's called great sound design. Games of the 90s and early 2000s put a lot of effort in that. See Thief the dark project. Sound design can bring more immersiveness than graphics alone. It's something forgotten in many games of today that keep beating the ray traced graphics horse

[netmare]

I think it was a rhetorical question. I wasn't a big fan of the SS series, but those damn kamikaze still echo in my mind. I've even had nightmares about them...

[vanjajaja1]

the way they start in the distance and blend into the rest of the sounds until... ".. wait what's that sound?"

[masfoobar]

I love Thief - I am playing new levels (I think its black parade)

One of my favourite games.

[knolan]

I think it was a playful rhetorical question.

[danielbln]

Oh you can thank Creative for buying Aureal and throwing it in the trash. That crippled immersive/3D game sound design for a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if that had ripple effects l the way into today. Also there is no need to rag on ray tracing, a nicely ray traced game look wonderful. Ideally we have a feast for eyes as well as ears though.

[ilamont]

The Witch in Left 4 Dead. Whoever cooked up the audio for that deserves an Oscar.

https://youtu.be/C71U4CxD_J8?si=dvaDyhYCKtb5f069

[kvakerok]

That's like one of the key selling features of the game. Great experience that also scars you for life.

[robertlagrant]

Exactly. See also: first headcrab fight with only a crowbar in Half-life.

[kvakerok]

Huh, it didn't do anything for me, I dodged it on the first jump and caught it mid-flight baseball bat style. The pack of sonic dogs was way worse. And the beaked hydra, with the constant metal drumming, ugh.

[fileeditview]

This is THE one thing I remember from playing Half-life :)

[robertlagrant]

The other thing is when it comes over the intercom: Forget about Freeman! Anyone still down there is on there own!

The worldbuilding in Half-life was so good. You weren't a character walking into rooms and enemies would attack you, like Doom and Quake. There was a big event happening, and you were just a part of it.

[nick7376182]

It's quite memorable in VR as well! If you get the chance I highly recommend playing HL Alyx with a valve index setup.

It was on par with my first playthrough of the original HL so many years ago.

[Cthulhu_]

The noises... the noises!

Which are actually voice lines of people in torment played in reverse.

[stavros]

I love how there's an article about how some legendary game was made, and someone in the comments casually goes "oh yeah, I built that, fun times". It's great.

[stuartjohnson12]

Hacker News is so special for that. I posted a question about Django a while back and sure enough, in rolled the framework's creator to answer it.

[stavros]

That's great! Which creator was it? Simon Willison is very active here, I don't know if Adrian Holovaty ever was.

[wodenokoto]

I once commented something to the effect of “that must have sucked” on a story about debugging a weird error on crash bandicoot and in comes the developer to tell me “yes, it did suck.”

[VikingCoder]

I work at a big company and commented once that some decision was stupid and one of the top two engineers at the company dropped in to tell me I was wrong. I felt so honored. (And he's wrong.)

[stavros]

Hahah oh man, do you have a link? I'd love to have an opinion on who's right.

[VikingCoder]

Internal company discussion boards... /sigh

The gist of it is...

The person who wrote v2 of a thing got a lot of shit, because there were a lot of "cons" that could have been predicted and mitigated.

I complained about them getting shit. Making a new thing is hard, and yes, there were "cons" but there are an enormous number of "pros," and you can't always block progress trying to enumerate and mitigate all of the "cons," especially if the "cons" are social in nature (which makes them hard to predict!)

I believe the company should have let the guy build v2 and see if it works. Let him test it in a few cases. Then he can try to shift to managing roll-out, and etc. Unfortunately, v2 became hugely popular instantly (wow, a problem I wish we all had!) and then a bunch of stuff went wrong, because the roll-out itself "should have been managed better."

So, #2 engineer-in-the-company came in to my comment thread, and documented the cons. Actually linked to a slideshow which showed each con on a separate slide.

Sure.

Here's the problem, v3 was written by a TEAM of people, with backing from leadership, and the "cons" of that job are enormous and embarrassing. I mean, really bad. Years later. Unpopular, and most people haven't migrated to it.

Stop giving that one guy shit when a team of people did worse. And especially if your main problem with his work was that it was too successful too fast!

Grrrr.

[stavros]

Oof, that sounds like some dysfunction. Can't really argue with adoption, though.

Pity this was in internal forums, I thought it was on HN.

[AdmiralAsshat]

HN is wonderful for that. I once commented on an article about Brave Browser that it was an ad extortion racket, and Brendan Eich showed up to call me an asshole. Good times!

[BrendanEich]

I never called you an asshole, I quipped that your handle's surname suits you. Accuracy matters, especially given that you are the source of the ass* name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232460

[AdmiralAsshat]

Hello, Brendan!

I don't personally see much of a distinction between "asshole" and "asshat" in this context, and I think the intent of your reply was pretty clear. Nor do I begrudge the comment--it comes with the territory of choosing such a username. But if you believe my characterization of that exchange to be false, my apologies. The link to the original reply was posted almost immediately after my comment, and so the context is there for all to see. I summarized it in a way that I thought would be entertaining to the audience.

[BrendanEich]

So everyone can see that you are neither accurate nor entertaining -- thanks for confirming!

[trwhite]

Link?

[AdmiralAsshat]

If you know a good way of searching through my entire comment history I'm happy to search for it, but it was some years ago, and I post several comments a day, so it may be a tall order to manually page through my history.

[burkaman]

You can use the sort of official HN search engine like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[aftbit]

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230347

[cybrjoe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230347

... via:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22Adm...

[k__]

Awesome.

I loved that game.

I was a huge fan of co-op games and shooters, but all my friends wanted to play Counter Strike all the time.

With Serious Sam I could at least sometimes motivate them to play something I liked.

Thanks for your service! :D

[BirAdam]

Serious Sam was one of my uncle’s favorite games (along with Duke Nukem 3D). He was a hugely important figure in my life, and playing through his favorites is a good way to keep connected to my memories of him. So, thanks to you and your coworkers! Excellent game, excellent multiplayer, and very good memories.

[vanjajaja1]

you've no doubt heard it many times, but the split screen game play was very appreciated

[seanhunter]

That game was legit. You should be proud that all your efforts resulted in something truly great that people loved to play. Thanks!