Nickname: Mr Fish

Irrational Title: Lead Programmer

Qualifications: University Combined Engineering IT Degree, to get into games/programming. Dropped out of uni because I got the job here while I was in the middle of doing that. I think I've got some kind of IT degree, I'm not sure because I basically took my combined degree and then took all the units from it and then tried to claim just a single degree because I dropped out early, and they did give it to me in the end.

Previous games worked on: Freedom Force (General Programmer, did rendering and text coding)

From up there, bob could see the best spot to OOB spam the vpad

Hardest moment in development of any game you have worked on: Definitely shipping Freedom Force, that was a ridiculous crunch, I was crunching for about a year on Freedom Force, and that was like 7 day weeks, a lot of crazy nights, you know coding all night, sleeping for a few hours, coming back in sort of thing. It was yeah, we just, unfortunately got into the situation where, kind of a few people on the team were doing a large percentage of the work, so, yeah, those people who were responsible for things had a crazy crunch.

First Gaming system: Commodore 64

Earliest gaming memories: Probably, Ghost and Goblins on the Commodore 64

Favorite game of all time and why: Probably, SystemShock 2 is one of my favorite games; I liked everything, the storyline, gameplay.

Games currently playing: A lot of console games, things like Return of the King, DOA3, GTA all that kind of stuff, I don't have time to play all the really in depth PC games anymore, yeah, pretty much learnt myself to games that I can pickup and play for five minutes and put down again.

Home PC rig: 1.8GHz AMD Radeon 9800

Console or PC?: Definitely console, PC games take up too much time usually

Single player or multi-player or co-op?: Multi-player

What are your responsibilities?
Basically, I'm responsible for a lot of the technology and technology divisions like build the main modifications to the core engine and stuff, deciding that we needed to switch to Havoc from Karma, stuff like that. I also, yeah, schedule everyone, figure out what we're all going to be working on and all that kind of general lead management stuff.

What's your time of hands on and management, is it like a 50/50 split?
It's about 50/50, and then, at work, it's 50/50, and then I also just do a lot of coding on the game at home in my spare time because I miss coding.

So you mentioned before, that the decision was made to change from Karma to Havoc. How painstaking was that? Was it a slow decision?
Definitely a slow decision, it was something we investigated thoroughly, there was a whole heap of stages to it. First of all, I just did quick tests with Havoc to convince myself it was actually necessary to do, and then I got an early version of Havoc integrated into the Unreal engine, and did a heap of tests on that, compared it to Karma, and then, yeah, once I was convinced, I then had to write up documents to kind of convince everyone else, then once everyone in this company was convinced, we then had to prepare a proposal for Sierra to actually get them to pay the money for it and everything.

So how do you go about getting trial versions of Havoc, or do you contact them and they say sure give it a go?
In this case we were just kind of talking to Havoc and they mentioned that they had this early version of Havoc integrated into the warfare engine, and, at the time, we were just having a lot of problems with Karma, really, quite bad. And ah, it has no support, the worst thing about it is the fact it has no support, and all these problems, so there's really nothing you can do. So yeah, when the Havoc guys mentioned that, we started investigating it, and ended up switching.

In the Unreal engine and relation to large outdoor terrains, was there much work that had to go into modifying it to meet that? To meet the criteria of the Tribes world?
Yeah, a lot of work, has gone into that. There's a lot of optimization just because not only rendering the terrain takes up time, but once you get outside suddenly you can see just heaps of non-terrain things like bases, and characters and objects, so yeah, early on did a lot of optimization into that. I guess it was not really aimed at outdoor areas specifically, just general optimizations of the renderer to handle large numbers of objects and its something we are continuing to do. And also there terrain support we just added a few visual quality features that I think hopefully will make our terrain look a lot better than what they can do with UT2004.

So there's a bit of competition I suppose. What are you going to do with their own engine, what they could do with it.
It's interesting, because, a lot of times you, even though, they theoretically provide support, you don't want to clue them into what you're doing.

It's probably a conflict of interest to them in some places as well wouldn't it? Because surely they are competing with your product that you are making.
It's an interesting situation, but we generally have just been going it alone and haven't used that much support from them.

I think Tony mentioned that there is a shared code base between 'The Lost' and between Boston and Sydney. How much are you relying on that? Obviously 'The Lost' has been in development longer, would that be correct, or is it about the same time? Was some work done over there and optimized in the engine, to the way you wanted it, or was it really starting all over?
The majority of the work in that shared engine was done here for Tribes, and then, a lot of that could be extended to other games. Though, I definitely want to say the majority of the tech stuff in that engine was done specifically for Tribes.

Working for low spec machines? Is that a real challenge? You could relate this to any game as well, obviously there is a minimum performance standard that you need. How much of a challenge is that on something like Tribes: Vengeance or Freedom Force.
Ah it's definitely a challenge, I think any game developer will tell you that it's one of the biggest pains about working for PCs. In Tribes, we are kind of in a fairly good situation because we added all this bump mapping and shader effects and there's something that can really easily scale. You just disable them all on the low end box, and it doesn't require you to change your content or do anything like that. So yeah, it's definitely still a challenge though.

It's not your responsibility for testing stuff like QA, in terms of getting rows of machines out, and you know…
It's my responsibility once a problem has been found, I have got to figure out how we are actually going to address it.

Is there a favorite part of your job, like a favorite aspect of coding or something you get lost in?
Definitely coding renderer stuff, that's what I like to do.

Explain that to us, we are not coders ourselves.
Like coding graphics features, like eye candy, essentially, that's what I love doing. It's been good because I've got to add a lot of stuff for Tribes, we've actually got a really good engine. I think, in terms of the graphics it can do significantly better than the UT2004 because they are still staying with the kind of old style, like, no bump mapping, no shaders, or anything like that.

Thanks for the interview Rowan.