Casey's videos are the type of content that helps me keep the programming flame alive in the current state of the field.

I'm genuinely grateful for that.

2026 has been an incredible year in regards to Casey producing posting quality stuff. Not sure what changed but this is the type of stuff that I seek out in tech youtube :)

Casey, more like this please.  Thank you.

More guys who were there, doing the thing, talking about how & why they solved game architecture problems in the golden age.

Glad Casey is finally letting us here to say thank you.

In the System Shock source code, in addition to objects having 1-byte class and 1-byte subclass, objects have a 2-byte ObjSpecID, indexing the "object-type-SPECific" (presumably) ID. Then there's a common header for every ObjSpec type, which includes both a back-pointer ObjID, but also 'next' and 'prev' ObjSpecID. So rather than iterating over the arrays, code in Shock iterated over a type-specific doubly-linked list of ObjSpecIDs, allowing it to skip around through a sparsely-allocated array. (There's a macro FORALLOBJSPECS that steps through such a linked list.)

typedef struct ObjSpec {
   union {
       struct {
           ObjID id : 15;   // ID in master list
           ushort tile : 1; // look in tiled array?
       } bits;
       ObjSpecID headused;
   };
   union {
       ObjSpecID next; // next struct in free or used chain
       ObjSpecID headfree;
   };
   ObjSpecID prev; // prev struct in used chain
} ObjSpec;

so much casey content is the best thing thats happened in the ai era

i was googling ECS videos yesterday, so i have no choice but to believe i caused this video

Casey's been on fire recently

That 'Big OOps' talk was the best I've seen in a long time

"Mayday, mayday. My heap is fragmented, I need to land immediately."

The amount of care and attention to detail MAHK talks about is the exact type of mindset I want to have in my code. I'm just a student but I can already tell that this sort of thinking about solutions in a full and complete way is really why older games "feel" better. This goes beyond games too, I think this can be applied to a lot of different areas in and outside of software development.

Thanks for recording this! The 90s era of development to me stands as the golden age of technical achievement coupled with like, garage band authenticity and enthusiasm. Remains my biggest inspiration for game development even now.

Incidentally, Mahk was also guest on Warren Spector’s game design lectures, and it’s well worth seeking it (and the rest) out on YouTube.

1:56:43

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It's just absolutely insane how much talent was at Looking Glass at one time. The fact that they didn't survive for much longer than they did is such a travesty.

1:15:00 It occurs to me now that one of the other motivations for column major that I forgot about was a kind of type safety or type coherence.  If you have a linked list of properties you are going to be dangling all these variable-sized blocks off of it, which means you are going to end up doing type casting to get from the block to the real data record, and also you need to think about how these little blocks are all getting allocated.  Column-major lets you use container templates to keep like things together, allocate them efficiently, and not have to do any casting (or at least push the casts down into the container types).

22:56 "...with Paul Neurath of Blue Sky saying that John Romero and resident-of-the-binding-in-between-space-that-holds-reality-together John Carmack, had seen the game's demo in 1990.

And according to Neurath, Carmack said he could make a faster texture-mapped engine. And at the time, that sounded a bit presumptuous... y'know, but then he DID."

- Civvie

Thief 1 was a religious experience for me at the time. Thank you for your work Marc and team!

I see MAHK, I CLAHK

As someone who had to take over a thousands of LOC build and testing system written in Perl the whole Perl-Thief Levelediting made me laugh out so hard. I'd never touch Perl voluntarily again. I love this.

Looking Glass was such an extraordinary company. The contributions these people did to the videogame industry always amaze me. I'm surprised that ECS came from there as well!