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News
Celebrating 20+ Years of Cube: An in-depth interview with Aardappel
Posted by swatllama
Date: November 07, 2021
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<swatllama> Thanks for sitting down with us, aard. Do you want to
introduce yourself to people, tell us about yourself, your
background, what you do?
<aardappel> Yeah, sure. I'm a programmer originally from Holland.
I've spent most of my life making either game engines or programming
languages - I tend to alternate between the two. That's kind of what
I worked on and I guess the Cube games have been my most well-known
personal projects on that side.
<swatllama> Speaking of your day job, what have you been doing at
Google since you started?
<aardappel> The first years that I was there, I was part of a games
team, with my job particularly being to write libraries and other
things and other tools to make it easier for people to develop games
on Android and beyond. Later on, as part of that team, I got involved
with the VR team and helped them with the libraries we're building as
the underpinnings for a lot of the VR work that was happening at
Google.
I made a bunch of libraries. The funny thing is that, the simplest of
those libraries, or at least one of the earliest ones that I thought
was going to be the simplest, which is Flatbuffers, was also by far
the most successful out of the work we've done there. That kind of
started when I joined Google. And that was supposed to be my initial
project, maybe lasting a couple of months and then being done. And,
that just kind of blew up. It blew up particularly outside of games
as well, with a lot of large companies adopting it for their
serialization needs. And because of that, I've been working way more
on Flatbuffers.
That was the start of when I was working there, then I got the
opportunity to work with the guys making WebAssembly, and I just
kind of had to jump at that opportunity because I've always been such
a fan of programming languages and compilers, so I joined the
WebAssembly team. I'm still doing flat buffers as well because it's
simply too popular to not work on - but my main task is actually now
working on WebAssembly, in particular, on LLVM and other related
tools implementing WebAssembly, and that's been a ton of fun as well,
because I do believe WebAssembly is going to be kind of the
intermediate format between languages and platforms going forward. So
yeah, super excited about that, working on things like LLVM and, in
general, compiler stuff is a lot of fun for me, especially since I've
spent so much time working on games, so alternating these things is a
good thing for me.
<swatllama> So is it correct that you started working on the original
Cube engine in the late 90's / early 2000s, after your PhD work was
completed while you were teaching at Guild Hall?
<aardappel> Not quite, no. I did a fair bit of the initial work of
making my first 3D engine during my PhD. Towards the end of my PhD is
when I started working on the Cube engine. And then, I transitioned
to working for Crytek, the makers of Far Cry. And actually I think
the Cube engine helped me land that job in the sense that the
then-CEO of Crytek saw the Cube engine and was particularly excited
about the idea of the in-game map editing that it was presenting, and
he had all these ideas about how Cryengine was also going to have
in-game map editing. And while I was working at Crytek, because I
ended up talking to a lot of other game programmers and lots of close
friends there, somehow I got inspired for the octree based format
that was the basis for Cube 2. So Cube 2 I actually designed and
started working on during my time working at Crytek. And then only
after leaving Crytek and after Cube 2 was already released that I
started working as a teacher for Guild Hall in Texas.
<swatllama> The first release for Cube on Sourceforge was 2002, and
your site has it listed as 2001, but it sounds like you had older
releases much earlier than those dates.
<aardappel> Yeah. Releasing it on SourceForge was a relatively late
thing. Initially, it was just me hacking on a bit of source code and
I did not use source control or SourceForge or any of that stuff. It
was just me, and then after a while Lee Salzman - eihrul - came in.
The first version of Cube had this really simple TCP/IP based
networking. Me and him were already talking a lot about programming
languages, so naturally I showed him what I was working on on the
engine side, and he was not working on anything like 3D engines at
the time. He was like, well, "that's all very cool, but this TCP/IP
based networking really has to go. That is absolutely terrible. You
can't do that in games", which I agreed to, but I didn't have time to
do anything else.
That's when he decided to start making this little library called
ENet, which was kind of developed in parallel with Cube, becoming
Cube's networking engine, and he tested it with Cube. I was
developing on Windows at the time, he was a big Linux user and also
was working on Mac, so he started helping me out with porting. And
then, Cube 2 came around. He got more and more involved and even got
involved in graphics - and eventually, as you all know, eventually
ended up taking over maintenance entirely. As for the timeline
initially, I'm not sure exactly when Lee started getting involved and
it became a two person project, but for the first half year or so,
the sourcecode was just on my hard drive, and that was it.
<swatllama> So then did you release it to SourceForge specifically
because you wanted to release it as a game versus just a little
engine demo?
<aardappel> I guess we brought it to SourceForge because it was
easier for me and him to work to get it that way. With the very first
version of Cube, it was mostly a whole bunch of my Quake and DOOM map
editing buddies, basically people I used to play with at the time.
They were the people that were most interested in playing the game
and playing with the engine and making maps for it, so I probably
just had a binary on my website. And the thing was at the time,
everything about that whole game was incredibly small. I mean, much
smaller than the distribution you can still download today., the
first binary of Cube could actually fit in only 64k with some
compression. The maps were tiny; like the first version of aard1,
which is one of the maps I made, was just like three kilobytes or
something. I made most of the initial sounds for the game, which were
all 8-bit 11KHz sounds. I think textures probably must have taken up
the largest amount of space in the first releases, but the first
release was only a couple of megabytes in total space.
<swatllama> When did Cube transition from this kind of editor you
used to a fully fledged game that was played and people tried to
actually get good at and what-not?
<aardappel> It didn't transition. It was pretty much a game from day
one in the sense that the absolute first release of Cube had that
basic first person shooter game playing there. The thing about it was
definitely, the first versions were only multiplayer first person
shooter gameplay. The single player gameplay was something that came
later. It took quite a while. So initially you just had deathmatch
and co-operative editing things you would do with Cube, but that
wasn't there right from the start, like the first version I ever
showed to my friends had the first-person shooter game in it. I'm not
sure how long it took me to add the single player game play, but that
must've been the first year as well - it couldn't have taken too
long. That was definitely a very separate thing. I remember having to
take some time to do that.
<swatllama> So Sauerbraten pops onto the scene, but Cube still had a
release in 2005. How long did it actually take before Cube was
basically "dead" - when did Sauer become the Cube game everyone
plays?
<aardappel> All the other parts of Cube that were not the world
structure - so we're talking about the gameplay, the networking,
sound, single-player, all these other parts - I was fairly happy
with. Of course it could be better, but that was no motivation with
the initial version of Sauerbraten. I really wanted to only overhaul
the world structure.
I just took a copy of Cube 1 and started replacing the world
structure stuff with the octree stuff, just incrementally and all the
rest of the stuff remained. The initial version of Sauerbraten
probably shares at least half the code with Cube 1. We did not start
over. It was all about the world structure. I started feeling that
the world structure for Cube 1, being essentially 2D, was starting to
get a little bit limiting. Particularly, I think that the worst thing
for me about the Cube 1 world structure was the lighting.
It basically had vertical lighting where there was like one light
value for the entire range of the entire height of a particular
column. Cube 1 has 2D lighting. It basically computes the lighting
for any particular point in the world in 2D, and it also does the
occlusion in 2D. While it works decently, it is very incorrect in all
sorts of ways. All the good mappers from that time really had to work
hard to try to make the most out of the lighting system of Cube 1.
It was nice because it's super quick because doing the lighting in 2D
meant that everything recomputed instantly. We even had lights on the
rockets that would just recompute as the rocket was flying through
the world, because it was so quick and simple.
All very nice, but visually didn't look quite as pretty as any of the
Quake games, mainly because of its very simplistic lighting. So that
was the thing I wanted to fix, but the problem was that with the Cube
1 world structure, there was no easy way to do lighting in the third
dimension because if you have like the side of a wall, there was no
place to store individual lighting values along the wall. It would
have greatly complicated the Cube 1 structure and made it way
slower..
Sort of thinking about these possible 3D structures, octrees are
really one of the simplest possible sort of these spatial structures.
But just plain octrees, as in cubes, I wasn't satisfied with, because
Cube 1 already had these nice facilities for being able to make
slopes. And if you remember, even the first maps like aard1 had these
beautiful arches that were kind of nice and round and stuff like
that.
[aard1]
I wanted to keep this ability to have slopes in there, but now things
got more complicated, because in 3D, the slopes must be able to be
placed in all six directions, basically. So that's when this system
which I call the deformable octree was made, where basically every
cube that sits inside an octree has a plane and a plane can be pushed
along four edges to shape a cube in any possible shape, and I thought
the combination of the octree and these deformable cubes would give
mappers a suitable amount of power to make pretty maps while not
being too complicated. I also found a way to store those six planes
in the cube in a very, very compact way so that maps would not be
gigantic. So that's kind of how that came to be. That seemed like a
natural progression from what had been in Cube 1.
<swatllama> What was your involvement in the Sauerbraten community
over the years? We noticed you pop into the community discord during
Corona times, but for instance, I've never interacted with you before
and I've been here for almost 12 years.
<aardappel> When I was still involved with it, there was quite an
active multiplayer community, but active leagues were something that
was a little bit later. I must've gotten less involved around 2009 or
something like that - that's just a rough guess.
[Editor's note: I started playing in 2009, which was around the
height of PSL and never saw this homie.]
And of course it was not one particular moment. It was kind of
gradual. I got less involved, and Lee became pretty much the sole
maintainer. I would say that at least since 2010 or so, Lee's been
the sole maintainer. And even before that, he was way more active
than I was.
So, yeah, I've missed a lot of the last 10 years of Cube's community,
especially in terms of leagues and multiplayer. I've missed a lot of
that, I must admit. It's absolutely awesome that Sauerbraten keeps
attracting new people and keeps them continuing. That's amazing. I
absolutely love that.
I think that's generally the case with games now because the internet
and open source, that games don't ever die; they might shrink a
little.
<swatllama> These days, Sauer's pretty much entirely updated by
eihrul with a little help from a few contributors, most notably Quin
adding bots 12 or 13 years ago. Who was involved more heavily in the
early development of Sauer?
<aardappel> I'd say programming wise, not really, for the longest
time it was really just Lee and me. That's maybe my fault, because
I've made Cube so much about simplicity that I was at least initially
very defensive about people adding or modifying things that I wanted
to keep things simple, and Lee was one of the few people that was
able to do that, so we never had really a lot of programming
contributors - like in the initial, early days at least there were
more, but there were a ton of mappers and people making art and
models and sound and music. Those were a much wider group of people
that were really fun to work with, but programming wise... I personally
never interacted with Quin too much. That was mostly Lee doing that.
So for me, it's been mostly just Lee and me for as long as I know.
<swatllama> So... what do you think of the 2020 release?
<aardappel> Yeah, I downloaded it, and pretty much went through all
the maps and checked out all the new ones. And man, it's amazing.
Like, some of the maps, what they are able to get out of this engine
is just absolutely gorgeous.
<swatllama> What were your favourite maps from looking at them?
<aardappel> I don't remember names from my session of going through
those maps. I haven't played a ton. That's the sad part, I guess. I
only tried it in single player. So I'm not actually aware of how it
now feels different in multiplayer.
<swatllama> Marc A Pullen has done the Cube and Sauer music forever.
How'd you get such a talented dude?
<aardappel> I think I knew him through DOOM. I had as ton of Quake
and DOOM mapping friends back then, and I guess he came along with
that. But yeah, some pretty cool music he's made.
<swatllama> Overall, what do you think of your legacy in the
open-source game community? Cube, Sauer, and AC have been some of the
most popular open source games for years, and all stemmed
specifically from your engine.
<aardappel> All this convinces me how valuable it is for games to
have fun tools for users to create stuff like user generated content.
Content is such an amazing thing that games should make more use of.
I mean, the fact that Sauerbraten is not a commercial engine, is an
open source game and still has this much content... I think if you go
look for games that have custom maps, Sauerbraten is probably one of
the games that has the most amount of maps available for it, even
though it's not even a commercial game. It's pretty amazing to
think.
The other thing I will say is I still love Sauerbraten's physics the
best of almost any game, probably even better than the physics in the
Quakes that I play. The feel of running around - I remember when I
got the 2020 download and the movement felt so great. It feels so
precise for some reason, the ability to kind of like jump from one
place to another, land on a thin pole and to be able to keep on
jumping from that pole to some other spot, do a difficult jump,
that's always been the best in Cube. So I'm also saying that because
I'm actually working on something new right now and I'm totally
reusing Cube's physics because it's just the best that I've ever
experienced.
I'm just going to say, it would be interesting to consider, like if
Sauerbraten is going to survive for another 20 years, where it would
be worth at some point to get it, to get it on GitHub. The problem
with doing everything on GitHub is that it also requires a lot of
energy for the head maintainer, so it would not necessarily be any
less work for Lee to have it on GitHub because you know, rather than
implementing it yourself, you can have someone else implement it, but
then you need to do a lot of reviewing
<swatllama> Oh a new project!! What is it?
<aardappel> I'm not going to say it's another game, because one thing
I've learned through the ages is to not make promises on what you're
going to make, because then you'll end up not doing it. So anyway,
I'm not promising I'm making a game. That said, I am working on a new
3D game with graphics that are fully GPU raytraced in pixel shaders.
The raytracing is going to happen entirely in pixel shaders. It could
be done in compute shaders, but there's no advantage to using compute
shaders for what I'm doing, so I do it just in pixel shaders.
It's again, made out of an octree, so it's all very familiar. The
graphics rendering side of that is getting somewhere. It's not
complete, but it certainly looks very pretty and interesting, so the
next step is to add the physical world and physics. That's what I'm
doing right now, and I'm actually using the Cube physics for that for
multiple reasons. First of all, it fits very well because this game
is also based around an octree and you're going to be jumping around
on a bunch of cubes. So that works very well. Then the next step is
to make sure that things like shooting and other things happen. So
then before you know it, you'll have a very basic shooter game in the
engine. Is that going to become a game again? Again, making no
promises, but I would certainly like it to go in that direction
eventually.
Some voxel ray-tracer progress: now using 8^3 blocks, with
islands style procedural world gen. Arbitrary position animated
"sprites". Using a rounded-box look for the voxels. Still all
placeholder art by me. pic.twitter.com/cjxyDgbj5j
-- Wouter van Oortmerssen (@wvo) January 13, 2021
<swatllama> This is not a "Cube 3".
<aardappel> No, this is not called Cube 3, even though there are some
similarities between the Cube engines and what I'm making right now.
Technically it's very different though, because like I said, it does
raytracing for graphics. No polygons are involved. It's purely voxel
based, and all the gameplay code is written, of course, in Lobster,
my own program language. In terms of code structure, it's very
different from the Cube engines, but you know, some people never
learn and keep making the same game over and over again. And that
probably includes me.
Check out Aardappel's projects at https://strlen.com/ and https://
twitter.com/wvo
The long-form version of this interview with many more questions and
discussions is available here!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
* Q&A #28 - How Did You Find Sauerbraten? by Swatllama 15/02/2021
* Officially Retiring From SauerDuels -- Frosty by Frosty 16/01/2020
* SCL FFA Ladder Results by Swatllama 10/09/2021
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