He works in the engine/tool side of things. He worked on some widely used libraries, mainly Bink 2 (video codec) and Granny 3D (3D animation) used in a ton of shipped games.
Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed.
What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professional success to a large extent.
He did work on the video games Dungeon Siege and The Witness afaik, but that's not what he is known for.
He also made one of the fastest terminal emulators (refterm), purely out of spite, to show Microsoft they were full of shit in their answer to an issue he posted to the Windows Terminal github. This directly led to performance improvements in Windows Terminal.
He mostly evangelizes non-pessimal software. He advocates that your program should only be a small factor like 3x slower than the hypothetical optimum - instead of 10000x slower as today's software often is. He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same project file and code files.
I have recently gotten a 45x on a shitty vibe coded Python project by using mypyc (2x), replacing datastructures with more CPU-friendly alternatives (15x) and using some smarter heuristics rather than just brute force on top of that (45x total).
And I never left Python, the slowest language around.
AI is only going to make the problem worse unless you know what to look for.
> He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same project file and code files.
"Highly successful middleware provider back in the day" is an understatement.
Bink was the cutscene video codec for a long time and it's still the most popular option by far. Kraken compression is so good Sony worked with AMD to make a hardware decoder for the PS5 and paid for a general license that lets games use it for free. They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees.
> They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees.
True, though they've been acquired by Epic since 2021. They keep the RAD Game Tools branding, but aren't their own separate company anymore.
Oodle/Kraken is mostly the work of Charles Bloom and Fabian Giesen, a couple of other "legendary game programmers" at RAD, but who aren't quite as visibly prominent as Casey has been in the modern software developer mediasphere.
