1. Who are you? Where did you come from?

When I was 16, I dropped out of high school to work at some multimedia companies like Media Vision and Hyperbole back when CD-ROMs were the big thing and everyone wanted to bring movies to PCs (in a 100x100 postage-stamp sized window at 10 fps). After Media Vision's multimedia division broke up I did some contracting for about a year, studying up on 3d programming. I wrote a renderer called WolfDoom (a cross between Wolfenstein's and Doom's renderers) and used that as part of my resume to get a job at Zombie VR in Seattle working on Locus, their first game. While at Zombie, Jason and Toby came by for preliminary talks about doing a game with Zombie so I got a chance to meet them. Toby and I clicked and we started speculating on 3d engine stuff. A few months later, I left Zombie with the intention of starting my own company but I heard Monolith had gotten office space and were starting up so I stopped by. I was very impressed with how professional and serious they were so I took the job and immediately started work on Metaltek (which became Riot, which became Shogo :)

2. What do you do at Monolith (other than being the GOD of LithTech)

My main responsibility is to manage the R&D of LithTech. I work with the leads of each of our games to determine how LithTech can support them.  Every once in a while, I'll focus on a certain game to do whatever I can to help when it's shipping. There is always one game that gets the primary focus so the engine doesn't get spread too thin.

3. Are you happy with the response Shogo has received from the community? The reviews have been great, and I was there the night the alpha patch was released and Shogo servers were popping up left and right. Is this what you expected?

Definitely! I had no idea what to expect. After working so hard for 2+ years I had no perspective on how the game stacked up against everything else. I'm VERY excited about the next games we're doing because we learned so much and cleared so many hurdles during the development of Shogo that we're much more 'optimized' and will be able to produce cool stuff much more efficiently.

4. With the final patch being released, do you feel that the network code is finally up to par with the other games on the net? Certain companies, and I won’t mention names, have promised and promised stellar network play, but have failed to deliver.   Do you feel that it is a lack of involvement with the paying customers that causes this?

It's hard to say. So far all the testing we've done has been very promising. I think it's easy to be over optimistic and then disappoint everyone so I never give guarantees:)

5. What was changed in the patches that improved net-play so much? LAN play was never a question, as it was great out of the box.

The two main changes were to put player movement and weapon firing on the client side. This means that those two things are never delayed by server lag. Now when you play Shogo it's much harder to tell if you've got a bad ping time. You can mainly tell by delays when you pickup items or open doors and that players you think you killed don't actually die sometimes.  We also made a lot more data sent with un-guaranteed delivery, which keeps the connection from getting clogged. Previously, it was very easy to get your connection stuffed up with packets, which would cause extra lag.

6. Has the LithTech Engine already begun its evolution with additional features in Blood2? Can you give us some inside stuff as to what we expect next in the engine and from Monolith in general?

Blood2 has a few features that Shogo didn't have when it shipped but for the most part it's the same engine. We won't be going into 'total R&D' for Lithtech2 until mid December so it's hard to guarantee what's going to be in there. We really want to focus on outdoor areas and seamless environments, meaning you never experience load times after the initial load of the game.  Our landscape support will be completely redone, allowing for much larger landscapes with a smaller memory footprint. DEdit will get a very nice UI upgrade.

7. What was the first multi-player LAN game you ever played? How about Internet multi-player?

The first multi-player game I played was on called Linewars. I played with a friend over our 2400 baud modems and it was VERY confusing. I think there were some out of sync errors because we never really were able to fight. The first LAN game I played was Spectre. They had great network support and it was a lot of fun. The first LAN game that really sucked my time was Doom of course :)

8. Who in the industry do you admire for their contribution to gaming?

Shigeru Miyamoto is the first person that comes to mind. I still remember how cool his games were on the original Nintendo and they're still great!  Other people that come to mind are Lord British, John Carmack, John Romero, Tim Sweeney, and everyone at SquareSoft and the original Blizzard crew.

9. Carmack and Cash…have they inspired your work?

Carmack and Cash, very much so. Their whole open approach to development is admirable and results in the gamers getting much more fun out of their games.

10. Do you still play LAN games? If so, what are you playing right now?

Yep! I pretty much stick to Shogo, Doom 2, and Quake 1.

11. Pay for Play, or Free (the GameSpy Model) Play. Valve seems to be doing some very strange and confusing things with how they are setting up servers, do you feel that this could be detrimental to their success?

I'm not too up to date on what they're doing with Half-life's networking. We'll have to see what happens. I know it's an incredible game so I don't think anything would hurt it in its first month or two of sales.

12. So if the Techp1mp wanted to leave the Data Communications world, to start a multi-player testing lab for game companies, you know modems, T1’s, big servers and such….sort of like an independent testing facility, backed by corporate dollars, is this something you see being needed, or would game companies prefer to do this in-house?

Ugh, that's a hard one! The testing we were able to do with the LAN party guys was extremely helpful to us, but it's hard to tell whether or not a company would want to pay for multi-player testing without having tried it for free ahead of time.

13. Last Question. Do you have a home LAN?

Nope. I don't even have a computer at home (anymore). I live 2 blocks from Monolith and I'm always here so I brought my home computer in and always upgrade it to the fastest possible config.

-hadji