Thred - Three Dimensional Editor

The story of Thred.  This is the program that taught me about the emerging power of the internet. 

In December of 1995 we shipped Radix: Beyond the Void as a shareware title.  I'll write up the story of Radix some other time but basically it didn't sell well and the team broke up.  I ended up taking a few months off, going to GDC and meeting Chris Taylor who offered me a job on TA.  However, during the time between when he offered me the job and when I started we needed to deal with visa paperwork crap.  So I was sitting at my desk in Kanata knowing I had a job with nothing to do until the paperwork came in.

So I did what any programmer would do, I started on a new project.  At the time we wrapped up Radix Shahzad had been working on some new engine tech that could render arbitrary 3d environments.  During Radix we used a 2D editor I wrote called RadCad to make the levels.   But to make 3d environments we had nothing.  I really just wanted to learn how to write a fully 3d editor because I knew that was the next step and I was excited to get going.

Let me digress a bit and talk about BSP trees.  This was a really hot topic at the time because Carmack had used 2D BSP's in doom.  When we initially wrote the Radix engine we used a ray-casting approach but it was just suboptimal compared to the BSP.  I somehow managed to shoehorn in a 2D BSP into Radix not long before we shipped so I had an understanding of how they worked.

So I started out writing a simple editor that could draw polygonal shapes with no textures and no shading.  Once I had some basic navigation and movement I started to add the ability to CSG the shapes together to build more complex pieces of level.  There was a lot of this kind of research going on at the time including Quake which was coming soon.

So to do the 3D CSG that was required I experimented with a ton of different BSP construction methods.  The easiest one is to just build a BSP one piece at a time doing the correct operation but it results in pretty bad splits.  If you rebuild from scratch you can balance the tree better and improve the result.  Anyway the bottom line is that I got it mostly working in about a week or so.

And that probably would have been it if it wasn't for a certain confluence of events.  Even though Radix didn't do very well we had a few fans of the game.  One of them was a really smart guy named Jim Lowell who pointed out that the editor (which I had shown him) could be used to edit Quake levels.  Now Quake wasn't out yet but there was the quake test and all of that so we generally knew how it worked.

The real genius Jim had though was to post this on a web page.  Remember, in 1996 the web wasn't that mature yet.  I hadn't really grasped how much it was going to change the world.  Bottom line, the first version of Quake came out (a test or maybe the shareware something) and I managed to get a level up and running in about 3 hours.

Jim pretty much immediately posted some screenshots of the level and may have actually released a level.  This caused quite a stir as people were making quake levels using a text editor at the time.  I had just lucked into being the first person in the world with this tech ready to go.

And then I got an email from Carmack. I wish I still had access to my email archives from the Ottawa freenet but I don't.  Basically he asked me how I had cracked the protection... or if he had boneheaded the check.  I said he must have boneheaded it (he had) because I didn't have to do anything to get it to work.  Quake was supposed to need a valid license file before reading 3rd party levels.  Oops.

Anyway id was nice enough to send me a burned version of the full game when it was released. I think I still have this somewhere although it may have humungous stickers on it.

This is where the story goes crazy.  I started getting massive numbers of emails from people looking to license the editor, have me write a book, work for them etc.  Now I was already planning on going to work at Cavedog so I wasn't terribly interested in most of this stuff.  But I got interested quickly when people started wanting to pay serious cash for the editor.  The power of the internet was revealing itself to me.

The guy that intrigued me the most was someone named Steve Foust from Minnesota.  Steve called me and told me he would give me a bunch of money upfront and a back end royalty if I didn't release the editor.  He wanted to license it, make a quake level pack while nobody else could and make a killing.  He was fine with me releasing it after the pack came out.  The company steve was with was called Head Games and it was eventually acquired by Activision.

A book company called me and wanted me to write a book. I'd never considered that and didn't really think it was up my alley.  Based on what I understand of the economics of it I probably dodged a bullet as game books don't usually make any money.  A lot of publishers will pay extremely low royalties like 10% on books.  Bottom line, I was a better programmer than author.   I would probably be more into that today but why not just blog if I have something to say?

Anyway I eventually got my paperwork and headed for Seattle.  Aftershock for Quake came out and I released the editor to the world.  I also licensed it to a bunch of companies including Sierra On-line and Eclipse Entertainment.  It also got me an interview at Raven, where they did offer me a job that I declined.  Seattle and TA was waiting and a lot more exciting.

All of the licensing was my first real exposure to these kinds of contracts.  We had done a shareware publishing deal with Epic before that, but that's pretty much it.  I left a lot of money on the table back then because I was a horrible negotiator.  I had one of the licensees tell me recently that he probably would have paid me double the amount if I had bothered to hold out at all.  This is called paying your dues or stupid tax in Dave Ramsey speak. 

Also if you feel like I'm focusing on the financials a lot in this it's because I am.  My family wasn't very well off and I had a lot of things I wanted that I was working hard for.  Money was definitely a way that I measured my progress towards my goals.  As Zig Zigler says success is the progressive realization of a worthwhile goal.  I don't know if a Mustang Cobra was a worthwhile goal or not but by October of 1996 I had a brand new black Cobra.  That was, by far, the most exciting material thing that I've ever bought.  I had been lusting after 5.0 Mustangs for years before I even got my license.  Next I needed to get a WA state drivers license but that's another story.  Bottom line, Thred is the program that for the first time in my life put me in a financial position that wasn't shit.

Thred is also how I met Gabe Newell for the first time.   Not long after Valve was founded I went over there to talk to them and see what they were about.  They had already hired Yahn Bernier who wrote the editor BSP as well as Ben Morris who wrote WorldCraft, so they didn't need another editor.  We didn't really talk jobs because I was happy working at Cavedog. Our office at Uber today is just down the road from that building where Valve started.  Valve today blows my mind btw but... that's another story.

Anyway I think the fan community had a lot higher expectations than I had.  To me Thred was just a tool to learn what I need to know about 3D editing. I think the community expected me to make a career of expanding and supporting Thred. In reality I was busy writing new code for my employer and trying to actually create a top level game. Jim really took most of the flack for this, sorry about that Jim.

The fact that the first title I got work on after Radix was Total Annihilation is just an incredible bit of luck.  I did pass up other opportunities including more Thred work or even working at Raven because Chris had utterly convinced me that his vision was the next big thing.  I was a hardcore C&C fan and I wasn't going to lose the opportunity to work on what I thought was going to be a brilliant game. 

 Eventually the thought process behind Thred would turn into Eden which was the Cavedog editor for the Amen Engine.  But that's another story...