New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

By popular request, I just posted a new page that has everything I could find that I’ve done related to Dungeon Siege. It’s got the good, the bad, and the ugly. A large, memorable chapter of my early game development life.

Until now, this stuff has been scattered all over four different defunct websites in a mess of broken links. This new page fixes all of that for good.

I worked at Gas Powered Games between November 1999 and October 2003, back when it was a fresh startup. In that time, I lectured and wrote about some of the technology we used to build Dungeon Siege and later projects. I also released specifications for some of the internals of the engine to help the mod community.

This page collects all of my published Dungeon Siege work.

…continued here

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been busy. Did a talk for Audiokinetic, some remodeling at home, supporting my lady in her new MBA program…

…and I got a new job.

Moving On

I’ve moved on from Loose Cannon and am now working at Bungie. The reasons are personal and private, and were due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. It was the most difficult, painful choice I’ve ever had to make about anything.

So I’ve been laying low while all the emotion passes..it’s felt a lot like breaking up with a girl, I think. Similar feelings, similar lost personal investment, similar broken ties. Similar number of depressing hangovers.

The Loose Cannon crew is a great bunch of intensely creative and smart people, and I wish them all the best. They always treated me very well and I miss them.

Enter The Bungie

So now I’m at Bungie. First off, let me make it clear that I don’t speak for the company in any way. But further than that: just because I talk about something on my blog here doesn’t mean it has anything to do with what I’m working on at Bungie, so please don’t make any assumptions to that effect. I’ve been writing and lecturing for a long time now, and have a lot of personal projects and research that I do. This will continue as before.

Now, a lot of the writing that I’ve done has in fact been based directly on my ongoing work on a particular game. Previous companies I’ve worked for have been supportive of, or at least indifferent to, my talking about technical details of our setup or research I’m doing. That doesn’t necessarily have to stop now that I’ve joined Bungie, where they have recently started sharing quite a lot of information. But it does mean I have to be more careful and get things cleared before saying “this is in our upcoming Halo match-3 game”.

For the moment though, it’s a moot point. I just started and don’t know anything yet.

On the other side of the coin, there are some loose ends I never tied off from previous posts. Now that I’m no longer part of Loose Cannon, I can’t talk about work I did there, or reference code, which I no longer have access to. I think I can speak in generalities, though, about some high level concepts that wouldn’t be specific to the work I did there. We’ll see!

Well everything looks like it’s working fine being hosted on Bluehost. As long as everybody was getting into my old site using scottbilas.com, it ought to continue working fine with the switchover. Minus the RSS feed getting reset, perhaps.

Shutting down my Wordpress-hosted blog…now!