Questions for David Doak (The REAL Dr. Doak)

[RWG]

Hello everyone,

David Doak, developer of GoldenEye 007, reached out to me the other day.  He said he caught notice of the "Top 5 Mysterious Things.." and other videos while researching for a talk he's giving on the 20th anniversary of Goldeneye, and wanted to chat with me about Goldeneye.

So I should ask you guys, is there anything you'd like for me to bring up?  This is a great chance to hopefully get some of the wildest questions we have about the game answered, or at least gain some valuable insight.  Please just bombard this thread with stuff that Dr. Doak might be able to help us with.

Some stuff I'm planning asking;

- thoughts on the OOB/swissclip?
- can Control Objective B ever be broken/skipped?
- did you know R-Leans would happen/work the way they do?

Help me out guys!  I'm likely going to email Dr. Doak the good questions ahead of time so he has a chance to look into these a bit more before we get to talking too.

[Quirky]

Of course I have a DLTK question but would he have ever expected all levels to have been beaten on max settings on 007 mode?

[Bme51]

You should ask him if there's a way to get the gates on dam to open faster more consistently

[Carathorn]

I wonder if he can actually provide answers for these very detailed & speedrun oriented questions. Do you think his knowledge about the code of the game will still be good enough to say something about it? Would be amazing ofcourse.

[OHMSS]

Wow, what a great thing to happen!

Ask him about strafing and whether they had it on the radar. The target time of 1:45 on Streets A implies that they didn't (a clean run without strafing is 1:42) or at least they didn't expect casuals to figure it out.

Does he think running sideways, looking to the ground constantly, and skipping almost every guard is a disgrace to this great spy game?

I would like to hear the story behind the 2:05 target time on Facility 00A. Did they set it to this weird value because they thought it was near maxed and 2:00 would be too much? And what does he feel when he sees a run of 0:53 happening.

What did they think when the implemented Objective A on Frigate?

OoB questions are certainly interesting. I'd like to hear his comments on how the design of GE makes OoB insanely rare occurences.

His thoughts on DLTK and it being beaten after 18 years of unforeseeable insanity would certainly be interesting. Clearly they didn't design it that way, but it's highly remarkable that it was just barely possible with every trick in the box and fantastic execution and should be discussed with Dr Doak.

[Retrix]

Isn't there an emulator hidden in Goldeneye's code? Not that they'd ever spill it. Nevermind hackers figured it out. Would also be interesting to pull up the old detstar page and look through unanswered mysteries. I feel most of these have actually been answered...feels different looking at this page 9 years later.

My thoughts on Facility 2:05: half of everything is luck. My first time, just trying to complete the game, I cleared it 21 seconds under target. Barely survived too. Took tons of attempts but I feel most of the cheats you unlock correspond to what you wish you had to clear the level in that target time.

[fusioncutter]

Hi Goose,

That's an awesome news.

My suggestion would be to ask if him if he's any insight regarding the Goldeneye Remaster that was intended for Xbox 360 but was never released due to licensing issues. (With the game play video leaked we know it was in the works)

Please ask him if he has any wish of getting a remastered version of the game out, or if he has any thoughts about if it would ever happen.

[Retrix]

Ask him about the button codes for Perfect Dark. And don't let him tell you they don't exist. Lies and deceit.

[Illu]

Throw in a question about how the ingame timer might work, about how lag might affect it.

[OG]

If he could decipher what everything on the gameshark 'speed display' ui means it'd be great.

[RWG]

can you link me a screenshot pic of it, and why it "doesn't make sense" to you?  I need to know what I'm talking about if I ask such a thing.

[hotshott]

these questions sound nerdy as fuck  Ask him how his background in Biochemistry translated to gaming design. How did he end up designing games?

slightly off topic. idk if you guys have seen this maybe i got it from here a long time ago. includes a section about David Doak. interesting talk about GE.

if its not too late seeing as this is from May

[thrmax]

This is really cool. Can't wait to see what comes out of it. This thread is a month old, I assume the questions have already been relayed, but if not...

I would love to hear what moment during the game's development sticks out most in his memory. Like a big breakthrough where some code finally worked, or a funny moment when the game behaved in an unexpected way, or maybe something that was an accident that ended up becoming a feature.

Who made the decision that you could kill his likeness after he gives you the decoder and not fail the mission? How did he feel about that?

What were their expectations for the release? Did they realize they were making something that would be as successful as it was?

[RWG]

Dr. Doak and I have been in touch again and we're planning on talking this coming Wednesday, Sept 20.  Last chance for anyone who has anything they'd like me to pass along and ask!

[deletedprofile.u]

From what I understand, the development team for GoldenEye was relatively (brand) new. I'd be curious to know what kind of expectations he and the team had (if any) for the success and overall receiving of the game among its audience.

[Lost_Fitness]

Did the talk happen on Wednesday?

[RWG]

Yep

Figuring out how to share & present what we talked about.  We chatted for 2h30 so it's quite a lot of content.  Right now I'm thinking I might make individual videos where I set up a question, and then we listen to what Dr. Doak has to say about it.

[Lost_Fitness]

Did he give an insight into elements behind the speedrunning aspect of the game or was he a little vague on those?

[deletedprofile.u]

Did he give an insight into elements behind the speedrunning aspect of the game or was he a little vague on those?

Read Goose's latest post HERE:

Figuring out how to share & present what we talked about.  We chatted for 2h30 so it's quite a lot of content.  Right now I'm thinking I might make individual videos where I set up a question, and then we listen to what Dr. Doak has to say about it.

[Lost_Fitness]

Did he give an insight into elements behind the speedrunning aspect of the game or was he a little vague on those?

Read Goose's latest post HERE:

Figuring out how to share & present what we talked about.  We chatted for 2h30 so it's quite a lot of content.  Right now I'm thinking I might make individual videos where I set up a question, and then we listen to what Dr. Doak has to say about it.

Doesn't answer the question merely quoting what was said previously.

[Hypnotoad]

Pretty hype for this, looking forward to what you put out.

[deletedprofile.u]

Doesn't answer the question merely quoting what was said previously.

>Decisive reasoning!

Goose said he'll get the info out in videos. Why would he put all the juicy info here? Be no reason to watch the videos then 

[Lost_Fitness]

Doesn't answer the question merely quoting what was said previously.

>Decisive reasoning!

Goose said he'll get the info out in videos. Why would he put all the juicy info here? Be no reason to watch the videos then 

Eh, good point.

[RWG]

https://soundcloud.com/rwhitegoose/talking-goldeneye-with-dr-doak/s-ANLqq

The original record had audio issues, but a heroic viewer/audio engineer stepped up last night and produced this perfect copy of the interview.

I still do plan on releasing bits in Youtube videos, but since it's been such a long time coming, and some of the guys are hyper keen to listen, I'm posting it for you.

I'm sure some will listen to the entire 2h25... if someone who is actively listening could provide timestamps as to when various discussions on different things begin, I would hugely appreciate it.

Enjoy.

[SGT RAGEQUIT]

The way he explains clipping is pretty cool - it seems they set a benchmark that the game is to run at 30fps (NTSC), and when you lose frames, it tries to approximate where you should be if you were running at the optimal 30, then clipping is small errors in the math. (talks about it about 38min in)

The reasoning behind unarmed being slightly laggier than pp7 is interesting too - the game doesn't load the hand model until you switch to it.

I also enjoyed Doak trying to explain threading to Goose during the control protect bit 

[AEB]

That was a fantastic listen, really cool.

[Quirky]

Best line was at the end, in the modern world you'd have to pay for them in regards to cheats. Fascinating listen.

[Oskillz]

That was really interesting, would be awesome to hear more discussions between you two in the future ^^

[Chris P Bacon]

This was a great talk with David given it had goldeneye speedrunning in mind, I enjoyed his insight into what is happening in each level and what his thought process is when he was making it and talking about waypoints/code. I always felt it was odd that runway was 5 mins but the fact it was there to be the lead in for all cheats makes complete sense.
As I was listening I noted down times which things happened so you can narrow down things you want to chop out.


00:00:47 Intro/david talking about streaming schedule
00:02:40 Davids time frames working on goldeneye
00:04:07 Davids computing background
00:09:09 2.x control style how did that come about
00:18:20 In house testing
00:20:10 Davids favourite bug: pipe warp
00:24:00 Stopping clipping bugs STAN movement
00:32:10 Switching to unarmed and why it lags
00:34:20 The game tick / frame rate ticks
00:42:05 Game Portals/out of bounds
00:51:00 Game Mesh/ game geometry
00:55:20 Bypassing NAT in Control/ extra scripts
01:06:10 Looking at the ground
01:18:40 Infinite guards in archives/bunker2
01:22:00 Guard Despawn
01:24:50 Waypoints for NPC's
01:27:30 Nat(obj A) and the ending of control
01:30:00 Hostages and waypoints
01:39:54 R-leans as a bug
01:46:32 Depot warp
01:59:00 Roller doors on Depot
02:05:35 Start of the talk about guard despawn script
02:08:30 how ladders work
02:11:00 Dark License to kill/ Aztec difficulty curve
02:15:30 setting difficulty levels during testing
02:18:05 Cheat times, talks about strafing

[eastwood]

Was a great listen, thanks for posting the whole clip. David seems like a really likable chap.

[my man]

Wow, Great stuff! I'm super excited to hear how much he enjoyed the discussion himself! If there is a followup discussion, I wouldn't mind hearing more of his thoughts on the communities surrounding the game, the elite and GE Vault included. His excitement about the GE level editor/Goldfinger is really great. Must be an awesome feeling for him knowing about all the activity.

[thrmax]

This turned out great. What a fascinating discussion. Thanks, Goose.

[flukey lukey]

Fantastic and Fascinating listen.

10/10.

[RWG]

Doak has another talk out from earlier this year at the Norwich Gaming Festival.  I shared this in Discord and people seemed to really enjoy it too, so just wanted to post it here!

[Slugg Christ]

Super duper late, but I just remembered that I'm friends with Ken Lobb on facebook & he might be able to shed even more light on any remaining questions. He still works for Rare at Microsoft as far as I know, but he did an interview about Goldeneye last year for nintendoeverything.com, so I don't think it's a conflict of interest. I can try to connect you guys for a "part 2" if you're interested, because the Doak interview was absolutely amazing and Ken seems to still have a place in his heart for Goldeneye. I think he would be happy to talk to/know about The Elite.

EDIT; He also was integral in convincing Nintendo of Japan to include 4 controller ports with the N64, and Goldeneye's legendary multiplayer was a result of trying to get as many games as they could to support four players. He also conceived the cheats unlocked by time trial, effectively rendering him the Daddy of The Elite and debatably speedrunning as a whole.

[Clichejon]

Sounds great!

[Wuldntuliktono]

Ask him about silo like what ouromouvs briefcase was for, why the doors above the one missle in silo opens up, the extra walkways and leftover doors still in silo frpm when they changed the layout. Also why they named the worst gun in the game after him and if the extra body armors in the jap version was because it was illegal to rent video games in japan so they got taken out in other versions so people wouldnt be able to beat the game in a few days durring a rental period. Just my 2 cent suggestions.

[IDPTheory]

Hi Ryan,
If possible, as Dr Doak if he can put you in touch with Martin Hollis - He was the lead developer on the game and it was Martin who coded Bond's movement so he could potentially answer some of the more technical questions the Elite might have to ask.