61–70 of 173 posts
For some of the history of that time, I suggest checking out "Masters of Doom : how two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture", by David Kushner. The book is 15 years old (!!!) at this point, but I think it's still a compelling read.
Have id officially stopped their policy of releasing 'current - 2' game source as Open Source? Shouldn't Doom 3, Quake 4 and maybe Rage 1 be up here?
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Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look a…
I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…
The late 90s and 00s to me was all dominant single games (e.g. Starcraft, Quake, Halflife). A lot of it was about having the latest graphics, with big studios winning. And spinoff games were done with an 'engine', which often made them look/feel/respond similar to the original. You also saw a lot of sequels and series taking over from new game concepts because of this. And most of them were in a few genres (FPS and RTS especially).
I agree its a good time now though, we are so flooded with different types of games that you have to do something interesting to get noticed.
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Didn't Carmack himself port X11 to OS X? What is now "XQuartz". Anyway, great work scruffy!
XQuartz is an X11 server. https://www.xquartz.org/
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Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look a…
I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…
In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative".
(Especially if one considers the text and graphic adventure games in the 80s/90s).
At best they got some ersatz narrative qualities, but nothing to write home about.
We owe a lot to John Carmack in many ways - but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. I never ended up going into games myself, but in no small part I owe my career to him. As well as the Doom book, his plan files are a fascinating time capsule to go back over,…
Curious that you think it was a golden age.
More seriously, the rate of technical change in games development was huge during the 90s. We went from 3D being barely possible without textures to Half-Life 1's cinematic-style monorail introduction (which was visually better than most of the "full motion video" we'd seen in games up to that point). Graphics accelerators became a consumer product.
The development of the tech also made a wide open space for innovation in art direction - each new game looked noticeably different as well, in a way that's been attenuated among all the brown gritty shooters of today.
Doom also popularised multiplayer gaming (not really a thing on PCs at that point, limited to splitscreen on consoles). And it was the first game I encountered that really embraced modding - the Doom editors allowed the re-use and re-mix of the game assets into your own levels and all sorts of strange doom-flavoured experiences.
Have id officially stopped their policy of releasing 'current - 2' game source as Open Source? Shouldn't Doom 3, Quake 4 and maybe Rage 1 be up here?
There are Doom 3 + BFG Edition source codes, ctrl+f "DOOM-3".
https://github.com/DustinHLand/vkDOOM3
https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/20...
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Curious that you think it was a golden age.
Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play. I spin up OG Doom and have a rocking good time. Same goes for N64 games. They're still good. The same cannot be said for games from a decade ago. No one has a passion for COD4. Hence, the Golden Era title.
> Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play.
Is pure nostalgia.
DooM is not only fun, but it's great fun to play around with from the inside, or even to port. I've helped bring Doom to the x68000, which was quite the mission as the only compiler we had that could build 'large' executables was GCC 1.39 which had been translated into Japanese. But it's been fun doing ports to OS/2, DJGPP v1, Watcom C, and of course various other Unix via the X11 code. The GPL'd code was 'cleaned up…
I've certainly found it really useful for reproducing machine-learning papers I've been reading.
We owe a lot to John Carmack in many ways - but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. I never ended up going into games myself, but in no small part I owe my career to him. As well as the Doom book, his plan files are a fascinating time capsule to go back over,…
Curious that you think it was a golden age.