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Id Software

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Re: Id Software

#71

Post by danesparza »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #44
kar1181 wrote: post #41

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.

Doom was the first networked PC game I played. It was one of the first of it's kind. It opened up a world of connected gaming that lasted at least a decade.

I also think it began a golden age.

Re: Id Software

#72

Post by barrkel »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #44
kar1181 wrote: post #41

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.

It was a golden age for the first person immersive simulation game. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Thief, System Shock II, Half-Life, Deus Ex - there was a period of classics with large improvements and innovation from one game to the next, where game design space was explored just as the technology to render it became available.

First person immersive sims are generally best played on the PC. When consoles that were able to do decent graphics for a reasonable period (i.e. the pace of hardware evolution slowed) came into their own, third person control worked better with joypads, and for commercial reasons, PC games often ended up as a second-rate ports of console games, with compromised controls. You really need a mouse for first person.

Re: Id Software

#73

Post by barrkel »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Modern video games too often have far more linear gameplay, because AAA budgets means assets get wasted if they don't get consumed. See the entire CoD series, for example - tedious to play if you're used to a different kind of game.

Many people want a movie-like experience from their game, but that isn't what I played games for. It was more about emergent situations, rather than scripted. That was also what made games replayable - it's very rare for me to want to replay a modern game these days.

Re: Id Software

#74

Post by j1elo »

westoncb wrote: post #32

If you'd like to try out Doom now, there is an OpenGL port called Doomsday[0] which is very complete and loyal to the original, while smoothing out/modernizing things enough to make it genuinely fun for modern players. For instance, you can look in all directions with 'mouse look' and jump and run faster while pressing shift, and there are dynamic spot lights attached to certain things (e.g. fireballs), even though t…

I'm so glad the 3D models can be disabled, to experience the enemies sprites as their original creators envisioned.

Those 3D enemies that show up in the video, come walking towards the player as if they had a strong stomach ache!

Also explosions look too "fluffy"... Doom is not a game that needs to be reworked, IMHO.

Re: Id Software

#75

Post by cup-of-tea »

Can I use this to play Doom 3 BFG edition on Linux? I'd love to just buy it on Steam but sadly it's Windows only.

By the way, I love this from the readme:

> If you have obtained this source code several weeks after the time of release, it is likely that you can find modified and improved versions of the engine in various open source projects across the internet.

Re: Id Software

#76

Post by pjc50 »

wowtip wrote: post #58
kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I wonder sometimes, what could be built using today's tech if it was focused like Amigas back in the day with a single hardware spec and a dedicated OS just for that platform. Without regard to backwards compability in OS, like BeOS at the time. What would a revolutionary Amiga 1000 look like in 2018? With modern hardware and latest OS/system ideas. Gaming consoles could be considered examples of this, but they are k…

The three distinctive features of the Amiga:

- revolutionary custom graphics hardware - better sound hardware than competitors - pre-emptive multitasking

Therefore, if I was attempting something like this today, I would:

- make the graphics preeminent in the system. In other words, keep the graphics card and throw away the legacy CPU. Let it drive PCI devices.

- on its own, doing that makes it much harder to program, so put considerable work into making the instruction set and programmer's model open and well documented

- find a DAW engineer and let them build the audio subsystem with an obsessive focus on low latency. Let's aim for no more than 10 samples latency between input and output processing and see where that gets us.

- full multitasking in which nothing is ever allowed to block anything else unrelated, through resource reservation (qv the Nemesis research operating system). Having an Electron app on the system should not impair anything else, and the system's default editor should also be focused on low-latency.

- apps are by default fully security partitioned from each other. The operating system would maintain a CRDT-based record-orientated personal data storage system, incorporating lessons from PalmOS. This gives both native sync and automatic persistence across power-off.

- low latency non-USB keyboard and mouse. PS/2 would actually work but we could go for something really surprising like gigabit Ethernet or optical TOSLINK.

(Low latency is a good example of a feature which is extremely hard to retrofit and you end up redesigning the system around it).

Re: Id Software

#77

Post by pjc50 »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #75

Can I use this to play Doom 3 BFG edition on Linux? I'd love to just buy it on Steam but sadly it's Windows only. By the way, I love this from the readme: > If you have obtained this source code several weeks after the time of release, it is likely that you can find modified and improved versions of the engine in various open source projects across the internet.

See https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/playing-doom-3-on-lin...

Re: Id Software

#78

Post by pjmlp »

wowtip wrote: post #58
kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I wonder sometimes, what could be built using today's tech if it was focused like Amigas back in the day with a single hardware spec and a dedicated OS just for that platform. Without regard to backwards compability in OS, like BeOS at the time. What would a revolutionary Amiga 1000 look like in 2018? With modern hardware and latest OS/system ideas. Gaming consoles could be considered examples of this, but they are k…

Some ideas come to mind like Surface Pro and Surface Hub.

Re: Id Software

#79

Post by ksec »

There used to be sort of an Engine War in the late 90s and early 00s, Id tech, Source Engine, Unreal. Now ID is basically gone. And it is interesting both Valve and EPIC manage to create a platform, valve created Steam, and EPIC made Unreal almost like de facto standard. ( Yes I know there is Unity ).

I wonder why ID didn't continue to compete with Unreal in the middleware engine. Why Valve decide to leave what was at the time possibly the best game engine. How Unreal went from some mediocre engine to an insanely great engine and still improving rapidly.

Doom ( Or John Carmack ) used to be the sole cheer leader for OpenGL. I still loved 3Dfx, Voodoo and Glide though. The API was small and fast, in an era when Direct3D was .... really not very good. And Interesting times, Intel is now coming back to GPU market again after i740, it was the first Graphics card to use AGP Slot. May be instead of GPGPU which we should go back to graphics with AGP; Advance Graphics Processor.

Re: Id Software

#80

Post by a008t »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Video games have gone Hollywood.

Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks. Hence you get mostly sequels, online cash cows, linear on-rails shooters/cinematic experiences that are easy to sell. Content is expensive to produce so studios are afraid of "wasting" it. Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I first played it.

1997-2004 I think was the golden age of gaming where technology was good enough that cool things could be made, yet bad enough that small-ish creative studios could compete. Games were popular enough to make it profitable for studios to make them yet not too mainstream to dumb them down for the lowest common denominator.

System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 1-3, Resident Evil 1-3, No One Lives Forever, Age of Empires, Warzone 2100, Mafia 1, Half-Life, Syphon Filter, Parasite Eve - in no particular order; I am sure I am forgetting many many more great titles from that era.

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