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Id Software

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Re: Id Software

#121
post #97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

first person immersive simulation game FPS stands for First Person Shooter . The games you're listing don't simulate much, even if some of those games have RPG elements.

[deleted]

Re: Id Software

#122
post #102
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maria 1 was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03.

Wasn't Vice City was the Grand Theft Auto of 2002/03? ;) More to the original point, the first GTA remains along with Age of Empires one of my all-time favourite games. It's easy to forget in light of the franchise it became what a novel and crazy little game that was.

What I find absolutely fascinating is that there are only 16 years between the release of GTA1 and GTA5. How could such amazing progress have occurred in such a short timeframe? It's unbelievable.

Re: Id Software

#123
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for lifting this up!

My favourite part of the wiki page is: i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?

I like how they rewrite the code in different ways (type punning) and keep the "what the fuck?" comment intact.

Re: Id Software

#124
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,…

I certainly learned a lot by writing Quake 3 Arena mods and unreal tournament mods. Even if I wasn't make huge changes just the confidence that I could dive into an existing set of code, figure something out and make something happen gave me a lot of confidence for things in the future.

Re: Id Software

#125

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…

> videogames matured as a narrative medium

Did they really?

I agree things are more 'cinematic', but text based adventures were arguably just as 'narrative' if not more so, and these are some of the earliest games in existence.

Then there were the 'graphical adventure' games like kings quest, etc which were hugely popular, then things like 'tomb raider', and so on.

taking these as a lineage, one can say it's really just the presentation that has matured, which one could then say makes the argument a 'technological view'..

Re: Id Software

#126
Is there a good entry point into quake mods these days?

When I was a kid in 1996 I toyed with Quake C but really had no idea what I was doing. I'd love to toy with mods again but not really sure if there is a good way to get started. Most of the resources I knew of 22 years ago are gone or significantly outdated.

Re: Id Software

#127
In case anyone doubts how revolutionary some of these games were, check out these fan letters from the Wolfenstein source:

As a former POW (Vietnam), I hesitated to play WOLF for over a month after downloading as I feared flashbacks. I didn't want to remember all that I had been through all those years ago, when, as POW's, my friend and I decided an escape attempt would be better than a slow death by torture and starvation.

My friend and I made crude maps and hoarded food. The day of the escape we clubbed the guard with stones, took his gun and fought our way through two levels of underground tunnels (only a few guards and had to crawl). I made it, my friend didn't.

Dreams...NO! NIGHTMARES...YES!! However, the more I play WOLF the less frequently I have nightmares. The chilling part is turning a corner and seeing a guard with his gun drawn.

WOLF is a powerful game. Fearful as well. I believe that a person should face the past. So... when I can play EPISODE 1 comfortably (no nightmares), I plan on ordering the full series.

There's also a letter from a Microsoft manager requesting a multiplayer version.

https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/blob/master/WOLFSRC/GO...

Re: Id Software

#129
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Romero for anyone looking him up.

With that fabulous hair he sported, he will always be Romeo to me!

That might have made the infamous Daikatana ad a bit more...Shakespearean: "Romeo's about to make you his bitch."

Re: Id Software

#130
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's not surprising at all - what comes after the very early stages of development of many areas in science and technology are indeed usually could be called "a golden age." (In math it was the period of around 100 years after Newton; in physics - the second half of the 19th century plus the first half of the 20th.) As far as computers and software, we are now also way past the golden age, unfortunately...
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