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Id Software

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131–140 of 173 posts

Re: Id Software

#131
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,…

Is there documentation on the structure of the contents? Why is it a list of * followed by + and then a list with no prefix? See https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... as an example.

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/

There's a table in the above link, as well as a few more details

Re: Id Software

#132
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

All good points. You're certainly right about the costs involved in 'triple-A' development. Indie games are out there, though. Some of them even look great, just not photorealistic (such as Limbo).

> Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I first played it

Ever play the PS2 port?

They had to rework the maps to cope with the PS2's memory constraints. Everything's familiar, but a bit different. Worth a shot if you want another hit.

Re: Id Software

#133

I burned many hours on the original Doom, in my bedroom as a young teenager with headphones on in the dark. Remember the No Clipping cheat code? Here’s the source code check to turn it on: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/77735c3ff0772609e9c...

Another fun (90ies) fact: the noclip cheat code (idspispopd) stands for Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris . The Smashing Pumpkins paid tribute by using a Doom sample on their Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album. http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/SPISPOPD

And apparently the comment includes a small typo:

// Smashing Pumpkins Into Samml Piles Of Putried Debris.

I kept wondering what "samml" meant... in German "sammeln" means to gather and "semmel" in Austrian slang is a local kind of roll or bun.

Re: Id Software

#134

Where’s the commander keen?

Back in 2014 John Hall found the source to some of the old stuff, including Keen 4,5,6 https://games.slashdot.org/story/14/09/17/133228/commander-k... The game was bought by fans, the source was released and Keen Dreams was published on steam. https://github.com/keendreams/keen https://store.steampowered.com/app/356200/Keen_Dreams/ The ownership of the older stuff is quite fragmented.

Oh cool, I hadn't heard about this. Thanks!

Re: Id Software

#135
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,…

At a time when pretty much every regular pc and internet connection sucked, here's what is definitely an historical moment in online gaming. The birth of Quakeworld, the internet optimized quake engine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar...

Note JC's comment that "this is just my pet research project". If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw.

So really, thanks John Carmack for the countless wasted hours :)

Re: Id Software

#136
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> You really need a mouse for first person.

You did, until Golden Eye N64.

And many of those early games (Wolf3d, Doom, Hexen) didn't have Mouse look on be default, you played them Closed (Arrow Keys and Right Ctrl/Alt) or Open (Arrow Keys and Left Ctrl/Alt).

It really wasn't until Quake I/QuakeWorld that FPS' made the shift to Mouse+WASD. And evenstill in Quake1, mouse look was off by default.

Re: Id Software

#137

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.

Check Quaddicted[1] for some singleplayer maps. The most common engine by far is Quakespasm[2] which keeps the original style but fixes bugs, reintroduces some features from the software renderer that were lost in the original OpenGL version (fullbrights, lightmaps that go above 100%, non-power-of-two textures, etc) and removes and raises some hardcoded limits. You probably also want QuakeInjector[3], which is a "quake mod installer" that handles dependencies. You may also want MiniQL[4] (made by me) as a more straightforward and minimalistic launcher (you can also launch QuakeInjector from MiniQL if it is installed in the same directory).

This is all you need for playing maps and mods. For making maps (the most common type of mod) you'll also need a map editor - currently the most common seems to be Tenchbroom[5], but it is far from the only option and a lot of people use other editors, such as BSP[6], QuArK[7], GtkRadiant[8] and some people even use either the original Worldcraft 1.3 (i think) or a modded Hammer (from Valve) to make maps. I think some also use J.A.C.K.[9], which is basically a Hammer clone, although i think it is abandoned now.

The map editor isn't enough, you also need the command line tools to "compile" the map (this is how the Quake engine can support multiple and different editors: by decoupling the tools from the engine and the individual types of tools from each other - which to me is one of the best ways to architect and engine and its tools, but sadly most popular engines have forgotten it). There are several variations, depending on the features you want. But i think these days most people are using ericw's tools[10] since they support some advanced features from modified engines (like the BSP2 format for larger maps and colored lightmaps).

Beyond mapping, if you want to delve in QuakeC (the game's scripting language) you need the original QuakeC source code[11] and a QuakeC compiler - while you can probably use the original QCC, i've seen FTEQCC[12] from the FTE engine to be mentioned way more often. Some tutorials can be found here [13] (the Inside3D site which was a sort of 'nexus' for QuakeC modders was shut down some time ago and while the community create InsideQC[14] it looks like not everything survived the transition).

[1] https://www.quaddicted.com/

[2] http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm

[3] https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/quake_injector

[4] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/miniql

[5] http://kristianduske.com/trenchbroom/

[6] http://www.bspquakeeditor.com/

[7] http://quark.sourceforge.net/

[8] http://icculus.org/gtkradiant/

[9] http://jack.hlfx.ru/en/

[10] https://ericwa.github.io/ericw-tools/

[11] https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/idstuff/unsup/progs106

[12] https://sourceforge.net/projects/fteqw/files/FTEQCC/

[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20120526014134/http://www.inside...

[14] http://www.insideqc.com/

Re: Id Software

#138
post #135
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,…

At a time when pretty much every regular pc and internet connection sucked, here's what is definitely an historical moment in online gaming. The birth of Quakeworld, the internet optimized quake engine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar... Note JC's comment that "this is just my pet research project". If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement…

If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw.

Amen. Especially when you consider that a massive number of players, such as myself, were using dial-up (56k) modems. Quakeworld made multiplayer go from a slideshow to comparable to single-player performance, albeit with hiccups.

Re: Id Software

#139
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…

> You really need a mouse for first person. You did, until Golden Eye N64. And many of those early games (Wolf3d, Doom, Hexen) didn't have Mouse look on be default, you played them Closed (Arrow Keys and Right Ctrl/Alt) or Open (Arrow Keys and Left Ctrl/Alt). It really wasn't until Quake I/QuakeWorld that FPS' made the shift to Mouse+WASD. And evenstill in Quake1, mouse look was off by default.

> You did, until Golden Eye N64.

Improvements in aim assist really make console FPS games more approachable. Still not up to the usability of a mouse, but if the game is thoughtfully designed it meets a "good enough" bar.

Although I wasn't a big fan of Rare's cursor aim functionality, it felt very clumsy.

Personally I'm a fan of sticky aim assist (halo) or snap-to-body aim assist (call of duty, gta). These kinds of systems are the kind of work where players may not even realize they are being helped.

Re: Id Software

#140
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,…

> ... 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.

Never really realized it until now, but this is true for me.

The original Quake, in its heyday, is what sparked my interest in Linux. Linux then sparked my interest in, well... more Linux - and gave me a new direction for my eventual shift into engineering. It really shaped my entire career.

I had heard somehow, somewhere that you could squeak out slightly better frame rates and ping times in Quake, if you used this alternative OS called Linux (which really wasn't true, in retrospect). And so that began my quest, which triggered a cascade of deep dives into linux and its community for me. Everything from installation issues and troubleshooting, to compiling kernel modules (and everything in between). I even ended up dialoging with the driver developer for one of those modules (not yet in the kernel). A bug had surfaced - he actually fixed it and sent me a patch. So then I learned how to patch a driver too. One of the best "customer" experiences I've ever had, really :)

Ironically, I might have ended up in game development had there never been a linux port for quake :P

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