Their more recent works are amazing pieces of entertainment: DOOM, Eternal and Dark Ages
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
171–180 of 290 posts
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#172I agree with one of the comments: "'Coulda been Doom++' hides how everyone wanted the leap back then." Doom++ was already well under way in the form of Ken Silverman's Build engine. Duke Nukem 3D beat Quake to market by ~6 months as I recall. A shorter timeline on the latter would have put them in direct competition with each other, damaging both. It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the in…
from my memory of the time the whole promise of quake was that it was going to be a huge technological innovation. that’s what we wanted, that’s what kept my interest and had me playing the leaked alpha and buying on day one. this is an interesting perspective they have because quake was a huge success. nobody at the time thought it fell short of doom. so maybe it broke id’s internal culture, but it put them in a pos…
Quake 1 was an unbelievable tech breakthrough: full 3d, quakec vm, overall engine design held up really well. It was not a perfect game but it was ok.
I still hack on the engine and its derivations from time to time.
Quake 2 was a development of that, will a deep focus on multiplayer. And it won at that. As a singlr player game it was boring but LAN play was just amazing.
So quake 3 did rethink the engine but went all in on multiplayer.
As funny as it may sound but in the end, it is quake 1 that just keeps going thanks to its easy moddabilty.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#173Young energy shouldn’t be apologized. Apparently Bill Gates had that psycho energy too, Jobs and many others too. On a civilizational scale it seems like a net benefit that young, eager and driven people give a bit more than they wanted to in retrospect. It do indeed change things for the rest of us. The patriotic call of armed forces has been driven by this for millennia. At least Carmack and Co. chose their own mis…
I’m not sure it’s necessarily a given that what Jobs, Gates, and Carmack created are net-positives when talking on a civilizational scale. Though Carmack certainly gets credit for keeping me entertained for a good portion of my youth. And gates probably gets some civilizational credit for what he’s done with his wealth after he made it.
personal computing is inseparable from technological progress, and has been wildly positive for humanity
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#174> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...
Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
this is true in all human endeavors. Tech is not special in this regard, alas.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Can anyone recommend a good write-up on that history? 41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.
John Carmack slaved away writing super optimized ground breaking realtime 3d game engine code that created a multibillion dollar industry. Adrian Carmack mostly took photographs of clay scultures (and in some cases actual plastic toys, in the case of the chainsaw and pistol used in the original Doom), and digitized them in Corel. Something any half-way decent art student could do (not to discount the iconic visual st…
Which just goes to show that technical chops and business chops are entirely unrelated. I think John Carmack did alright anyway.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humanities in academia is just as bad as human factors. The biggest thing that can help is having a shitty low paying job or two early in one's career. And then working formal a stable, normal company where there is real mentorship.
When I say humanities, I mean having a humanistic attitude. Looking at the social and environmental dynamics before looking at any specific technical issue in detail. Not necessarily anything to do with academia. Strong agree that everyone would benefit from having a shitty service job or two when they're young to learn what life is really like for most people. I worked a bunch of different service jobs in high schoo…
Which Hamming quote, btw, do you refer to? I think he mostly talks about talking with other "smart" people, and communicating what you are working on a lot (like giving talks, etc.). But, this doesn't read like much of a case for the humanities, per se.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU. Not just graphics but character acting and animation, interactive world elements, deliberately dramatic scenarios in the levels (Half Life pioneered this, but Doom3 had a lot of really good ones). It was years ahead of…
Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it…
The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#178One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole. I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fu…
It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.
The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#179"Sorry, Sandy" Sandy Petersen's side of it comes out in a few interviews, like https://medium.com/@unkndoomer/back-to-the-past-e3c421fb2e70 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUeu96TKQwU (especially 14:17 onward)
The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit?
> One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
> We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
> Sorry, Sandy.
Is he saying that it was a mistake (but not his mistake... Romero's perhaps?) to demand that game designers were also artists? And that this resulted in a loss of talent ("Sorry, Sandy") versus just encouraging more collaboration between artists and designers?
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#180ID dominated the PC shooter scene for 4.5 generations in a row. Insane. Wolf, Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3 Arena Dark Forces was great, but that tech was too late so it never went anywhere. Duke3D showed up, and while it was entertaining, it was clearly a level below what ID could do. 3D Realms fumbled that tech, then got caught up with the ultimate vaporware, Prey, and it took Epic stepping in with Unreal that fin…
Prey was vaporware? It sold a million copies on release and got a sequel... Are we talking about the same game?