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There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

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Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#241

Post by phyzix5761 »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #148
gtowey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now…

One interesting counter data point is that 70% of billionaires are self made. No small loan of a million dollars from daddy for them.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#242

Post by vor_ »

cubefox wrote: post #162

One thing that happened much later, after Carmack himself left, was that id software stopped pushing the boundaries of engine development. Their last great innovation was magatextures, or virtual texture streaming in its more modern form. Now cutting edge graphical features are mostly pushed by Epic and their Unreal engine. Like ray-traced global illumination, virtual shadow maps, virtual geometry, and fast ray-trace…

Megatexture caused a lot of problems. In fact, it was such a hindrance that it was removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#243

Post by skeeter2020 »

rvba wrote: post #105
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192... Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio. HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods (Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)

Maybe they're related by blood, but the apple fell very far from the tree. the ID guys were quite vocal in their dislike of the slow pace & puzzle solving. This was when ID was all about technical advancements and repeatedly making the same game, faster & shinier. They also focused on multiplayer with Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament dictating where the market moved.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#244

Post by andrekandre »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #15
bigmattystyles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.

I'm of the opinion that people will be more successful if you don't act like their back is against the wall even if it is You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though

  > You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic.
just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#245

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #241
jurgenaut23 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. It is a direct result of the American dream and the (misdirected) idea that one’s success is a direct (and inevitable) consequence of hard work, talent and intelligence. Flash news: it is not, and success is massively dependent on luck and initial conditions. Dumb, lazy a$$holes with a rich/powerful dad will beat smart, hard working poor bastards almost every time, barring some black swan events. Now…

One interesting counter data point is that 70% of billionaires are self made. No small loan of a million dollars from daddy for them.

The report you're referring to counts anyone who didn't directly inherit their wealth as "self-made". For example, it counts Zuckerberg and Bezos as self-made, despite both of them receiving substantial amounts of money from their wealthy parents when starting their respective companies.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#246

Post by kllrnohj »

vor_ wrote: post #234
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #147

Carmack is a godly programmer, but he's largely a technical guy. Everything he releases is a feat of technical engineering ("real 3D!"; "curved surfaces!"; "realistic lighting!"; "the Megatexture!"), not so much artistic achievement. We could really see that after Doom 2 when all of the creatives at Id started jumping ship. The level design that you need to reinforce the technical leaps just wasn't there anymore.

The technical innovations also began to have no impact or even an adverse one. Doom 3's push for 100% real-time stencil shadows was practically ignored by the industry when HL2 and other competitors came out. MegaTexture was actually removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.

While MegaTexture was removed from Doom Eternal because it's just not necessary in a small level-based game like that, the general idea was carried on. It's a big reason you could basically describe the entire PS4 era as the era of texture pop-in. Virtual texturing made it very easy to build massively large worlds, using GPU "page misses" to figure out what textures to stream in.

The problem is, well, the player sees it. As ugly as fuck texture pop-in.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#247

Post by bombcar »

rvba wrote: post #105
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192... Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio. HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods (Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)

I always felt Serious Sam was the real spiritual successor of the original Doom lineage.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#248

Post by blt »

modeless wrote: post #211
blt wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun. Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I h…

Both The Longest Yard and Facing Worlds can now be played instantly on the web: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (instant, even works on phones) https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut (scroll down and click Create on CTF-FACE) They even have multiplayer support. I hope someone ports UT2K4 someday so I can play ONS-Torlan.

They both work great. The MUSIC in Facing Worlds is amazing! I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate good electronic music back then :)

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#249

Post by bartread »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #32
tejohnso wrote: post #4

Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years. I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.

In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192... Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore.

Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.

To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.

I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.

Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days

#250

Post by zeuxcg »

kllrnohj wrote: post #246
vor_ wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical innovations also began to have no impact or even an adverse one. Doom 3's push for 100% real-time stencil shadows was practically ignored by the industry when HL2 and other competitors came out. MegaTexture was actually removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.

While MegaTexture was removed from Doom Eternal because it's just not necessary in a small level-based game like that, the general idea was carried on. It's a big reason you could basically describe the entire PS4 era as the era of texture pop-in. Virtual texturing made it very easy to build massively large worlds, using GPU "page misses" to figure out what textures to stream in. The problem is, well, the player sees…

No, mega texture like approaches were almost never used outside of a couple id games. The texture pop in was mip streaming, which persists to this day but memory is a bit less scarce and disk read speeds are much better so you notice it less.
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