Earlier quoted context omitted.
The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software": https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294 > How Quake ruined id Software. > There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly…
> ... [thread continues] ... That's the interesting part that Twitter no longer lets us see without logging in...
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
251–260 of 290 posts
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#252Quake 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.
Same feeling. Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?
Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming. But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “l…
And tight objectives. Have an endgame. Know what "done" looks like, and get there, as fast as possible.
Also, only the minimal number of attendees. This helps a lot.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#254I remember feeling that Quake was something remarkably different from Doom, mainly because it felt actually worth using the mouse with. Marathon II on the Mac introduced me to mouse movement but it was very limited and kind of fisheyed and weird. Quake just felt good with the mouse.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#255I don’t believe the ends justify the means and I respect his perspective on these regrets. I wonder if he’s kind of looking back from a position of assumed success. Would Quake have succeeded on a Doom++ engine? I remember feeling that Quake was something remarkably different from Doom, mainly because it felt actually worth using the mouse with. Marathon II on the Mac introduced me to mouse movement but it was very l…
We could use Heretic/Hexen as the most direct contemporary example of a "Doom++ engine": it had keyboard look up/down, inventory, and the ability to fly up/down. Wiki reckons Heretic sold 500k units and Doom 2 sold 1.2M. Hard to say in hindsight if that was caused by less enthusiasm for a fantasy aesthetic or the decline in enthusiasm for Doom-level tech.
We can also look at how far BUILD-style engines were able to push environments in 2.5d engines of the day. Duke3D had sloping floors and wildly changing terrain that was revolutionary for the time. (Remember the second level in the shareware version, where you basically blew up a building halfway through the level?) Other contemporary BUILD-style titles like Eradicator were able to add crude room-over-room by declaring floating platforms and other special entities without having to build them into truly 3D world geometry.
A third point on the triangle might be Rise of the Triad, which pushed the Wolf3D engine well beyond anything a normal person would expect. Apogee were able to add keyboard look up/down and flight up/down, more verticality in levels by adding floating discs and floors (again outside of the standard level geometry).
And to stretch the triangle metaphor to a tetrahedron, there's also a lot stuff from the Doom source port universe that might have been invented if Carmack & Co. had to push the Doom engine as far as it could go. When you can add new things and linedef/sector actions, that allows a lot of flexibility when you don't have to build the engine from scratch.
All that makes me think that 1994 iD could probably have had a commercially successful game on a Doom++, especially if Carmack kept learning all the portability and networking stuff that made Quakeworld work during the shift to Windows 95. What's much less clear to me is whether they'd be able to catch and/or drive the wave of 3D accelerator development, and whether Epic MegaGames would have just leapfrogged them completely with Unreal. I think the Quake-on-Doom++ timeline might end with Unreal becoming the engine more people built on through the 2000s (instead of all the Q3/idTech3-based games). The talent retention could mean that iD stays competitive on worldbuilding and feel (the Doom Bible shows they had some of those ideas, but the tech wasn't ready for them), and Carmack+Abrash+... could probably catch up with Sweeney+.... We probably don't get American McGee's Alice in that timeline though.
EDIT: The other thing to consider is that Descent was also bringing 6DOF (degrees of freedom) to PC gaming. While it was a portal-based engine like BUILD, it had 3D-modelled polygonal enemies etc. It was a beloved but niche title because it was so challenging to play, but it shows that there's a bunch of technical innovation around at the time, and maybe it gets a larger market share and the technical innovation happens with or without iD?
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
goldsrc is based off the q1 engine.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#258I 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…
Id software would've benefitted from the income of another release. I thoroughly enjoyed Build games before and long after Quake. Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual quote is "It's a little silly to revisit your mistakes like this, as if you could have done anything better." What you're saying sounds very nice and correct, except it isn’t necessarily true. It's extremely easy to draw wrong lessons in retrospect. There are so many variables, including personalities, market conditions, timing, constraints, and accidents of history. You can't recall or even really underst…
If we don't look back and asses what worked, and what didn't, how do we grow?
Re: There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same feeling. Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.
Yet, Quake III Arena had no single player. It was a fun MP game, I spent years playing. It's not really the same as Quake and Quake 2.
It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.