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Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

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Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#71
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always heard "Tabs for indenting, spaces for aligning."

These days just use expand tab, in an age of online code review tools etc it's just better not to have to configure every system to interpret tabs to your given number of spaces - just write the damn spaces into the file.

> "it's just better not to have to configure every system to interpret tabs to your given number of spaces"

The entire point of "tabs to indent; spaces to align" is that you don't need to make sure everyone displays tabs the same way. If we are using that scheme and I have mine set to 4 spaces but you have yours set to 8, everything is fine. There is no problem there.

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#72
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always heard "Tabs for indenting, spaces for aligning."

That works but takes a lot of discipline. More than any team I ever worked with had.

In my experience, the difficult part is getting people to understand it.

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#73
post #47
post #37

> The game was a commercial success for id Software; with more than 3.5 million copies of the game were sold. Wrong/Cheated. It was such a success that they had to sell the company - they sold ID-Software...

Doom 3 - 2004 ZeniMax - 2009 It seemed to do well enough to slow the need to sale for five years or so. Or maybe, just maybe, it was so successful of a company that another company bought it to share in the success.

They were building Rage at the time. I'm sure the budget for that game was like 5x that of D3. Shit runs late, cost blooms. Lots of 90's era twenty person shops had trouble dealing with increasing costs.

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#74
I wonder what John Camack's current thoughts are on C++ design. I rarely use inheritance and usually have either inlined functions or functions that operate on arrays or many objects at a time. I also use templates when they deal with straight type substitution (including functions). I am though starting to get familiar with extern templates to be able keep compile times down.

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#75

I wonder why they opted not to use references? It seems an odd choice to me, did id software give an explanation?

Probably because Carmack didn't actually know C++[1], and C doesn't support references.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9303387

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#76
post #56
post #26

https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/neo/game/Target.... This is the "nicest looking code [you] have ever seen" ?

Just curious, are you cherry picking, or are there legitimately many areas of the code like this? I haven't had a chance to look yet.

To be honest i didn't look at all the code, but yes there are many areas like this.

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#78
post #73
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom 3 - 2004 ZeniMax - 2009 It seemed to do well enough to slow the need to sale for five years or so. Or maybe, just maybe, it was so successful of a company that another company bought it to share in the success.

They were building Rage at the time. I'm sure the budget for that game was like 5x that of D3. Shit runs late, cost blooms. Lots of 90's era twenty person shops had trouble dealing with increasing costs.

So, you are suggesting that id was sold to cover the costs of Rage?

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#79
post #60

> Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works This statement suits even better to id Tech 3 (Quake 3). John Carmack mentioned: I still think the Quake 3 code is cleaner, as a final evolution of my C style, rather than the first iteration of my C++ style [Doom 3] : http://kotaku.com/thanks-a-few-comments-in-some-ways-i-still... and he linked to his blog post about "Functional Programming in C++" on the now defunct…

I was surprised to learn that CoD still uses something based on the Quake 3 engine. Any idea how much the engine has changed?

Re: Doom3 is the proof that “keep it simple” works

#80
post #37

> The game was a commercial success for id Software; with more than 3.5 million copies of the game were sold. Wrong/Cheated. It was such a success that they had to sell the company - they sold ID-Software...

Why are you referring to the process of selling the company as an opposite of financial success?

I can't say for Id Software, because I have no clue about their financials. But historically, people who run profitable companies do not want to sell them. They want to grow them so they can make even more money. These days startups which are "owned" by VC money, usually have to sell so the VCs can recover their investment.
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