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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

#161

Post by tombert »

OnionBlender wrote: post #90
tombert wrote: post #21

One 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…

If you haven't already, you should read John Romero's autobiography "Doom Guy: Life in First Person". There are some details from "Masters of Doom" that Romero disputes.

It's been on my list, but I haven't read it yet.

I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.

[1] https://sharewareheroes.com/

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

#162

Post by cubefox »

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-traced direct illumination.

But id software's games themselves arguably improved after Carmack left, despite not pushing technical boundaries. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom TDA all were received very favorably at the time. Not sure whether this had anything to do with Carmack leaving though.

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

#163

Post by BiscuitBadger »

BiscuitBadger wrote: post #144

After reading those IdSoft histories, Quake shipped a new client server networking layer, a new quake C scripting engine, the new fully polygonal engine … This was far too ambitious and bottlenecked everything on Carmack’s graphics work. The rest of the team was left to create Doom II and Ultimate doom while Carmack worked, but even then it wasn’t enough to ease the bottleneck. doom II could have been a quake C scrip…

And this burnt the team out, made quake’s development a compromised scramble and led to Romero’s departure. That’s no way to run a company.

Anyway, listen to Xalavier Nelson of strange scaffold talks on sustainable indie game development. It makes no sense to compromise a company for the sake of shipping a single game.

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

#164

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

_doctor_love wrote: post #131
schmuhblaster wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This somehow resonates with me and I feel this is one of the negative side effects of a CS/Maths dominated culture and mindset that strongly emphasizes intellectual achievement, but hasn’t yet matured enough to appreciate the more messy and irrational parts of our existence.

I am a great admirer of the late Dr. Richard Hamming and he said basically the same thing. Math and science education is important, but humanities is missing for most engineers to their great detriment. I have a BA in Economics though I am a 20-year software veteran and I can honestly say that this degree has probably helped my career more than any CS knowledge I have. My family was also heavily into the humanities i…

I always thought that an Engineering degree with an MBA is a very good combination. You get very practical, useful things when you are younger. Once you have acquired enough life and work experience then you can appreciate the subtleties of cases that you study in an MBA.

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

#165

Post by nilirl »

lokimedes wrote: post #110
nilirl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? What if it did bad?

At least it was just a game company :) I find that initiative and grit combined is an exceedingly rare commodity, and it do power progress. We can always be picky about the worth or risks of the projects these souls end up realizing, but the function this provides to our society is critical.

It's not being "picky" to those whose lives get worse.

How do you have such confidence for what works in a complex adaptive system?

Do you think society can be reduced to a model of functions and metrics?

You can only afford to use that model if it doesn't harm your experience of life. For many, it's a model that makes them invisible.

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

#166

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

fatnoah wrote: post #151
manphone wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.

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

#167

Post by palmotea »

_doctor_love wrote: post #138
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.

> We never learn. To my mind, the key is that it's leaders who never learn. The sad thing is that the system gives them no incentives to do so. If you look into the work of Bob Emiliani, this seems to be the tragic conclusion he's come to in recent years. We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but b…

> We "know" all the right things to do, but time and time again, management dehumanizes the floor staff and refuses to listen. It's often not even out of malice but because that leader simply has no reason whatsoever to change.

There's another possibility that the people who gravitate to "leadership" have certain personality problems that cause those behaviors, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b....

> Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to figure out how to weed those types out before they get to leadership positions. The trouble is how.

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

#168

Post by Demiurge »

nakedneuron wrote: post #78
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.

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.

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

#169

Post by nsxwolf »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #29
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.

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…

I have attempted to play Doom 3 on three separate occasions in my life, and each time I gave up before ever having a chance to fire a weapon.

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

#170

Post by bibabaloo »

tombert wrote: post #21

One 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…

For anyone who wants more books that dig into the games industry, all of Jason Schreier's books are fantastic.
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