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Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

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Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#171

Post by hyperman1 »

ben7799 wrote: post #135
Eisenstein wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good chance it was John Carmack, probably one the top 10 programmers of all time. He basically built the Quake engine himself. There is a pretty decent analysis of it here: * https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php I recommend checking it out. EDIT: i was thinking of the analysis done on Quake 2, which is more about the engine: * https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php while the one about is regarding th…

Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something…

Carmack's main superpowers seem to be tons of hard work, not raw intelligence

1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up.

2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels on it, while the integer code spit out the pixels.

3) Attention to detail. The doom span renderer was sub pixel precise, which was pretty unique for its time. It looked better in a hard to define way.

4) Code quality. Doom and quake are very readable, very portable and heavily documented. The average 1-person codebase tends to be messy and undocumented, as nobody else ever takes a look. On the other hand, plenty of fixmes in there. It was unabashedly special cased where he could get away with it.

5) He consumed whatever idea he could get. BSPs were an obscure research trick before he took them and ran with it.

He had huge holes in his 3D knowledge when writing doom, as he admits himself. He didn't care until quake forced him to level up. But he could look in the mirror, say he needed to do better, and learn the extra things when he had to.

I don't know if Carmack is that much smarter than the average HNer, but he surely works a lot harder. And that's an even better compliment, in my book

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#173

Post by mrob »

RobotToaster wrote: post #62
JD557 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can even tell that from the quality of Quake's levels which start with beautifully crafted and intricate levels, and as you approach the end, progress into "whatever, let's just ship it, this is gonna sell" kind of levels that were mostly just filler to pad the play time. This rings really true to me. I only had played the shareware version of quake and only recently played the full game, and the second half re…

They probably didn't expect many people to get more than half way through the game.

You can play the episodes in any order, so I expect most people tried all of them.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#174

Post by mmh0000 »

cubefox wrote: post #82
divan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried it on Quest 2 headset. Quite playable in VR!

Really? I thought such shooters with quick movement don't work in VR.

They work REALLY well. Ever since getting my HTC Vive in 2017, and recently upgrading to a Valve Index, I haven't played a non-vr FPS game.

Check out

  PavlovVR (CS:GO ripoff): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPMllOHfxCc

  Serious Sam VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Qgx70_P8E

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#175

Post by saltcured »

Eisenstein wrote: post #156
ben7799 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something…

> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. If a musician had a noticeable impact on culture and was prolific, I don't see why we can't put them in a bracket of [in top #]. The ranking is really just to illustrate my respect for his work, accomplishments, insightful communications, and continued relevance as well as impact on my life and those around me. You can call that 'dumb' if you like, but I am human…

To me, Carmack equates more to an engineer who designed wild equipment used by sound engineers and musicians. Aside from Torvalds or Wozniak, I think most programmers are unsung, regardless of how much their products impact the world.

Most programmers are quickly forgotten if they were ever known in the first place. In terms of cultural impact, think of the programmers behind our PC or mobile operating systems, major consumer app categories like spreadsheets, word processors, photo or video editing, etc. Of course some nerds of computing history can cite folks behind all these, but it is niche trivia to most of the population.

It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. Who gets the credit instead? Usually an executive or entrepreneur gets the credit. Sometimes this person programmed early on, but often they either transitioned to management or started there and other programmers were responsible for delivering the product we eventually know.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#176

Post by paulryanrogers »

nailer wrote: post #138
hardware2win wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>probably one the top 10 programmers of all time By what metric? Popularity? PR? Net worth? Complex software? Competitive programming? Impact? For every "top" SE there are tens of similarly skilled engineers that you have never heard of

He popularised BSP for FPS which meant doom ran faster than SystemShock, despite having more complex level geometry

Was Doom's geometry more complex? No room over room, no slopes, vertical axis was awkward. Feels like apples and oranges, even before considering the gameplay was also very distinct between them.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#177

Post by ehaliewicz2 »

vinyl7 wrote: post #106
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some really big innovations happening in e.g. rendering like that; I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity and work involved in just Nanite is 10x that of the whole Quake engine. Similarly there's the work nvidia is doing, using AI technology to upscale graphics instead of rendering things at 4K.

Hobbyists have already made their own implementation of Nanite. It's not that complicated.

It has been over a year since the algorithm has been explained in quite a bit of detail.

Hobbyists make complicated things quite regularly, although I don't know about 10x quake.

10x a quake for modern hardware, maybe (could be quite simple)

10x software rendered dos quake with loads of asm, probably not.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#179

Post by at-fates-hands »

hyperman1 wrote: post #171
ben7799 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something…

Carmack's main superpowers seem to be tons of hard work, not raw intelligence 1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up. 2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels o…

Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. As long as he had both, he could remain in the zone indefinitely, which is pretty crazy when think about all the things he accomplished that you listed.

Re: Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

#180

Post by boredemployee »

gambiting wrote: post #137
boredemployee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It was extremely difficult to play for newcomers. You almost didn't even get a chance to frag old school players once because of the skill discrepancy. I think games say a lot about generations. In the old days you had to persist a lot and be a bit of a "hacker" to play Quake, or at least have basic computer skills. I remember how difficult it was to configure Qizmo for Quake World. Nowadays everything is ready fo…

>>Nowadays everything is ready for you to play and even if you are a beginner you can play with the most experienced. In Quake you can spend 1 year playing and not win a single match. I mean......saying this as a game developer - this is a good thing. You want people to come in and enjoy the game, and not be frustrated by it. Obviously there should still be a mode somewhere where you can truly test your skills and wh…

I 100% agree with you, thanks for your point of view.
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