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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

#271

Post by account42 »

rzzzt wrote: post #20
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.

Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume

Shadow volumes turned out to be a dead end technology though because they can only do unrealistically hard shadows.

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

#272

Post by account42 »

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.

Stencil shadows never had a chance as the primary technique for games targeting realistic graphics as they inherently cannot do soft shadows.

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

#273

Post by account42 »

ryandrake wrote: post #215
mikeocool wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying they didn't have an impact -- just that it's worth debating whether the impact is truly a net positive for society on a grand scale, particularly if we're going to give them a pass on less than stellar behavior. Zuckerberg likely has similar tendencies, should he be given a pass for making social media such a large part of our society?

A lot of people on HN confuse "large impact" with "positive impact."

It's not just HN - history remembers those who had large impacts, not only those who made the world better.

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

#274

Post by account42 »

Jtarii wrote: post #140
Drupon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think he is talking more about the malaria foundation.

I don't think everyone is going to see his meddling with the health policies in other countries as a positive as a whole, especially for projects that very well could have disastrous unintended consequences.

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

#275

Post by account42 »

curiousObject wrote: post #159

Quake was an incredible leap forward in desktop games. But Sandy Peterson is probably right, saying that it ‘Ruined’ the company - as an artistic creative force anyway. The breakup of the brilliant and well-balanced ID Software team was caused by the trauma of developing Quake. Romero and others were forced out or quit. This cut the heart out of the team, despite all of Carmack’s drive and technical brilliance That i…

> That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine

How is that telling? Source is based on Q1 instead of Q2 because Valve decided to keep working on the HL1 engine (GoldSrc) which already had extensive modifications from Q1 instead of rebasing all that work on Q2 or another engine. It's a perfectly valid decision irrespective of the quality of the Q2 engine.

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

#276

Post by account42 »

furyofantares wrote: post #68
ryandvm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because X is a dumb name

Yeah but it's a lot easier to turn an x.com link into an xcancel link so you can actually read it logged out .

Unfortunately xcancel has annoying bot protection these days so for individual tweets x.com is actually more usable IMO. Not that xcancel is the only remaining working nitter instance but I'm not aware of others that both work and keep their bot checks reasonable for non-Chrome users.

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

#277

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

bartread wrote: post #249
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.

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 lac…

Yeah, they could do a lot more in it with true 3D maps, but the design was all brown. The bosses were boring - the first one is kinda cool, the others not (IIRC episodes 2 and 3 were just kind of standard enemies); all three of Doom's were scary, especially the Cyberdemon when you can hear it roaring and the noise of it walking around.

The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.

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

#278

Post by pezezin »

bartread wrote: post #249
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.

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 lac…

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

That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.

Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.

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

#279

Post by shifto »

tombert wrote: post #127
stuxnet79 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career…

I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad . It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game. Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.

Deus Ex is such a sad story though. I really loved the first one but then was dissapointed by Invisible War. Fast forward a decade and there is Deus Ex Human Revolution which hit all the right notes for me. Fell in love with the series all over again. Mankind Divided was everything I wanted from the sequel until it just stopped. Read all the novels, even played The Fall and love everything about the universe. Shame how it died without a resolution to the Jensen story.

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

#280

Post by stasomatic »

bartread wrote: post #249
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.

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 lac…

I think it's about the first thing that got you hooked. My Macintosh LC II with a 486sx daughtercard couldn't play Doom well. By the time I sorted my PC situation out, there was Quake.

For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)

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