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Dave 'Zoid' Kirsch Leaving id Software
Digital_Fiend writes, "Dave 'Zoid' Kirsch (creator of Capture the Flag, among other things) made a plan update saying he's leaving id. Zoid will be working at Retro Studios to make games for Nintendo's Dolphin. We'll miss you, Dave. "
Retro Studios: Dave, how would you like to come and work with us?
Dave: I don't know, I kind of like reinventing the same game over and over, year after year. I really have a great rythm going.
Retro Studios: You get to work with top of the line technology, stuff you PC boys only dream of!
Dave: Hmm, I really don't....
Retro Studios: All the donuts you can eat!
Dave: WOOHOO!
..he was also the guy behind the Q1/Q2 Linux ports.
A t t e n t i o n J o h n C a r m a c k . T h i s i s a r a n s o m n o t e . I f y o u d o n o t r e t u r n Z o i d t o i d , I w i l l b e f o r c e d t o p o u r h o t g r i t s d o w n m y p a n t s . T h a n k y o u .
Quake CTF . . it's not just a game, it's a lifestyle.
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+5 for creativity. It does look like a ransom note ;)
".. and you know what happens when you make an assumption. You make an ass out of you .. and umption."
Threewave CTF's home page isn't http://threewave.com/. It's http://www.captured.com/threewave/ and it hasn't been updated since he went to work for id (if I'm not mistaken).
As always, this comes with the disclaimer that I may be wrong.
(heh, "Dolphin Developer". kinda rolls off the toungue).
We the people demand new-fangled versions of the following Nintendo classics upon the release of the new Dolphin console. Failure to help deliver on these demands will result in an unspeakable loss of personal karma:
- Metroid
- Kid Icarus
- Balloon Fight
- Clu Clu Land
and, for the love of gawd, we DEMAND a Dolphin version of
- Donkey Kong Jr. Math
Nope, I'm afraid not. The moment that Zoid leaves id at the end of this month, Capture the Flag and the Linux ports of Quake revert to him. If you're a windows user like me, you'll just have to delete all instances of CTF in the game directory, but poor linuxs users are going to be Quakeless. Dan
Zoid was the best thing that ever happened to Quake. I remember downloading Quake 1 for the first time, playing a bit, and thinking, "Hey, what a cool 3D engine. Somebody should make a game out of it." Zoid did.
Zoid's Quake 1 CTF took a horrible mess of a game and turned it into an amazing, addictive team event that kept the program on my machine longer than anything else before it. I always thought that the grappling hook was kinda stupid, particularly when you could latch onto someone with it and drain their health down to nothing, but it didn't prevent Q1 CTF from being extremely fun.
Then Quake 2 CTF came along and looked beautiful, but didn't play quite as well. The wide-open spaces allowed low-ping grapplers to fly around ceilings like tarzan and team assaults were replaced by the single LPB monkey-swinging around and running away at high speed. But again, the useful life of the game was extended tenfold by the CTF mod -- without it, Q2 was maps full of brain-dead monsters or mindless deathmatch.
Now we have Quake 3 CTF. The grapple is thankfully history, but the magic is almost gone. I usually find myself playing Unreal Tournament's CTF instead -- let me shoot cool weapons at other soldiers in gritty settings instead of plugging away at big mechanical eyeballs in shiny, brightly-coloured funhouses.
Maybe Quake 3 Arena is too much of a goofy cartoon for even Zoid to save, or maybe he's run out of steam at last. Whatever the case:
Nintendo recently shot themselves in the foot. According to IGN64, Nintendo finally admitted that Dolphin wasn't on schedule, and will be delayed from Fall '2000 to Q3/2001!
This really sucks, because Dolphin would have had the ability to really compete with PS2 (better hardware, better 1st/2nd party developers, lower cost), but now PS2 will truly reign with no competition for over a whole year. Now I know I will definitely be getting a PS2. Nintendo is going to really need something up their sleeves now, and I say this as a long-time Nintendo supporter.
Among other things, Zoid did a lot of the porting and developement of Quake on Linux and the other Unix platforms. I guess they will need to find a Linux programmer to take his job now...
Is that the sound of a thousand Slashdot readers printing their CVs I hear?
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In Glqwcl, ever tried using the numeric keypad in linux? / * - and enter were all bound to the same keycode (space). The non-gl version worked fine, so it was probably a simple change.
I had to work around this (since I use the keypad for fps games) by remapping the keyboard in svgalib's keymaps -- I mapped / to the regular / on the keyboard, * to the regular *, etc.... If you read rec.games.computer.quake.misc, I think there's an old post in there where I described how to do this (ah, here it is ), although it is probably fixed now in all the open source project versions of glqwcl.
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It does look like a ransom note, but don't let any kids click the link!
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I can't begin to say how pumped I am for what this means to the networking of console gaming systems. I mean yes, they're saying "Dolphin/PSX2 will have DSL/Cable/Eth capabilities," but I didn't expect much from them.
:]
Zoid, however, is the key to this. Yes, CTF was cool, yes, his mods are cool, but the coolest thing Zoid has done for all of us was QuakeWorld. Quake 1 was pretty cool, and i was amazed at it, but the internet play wasn't there. You couldn't play very good games on a modem, and the promise of netplay faltered for most of us.
But then..... Oh, then.... Zoid made QuakeWorld, and the world changed for me and millions of others like me. Fast networking code, a reasonable level of playability on a modem...
Thanks Zoid, and keep kicking ass. Let's see some sweet-ass multiplayer on the Dolphin. Someday I wanna sit on my couch in front of the TV and kick esses' ass instead of having to sit at my desk.
I have fond memories of playing CTF in Quake 1---particularily the Expert CTF modification with the offhand grapple and the Thunderwalker version with the cartoon sounds---although Threewave was always good to play. Somehow CTF II always lacked the fun of Threewave CTF and friends.
.. I had many an excellent game in Gloom Castles (the two castle version of Gloom Keep, which is a quake 1 single player map). I remember madly firing the rocket at attackers in this map while our flag carrier swung around the room wildly desperately trying to avoid fire...and pursuing people through the air praying for a midair shot--this all changed in Quake2 where the attackers would just whip out the railgun and knock him out of the sky. There were other good maps, like McKinley Station, the Warzone, and a few others (like one with 3 windtunnels in each base) that have been so long that I can't remember. In mid-98 I got into Team Fortress, and people were leaving Quake1 CTF anyways, so I haven't really played it much since.
.. people use the excuse that id is just a "game engine" company and that "mod makers will make the game better" -- if this is the case why should I pay $70 (CDN) for the game? I don't like this possibly perceived freeloading off of mod makers in order to get a game out the door faster...quite frankly, I believe that Q3A should have been delayed 6 months while some better gameplay modes were added and more maps were made, or if that was not possible, more people should have been hired before to give more polish and features to the game (besides gameplay modes, an easier to use server browser and stats support like UT has built in). id is a fairly small shop compared to Epic (Epic has around 25 people), and it really showed in a comparison of their latest games.
Some of the levels in Threewave CTF were modifications of normal quake 1 levels
Quake3 CTF is probably more true to what CTF probably should be than Quake2 CTF. There shouldn't be a grappling hook in the first place -- Threewave CTF used it because the maps were taken at first from single player, and not suited otherwise for CTF play.
However, I find myself playing Unreal Tournament CTF. After looking at the UT and Q3A demos, I decided to buy UT -- with the extra maps and gameplay modes, there's no way UT is worth $10 less than Q3A, and so IMHO Q3A is way overpriced
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the main reason their games were massively overpriced (compared to, say, playstation) was based on chioce of using faster "carts" that were rom based vs playstations much cheaper cd's.
This accounts for about an extra $10 in the productin costs, paid for by the purchaser, of course...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I've never understood how people can be such rabid devotees of particular consoles. It's even more amazing that someone can read a few sparse press releases and become a disciple of a console that he's never seen, doesn't really know anything about, and that isn't supposed to be available for 18 months. Bizarre.
Dave's moving to Retro because he feels that's the direction he needs to go, to stay on top of things in the industry. He did all that was humanly possibly for id, and anyone who doubts his abilities is obviously without a clue. id chose not to include his maps in the q3 release, and he was disappointed. He wanted a greater role in the production of q3, but was satisfied in doing his best in the role he had. His decision is his to make, and everyone's presumptions mean little to him or those around him. He knows what he's doing, and no one can dispute what he's done for gaming. Judging by all the CTF clones out there, I'd say he started quite the revolution in multiplayer networking. Give him the respect he deserves. For those of us who DO know him, we support him completely, and know he's doing the right thing. TikTok
All I see and hear are people raggin on "normal" death match. Maybe I haven't played quake[I,II,III] to the point of eye-bleeding hypnosis, but I still have fun playing straight or team DM. Am I the only one? Well, from the full servers I see every time I play, no. I'm no newbie, but I'm no thresh either, and every time I play, I have loads of fun, as I'm sure countless others do.
CTF and the other mods are fun too, but different types of fun. I doubt all of the millions of copies of Q1 sales were directly due to CTF. Saying that quake1 was "not a game until CTF came along" or "mindless DM" is insulting not only to me, but all the other "normal" DM'ers.
The Q3/UT comparison is another thread altogether...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Some more specs can be found here. The gist is:
Needless to say, no boxes have been unveiled so it's all still vapor in that sense.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I had talked with Zoid about it a few times over the years, and I think he is making a pretty good decision.
It wasn't always clear from the outside, but Zoid was a remote contractor, not an employee. It was a low key relationship that worked out well for all of us. He stayed in canada and basically worked on whatever he liked, because I thought he had pretty good judgement. He had responsibility for the linux ports and the CTF code, but much of his time was his to allocate as he wanted.
With Loki now picking up the maintenance of the linux port (as well as my steadily increasing involvement with linux), and a new game design starting at Id, his choice was basically to either go develop a brand new Q3 mod by himself, or go work for one of the many gaming companies that had been trying to hire him.
We weren't interested in bringin on another core programmer at id, especially another one with immigration hassles (we have had enough issues with that for a small company). We would have been happy to continue the current arrangement indefinately, but he wanted to get out of the holding pattern.
Another thing he mentioned that I am sympathetic to is the desire to get a bit out of the community limelight. Being a public figure of some note isn't always all it is cracked up to be.
We are parting on the best of terms (leaving right AFTER a project completes is the considerate way to go). He is going to finish up the Quake2 linux updates (better X/GLX support), even if he has to complete the work from his new job.
John Carmack
So does that mean that you consider Brian Hook inconsiderate for leaving before Quake 3 was out the door? Or was Brian correct that HIS part of the developement process was complete?