Carmack: Lord of the Games

seer writes: "This article on Red Herring is a nice look at the interworkings of id software, most specifically their famous employee John Carmack. It delves deeply into the fact that id has stayed a very small company and dabbles with other topics such as Carmack's tendency to stay away from Microsoft 'standards' and the whole DooM ]I[ debacle. An interesting read."

Comments

Re:Oh dear, not again...

[MajroMax]

a common code that can run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems Last time they did this we got Java. And look what it has done for our web browsing experience! Oh wait, you don't like lag?

This is really an unfair comparison -- you're comparing oranges and apple pie.

From a compatibility perspective, Java is all about cross-platform-binary-compatibility. To do that, it essentially needs to emulate a consistent set of machine-interfaces -- that's where the Virtual Machine comes in. Beyond that, Java is also supposed to be a "next generation" "idiot-proof" language, and to that end it sacrificed speed for safety (of code).

Carmack's code is about source compatibility. So far as I know, the primary language for ID Software's 1st-person shooters is C/C++. That language, to the bane of novice programmers everywhere, has a tendency to make absolutely no assumptions for you, and as a result well-written code can be highly efficent [gaining an immediate speed advantage over comparably well-written Java code]. Of course, it does mandate some level of system-speficic code somewhere in there, but a good programmer (like, for example, Carkack) will encapsulate it behind an #IFDEF or two.

The only thing that really stops people from writing cross-platform code is system-specific libraries (Like DirectX). Once your code is built around something that tends to be as fundamental as DirectX, a transplant to another library for a different platform is no easy task.

Carmack's "common code," is therefore merely smart design. As the article says, he shies away from the system-specific libraries, so porting becomes a much easier task.

It gets better.

[dangermouse]

Thanks to my grade school teachers' firm belief in reading comprehension skills, I noticed that the article claims Shrek has characters comprised of 1.5 million polygons, while the new Doom will display images comprised of 250,000 polygons.

Having seen Shrek, I know there is more onscreen at any given moment than a single character.

Those apples are nowhere near the size of those oranges.