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The Technology Behind ID's Games
orac2 writes: "The current issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on the groundbreaking technology behind iD Software's games, from the days of Commander Keen through to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Graphics technologies covered include the original 2-D buffer trick that made side-scrolling games on the PC feasible, as well as the more modern Raycasting and Binary Space Partition Tree techniques. Carmack is quoted extensively."
I mean, hes not only a very good programmer, he looks like a computer dork, has a phat car, and actually cares what the community thinks about his games. As was the case when there was such a backlash about fixing the bug in the engine of quake2 that produced the strafe jump, he changed it, uproar ensued, he changed it back.
Carmack embodies what every programmer and any kind of computer company should strive to be.
Carmack has embraced the platform-generic opengl, and even coded his engine to be compatible on every major os. I love you carmack, please have my love child.
I MEAN C'MON hes the one responsible for such things as the infamous railgun, and the hilarious warnings about piracy on my copied version of wolf3d, which i still play on my 386 laptop.
This one is particularly good: about binary space partition tree.
ARRG (offtopic)
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So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
C code is C code. No new languages, techniques, or processes will ever replace an experienced architect. Crap passes through an IDE every bit as well as the good stuff.
I have a volunteer who works with me. The kid is brilliant, and has programming mojo pouring out of his eyebrows. But there are so many debugging techniques, algorythems, and habits that he doesn't have. (Yet.)
I'm not saying older in neccissarily better. Experience is the key. 20 years of experience is 20 years of experience whether you start at 7 or 27. In my case it's 7.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Basically, what I got out of this article was that John Carmack is almost single-handedly responsible for all of my non-productive time over the past 10 years. Thanks John!
"There were critical points in the evolution of this stuff," Carmack says, "getting into first person at all, then getting into arbitrary 3-D, and then getting into hardware acceleration....But the critical goals have been met. There's still infinite refinement that we can do on all these different things, but...we can build an arbitrary representational world at some level of fidelity. We can be improving our fidelity and our special effects and all that. But we have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world."
This article highlights how far we have come as game developers. id has been the "poster child" of the game development community, with the majority of other game developers following their lead. Doom III will continue this trend.
The next generation of games is going to be outstanding!
This article gives a great view of where we can be going with new technology. How realistic will games be in 10 years? My guess is that the graphic reality will become nearly indistinguishable from real life, but the greatest innovations will be in game-play. Interfacing with a keyboard/mouse/joystick isn't realistic. Voice control and force-feedback-like technologies are the way of the future, if our computing power can support it.
Kudos to Carmack on 10 years of FPS game design. Here's to the next 10!
Good article, but the Commander Keen scrolling trick was old news by then. Lots of Apple II, Atari ST, and Amiga scrolling games did the same thing. Impressive? At the time, yes. But let's not get too carried away with giving Carmack credit for everything.
Age has nothing to do with it, it's all about experience and continuing to learn. Older programmers are better as long as they continue to learn and maintain curiosity about "new stuff". Experience + current knowledge > current knowledge. The myth of older programmers not being as good is really that many older programmers stop learning. For a while they are able to outperform younger programmers due to experience but eventually their laziness catches up and they being to underperform.
Our Carmack, who art in Texas,
hallowed be thy textures.
Thy software come, thy games be done,
on my b0xen as it is at E3.
Give us this day, our daily FPS.
And forgive us our camping,
as we gun down those who camp against us.
Lead us not into a spawn site,
but just give me the damn BFG.
For the gaming market, the GeForce,
and the booth babes are yours, now and until payday.
I joined Softdisk in 1995, a few years after the id guys left. The company was stunned by the success of Wolfenstein and Doom, and by Duke Nukem - also born of Softdisk alumni. It was basically a subscription software company, selling a package (card games, screen savers, etc.) on disk monthly. It was a good model for the 80's.
Softdisk tried to produce a couple of games, one called Greed (later In Pursuit of Greed) which was basically a 3D Doom-clone shooter. There was some neat technology (e.g. curved surfaces), but the art was...uh, well weak. The gameplay was decent, but there were some bugs to stomp and the ship date slipped...and slipped...and slipped. It was released, but didn't live up to the hype. The game was torn to shreds in the reviews. There was a second 3D shooter - developed totally in house, though it was basically a one-man project. The lead (only) programmer left, so it was shelved.
Softdisk finally shut down its on-disk-monthly subscription software and became an ISP/web development company. It was a necessary move, but sad since the company kicked a lot of ass in the 80's with LoadStar and Big Blue Disk.
For those interested, I ran Softdisk's online download software stores on CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL while another dude took care of eWorld. We were selling Commander Keen, Dangerous Dave, and a host of other early games the id guys produced at Softdisk. Last I checked, they were still being sold (at $19.95 a pop, even).
Not to troll or anything -- but it did seem quite amazing. I keep thinking he was like 27 or some such.
...right...?
:)
Well, it's not as if 31 is that old... I mean, I'm 31, and I'm not "old"...
Flight Simulator pioneered this sort of limited 3D. Bruce Artwick did the original Flight Simulator on machines that didn't have enough power to fill the whole screen with a solid color in one refresh. He wrote a book about how he did it in 1985. The pain, the agony...
Artwick seems to have dropped out of game development, but Carmack keeps pushing what's possible with available hardware.
Oh really, is that so? Hmm, where did I see that, oh right, IN THE ARTICLE.
Profiting from improvements in computer speed and memory, Carmack began working on how to draw polygons with more arbitrary shapes than Wolfenstein's trapezoids. "It was looking like [the graphics engine] wouldn't be fast enough," he recalls, "so we had to come up with a new approach....I knew that to be fast, we still had to have strictly horizontal floors and vertical walls." The answer was a technique known as binary space partitioning (BSP). Henry Fuchs, Zvi Kedem, and Bruce Naylor had popularized BSP techniques in 1980 while at Bell Labs to render 3-D models of objects on screen.
(emphasis mine)
Perhaps READING THE ARTICLE would have saved you the trouble of trying to show us how smart you are.
Everything's stolen these days. Take the FAX machine. Why that's nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!
</abesimpson>
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Why people worship him, especially now, is beyond me.
Well, ummm, you have a go then. Particularly at the 1996 stuff - you have a P75 and 8Mb, render a 3d texture mapped scene at 20fps.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
It's *id* Software. Not ID. Not iD. id. as in the psychology term.
id
Pronunciation: 'id
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from Latin, it
Date: 1924
: one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that is completely unconscious and is the source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives.
No sig for you!!
I remember Al talking about the lawsuit and the source code. One poker night (which I played badly) Dan Tobias went on a long rant (suprise) about the whole ordeal. I share his opinion that moonlight code belonged to the programmer, not the company.
Absolutely nothing came of the source code. It sat in Jim's office unused.
I was fairly pleased with how that article turned out - when I first heard about it, I dreaded seeing a trivialized simplification of the issues, but it turned out as representative as you can be in that space.
However, I really dislike discussions of the attribution of techniques to a particular programmer. Everything is derived from things before it, and I make no claims of originality. I would say that one of my talents is the ability to be aware of what sources are feeding into my work, and be able to backtrack to them. Also, there are always lots of other possible answers for any given problem that can be made to work. BSP vs sector list, Portals vs PVS vs scan line occlusion, tilted constant Z rasterization vs block subdivision vs background divides, etc. Looked at in the proper perspective, individual techniques just aren't all that important. Sometimes it sounds like "Dude, he INVENTED needle nose pliers!!!"
Heck, I somewhat deride the very concept of originality. Creativity is just synthesis without the introspection. Lots of people will catch on that and start a rant about how Id games aren't original, but they are missing the point - it is possible to set out and develop something that will be received as "original" without ever having an "original" idea spring into your mind.
The best way to get answers is to just keep working the problem, recognizing when you are stalled, and directing the search pattern. Many of the popular notions of innovation and creativity are in some ways cop-outs that keep people from being as effective as they could be. The little document I wrote about developing a part of the shadow algorithm for Doom that Nvidia has on their website was a pretty good example of my process. Don't just wait for The Right Thing to strike you - try everything you think might even be in the right direction, so you can collect clues about the nature of the problem.
John Carmack
To add another perspective:
The mathematicians I have met (I'm one of them) by-and-large feel that new math ideas are *discovered* instaed of *created*. The distinction is important. Truth and algorithms already exist, we're just trying to *find* them and sort through the crap. Just because no human has previously written down some piece of truth or an algorithm before you do, doesn't mean you invented that truth or algorithm.
We're all standing on the shoulders of reality, trying to decode what we see. John Carmack's comment about struggling with a problem in order to understand it seems very much in line with this view, and very much inline with the academic research process. Academics don't get research done just by sitting around, trying to be creative. We do research by repeatedly struggling with a problem until we figure out which defects in our brain prevented earlier understanding.
-Paul Komarek