4 ms·
aug 8: Romero is now gone from id. There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects. I can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am try
by AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
aug 8:
Romero is now gone from id.
There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects.
I can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am trying to acomplish,
but all I promise is my best effort.
John Carmack
I think this brief, internal message to staff following Romero's departure is more interesting than the rest of this sheet.
- pvg 10y agoIt's from his public .plan file, I think, not an internal message to staff but the public announcement. Carmack just didn't do 'our incredible journey'
- anc84 10y agoThat's correct. One could think of it as a blog post.
- sehugg 10y agoI remember typing "finger johnc@idsoftware.com" every couple of days.
- anonbanker 10y agoor just reading his .plan on shugashack.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI actually tried this. It doesn't work. id still seem to be running fingerd though...
- voltagex_ 10y agoSee if it'll return anything if you ask for all online users? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1288#section-2.5.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1288#section-2.5.1
- Bromskloss 10y agoCould people outside their internal computer system read his .plan file?
- sveiss 10y agoYes, they ran a public finger server (which was then scraped and put on the web by third-parties).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- panic 10y agoThe book Masters of Doom is a good read if you're interested in the backstory here.
- jzelinskie 10y agoThis was very cool to read after having read this book, but never actually read the .plan files before. Kind of an "aha" moment.
- dleslie 10y agoAnd what's telling is that Carmack follows it up with a long, grandiose statement about his future project; making him appear somewhat dishonest.
- pvg 10y agoHe specifically makes no promises. QuakeWorld was released, more or less as described just five months later in December 1996.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, the master server idea kinda died (partly for technical reasons, i.e. authentication was hard, and the server kept dropping because of unreliable networks, and partly because people stopped wanting to play, afraid every game would drop their score) , so it wound up just being a better Quake network client. But that was still pretty revolutionary.
- pvg 10y agoThe master (meta) server sort of happened, it was just GameSpy. Global scoring and stat keeping didn't but then there was NetGames USA a bit later although it always seemed a bit pointless to me for FPS games.
- strictnein 10y agoYep, I was a GameSpy beta tester. There was a partnership of sorts that ended up forming sometime in 1996. We ended up taking part in a couple of QuakeWorld beta tests later that year. I remember how the networking code was remarkably better, even on a dialup connection with 200-300ms pings.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoEh. I think it's more interesting that this predicted and explained an intent to implement pretty much everything that modern gaming services like Steam provide. Save voice chat and achievements, obviously.
- rasz_pl 10y agoIt takes a special state of mind to run around telling stories about being hired by US military while 8 years old to hack on nuclear launch computers (script to War Games), which is what Brenda Romero repeats in interviews about her husband.