11 ms·

We owe a lot to John Carmack in many ways - but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped

We owe a lot to John Carmack in many ways - but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. I never ended up going into games myself, but in no small part I owe my career to him. As well as the Doom book, his plan files are a fascinating time capsule to go back over, particularly if you 'came of age' during that golden age of PC games development. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
Curious that you think it was a golden age.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look at, say, 2000-2010 or even 2010 to now it seems things have slowed down - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    I would agree to the 90s having huge fundamental leaps. For more recently, on the innovative technology side you do have VR, SSDs, steady performance increases across the board. But I would say the biggest leaps have come with better code and asset generation rather than brute hardware improvements. PBR was a massive change in the way assets are generated and how real they can look and feel. Likewise games are reaching really impressive levels of mechanical fidelity and visual depth. GTAV still looks amazing today, and that's down to the sheer amount of unique assets and texture variance in the game. Games now tend to flourish due to gameplay depth, scale and freedom over every impressive visuals. Which is great.
  - pizza234 8y ago
    I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in the next decade(s), and it will require a long time to be able to have a judgment of what characterized video games/developemnt in each era.
    - twelvechairs 8y ago
      For me the early 90s with the new technology came a lot of experimentation and new kinds of games. For example one of my favourite developers Bullfrog made games like Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper. All radically different game styles and all excellent games. The late 90s and 00s to me was all dominant single games (e.g. Starcraft, Quake, Halflife). A lot of it was about having the latest graphics, with big studios winning. And spinoff games were done with an 'engine', which often made them look/feel/respond similar to the original. You also saw a lot of sequels and series taking over from new game concepts because of this. And most of them were in a few genres (FPS and RTS especially). I agree its a good time now though, we are so flooded with different types of games that you have to do something interesting to get noticed.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graphic adventure games in the 80s/90s). At best they got some ersatz narrative qualities, but nothing to write home about.
      - froasty 8y ago
        Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents. Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter. Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid." I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1] Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3] Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded. --- [0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-The-Design http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T... [1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-218.html https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21... [2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/ https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/
- kar1181 8y ago
  As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet connections and powerful general purpose sound adapters. Today we have orders of magnitude more computing power, but essentially they are powering the same experiences, albeit far more polished. If we look back four years, 2014, not much has really changed. The big game releases indeed are the same games (in the 90s they'd have been called mission packs). The magic of experiencing something completely brand new, completely alien and magical, has gone away. Though, I am hopeful VR/AR is going to deliver that again. I don't know how far off it is, but it would be fitting if it's Carmack and Abrash behind it. Again.
  - wowtip 8y ago
    I wonder sometimes, what could be built using today's tech if it was focused like Amigas back in the day with a single hardware spec and a dedicated OS just for that platform. Without regard to backwards compability in OS, like BeOS at the time. What would a revolutionary Amiga 1000 look like in 2018? With modern hardware and latest OS/system ideas. Gaming consoles could be considered examples of this, but they are kind of single purpose. Maybe a topic for an AskHN, for a rainy day.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      The three distinctive features of the Amiga: - revolutionary custom graphics hardware - better sound hardware than competitors - pre-emptive multitasking Therefore, if I was attempting something like this today, I would: - make the graphics preeminent in the system. In other words, keep the graphics card and throw away the legacy CPU. Let it drive PCI devices. - on its own, doing that makes it much harder to program, so put considerable work into making the instruction set and programmer's model open and well documented - find a DAW engineer and let them build the audio subsystem with an obsessive focus on low latency. Let's aim for no more than 10 samples latency between input and output processing and see where that gets us. - full multitasking in which nothing is ever allowed to block anything else unrelated, through resource reservation (qv the Nemesis research operating system). Having an Electron app on the system should not impair anything else, and the system's default editor should also be focused on low-latency. - apps are by default fully security partitioned from each other. The operating system would maintain a CRDT-based record-orientated personal data storage system, incorporating lessons from PalmOS. This gives both native sync and automatic persistence across power-off. - low latency non-USB keyboard and mouse. PS/2 would actually work but we could go for something really surprising like gigabit Ethernet or optical TOSLINK. (Low latency is a good example of a feature which is extremely hard to retrofit and you end up redesigning the system around it).
- huffmsa 8y ago
  Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play. I spin up OG Doom and have a rocking good time. Same goes for N64 games. They're still good. The same cannot be said for games from a decade ago. No one has a passion for COD4. Hence, the Golden Era title.
  - crummy 8y ago
    Doesn't CoD4 still have a pretty large following? I think a lot of people view it as the peak of the series.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    CoD 4 is widely recognized as the last good CoD, and arguably, the best one. CoD was and is huge. Not among your peers, but among youth. We're no longer in "the gaming scene" as old farts, and > Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play. Is pure nostalgia.
- pjc50 8y ago
  It was my teenagerhood, of course it was a golden age. More seriously, the rate of technical change in games development was huge during the 90s. We went from 3D being barely possible without textures to Half-Life 1's cinematic-style monorail introduction (which was visually better than most of the "full motion video" we'd seen in games up to that point). Graphics accelerators became a consumer product. The development of the tech also made a wide open space for innovation in art direction - each new game looked noticeably different as well, in a way that's been attenuated among all the brown gritty shooters of today. Doom also popularised multiplayer gaming (not really a thing on PCs at that point, limited to splitscreen on consoles). And it was the first game I encountered that really embraced modding - the Doom editors allowed the re-use and re-mix of the game assets into your own levels and all sorts of strange doom-flavoured experiences.
- matwood 8y ago
  For PC gaming, the move from pre to post Voodoo cards was a revolution leap I have yet to see again in that space. Everything since has been evolutionary. Carmack and glQuake were one of things leading the charge. Each new game, new video card, new processor at the time brought so much new power and excitement. It was the golden age.
- danesparza 8y ago
  Doom was the first networked PC game I played. It was one of the first of it's kind. It opened up a world of connected gaming that lasted at least a decade. I also think it began a golden age.
- barrkel 8y ago
  It was a golden age for the first person immersive simulation game. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Thief, System Shock II, Half-Life, Deus Ex - there was a period of classics with large improvements and innovation from one game to the next, where game design space was explored just as the technology to render it became available. First person immersive sims are generally best played on the PC. When consoles that were able to do decent graphics for a reasonable period (i.e. the pace of hardware evolution slowed) came into their own, third person control worked better with joypads, and for commercial reasons, PC games often ended up as a second-rate ports of console games, with compromised controls. You really need a mouse for first person.
  - dfxm12 8y ago
    first person immersive simulation game FPS stands for First Person Shooter. The games you're listing don't simulate much, even if some of those games have RPG elements.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - barrkel 8y ago
      I know what FPS stands for, but Thief most definitely isn't a shooter, and System Shock II is less of a shooter than a creepy exploration game. Deus Ex is half an RPG. FPS is too reductive. I'm using the phrase immersive sim in the same way as these articles: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/29/dark-futures-part-1-randy-smith/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/29/dark-futures-par... https://www.pcgamer.com/history-of-the-best-immersive-sims/ https://www.pcgamer.com/history-of-the-best-immersive-sims/ See also Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim HTH
      - dfxm12 8y ago
        No, it doesn't really help explain how Doom, Wolfenstein, or Quake, etc., are lumped in together with games like Thief as simulations. FPS is certainly not reductive. A game can be more than one genre, but sometimes an FPS is just an FPS, and more than half the games you listed are pretty much just an FPS.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  It's not surprising at all - what comes after the very early stages of development of many areas in science and technology are indeed usually could be called "a golden age." (In math it was the period of around 100 years after Newton; in physics - the second half of the 19th century plus the first half of the 20th.) As far as computers and software, we are now also way past the golden age, unfortunately...
newest_user_ 8y ago
Is there documentation on the structure of the contents? Why is it a list of * followed by + and then a list with no prefix? See https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/master/by_day/johnc_plan_19960222.txt https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... as an example.
- partycoder 8y ago
  Does not seem to have a particular structure, but it's a .plan file, which is a file that is displayed when a user is "fingered" (see finger protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
- valczir 8y ago
  https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ There's a table in the above link, as well as a few more details
Tobani 8y ago
I certainly learned a lot by writing Quake 3 Arena mods and unreal tournament mods. Even if I wasn't make huge changes just the confidence that I could dive into an existing set of code, figure something out and make something happen gave me a lot of confidence for things in the future.
lgl 8y ago
At a time when pretty much every regular pc and internet connection sucked, here's what is definitely an historical moment in online gaming. The birth of Quakeworld, the internet optimized quake engine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/33ae52fdba46aa0d1abfed6fc7598233748541c0/by_day/johnc_plan_19960802.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar... Note JC's comment that "this is just my pet research project". If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw. So really, thanks John Carmack for the countless wasted hours :)
- MrZongle2 8y ago
  If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw. Amen. Especially when you consider that a massive number of players, such as myself, were using dial-up (56k) modems. Quakeworld made multiplayer go from a slideshow to comparable to single-player performance, albeit with hiccups.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
  As I just posted above, this strikes home for me. For me it wasn't just the client-side prediction, it was that there was also a linux client for quake world.
  - lgl 8y ago
    Yeah I remember that. It was also at about that time that I started using and learning linux. Back then, just managing to setup XFree86 correctly was like a huge personal victory and running quake there was really the cherry on top. I seem to recall having to actually input a bunch of numbers/frequencies taken from my crappy CRT monitor's specsheet into the X config and basically bruteforcing it until it worked. "Good times"!
    - SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
      Ahh yes, x11 mode-lines: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline) Those were particularly thorny for me too, when I was getting started with linux (and was still a newbie with computers in most respects). "Good times" indeed :)
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
> ... but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. Never really realized it until now, but this is true for me. The original Quake, in its heyday, is what sparked my interest in Linux. Linux then sparked my interest in, well... more Linux - and gave me a new direction for my eventual shift into engineering. It really shaped my entire career. I had heard somehow, somewhere that you could squeak out slightly better frame rates and ping times in Quake, if you used this alternative OS called Linux (which really wasn't true, in retrospect). And so that began my quest, which triggered a cascade of deep dives into linux and its community for me. Everything from installation issues and troubleshooting, to compiling kernel modules (and everything in between). I even ended up dialoging with the driver developer for one of those modules (not yet in the kernel). A bug had surfaced - he actually fixed it and sent me a patch. So then I learned how to patch a driver too. One of the best "customer" experiences I've ever had, really :) Ironically, I might have ended up in game development had there never been a linux port for quake :P

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

Curious that you think it was a golden age.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look at, say, 2000-2010 or even 2010 to now it seems things have slowed down - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- ehnto 8y ago
  I would agree to the 90s having huge fundamental leaps. For more recently, on the innovative technology side you do have VR, SSDs, steady performance increases across the board. But I would say the biggest leaps have come with better code and asset generation rather than brute hardware improvements. PBR was a massive change in the way assets are generated and how real they can look and feel. Likewise games are reaching really impressive levels of mechanical fidelity and visual depth. GTAV still looks amazing today, and that's down to the sheer amount of unique assets and texture variance in the game. Games now tend to flourish due to gameplay depth, scale and freedom over every impressive visuals. Which is great.
- pizza234 8y ago
  I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in the next decade(s), and it will require a long time to be able to have a judgment of what characterized video games/developemnt in each era.
  - twelvechairs 8y ago
    For me the early 90s with the new technology came a lot of experimentation and new kinds of games. For example one of my favourite developers Bullfrog made games like Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper. All radically different game styles and all excellent games. The late 90s and 00s to me was all dominant single games (e.g. Starcraft, Quake, Halflife). A lot of it was about having the latest graphics, with big studios winning. And spinoff games were done with an 'engine', which often made them look/feel/respond similar to the original. You also saw a lot of sequels and series taking over from new game concepts because of this. And most of them were in a few genres (FPS and RTS especially). I agree its a good time now though, we are so flooded with different types of games that you have to do something interesting to get noticed.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graphic adventure games in the 80s/90s). At best they got some ersatz narrative qualities, but nothing to write home about.
    - froasty 8y ago
      Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents. Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter. Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid." I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1] Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3] Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded. --- [0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-The-Design http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T... [1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-218.html https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21... [2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/ https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/
kar1181 8y ago
As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet connections and powerful general purpose sound adapters. Today we have orders of magnitude more computing power, but essentially they are powering the same experiences, albeit far more polished. If we look back four years, 2014, not much has really changed. The big game releases indeed are the same games (in the 90s they'd have been called mission packs). The magic of experiencing something completely brand new, completely alien and magical, has gone away. Though, I am hopeful VR/AR is going to deliver that again. I don't know how far off it is, but it would be fitting if it's Carmack and Abrash behind it. Again.
- wowtip 8y ago
  I wonder sometimes, what could be built using today's tech if it was focused like Amigas back in the day with a single hardware spec and a dedicated OS just for that platform. Without regard to backwards compability in OS, like BeOS at the time. What would a revolutionary Amiga 1000 look like in 2018? With modern hardware and latest OS/system ideas. Gaming consoles could be considered examples of this, but they are kind of single purpose. Maybe a topic for an AskHN, for a rainy day.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    The three distinctive features of the Amiga: - revolutionary custom graphics hardware - better sound hardware than competitors - pre-emptive multitasking Therefore, if I was attempting something like this today, I would: - make the graphics preeminent in the system. In other words, keep the graphics card and throw away the legacy CPU. Let it drive PCI devices. - on its own, doing that makes it much harder to program, so put considerable work into making the instruction set and programmer's model open and well documented - find a DAW engineer and let them build the audio subsystem with an obsessive focus on low latency. Let's aim for no more than 10 samples latency between input and output processing and see where that gets us. - full multitasking in which nothing is ever allowed to block anything else unrelated, through resource reservation (qv the Nemesis research operating system). Having an Electron app on the system should not impair anything else, and the system's default editor should also be focused on low-latency. - apps are by default fully security partitioned from each other. The operating system would maintain a CRDT-based record-orientated personal data storage system, incorporating lessons from PalmOS. This gives both native sync and automatic persistence across power-off. - low latency non-USB keyboard and mouse. PS/2 would actually work but we could go for something really surprising like gigabit Ethernet or optical TOSLINK. (Low latency is a good example of a feature which is extremely hard to retrofit and you end up redesigning the system around it).
huffmsa 8y ago
Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play. I spin up OG Doom and have a rocking good time. Same goes for N64 games. They're still good. The same cannot be said for games from a decade ago. No one has a passion for COD4. Hence, the Golden Era title.
- crummy 8y ago
  Doesn't CoD4 still have a pretty large following? I think a lot of people view it as the peak of the series.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  CoD 4 is widely recognized as the last good CoD, and arguably, the best one. CoD was and is huge. Not among your peers, but among youth. We're no longer in "the gaming scene" as old farts, and > Games from that era are still fun and enjoyable to pick up and play. Is pure nostalgia.
pjc50 8y ago
It was my teenagerhood, of course it was a golden age. More seriously, the rate of technical change in games development was huge during the 90s. We went from 3D being barely possible without textures to Half-Life 1's cinematic-style monorail introduction (which was visually better than most of the "full motion video" we'd seen in games up to that point). Graphics accelerators became a consumer product. The development of the tech also made a wide open space for innovation in art direction - each new game looked noticeably different as well, in a way that's been attenuated among all the brown gritty shooters of today. Doom also popularised multiplayer gaming (not really a thing on PCs at that point, limited to splitscreen on consoles). And it was the first game I encountered that really embraced modding - the Doom editors allowed the re-use and re-mix of the game assets into your own levels and all sorts of strange doom-flavoured experiences.
matwood 8y ago
For PC gaming, the move from pre to post Voodoo cards was a revolution leap I have yet to see again in that space. Everything since has been evolutionary. Carmack and glQuake were one of things leading the charge. Each new game, new video card, new processor at the time brought so much new power and excitement. It was the golden age.
danesparza 8y ago
Doom was the first networked PC game I played. It was one of the first of it's kind. It opened up a world of connected gaming that lasted at least a decade. I also think it began a golden age.
barrkel 8y ago
It was a golden age for the first person immersive simulation game. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Thief, System Shock II, Half-Life, Deus Ex - there was a period of classics with large improvements and innovation from one game to the next, where game design space was explored just as the technology to render it became available. First person immersive sims are generally best played on the PC. When consoles that were able to do decent graphics for a reasonable period (i.e. the pace of hardware evolution slowed) came into their own, third person control worked better with joypads, and for commercial reasons, PC games often ended up as a second-rate ports of console games, with compromised controls. You really need a mouse for first person.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  first person immersive simulation game FPS stands for First Person Shooter. The games you're listing don't simulate much, even if some of those games have RPG elements.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrkel 8y ago
    I know what FPS stands for, but Thief most definitely isn't a shooter, and System Shock II is less of a shooter than a creepy exploration game. Deus Ex is half an RPG. FPS is too reductive. I'm using the phrase immersive sim in the same way as these articles: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/29/dark-futures-part-1-randy-smith/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/06/29/dark-futures-par... https://www.pcgamer.com/history-of-the-best-immersive-sims/ https://www.pcgamer.com/history-of-the-best-immersive-sims/ See also Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersive_sim HTH
    - dfxm12 8y ago
      No, it doesn't really help explain how Doom, Wolfenstein, or Quake, etc., are lumped in together with games like Thief as simulations. FPS is certainly not reductive. A game can be more than one genre, but sometimes an FPS is just an FPS, and more than half the games you listed are pretty much just an FPS.
Koshkin 8y ago
It's not surprising at all - what comes after the very early stages of development of many areas in science and technology are indeed usually could be called "a golden age." (In math it was the period of around 100 years after Newton; in physics - the second half of the 19th century plus the first half of the 20th.) As far as computers and software, we are now also way past the golden age, unfortunately...

newest_user_ 8y ago

Is there documentation on the structure of the contents? Why is it a list of * followed by + and then a list with no prefix? See https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/master/by_day/johnc_plan_19960222.txt https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... as an example.

partycoder 8y ago
Does not seem to have a particular structure, but it's a .plan file, which is a file that is displayed when a user is "fingered" (see finger protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
valczir 8y ago
https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/ There's a table in the above link, as well as a few more details

Tobani 8y ago

I certainly learned a lot by writing Quake 3 Arena mods and unreal tournament mods. Even if I wasn't make huge changes just the confidence that I could dive into an existing set of code, figure something out and make something happen gave me a lot of confidence for things in the future.

lgl 8y ago

At a time when pretty much every regular pc and internet connection sucked, here's what is definitely an historical moment in online gaming. The birth of Quakeworld, the internet optimized quake engine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/33ae52fdba46aa0d1abfed6fc7598233748541c0/by_day/johnc_plan_19960802.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar... Note JC's comment that "this is just my pet research project". If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw. So really, thanks John Carmack for the countless wasted hours :)

MrZongle2 8y ago
If you've ever played quake and then quakeworld online, you'll know what an understatement that was and how freaking awesome the online gameplay became with qw. Amen. Especially when you consider that a massive number of players, such as myself, were using dial-up (56k) modems. Quakeworld made multiplayer go from a slideshow to comparable to single-player performance, albeit with hiccups.
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
As I just posted above, this strikes home for me. For me it wasn't just the client-side prediction, it was that there was also a linux client for quake world.
- lgl 8y ago
  Yeah I remember that. It was also at about that time that I started using and learning linux. Back then, just managing to setup XFree86 correctly was like a huge personal victory and running quake there was really the cherry on top. I seem to recall having to actually input a bunch of numbers/frequencies taken from my crappy CRT monitor's specsheet into the X config and basically bruteforcing it until it worked. "Good times"!
  - SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
    Ahh yes, x11 mode-lines: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline) Those were particularly thorny for me too, when I was getting started with linux (and was still a newbie with computers in most respects). "Good times" indeed :)

SmirkingRevenge 8y ago

> ... but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. Never really realized it until now, but this is true for me. The original Quake, in its heyday, is what sparked my interest in Linux. Linux then sparked my interest in, well... more Linux - and gave me a new direction for my eventual shift into engineering. It really shaped my entire career. I had heard somehow, somewhere that you could squeak out slightly better frame rates and ping times in Quake, if you used this alternative OS called Linux (which really wasn't true, in retrospect). And so that began my quest, which triggered a cascade of deep dives into linux and its community for me. Everything from installation issues and troubleshooting, to compiling kernel modules (and everything in between). I even ended up dialoging with the driver developer for one of those modules (not yet in the kernel). A bug had surfaced - he actually fixed it and sent me a patch. So then I learned how to patch a driver too. One of the best "customer" experiences I've ever had, really :) Ironically, I might have ended up in game development had there never been a linux port for quake :P