6 ms·

Wikipedia: Making of Doom

96 points by olliesaunders 15y ago

5hoom 15y ago
Gotta love the cool stop animated models they used for the sprites in the games, but here's the best bit that I didn't know: (about the sources for some of the textures)"Among the more unusual sources, one texture was based on Adrian's snakeskin boots, and a bloody texture for the hell levels was created from a photograph of a wound on Cloud's knee" Awesome. I thought the skin-wall textures in ep.3 were pretty gross. Eww! nerdscabs!
dzuc 15y ago
Worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
- diolpah 15y ago
  + one for this book. Excellent startup narrative.
  - jdefarge 15y ago
    + one here too. Very good book, very nice narrative.
- blaenk 15y ago
  This is a great book. It basically goes over how the game industry was able to develop itself for the PC, which at the time people believed was only for work. The guys at I'd pioneered a lot of efficient technology whited allowed for games to even be playable on PCs.
bdickason 15y ago
This is a really great wiki entry. I was searching around after reading it and came across this pic from '92 which is really amazing: http://bit.ly/qxaxrC http://bit.ly/qxaxrC Both Carmacks, Romero, Tom Hall, Kevin Cloud, etc in startup mode :D I used to read their .plan's.... :o
- m_eiman 15y ago
  Unshortened link: http://www.3drealms.com/bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg http://www.3drealms.com/bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg
  - mikle 15y ago
    Why do people post bit.ly links in places where there is no char limit? Are people that conditioned by twitter?
    - bdickason 15y ago
      I'm a data nerd and I like to see when people click on my links :) For example barely anyone clicked when I posted this on twitter vs. tons of exposure on HN: https://bitly.com/qxaxrC+ https://bitly.com/qxaxrC+ Dunno, I just enjoy keeping track of what I post and seeing what's popular, etc!
      - mikle 15y ago
        Fair enough, I guess I forgot about that. It's still a leap of faith to press a bit.ly link by paranoids like me. I should probably use an addon and forget about these.
tdicola 15y ago
John Romero's blog has a lot of good content on the making of Doom and other classic id software games too: http://planetromero.com/ http://planetromero.com/
zinkem 15y ago
Here's a video tour of their offices circa 1993, for those who haven't seen it. I think this is a cool look into the beginnings of the company and the (early) excitement surrounding Doom at the time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI
- yread 15y ago
  Haha great video! They're playing not completely finished Doom and sometimes it kicks them back to DOS with an error message like File not found Don't worry about "File not found"
srean 15y ago
One really nifty piece of code that I associate id-software with is the 0x5f3759df hack. Though it was probably known before, Hakmem would be the first place to look. I am sure there are many more such bit twiddling and magic number hacks, but nothing quite as useful to me than this magic to compute the reciprocal of a square root. The only other floating point operations that comes up this frequently in what I do are log and exp. In my day to day coding (not that I code every day, far from it) I have nothing to do with game engines, yet inverse square root shows up in almost every corner (pun intended) in the vector manipulation code, for example in finding the cosine similarity between two documents. Does not work for double precision, 64 bit, and nothing I write is so performance critical that it demands the use of this trick, but its still fun float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); return y; } Taken from the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root has the fuller story.
- iliis 15y ago
  Yeah, this is really cool :) A favorite of mine is the xor-swap: While not useful in pratice for me, you can get quite stunned faces if you tell your friends, that a swap is possible without a third variable. x = x xor y y = x xor y x = x xor y It's also possible to use addition and subtraction instead of xor.
  - shrikant 15y ago
    FWIW, pretty much every 3rd (penultimate) year engineering student in India knows the xor-swap, I should think (only they might not call it that, because they've just memorised the procedure, and have very little idea why it works... /cynical) This is one of the most common questions in 'technical interviews' when big IT companies are recruiting fresh grads. (See http://www.allinterview.com/showanswers/17145.html http://www.allinterview.com/showanswers/17145.html)
junkbit 15y ago
Here is a 60min DOOM post-mortem by John Romero from the Game Developers' Conference. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014627/Classic_Game_Postmortem___DOOM http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014627/Classic_Game_Postmortem... If you look around the free section of the GDC site there are a lot videos about other classic games too
- thristian 15y ago
  John Romero and Tom Hall, in fact. It's quite an interesting talk - lots of people have interviewed John Carmack about the history of Doom, and he was certainly a core figure, but I enjoyed hearing a telling from outside the usual "id Software has been continuously successful for decades" frame of reference.
atomicdog 15y ago
>and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. I find this really interesting, Carmack's been using Objective-C long before he started his iPhone work.
- swah 15y ago
  Does that makes him a hipster?
danieldk 15y ago
More fun Doom trivia on the origin of the (id)spispopd cheat code: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=idspispopd http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=idspispopd The Smashing Pumpkins for their part continued to the joke by adding a sample from Doom to 'Where Boys Fear to Tread' on 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'. The booklet contains the following credit: "Explosion from Doom courtesy of id Software, Inc and bobby prince Music""
aaronharnly 15y ago
So, software invented on the NeXT includes Doom and the World Wide Web? Not bad for a failed platform.
- jdefarge 15y ago
  If I remember well, the biggest problem with NeXT was that it was quite expensive! According to the "Master of Doom" book, Carmack pay around U$ 10,000 for one workstation in 1991.
  - wallflower 15y ago
    And total non-sequitor (if you missed it the first time around): How to burn a NeXTCube http://simson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html http://simson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html
sandieman 15y ago
I would pay decent money to see the movie remake, kickstarter anyone?

96 points by olliesaunders 15y ago

5hoom 15y ago

Gotta love the cool stop animated models they used for the sprites in the games, but here's the best bit that I didn't know: (about the sources for some of the textures)"Among the more unusual sources, one texture was based on Adrian's snakeskin boots, and a bloody texture for the hell levels was created from a photograph of a wound on Cloud's knee" Awesome. I thought the skin-wall textures in ep.3 were pretty gross. Eww! nerdscabs!

dzuc 15y ago

Worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

diolpah 15y ago
+ one for this book. Excellent startup narrative.
- jdefarge 15y ago
  + one here too. Very good book, very nice narrative.
blaenk 15y ago
This is a great book. It basically goes over how the game industry was able to develop itself for the PC, which at the time people believed was only for work. The guys at I'd pioneered a lot of efficient technology whited allowed for games to even be playable on PCs.

bdickason 15y ago

This is a really great wiki entry. I was searching around after reading it and came across this pic from '92 which is really amazing: http://bit.ly/qxaxrC http://bit.ly/qxaxrC Both Carmacks, Romero, Tom Hall, Kevin Cloud, etc in startup mode :D I used to read their .plan's.... :o

m_eiman 15y ago
Unshortened link: http://www.3drealms.com/bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg http://www.3drealms.com/bio/images/legacy_romero2.jpg
- mikle 15y ago
  Why do people post bit.ly links in places where there is no char limit? Are people that conditioned by twitter?
  - bdickason 15y ago
    I'm a data nerd and I like to see when people click on my links :) For example barely anyone clicked when I posted this on twitter vs. tons of exposure on HN: https://bitly.com/qxaxrC+ https://bitly.com/qxaxrC+ Dunno, I just enjoy keeping track of what I post and seeing what's popular, etc!
    - mikle 15y ago
      Fair enough, I guess I forgot about that. It's still a leap of faith to press a bit.ly link by paranoids like me. I should probably use an addon and forget about these.

tdicola 15y ago

John Romero's blog has a lot of good content on the making of Doom and other classic id software games too: http://planetromero.com/ http://planetromero.com/

zinkem 15y ago

Here's a video tour of their offices circa 1993, for those who haven't seen it. I think this is a cool look into the beginnings of the company and the (early) excitement surrounding Doom at the time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI

yread 15y ago
Haha great video! They're playing not completely finished Doom and sometimes it kicks them back to DOS with an error message like File not found Don't worry about "File not found"

srean 15y ago

One really nifty piece of code that I associate id-software with is the 0x5f3759df hack. Though it was probably known before, Hakmem would be the first place to look. I am sure there are many more such bit twiddling and magic number hacks, but nothing quite as useful to me than this magic to compute the reciprocal of a square root. The only other floating point operations that comes up this frequently in what I do are log and exp. In my day to day coding (not that I code every day, far from it) I have nothing to do with game engines, yet inverse square root shows up in almost every corner (pun intended) in the vector manipulation code, for example in finding the cosine similarity between two documents. Does not work for double precision, 64 bit, and nothing I write is so performance critical that it demands the use of this trick, but its still fun float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); return y; } Taken from the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root has the fuller story.

iliis 15y ago
Yeah, this is really cool :) A favorite of mine is the xor-swap: While not useful in pratice for me, you can get quite stunned faces if you tell your friends, that a swap is possible without a third variable. x = x xor y y = x xor y x = x xor y It's also possible to use addition and subtraction instead of xor.
- shrikant 15y ago
  FWIW, pretty much every 3rd (penultimate) year engineering student in India knows the xor-swap, I should think (only they might not call it that, because they've just memorised the procedure, and have very little idea why it works... /cynical) This is one of the most common questions in 'technical interviews' when big IT companies are recruiting fresh grads. (See http://www.allinterview.com/showanswers/17145.html http://www.allinterview.com/showanswers/17145.html)

junkbit 15y ago

Here is a 60min DOOM post-mortem by John Romero from the Game Developers' Conference. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014627/Classic_Game_Postmortem___DOOM http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014627/Classic_Game_Postmortem... If you look around the free section of the GDC site there are a lot videos about other classic games too

thristian 15y ago
John Romero and Tom Hall, in fact. It's quite an interesting talk - lots of people have interviewed John Carmack about the history of Doom, and he was certainly a core figure, but I enjoyed hearing a telling from outside the usual "id Software has been continuously successful for decades" frame of reference.

atomicdog 15y ago

>and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. I find this really interesting, Carmack's been using Objective-C long before he started his iPhone work.

swah 15y ago
Does that makes him a hipster?

danieldk 15y ago

More fun Doom trivia on the origin of the (id)spispopd cheat code: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=idspispopd http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=idspispopd The Smashing Pumpkins for their part continued to the joke by adding a sample from Doom to 'Where Boys Fear to Tread' on 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'. The booklet contains the following credit: "Explosion from Doom courtesy of id Software, Inc and bobby prince Music""

aaronharnly 15y ago

So, software invented on the NeXT includes Doom and the World Wide Web? Not bad for a failed platform.

jdefarge 15y ago
If I remember well, the biggest problem with NeXT was that it was quite expensive! According to the "Master of Doom" book, Carmack pay around U$ 10,000 for one workstation in 1991.
- wallflower 15y ago
  And total non-sequitor (if you missed it the first time around): How to burn a NeXTCube http://simson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html http://simson.net/photos/hacks/cubefire.html

sandieman 15y ago

I would pay decent money to see the movie remake, kickstarter anyone?