I really respect Carmack, he is one of the few programmers I'd describe as an industry trend setter. I've worked on many games in my career, and seen a lot of e

I really respect Carmack, he is one of the few programmers I'd describe as an industry trend setter. I've worked on many games in my career, and seen a lot of engines. When you read through the Q2 and perhaps a better example is the Q3 engine source, you sit there and think, hang on .. where's the rest of the code? He takes a complex problem and reduces it to a set of simple components, and reuses those components. This is incredibly hard to do. What the article doesn't impress upon people is the effect Carmacks code has on the industry. The shaders in Quake 3 were a huge thing, now seems so obvious. I have no evidence for this, however I wouldn't be surprised if Q3 shaders are the reason we have vertex/pixel shaders in hardware today.