4 ms·

A lot of the skills were very similar back then, with almost everything just about how to blit 2D data to the screen in the shortest amount of time. At the time

A lot of the skills were very similar back then, with almost everything just about how to blit 2D data to the screen in the shortest amount of time. At the time period you're talking about communities were starting to appear, certainly on Usenet and BBSes where coding techniques were discussed and traded. There was a huge amount of competition too between coders back then to get more and more out of the limited hardware we had to work with. And you had to code everything yourself from scratch. There was no throwing a bunch of vertices and textures at some hardware and getting back a fully rendered scene. It was a fun era. I know I did the same as Carmack and went from writing 2D platformers to writing Phong-shaded, perspective-corrected texture-mapped worlds in under a year. Everything that Carmack did had been done before, but Carmack made it cool. He had way more vision and imagination than the guys that had done it before.

markus_zhang 5y ago
Agreed. I have a lot of respect for programmers of that era. Nowadays 3d engines are so complex that it probably takes a lot of practices for someone to reach the level of UE firefighter: https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/17/confessions-of-an-unreal-engine-4-engineering-firefighter/ https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/17/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...
- a-dub 5y ago
  things were simpler, so the scope of what small teams could achieve was greater... but there was also complexity in different ways. (weak memory protection so lots of reboots, buggier tooling, near and far pointers, memory and cpu constraints) i think maybe the most exciting part of that time was the rate of innovation in hardware. new capabilities were opening up every few years and you didn't need an enormous team or tons of capital to push the envelope.
outworlder 5y ago
> Everything that Carmack did had been done before, Except for the smooth scrolling (that everyone thought impossible on that era hardware)? And the incredibly performant Doom engine?
- bonzini 5y ago
  The smooth scrolling was easy, the EGA had more or less the same hardware capabilities as a C64 in terms of smooth scrolling. It's just that few or no games had tried to use it. For VGA, Mode X was the real game changer because it allowed to use both double buffering and smooth scrolling at the same time. A later 2D platform game that took Keen's smooth scrolling to the next level is Jazz Jackrabbit. But as CPUs got more powerful, Carmack recognized that you didn't need hardware help anymore and that removed constraints on what games he could program. Keen to Wolf3D to Doom is when id games went from good to wow to insane.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    The graphics bus was also a huge constraint. Using dirty triangles to bit bang is effective but tedious.
psyc 5y ago
Synthesis is underrated. Yes, front-to-back BSP tree rendering "had been done before" by like two academics, who didn't use it to make a game, let alone a great game.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Agreed. I have a lot of respect for programmers of that era. Nowadays 3d engines are so complex that it probably takes a lot of practices for someone to reach the level of UE firefighter: https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/17/confessions-of-an-unreal-engine-4-engineering-firefighter/ https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/17/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...

a-dub 5y ago
things were simpler, so the scope of what small teams could achieve was greater... but there was also complexity in different ways. (weak memory protection so lots of reboots, buggier tooling, near and far pointers, memory and cpu constraints) i think maybe the most exciting part of that time was the rate of innovation in hardware. new capabilities were opening up every few years and you didn't need an enormous team or tons of capital to push the envelope.

outworlder 5y ago

> Everything that Carmack did had been done before, Except for the smooth scrolling (that everyone thought impossible on that era hardware)? And the incredibly performant Doom engine?

bonzini 5y ago
The smooth scrolling was easy, the EGA had more or less the same hardware capabilities as a C64 in terms of smooth scrolling. It's just that few or no games had tried to use it. For VGA, Mode X was the real game changer because it allowed to use both double buffering and smooth scrolling at the same time. A later 2D platform game that took Keen's smooth scrolling to the next level is Jazz Jackrabbit. But as CPUs got more powerful, Carmack recognized that you didn't need hardware help anymore and that removed constraints on what games he could program. Keen to Wolf3D to Doom is when id games went from good to wow to insane.
- flatiron 5y ago
  The graphics bus was also a huge constraint. Using dirty triangles to bit bang is effective but tedious.

psyc 5y ago

Synthesis is underrated. Yes, front-to-back BSP tree rendering "had been done before" by like two academics, who didn't use it to make a game, let alone a great game.