3 ms·

QuakeC always reminds me that Carmack was a genius and I am not. I mean, besides writing a almost fully customizable 3D-engine and a mulitplayer stack, he creat

QuakeC always reminds me that Carmack was a genius and I am not. I mean, besides writing a almost fully customizable 3D-engine and a mulitplayer stack, he created a program language for game control, including a compiler. I home-studied it all back in those days, but even today with all my experience I still couldn‘t build any of those things… so congratulations to the author, even if I don‘t quite see the point.

sigjuice 4y ago
Would have been nice to stop at the last comma.
smcl 4y ago
Don't sell yourself short, I imagine you could achieve a lot more than you think! It's just a case of breaking the problem down, simplifying accordingly and (probably the most difficult bit) finding the time to sit down and work on it. There are some DIY courses that could even be followed and mashed up to approximate a scriptable "3D" engine with a bit of creativity. You could familiarise yourself with building a simple compiler + VM for a little language by following "Crafting Interpreters" (https://craftinginterpreters.com https://craftinginterpreters.com). For the engine side of things someone recently posted this "DIY Doom" over @ https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom https://github.com/amroibrahim/DIYDoom which looks like a bit of fun. I mean it's a bit tougher to do it all completely from scratch, but remember John Carmack didn’t just sit down one day, open a blank text editor and say “I’m going to make Quake” - he started with game dev years before, built 2D platformers, built Wolf 3D, then Doom. With the tools and docs we have at our disposal nowadays, I reckon most HNers could get quite a lot of the way towards Quake if they could dedicate the time to the task :)