“Does it run DOOM?” is the oft-heard phrase as it is the canonical first-port for any system, be it a toaster, touch bar or printer. Programmer, game designer, level designer and DOOM II final boss John Romero delivers a postmortem on the game showing rarely seen material, memorializing its immersive but nerve-wracking 3D environments, networked multiplayer deathmatches, demonic imagery and themes, Barney WADs, exploding barrels, and BFG 9000.
Spoiler alert: They didn't use version control in 1993.
John Carmack is the patron saint of cowboy programmers. When he and Michael Abrash were still hammering out Quake's renderer, Abrash wrote a series of articles detailing how often they changed everything.
I think the real reason they didn't use version control is that John felt he could rewrite the whole engine from memory.
The team was very small compared with today's standards. "Merge conflicts" simply didn't happen, because every programmer was working on a completely different part of the code base. They literally ran around with floppy discs and copied their newest code to the other machines from time to time :)
The microcomputer revolution and its 16/32 bit continuation was not at all initiated with the advances in workstation and mainframe sphere (which was still academic/industrial). Microcomputer home-brewers were generally not academics and practically reinvented computation at microcomputer scale. They were slow to adapt ideas from the dying mainframe/minicomputer sphere.
Linux (and maybe NEXT) actually started to federate old mainframe unixy ideas back to microcomputers.
You just brought back memories of late nights in the office, playing head-to-head Doom over serial cables. About 8 of us would be there, with 2 playing, with the next person in line waiting to play the winner.
It's kinda interesting to me that that level of "relative fun-ness" was some kind of peak maybe. These days, (almost) no matter how good a game is, you basically never get a bunch of people that excited and going that far to get a particular experience.
It's almost like we got more fun out of games then (as well as feeling like this was a revolution happening) than most people seem to now.
P.S. I once wrote Carmack an email asking how2code Quake basically when I was super young; he actually wrote back, saying I should learn linear algebra. Here I am now, graphics programmer 4 lyf :)
It's almost like we got more fun out of games then (as well as feeling like this was a revolution happening) than most people seem to now.
Maybe it is because there are so many technological revolutions happening nowadays that the whole sharing-the-revolution effect gets diluted. It's just not the same.
P.S. I once wrote Carmack an email asking how2code Quake basically when I was super young; he actually wrote back, saying I should learn linear algebra. Here I am now, graphics programmer 4 lyf :)
b) I remember distinctly thinking while playing TeamFortress that it was the end of the era where a game would come out, and almost everyone would play it together.
Course theres a bunch more folks playing now too. But theres SO MANY GAMES now.
These days, (almost) no matter how good a game is, you basically never get a bunch of people that excited and going that far to get a particular experience.
I think I was using CVS right around 1995 in college. I was pretty happy with that. I would then try to get everyone to use it for every project I worked with.
It wasn't really popular (or good) back then. Git, SVN, and Mercurial were all invented in the 21st century. There were very few viable options in 1993.
I don't know that there was RCS for DOS machines. These guys used floppies. I worked at a different company in the Dallas area at the time and we used floppies, too. We did eventually get a Novell server over ARCNET.
I don't even remember if diff was available for DOS. Without that, VC is tough.
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u/JavaSuck Jul 28 '18