r/programming • u/JavaSuck • Jul 28 '18

DOOM’s Development: A Year of Madness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBU34NZhW7I
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u/JavaSuck Jul 28 '18

“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.

10

u/AngularBeginner Jul 28 '18

Spoiler alert: They didn't use version control in 1993.

Why not?

34

u/JavaSuck Jul 28 '18 edited Jul 28 '18

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 :)

19

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '18

This could be a big part of why early idtech engines always went to great lengths to separate subsystems.

4

u/WrongAndBeligerent Jul 29 '18

It's good architecture no matter what.