[HN Gopher] Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in le...
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Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-
mortem chat
Author : WithinReason
Score : 172 points
Date : 2022-03-24 11:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| blibble wrote:
| keen 7 tech demo mentioned in article (but not linked):
| https://vimeo.com/148926335
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Was that music actually in the game playing on a DOS PC, or
| added separately to the video? If the former, it sure doesn't
| sound like the usual game music of that time playing on an
| Adlib or Sound Blaster. Maybe it was using a higher-end sound
| card of that time, like a Roland MT-32.
| blibble wrote:
| afraid not
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7qVmKDDVYM
| walrus01 wrote:
| Ctrl-F "daikatana"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
|
| no? Can't have a discussion of Romero without it.
| LosWochosWeek wrote:
| As a matter of fact - yes you can.
| [deleted]
| flatiron wrote:
| Masters of doom goes through these stories in detail. Very good
| book.
| kqr wrote:
| I had a very weird relationship with those games.
|
| Technically, I was probably born into a world where they had
| already revolutionised gaming -- I was a couple years late to
| watch it unfold personally.
|
| On the other hand, I didn't grow up in an extremely well-off
| household, and our computers were for a long time pretty much
| dumpster-dive finds. This meant I was always exposed to
| hardware a few years old, which in turn meant I got to witness
| the technical revolution in real time, a few years after the
| cultural Revolution. (In other words, when Doom had taken over
| the world, I still couldn't play it. But a few years later, I
| could, and marvelled at what the computer could do.)
|
| In another twist of fate, one of my parents strongly disliked
| that type of entertainment, and once they understood what I was
| doing, there was a strict ban on (most) violent media. (With
| very unclear boundaries of what constitutes violence.)
|
| So, in effect, I missed the revolution, caught a glimpse of it,
| and then got cut off from it.
|
| Reading _Masters of Doom_ gave me back a chunk of my childhood
| that I feel was taken from me, in a weird sort of way.
| gabereiser wrote:
| You needed that DX turbo boost too, huh? You pretty much sun
| up my experience as well except I had an older brother that
| gave me his old PC when he went to college.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| I'll never be able to make games while listening to Metallica
| with my bros in the 90s :(
| flatiron wrote:
| Quake 1 used to play the music via cdda. I "borrowed" my copy
| as a teen which did not include that music. My friend at
| school burned me a cd of Led Zeppelin 1. The summer of me
| playing quake listening to zeppelin is nostalgia heaven for
| me.
| junga wrote:
| But don't play that data track on your stereo as it might
| destroy your speakers! I was really afraid of this back in
| those days.
| eljimmy wrote:
| I really enjoyed that book and highly recommend it to anyone
| who hasn't!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The book made me dislike everyone involved with id. I'm still
| not sure if that was the author's intent.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Agreed. ID was really a dream team at that time (probably
| before Romero left). Small team, everyone already bagged multi
| year gamedev exp before (I think Carmack shipped a few games
| since 1989 and Romero a lot more from mid 80s); Everyone is
| passionate so no management overhead; Very disciplined;
|
| A dream team.
| aksss wrote:
| I was in the habit of getting games via shareware, through one of
| the common catalogs then - yep, an actual paper catalog of
| shareware games you could order for price of shipping, or close
| enough. They were cheap and I was entertained by them - Commander
| Keen, Prince of Persia, Pharoh's Tomb, etc. My friends and I all
| played some awesome games of the day, but I remember loading up
| W3D and just being blown away - it really was the first fps I
| ever played.
|
| Many of the other first-person perspective games I had experience
| with were the D&D games which were largely still-frame, turn-
| based games like Eye of the Beholder from SSI[0]. Also played
| Falcon 3.0 over modem, which was super cool; Gunship 2000 where I
| first started using a hex editor, diff'ing pre-and post-mission
| save game files via stare-and-compare to understand how to give
| myself more medals. But W3D was a whole different level, game-
| wise.
|
| I called all my friends and told them, basically, "holy sh*t,
| you're not going to believe how flipping awesome this is! It's
| like nothing you've ever seen before, come over. It's better than
| anything you've ever played." To a man (teen boy) they were all
| dismissive - like, whatever dude. Until they came over to my
| house and I loaded it up. I think I got it on a bunch of 3.5"
| floppies, and quickly handed it out, made copies, etc.
|
| I played that game so much I would go to bed, close my eyes, and
| still be running down the hallways, so burned into my retinas
| were the graphics. Truly the first game I was completely and
| unapologetically addicted to.
|
| Then some time later a kid at school who wasn't into computers
| handed me an unopened game box he had gotten as a present from
| his folks. He didn't care about it, knew I liked computer games,
| asked me if I wanted it. I had no idea what was in that box, but
| said sure, why the heck not? The thing was like a black monolith.
| It was Ultima VII - The Black Gate. It had a cloth world map, a
| book to translate runes. I pretty much forgot all about
| Wolfenstein after that, mostly. A friend and I would play it
| "together" while talking over the landline for hours (local
| call).
|
| Doom was cool, so was Descent, played the heck out of them. Was
| also the time I started taking programming classes in school,
| including a semester of Pascal. It was always in the back of my
| mind that Pharoh's Tomb was programmed in Pascal.
|
| It was a fine time to be a young nerdling. :D
|
| [0] https://playclassic.games/games/role-playing-dos-games-
| onlin...
| thecrumb wrote:
| I remember waiting for Carmack to update his .plan file and have
| some other date other than 'when it's ready' LOL.
| sedatk wrote:
| Finger was the OG Twitter IMHO. Decentralized too :)
| markus_zhang wrote:
| He has a presentation about the same story but goes into more
| details. Principles of early ID software IIRC.
| memish wrote:
| "In the last six months of 1991, we started and shipped five
| games,"
|
| What was so different about development back then that they were
| able to do that? That's unheard of today despite better hardware
| and a lot more tools. And they didn't have stackoverflow.com!
| yumaikas wrote:
| Games are dramatically simpler.
|
| Like, Commander Keen and the other of those games are the same
| amount of effort that might go in to a particularly well
| staffed month-long game jam today, just in terms of assets and
| total needed code. CV-11s video on Quake has a section covering
| that transition from mostly 2D to mostly 3D. It caught a lot
| folks off guard.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Yes and no.. assets were simpler, games were simpler.
|
| But they had to write a lot their tools to create the assets.
| They had no middleware, no engine to license. They had to
| write stuff in assembly. The computers they used were super
| slow and you could crash them so easily. At some points in
| iD's early history they were smuggling computers from
| Softdisk out of their offices and working over the weekend
| and then taking the computers back Monday morning. The tools
| were terrible. Documentation was a lot harder to come by. A
| lot of the people in iD at the beginning were also juggling a
| day job, they were moonlighting making those earliest games.
| IIRC Wolfenstein was the first one they worked full time on.
| smm11 wrote:
| DOOM was written on a 68040 33MHz processor.
| homarp wrote:
| https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Development_of_Doom
|
| Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the
| NeXTSTEP operating system. The final game engine was
| programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in
| Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C
| compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's compiler was used.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-
| NeXT/answe... adds:
|
| Over the entire course of Doom and Quake 1's development
| we probably spent $100,000 on NeXT computers, which isn't
| much at all in the larger scheme of development. We later
| spent more than that on Unix SMP server systems (first a
| quad Alpha, then an eventually 16-way SGI system) to run
| the time consuming lighting and visibility calculations
| for the Quake series. I remember one year looking at the
| Top 500 supercomputer list and thinking that if we had
| expanded our SGI to 32 processors, we would have just
| snuck in at the bottom.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDAzJLBB6pE is a visit to
| id Software in November 1993
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Programmers like to overengineer everything, so there's a lot
| of unneeded complexity slowing down development time
| markus_zhang wrote:
| First all developers are extremely talent and some bagged years
| of production experience under belt before they formed ID.
|
| Second as other mentioned these are relatively simply games,
| not the ones like Ultima and Golden box that usually takes
| years to develop.
|
| Third I think there is a unique culture in teams such as early
| ID: No bullshit, devs willing to devote 80, 100 hours per week,
| no management overhead as they KNOW what they are going to do.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > No bullshit, devs willing to devote 80, 100 hours per week,
| no management overhead as they KNOW what they are going to
| do.
|
| Yes, I think nowadays there is _rightly_ a reluctance to do
| this sort of thing without either an ownership stake or very
| high compensation - neither of which are common in the gaming
| industry.
| gicadin wrote:
| One thing i've found as an avid gamer is the lack of "humanity"
| in modern games. Modern high budget games are streamlined, risk
| averse, and predictable.
|
| If you look at older games you'll often find the creator's /
| developer's quirks and mannerisms have seeped through showing
| mild biases, prejudice, stereotypes, etc (humanity). The
| freedom to express yourself in your work, resulted in people
| becoming emotionally invested in the product. This investment
| likely meant they spend many additional hours if not directly
| working on the product, than thinking about it resulting in a
| faster shipping date or a higher quality product in the same
| timespan.
| dlp211 wrote:
| Maybe in aggregate modern gaming exhibits less humanity, but
| the best games today are on an entirely different level of
| story telling and emotional investment than 1991.
| anthk wrote:
| In depends on the genre. On IF, a lot of story telling has
| been unmatched.
| mabub24 wrote:
| Have you ever been bit by the bug of absolutely _needing_ to
| get something done and finished just so you can keep riding the
| high of finishing something? You chase that feeling into the
| next thing, and the next thing, and so on.
|
| They were doing that. Finishing and shipping anything feels
| really really good. If you're a small team and you feel a deep
| personal investment in the product then shipping becomes
| addictive.
|
| Brandon Sanderson and writing is a similar example. Is the
| quality always there? No. But, the guy is very very good at
| _finishing_ and clearly rides to wherever his passion takes
| him. His output is, in comparison to other authors writing in
| similar genres, incredible.
|
| Also, games were much simpler and players had much simpler
| expectations.
| vikingerik wrote:
| You can do that today, you could ship five Chess or Candy Crush
| games in six months if you wanted to. It's just a matter of
| where you set the bar for complexity and effort.
| equalsione wrote:
| You could still produce a AAA title with a small team (e.g 10)
| in the early to mid-90s. By 2000 an average team was about 100
| people. There are exceptions to this in both directions but
| that was the overall trend.
|
| In that period, you moved from mostly 2D to mostly 3D games so
| more complex code generally, plus the need for artists to do 3D
| modelling, texturing, rendering, optimisation, etc etc. Sound
| designers, composers, etc etc. AAA Games just got bigger, plus
| multiplayer. Hardware got more powerful (sound and graphics
| cards) so there was a desire/demand to make more use of that
| hardware. Generally, it all became a lot more "Hollywood".
|
| There are still great games made by small teams of people in a
| short period of time. But to hit the AAA mark you need to be
| with a big studio and have the marketing budget behind you.
| Again, Hollywood.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| id Software went independent after working for a company named
| Softdisk making a monthly floppy disk called "Gamer's Edge":
| Softdisk is most famous for being the former workplace of
| several of the founders of id Software, who worked on a short-
| lived game subscription product, Gamer's Edge. Gamer's Edge was
| a monthly[3] PC game disk started in 1990 by John Romero.
|
| Having a monthly deadline making MS-DOS games on floppy is why
| they were so prolific at that point. None of the Cmdr Keen
| games are much different from each other, and there were 6 of
| them.
| to11mtm wrote:
| The original 'trilogy' is a bit more distinct from the rest
| IMO; Yes the basic platforming concepts are the same, but I'd
| say Keen 3 and Keen 4 is a pretty substantial jump in
| style/features like swimming. (Also setting aside the odd
| duck of Keen Dreams).
|
| Did anyone ever actually successfully buy just one episode? I
| mean, 10 year old me did from a different publisher (Epic
| Megagames), but they just sent the whole trilogy anyway.
|
| But overall yes, a lot of those folks got good at churning
| out games, and part of that was understanding the value of
| good tooling.
|
| The level editor used for Keen, called TEd (Tile Editor) was
| actually used for something like 30 different titles, both 2d
| and 2.5D, prettymuch up to the original Rise of the Triad..
| acomjean wrote:
| I've listened to a bunch of John Romero's apple time warp
| podcasts about apple2 development. It was very small companies
| (sometimes single developers). This was in the 80s... A little
| bit before.
|
| They're kind of fun when they get into old stories about long
| gone companies. They don't come out very often however: They're
| 10% annoying and 90% really fun.
|
| https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com
| brink wrote:
| My thoughts are -
|
| 1. Less distractions (no Youtube, social media, etc..)
|
| 2. Games were simpler
|
| 3. The games produced probably weren't that good
| awelxtr wrote:
| Less distractions?
|
| They were gamers, they could've been playing games instead of
| working their asses off internet and social media here are
| not to blame.
|
| They were _really_ driven and passionate
| mywittyname wrote:
| To add on to the other comments of games being more simple back
| then, most of the games released in 1991 by them were sequels
| and/or shared codebases and tooling with other games.
|
| Three of those releases were Commander Keen games; Shadow
| Knights and Danger Dave shared engines; as did Catacomb 3D and
| Hovertank; Rescue Rover I/II were simple puzzle games built on
| an old demo code base. I'm not trying to take away from their
| accomplishments, merely pointing out that they didn't start
| from scratch every time.
|
| I think id was trying to get out of come contractual
| obligations from Softdisk.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Commander Keen is super super underrated - many know of it
| but I rarely here it come up in casual convo. And there has
| never been a reboot.
| ch_sm wrote:
| There was going to be! But it looked terrible, IMHO
| https://www.vg247.com/commander-keen-mobile-vanished
| leeoniya wrote:
| oof. has a very Worms aesthetic to it.
| mulmen wrote:
| If anything else this makes the achievement that much more
| impressive. They built tools instead of just hammering out
| assembly. The five games in six months was just collecting on
| that previous effort. But knowing what tools to build and how
| is the real achievement.
| kqr wrote:
| It's not just about knowing what tools to build ahead of
| time. That might well be impossible.
|
| It's about finding the intersection in the design space
| between "the game I want to make" and "the capabilities of
| the tools I have" that allow you to adapt your tools to
| make something 90 % of the way there with 10 % of the
| effort.
|
| This goes for any fast product development! Lockheeds'
| Skunk Works were amazing at repurposing tools and parts to
| invent completely new planes with few components that were
| actually new.
| mulmen wrote:
| Right. That's what's impressive. They built the right
| tools, presumably during previous projects. The tools
| they built were useful enough to enable future work.
|
| You may not know what tools you will need in the future
| but when you need a new tool you can build it in a way
| that it is reusable.
|
| In other words a good tool solves an _abstract_ problem.
| I don 't need an Ikea-Bergmund-chair-leg-attacher. I need
| a _screwdriver_.
|
| Once you have a toolbox full of these basic tools you are
| better prepared to tackle those future projects.
| joshcryer wrote:
| It should not be understated though how good the toolset was
| for the time. The original idea for Keen came after they
| (Carmack and Tom Hall) recreated the first level of Super
| Mario Bro's 3 in one night. They had to break from Softdisk
| under Romero's suggestion, because Softdisk would claim
| proprietorship over the engine. They actually "borrowed"
| their work computers from Softdisk over a weekend to work on
| Keen and created the first level in 72 hours. After the
| success of the first Keen it was a no-brainer to keep making
| more and milking it for all they could.
| layer8 wrote:
| Games were simpler, computers were simpler.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Games had to be smaller projects. The console and home
| computer hardware at that time put a tight limit on how much
| code and data you could ship. Filling that up wasn't hard. It
| was mostly a matter using these resources well.
|
| This changed a few years later when CDs came along. Many game
| devs originally didn't quite know what to do with so much
| storage space. Then processors also got much faster still and
| 3D acceleration became a thing. Game dev project scopes
| exploded accordingly to give you the game industry we have
| today.
| ushakov wrote:
| they did it for passion
| aresant wrote:
| If you enjoyed the Romero article there is an informative &
| belly-achingly funny podcast of Blindboy interviewing John and
| his spouse Brenda in front of a live audience in Ireland ->
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brenda-and-john-romero...
|
| John is great in that interview, but Brenda almost out shines -
| she has a really fascinating history and experience in the gaming
| industry.
|
| If you're not far enough down the rabbit hole after listening to
| the above Brenda does a solo interview on the similarly awesome
| "Retro Hour" podcast that is a great listen as well ->
|
| https://audioboom.com/posts/7797932-brenda-romero-wizardry-s...
| corysama wrote:
| And, for something completely different: Brenda's GDC talk
| about her board game _Train_ is deeply moving. It 's a tear-
| jerker. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train-
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