atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter rss same thing
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs/rss
Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
<a href="https://wolf.observer/88x31"><img src="https://wolf.observer/images/wolf-88x31.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>
forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
forest.stream/
bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

added a comment to the IA upload with some extra commands you can run ingame. It'll run in DOSbox no problem. Sadly there's not a lot there - I wish this had been a build from a bit later, because it doesn't have any of the juicy 96-97 era portal stuff.

Scrubbed through the main EXE with /bin/strings. Don't see anything suggesting code borrowed from any other engine, so it appears to be scratch built, except for references to "LIBMACT" which I believe was a general "toolbox" library someone at 3D Realms developed that got used in Duke 3D among other things, with a bunch of input/output primitives, keyboard handling routines, etc.

Curiously though, the .WAD is definitely based on the Doom format. There are references to "lumps" in the strings, and that file will open in a Doom WAD editor, though it doesn't quite read correctly. The Doom source wasn't out yet, but the WAD format was fully documented by 95, so presumably they just chose it as a convenient starting point for game materials.

The .BSP map file is unrelated to the Quake files of the same name, and BSP was a universal technique of the time so I suspect that's a total coincidence. The file format is completely plaintext!

node 1771
A 0.000000 B 1.000000 C 0.000000 D 27648.000000
inid 504
outid -1
samenormal
polygon 1692
verts  2416 2428 2424 2415 2419 2420
tname PREY5
tu 0.000000 0.000000 -64.000000
tv -64.000000 0.000000 0.000000
to -32768.000000 -27648.000000 -251904.000000
back 1772

so that's fun.

Post-Doom, a bunch of companies started independently developing polygonal 3D engines; Quake became the most well known, but there were others that developed independently and, if I recall, ended up with similar results. This demo looks a lot like Quake, but in 95 I don't think anyone had seen that game yet. Maybe there were personnel connections to id that let them see what the future held, but I imagine this is just convergent evolution.

The 486 enabled 3D programmers to do things they'd been champing at the bit to implement for years. I'd guess most of the techniques that games like Quake or Chasm: The Rift utilized were the subject of SIGGRAPH papers and demos from 92 or 93 that required $15,000 machines to demo.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

that's a good point, and something that's been clawing at me since the demo -- this looks like Jedi Knight, which came out in 1997, but in software rendering mode.

which makes me realize that most of these were not so much various engines being 'visionary' or 'having breakthroughs', but instead that the state of everything was raising all the boats, and first to market kept being given credit for what the hardware + graphics software innovations brought as if it was their invention

or, rather, the devs WERE having breakthroughs, and visionary in their ability to keep a finger on the pulse of the leading edge of consumer hardware, and various ways of coding that allowed them to cram even more into that limited space. But the innovations themselves were just from the computer equivalent of "the face of archetecture was completely changed when we learned a new way to make steel that allowed huge lengths of it to be manufactured in bulk" or "hey guys when you put sticks in the cement it's way stronger"


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

as someone who has absorbed just about every piece of publicly available information on the first decade of id software's history, if there's one thing i wish i could impart to the collective gamer + game dev consciousness about this period of game history it is that the quake 1 engine was not some great leap forward by a lone promethean genius (and i think carmack himself would wholeheartedly reject this narrative as well; he's many things but not an egomaniac). if id hadn't shipped qtest in february 96 and quake that june, the evolutionary trajectory of 3D engines would not have turned out substantially differently. the timeframes of a few "firsts" might have shifted a bit, but many studios had already been working towards various quake-like (let's define that as: true 6DOF texture-mapped 3D, hybrid precalculated + dynamic lighting, complex overdraw management techniques) rendering approaches since the doom timeframe: looking glass, 3DR, lucasarts, bethesda, bungie, bullfrog, and probably dozens of european and japanese devs most of us know less about because of various language and cultural-historical barriers.

the truly exciting thing about this era of game dev history was that so many talented people, not just carmack and sweeney and whoever else history [mild rolleyes] has decided belongs in the marble bust gallery, could see what was just around the corner and knew what kinds of creative possibilities the new technology could unlock - and unlike the promises of so many later generations, much of that potential actually panned out instead of just dumping more money and fancier hardware into an arms race whose parameters were already very well understood.

it also brings the tragedy of id software's first decade into sharper focus - i would argue that the true "secret weapon" id possessed was less one heroic wizard who could pull some world-changing tech out of his hat, but the creative chemistry the whole team had built during their first few years of frantic creative and technical exploration, which of course was already unraveling by the beginning of quake's development and would come completely apart before its end. and if you'd told them in late 94 / early 95, "you can have this hot shit new 3D engine, but it'll cost you the team's creative soul", i think any game dev who was wiser than they were smart would've stepped off that path. but, sadly... we know how it turned out.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

yeah, my take is that nothing about Quake is revolutionary except that it got done quickly, with extremely high quality and efficiency, and a highly flexible codebase behind it.

what made id special compared to anyone else is that Carmack was able to do most of the work himself, with the resources of an established company, meaning no execs had to be convinced that it could be done or that it was worth it. he finished doom, then simply began working on the next obvious thing pretty much without a break.

the resulting product is basically what you'd get if you handed aliens a Pentium CPU and told them "write something that creates realistic 3D." they'd show up a month later with Quake and say "this is all this processor is capable of. do you have something with vector units? we could do more with that"

Miserable in what way? I never had a problem with it, and when I got a Voodoo and tried glquake my reaction was "why is everything blurry now" and I went back to software. I didn't want anything to do with acceleration until quake2, and only once I got a card that could do colored lighting.

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what point you're making, as far as how it connects to the prior conversation. You were talking about glquake being important, but now about graphics cards being bad. I get that, but I don't understand why you pivoted from one to the other, they seem to be contradictions.

in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

in retrospect some of it is probably also that iD (and other scrappy dev houses) also sorta unthinkingly agile'd itself in the sense of the original idealistic version of agile, by being a mostly-flat-hierarchy small team with ~short feedback loops to something tangible

my understanding of the problem was actually that they were hierarchical, with carmack basically able to determine the future of the company by dictating what he wanted to do with his next tech, and everyone else having to figure out how to work within those constraints. tom hall and romero being founders didn't ultimately mean much because they couldn't control the company like that, and combined with carmack's pretty fundamental lack of empathy and management skills (to be fair, nobody at id seemed to have management skills) everyone else was just kinda running around trying not to trip him up.

that said, a lot of companies can be deeply and horrifically hierarchical while telling themselves things like "we're a flat structure", "we use cool production process X" and pointing to shareholder or compensation arrangements as proof, when in practice they're working in a totally different way. seeing the true nature of organizations and processes behind the internal, company-approved narrative is a very different skillset from the other dev disciplines and industry definitions of "success" don't really select for it in any direct way.

yep

I think my misunderstanding there is I read the inability to manage as a general lack of it in the clunky-but-useful-in-1993-compared-to-elsewhere, I need to reread masters of doom; I guess it's been almost two decades.

i'd recommend a different source, maybe shacknews's rocket jump? not sure. masters of doom tends to minimize carmack's abusive shit as "wow look at this eccentric genius". though masters of doom has a lot of solid research in it; you just have to look upon its tone with a very critical eye.

Probably not to the same degree as ID but is there a good book or other history of 3D realms from 1994-2000? I'm very curious about what forces led to them not shipping this 6DOF engine and moving to just publishing.

i'm not aware of any good histories of 3DR but maybe someone looking at this thread is. my guess as to why they didn't ship prey sooner was partly that actually shipping a game with that kind of tech is obviously a ton of work, their tools situation might have been light years behind what id had (custom NeXT application building on what they'd used for Doom's level design) making content creation laborious, the fact that Duke3D made plenty of money despite having older technology (made by a 19 year old they could control rather than someone like carmack), and the general shift in conventional wisdom that started to take hold around 96-97, that licensing someone else's tech was more cost effective if the tech was good enough (which quake and later unreal certainly were). there was really only a very narrow window within which 3DR could have shipped something with that prey tech and they didn't have the personnel or know-how to make it happen.

rocket jump is the closest we have atm. there was an attempt to get a 3d realms book off the ground after that DNF wired article back in 08, but Broussard killed it by refusing to participate iirc. there might be more stuff in the upcoming FPS doc this summer