ĭoom 3 interiors looked like this in 2004. were just lucky to be early in the industry.Īs soon as other talented coders emerged, they couldn't keep up at all and died off into the sideways.įarcry interiors looked like this in 2004.

Seeing how Carmack's and Id's engines buiilding capabilities panned out in the last 20 years, it's clear Carmack and co. In comparison, what they delivered in those years was quake 4's engine. The 'geniuses' at id tech could never produce such an engine. The real KINGS of the early to late '00s were the Unreal engines and the Source engine.Īnd let's not forget Crytech that with their Crysys engine blew it out of the park for years to come even if it was heavy. They were also mostly technical failures as well, only good to render small cramped interiors, and very resource intensive.Īnd no, don't even try the old 'b-but quake 3 runs great on my 2023 3000$ rig!' And not even that one, because extremely few other games used it.Īll the engines coming after that one- idtech4, 5 and 6 were complete commercial failures.

His last relevant engine was maybe Idtech3, quake 3's engine in 1999. Like I said, just ocurred to me now, food for thought. And while I cannot be sure how smart he was in programming, I know his game design ideas are closer to ESReality bots than they are to geniuses. Maybe he was just a run of the mill code monkey who had the luck of being first and he got gassed by idiots like me praising him for being a genius, so much so that he decided he even knew game design. I know his engines have always had bugs, as any engine always has. Which I am ill-equipped to do, seeing as how I'm not even a coder, let alone an engine maker. Truthfully, in the way a game should not be judged by sales and critic scores, an engine should maybe be judged by nothing other than performance metrics. Because, yeah q3 has always felt best to me, but maybe that's my own gaming bias, because that's the game I've played the most. I always assumed Carmack was an amazing coder, but right know is the first time I'm actually questioning that. Engineers don't tell surgeons what to cut. That's like saying Miyamoto is a crap designer cos' he was wasn't a good coder.If he tried to, say, push to use certain libraries while not being a coder, he would be just as bad as Carmack, yes.Īt a very basic stage, part of knowing a certain domain means knowing where that domain ends. Carmack was a coder, so it wasn't his job to know about good gameplay (even if that is true).

Quake 3 john carmack player model