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There Is No Plan - id Software employee: "We keep thinking morale can't sink lower but the obvious incompetence of Xbox management somehow keeps driving it down worse." (aftermath.site)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 35 points 6 days ago (12 children)

I wish Carnack would emerge from the void and offer to buy back his first child. id Software and idTech could be so well repositioned to take a cut out of Epic’s pie. Unreal performance is utterly abysmal these days. If only idTech had similar licensing to Unreal…

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  • [–] 22 points 6 days ago

    I think that Unreal's real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there's a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you'll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.

    Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can't blame him there, really. Am not sure he's the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he's more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 days ago (3 children)

    id was fractious and wracked by strife even when it was tiny any young. It worked at a time when technical proficiency and innovation was enough to amaze, enough to make a game company viable. There's no reason to suspect that Carmack is or was any kind of business visionary or talented manager.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    Carmack is a clever programmer and successful engineer. That's underselling it, he's been called the best programmer of a generation.

    I don't know if that's true, but I do know while he created impressive software everybody I've talked to who has worked for or near him says he's an insufferable perfectionist who grinds people around him.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    The bones of some of his lighting algorithms are still in use to this day. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that he is an exceptional programmer.

    The best of his generation is harder to assert just because that generation had a pretty large handful of names who each truly revolutionized computing. But I do believe that without Carmack then Doom never happens, idtech never happens, the resulting 90's-2000's FPS craze never happens. Without Doom landing on the hardware of every nerd on the planet it's very likely the middle age of the video game industry went in a very different direction.

    I'd say he earned that ego, even if I wouldn't like dealing with it in a professional environment. But I think it's a reasonable thing to say that a good 75% of the next decade of game dev was primarily borne up by Carmack's bootstraps.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 days ago

    It's not abysmal for what it does. They've just added a few features that require a lot of computation when turned on, and every idiot studio and idiot gamer turns them on and goes, "ugh performance is so crap now".

    The lack of optimization is a problem, but it's not nearly as big of an impact as expensive features like ray tracing and ultra-high detail assets that still look crisp at 4k.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (2 children)

    Unreal's non-free, so 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

    (I mean both as in freedom and as in free beer)

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