[OT] Re: Tango collections

Pragma ericanderton at yahoo.removeme.com
Fri Mar 23 09:29:12 PDT 2007


Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Pragma wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Sean Kelly wrote:
>>>> I'll admit that I wouldn't mind taking a crack at this myself, but 
>>>> from experience I think it's unlikely I'll have much time for 
>>>> user-level code before Tango reaches 1.0.  Something always seems to 
>>>> come up that pulls me back into working on low-level features.
>>>
>>> Funny that you say that, it reminds me of my work on Empire years 
>>> ago. I'd never play a game all the way through because I'd go back to 
>>> working on the guts of it.
>>
>> Although you were past the post Walter, I like to call this condition 
>> "Carmack's Syndrome".

Oops, that should be "first past the post", sorry. :)

>>
> Hum, if I can ask, why do you call it "Carmack's Syndrome"? (I assume 
> you are refering to John Carmack)
> 

Yes, the very same.  The comment is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I still think he's a prime example of this tendency 
in highly capable (software) engineers.  If anything, he has the portfolio to prove it.

Overall, he's made a career out of making games out of freestanding tech-demos, with razor-thin plots holding them 
together.  It springs from this tendency to return to the core, tweak the hell out of it, and turn it into the next big 
thing - ID software has typically raked in the dough on engine licensing, not just game sales.  IIRC, he doesn't spend 
that much time playing the games he's made so he tends to get his ass handed to him at the few public quake matches he's 
had with fans.  So obviously, he's busy improving and streamlining things instead.

Besides, play-balancing and storyline is what we have content and testing people for. ;)

But what I attribute to this "syndrome" is really more about innovation, vision and merit applied to the core product 
than cashing out in a big way.  I for one think the software renderer in Quake I is a work of art, considering what it 
did for the time.  Also, he came up with a shadow-volume technique that made Doom 3 what it was.  He has also brushed up 
against the limitations of consumer 3D hardware enough times as to help steer the future of that technology along for 
quite a while now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_caching
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmack%27s_Reverse

And that's just software.  Following his adventures in aerospace, again, this tendency comes back in full force.  He's 
been tweaking rocket engine designs for years now, despite his wanting to "get away from the core" and actually design a 
ship around them.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News

-- 
- EricAnderton at yahoo



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list