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Comment by avaer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting contrast to the Carmack school of thought: _do_ build your own game engine and don't even reuse anything you made before, because you'll know better this time.

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Also remember that id Software wrote an engine specific to the game they were creating (it's debatable whether you can call them engines at all, really). Things are a lot more streamlined if you take this approach because you rarely, if ever, have to answer the question "would this work for some other title?". Or worse, "would this work for any future title that may not even be in the same genre?"!

That, I think, is the mistake many game devs (who write their own engines) make. They make an engine for all possible games, then try to use it for their 2D match-3 puzzler, which uses about 5% of the code they've written, and even then they have to cludge some bits.

They (id tech 2-4+) definitely are considered full on world class engines, FPS specific but still. They each have a renderer, physics, scripting, asset pipeline, map and data formats, tooling, etc. and were used to make other games. They are too big, unified, oppressive (as in - they control the main loop, their elements are all together, you can't mix and match easily, your game code is on a level of a plugin for the engine code to call, not the other way around) and multi domain to be considered libraries/frameworks.

Most of us aren't John Carmack, though. When you're the guy that basically invented the genre of code you're talking about, there's a very good chance that your next project will advance the state of the art. When you're basically a hobby coder looking to get an game in the app store, it's a slightly different story.

Beyond that, it's not the 90s anymore; what novel feature are you going to implement that is going to wow anyone in the way that Carmack's engines did?

I wish modern games could get the basics as right as Carmack's engines did.

What good is the tech in No Man's Sky if visiting untold numbers of planets feels like a slog through mud?

Game mechanics were a lot of what always set id apart from everyone else. You could always count on them for smooth, fast-paced action, without much in the way of frills.

While their new games are still quite good, they seem to have begun to slip a bit after Carmack's departure.

Huge Carmack fan here but I feel the need to defend the latest hi-octane Doom incarnation from 2016 - IMHO great controls, fast old-school gameplay, superbe graphics.

I'd agree. The single-player for the new Doom was excellent, but not groundbreaking.

The new Quake I'm not as much of a fan of, since it tries to be Quake 3 with some Overwatch bits tacked on.

If tacking on a few Overwatch bits means I'll be able to find matches, let it be. Quake Live has been pretty dead for a while now.

The matchmaking in Quake Champions is god-awful.

The Overwatch bits I'm talking about are champion abilities, which is against the entire premise of Quake 3 (everyone is equal).

I mostly do play single player these days, which I found excellent as well :)

> what novel feature

Ask that in 10 years; I believe there is always progress to be made.

Yes, there is always progress to be made, but the thing is that it gets more incremental every time. I don't think we're likely to see games that look as starkly different as Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 did anymore. By contrast, Tekken 6 and 7 are separated by ten years and don't look anywhere near as different as those two games, released one year apart, did.

It's worth pointing out that without id's engine licensing business that depended on other companies NOT following the Carmack school of thought, it would've been harder to justify writing a new engine for every game.

I'd argue it's probably better to think of most of the later games as elaborate tech demos for the engine business

Where did you get that information from? Id tech is a clear engine family/line, they aren't named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 for fun(except for the first one which really doesn't fit the rest).

1. Carmack himself says he wrote D3 renderer inside Q3 in C and then ported it to C++ (Doom 3 was first C++ id game). 2. Carmack himself says between Q1, 2 and 3 the move was "evolutionary" and lots of code stayed the same. 3. On Mac the main of D3 is even called quakeMain. 4. Radiant - GtkRadiant is shared between many games and various radiants (Net, Dark, Gtk, etc.) share a lot of code with each other, DarkRadiant is for example a fork of GtkRadiant meant for D3 and TDM. 5. The MegaTexturing code must definitely be shared between 4, 5 and 6 because it'd be crazy to reinvent this from scratch each time to do the same thing.

The only big/throw everything away jumps are from previous odd games (Commander Keen which was 2D, Wolf3D which was a super simple ray caster) to id tech 1 (Doom 1 and 2, pure software, fake 3D) to id tech 2 (Q1 and 2 and beyond, GL but often with software fallback, real 3D). And that kind of jump is like giving web devs shit for not writing Java browser applets and thus "not reusing what they made before". From 2 and beyond it's evolutionary with the data formats, editors, code, etc. and never a total rewrite from scratch. Case in point: the use of OpenGL (or wrapping other APIs in a GL like one when there is no GL), Carmack used to (90s) prefer it over DirectX but much later in life (2010s) switched his preference but the code stayed with OpenGL out of inertia. Even Rage and new Doom use OpenGL (id tech 5 and 6 respectively). Why would this happen instead of switching to DX if they threw everything away with each new engine and never reused code?

Granted: lots of stuff and the ENTIRE scripting system (and Carmack's opinion of scripting) change almost each iteration but "change most of stuff but it's very evolutionary and lots of code is same" is far from your claimed "don't even reuse anything".

As for his opinion on writing your own engine it's not super clear, few years back he admitted that Epic dominated that field, but he was happy to stop licensing his tech to outsiders because it was a burden and started almost by an accident ("It's interesting when you look at our technology licensing -- it was never really a business that I wanted to be in. In the very early days, people would pester us, and we'd just throw out some ridiculous terms, and we were surprised when people started taking us up on it."). He is also reportedly a very calm, reasonable and polite person so even if he thinks reusing engines is shit he won't tell us. One interviewer who interviewed him said he just turned around in his chair, didn't even say 'hi', answered all questions in length in detail with no BS and then just thanked for the interview and turned back away to his screen without a 'bye'. Embodiment of pragmatism and niceness, despite the lack of 'hi' and 'bye'.

Sources: http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/interviews.php http://icculus.org/gtkradiant/developers.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125324/E3_ids_Carmack_Wil...

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