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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

1. Carmack stopped making games for us PC gamers and started making games for the true mass market: casual console gamers. Rage is a great competitor to Halo or Call of Duty or whatever.

2. He left a huge void in the world of FPS gaming. The "best" FPS games today (Battlefield 3, Call of Duty) are graphically beautiful, watered down, crap for console gamers. Their actual game play sucks.

Quake1 Netquake Deathmatch/CTF/Clan Arena/Rocket Arena is still more intense and more a test of skill than any other game to follow in the ~13 years since it was created.

Creating a modern replacement (for no other reason really than fixing a few minor issues and bringing in new players) is on my list of Things To Do.

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> It's one of my fantasies to work on this.

Then why don't you?

No, really, why don't you? Right now.

http://nehe.gamedev.net

http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html

http://developer.nvidia.com/physx

These are the (free) tools that I used to build something very close to Quake. If a dummy like me can, then so can you.

And if it's your fantasy, then you owe it to yourself to make it your reality. Go achieve what I didn't.

I'm living out my top-choice fantasy already: working on my web startup. Gaming is a secondary love, but if no one else gets around to it I definitely will.

DaVinci tackled a dozen fantasies pretty much simultaneously.

I think you're more capable than you give yourself credit for.

Hah. Da Vinci was a time traveler though. Unfair advantage.

That's like saying that somebody should be pretty good at physics because Einstein was. Juggling lots of ideas at once was pretty much Leonardo da Vinci's thing.

Discouraging people from having confidence in themselves (even when that confidence is unrealistic) is one of the biggest tragedies brought about by modern-day mediums such as HN et al.

I'd rather strike out a dozen times than watch from the stands.

Yeah but a lot of what you think of when you think DaVinci never really got past the idea state.

I love it how you linked to beej's guide, nehe and physx. Except for the PhysX link its like its 1999 all over again!

To avoid getting down voted here are what I would call modern, or at least more comprehensive versions of those links.

http://www.unity3d.com http://www.udk.com http://mycryengine.com

If you really want to role your own engine then...

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/ http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/ http://bulletphysics.org

Although a handful of links can't sum up the amount of work, knowledge and tech required to build something resembling a modern 3D game engine.

Quake Live [1] is actually pretty good and idtech3 based! its not cod big but big enough for a lot of competition on almost all skillevels.

but as you said it's sad that theres no true "hardcore" fps on the horizon :-/

[1] http://www.quakelive.com/

Red Orchestra 2 is pretty good, but it is super buggy and the community is small. If it didn't suffer from so many game breaking bugs on release it would easily be the best FPS of the last 10 years.

Call of Duty is pretty good and also idtech3 based ;) Of course the IW engine has had years of work put into it to the point where it could be considered a different engine, even though the core code base is still the same.

Sadly and relatedly, the Descent series (6 degree of freedom FPS) was an intense test of skill unmatched anywhere else, and the last release in that series was ~13 years ago. I don't know of any other newer games in the genre.

Competitive FPS gaming reached a peak around 1998. Since then, the only games I've heard of with similar high-level competition have been in the RTS genre. "Watered down" seems to be the name of the game nowadays.

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