John Carmack on hacking Doom and Quake (.plan file from 1998) | Hacker News Reader

John Carmack on hacking Doom and Quake (.plan file from 1998)

team5150.com

42 pointsmace9 comments

He mentions going away to stay at a hotel for a week doing research (only leaving to get diet coke). That sounds pretty cool, does anyone have more information about that?

I remember reading a similar thing about Bill Gates checking into a hotel and disconnecting the phone for a couple of days to finish MS DOS before the IBM deadline or something like that. Are hotels the dirty little secret to hacker greatness?

Also, what was the 'trinity' game he was working on at that time? I have never heard of it.

The book Masters of Doom gives more information. It's a good read about the early days of id and the gaming industry in general.

Carmack would go on 'research getaways' to hack on the Quake 3 engine. He did this because, at the time, the id office was not conducive to his work style. "Trinity" was the codename for the Quake 3 engine.

Steve Yegge, too:

"I've often idly wondered what the ideal innovation environment is. I know it's not at home -- staying up all night just to get some free time for innovation doesn't scale well when you have a family and a day job. Home has its share of distractions. And I know it's not in the office, at least not the space we're in today.

Every time I let my thoughts wander on this subject, the same vision comes to mind. I'm sitting in a comfortable armchair, in a large room or atrium that's lit primarily by daylight coming through large windows. There are nice green plants everywhere, including a large fern-ish looking tree (apologies; botany has never been my strong subject) next to me. There are people coming and going nearby, but their noise is white noise, and it's not terribly distracting. I've been in this place a hundred times, in a hundred different locations.

It's a hotel lobby."

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/innovation-101

Funny. The primary things that come to my mind when I think of hotel lobbies are: drafts, uncomfortable laptop wrangling, competition for power outlets, and a vague wish that the maid service would just hurry up already so I could get back into my room.

To me, hotels are a form of hell. The more expensive the room is, the more expensive everything else is, and in particular the less likely that wifi is free. A moment that sticks out: I recall a 400 GBP (800+ USD equivalent at the time) laundry bill - bank paid, not out of pocket, but it was still an eyebrow-raiser.

This "I wind up catagorizing periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time." is the true definition of a hacker.

I often lament the fact that the .plan format isn't credited more often as the original blogging format. Finger and .plan was very common before 2000, especially in the game industry and lots of hackers build their own aggregators for it.

Man. One moment he is donating an old Unix box to a local hacker or rambling about obscure details of contemporary graphics cards, the next he is comparing his F50 to his custom built TVR.

Now I know where the term 'rock star programmer' came from.

Not TVR, TR = Testarossa

I enjoyed the drag strip stories more than any of it...

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