How Doom got ported to NeXTSTEP (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How Doom got ported to NeXTSTEP (2013)

blog.wilshipley.com

77 pointsfezz12 comments

I thought Doom was developed on NextSTEP, at least wikipedia says so

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom

"We wrote all of DOOM and Quake's code on NeXTSTEP"

http://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/200...

The author notes this in the post. I wrote Carmack a message which apparently had the subject line "Doom diddly doom!" and said something like, hey, since you wrote this game on NEXTSTEP but don't want to waste your time tuning it up for that platform (it kind of ran in a pseudo-PC-emulation layer) can Omni do it for you and release it for free?

Let's not forget the port of Doom to the Atari Falcon either...

...and irix at the other end of the spectrum.

Had the joy of running Irix DOOM on a 16-processor Onyx which was, for the time, amazing. Over 180 FPS for software-rendered 3D stretched over 3 monitors was just glorious.

Great read. I love to read anything about Carmack, it just blows my mind that he re-wrote all his engines from scratch. I can't even fathom developing at that level.

Yeah, every time I read something he's written, or written about him, it's a good read. I've always considered myself good at understanding how systems work together, mainly with web applications from front (html/css/js) to back (http/app/services/sql), but Carmack does that with very low level/detailed applications... It's hard for me to imagine.

He is a great coder, but that is how we used to develop software before the web, you really needed to understand everything, specially the hardware.

In absolute terms I think there are more people than ever programming this way today. Just doesn't feel that way because there are even more people doing stuff differently.

Check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3946/building_quake_li...

""" What really hurt us was the initial thought of putting a web interface on it. Some things surrounding the game were certainly overly trivialized by us. That's easy to do when you say, "Oh, we're hotshot game developers. This web stuff can't be too hard because so many people do it."

There's a little bit of a humbling lesson there in how much work we did have to do with all the things on browser compatibility and backend database integration and optimization. """

Low level and also advanced geometry. IIRC he was one of the first to ship real time dynamic shadow rendering. I can't judge the math behind it, but it wasn't trivial for sure.

NeXTSTEP was so ahead of its time. I wrote many sets of documentation (yes the printed kind) on my pizza box using FrameMaker. Best writing experience to this day.

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