> He was building for at least Windows and Linux
Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...
Wikipedia seems to suggest in the first line that it was originally released for Linux. But the "Ports" section it mentions that:
> The first port to be completed was the Linux port Quake 0.91 by id Software employee Dave D. Taylor using X11 on July 5, 1996
And on that topic:
> In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a source port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using the Rendition Vérité chipset.
> and didn't have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually
So in other words he could focus on the fundamentals of doing vector math and rasterizing pixels, rather than worrying about 600 different incompatible OpenGL extensions, pipeline stalls, and memory management bugs?
> Plus assembly code...
Assembly isn't that hard. Pokemon Red/Blue was written entirely in assembly.
> had to handle all the raw networking code
Again, not that hard when all you're doing is blasting out UDP packets on a very simple network. You didn't have to worry about double NAT, people didn't expect your game to work for diverse peers connected from Germany to Belgium.
> wrote tools to work with assets and process levels
I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling. Side note - have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.
> encryption to unlock the full game on the shareware
I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13, it's not like Carmack was also Daniel J. Bernstein in disguise :) Back then the state of computer security was, well, rather nascent.
I hope this comment doesn't come across as contrarian. I also hope it doesn't sound like I'm trying to diminish the achievements of Carmack. He's a role model for me personally as a programmer. And he and his mates spawned an entire game genre that I have enjoyed for ... an amount of time I'd rather not disclose or think too much about!
The original point I was trying to make is thus: computers, and computing, have steadily become more and more powerful, which results in more and more complexity, and progressively more unwieldy abstractions to deal with all that complexity. Back when Carmack was cutting his teeth, computers were still fairly early on that complexity curve.