News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by ndepoel on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:40AM (#36338600)
I'm not sure if it would've been John Carmack in this particular case. He was more concerned with the engine and rendering side of things, less with the gameplay logic stuff. More likely it would've been either John Romero or John Cash who wrote this code, but it's hard to say for sure. Best thing we can hope for is that John Romero pitches in with his impeccable memory :D
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by midasuni on Thursday June 15, 2023 @07:30AM (#36338956)
So the only requirement to work at iD back in the day was to be called John?
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by brookst on Thursday June 15, 2023 @07:52AM (#36339147)
That’s what my buddy said, yeah. Good old John Manyjohns.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by klodolph on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:06AM (#36339290)
For those who haven’t seen Buckaroo Banzai—all the people working at Yoyodyne Propulsion are named John. It’s a plot point.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by cfj on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:32AM (#36339540)
Or Carmack.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by TechBro8615 on Thursday June 15, 2023 @03:06PM (#36345081)
It seems like Amazon has the same idea when promoting people named Andy or Jeff to executive roles.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by mysterydip on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:45AM (#36339671)
"Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well."
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by i_c_b on Thursday June 15, 2023 @09:51AM (#36340508)
You can read Carmack's .plan archive from 1996 here, if you're so inclined:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...

It's a _fascinating_ snapshot into Quake's development.

I have no idea if his .plan is a record of what he, specifically, was doing, or if he was just capturing what the programming team was doing, but at the very least, it makes clear that he was aware of huge amounts of very highly specific game code issues as they were being worked on and was almost certainly deeply involved.

Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by baal80spam on Thursday June 15, 2023 @04:10PM (#36345819)
Wow, this link is something else - you can track what problems he tackled and what he worked on DAILY.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by Solvency on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:25PM (#36347521)
Guessing you're on the younger side? I used to read these voraciously as a 11 year old. Felt like a magic window into the game industry.
Re:Quake's lightning gun bug explained by sillysaurusx on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:36PM (#36347679)
Hello fellow I-was-once-11-and-fascinated-by-.plan! I wasn't sure if I was the only one. St Louis in 2000 made it seem like there were only a handful of people interested in programming at all.

Hmm... 11 would put me at 19999, so I must've been more like 12 or 13. I remember that's when I started taking gamedev seriously.