run romero, run, he’ll try to defeat you
DOOM (2016) - Graphics Study
Historically id Software is known for open-sourcing their engines after a few years, which often leads to nice remakes and breakdowns. Whether this will stand true with id Tech 6 remains to be seen but we don’t necessarily need the source code to appreciate the nice graphics techniques implemented in the engine.
This is the combination of three modifications.
1. A WAD that contains the tim allen grunt and all sound entries for Doom pointing to it.
2. An OpenGL wrapper library for Linux that intercepts all texture loading and replaces everything with one file, in this case, Tim Allen’s face.
3. A soundfont that works similarly to 1, there’s the grunt, and then all MIDI instruments use it.
No regrets at all!
I bought our first NeXT (a ColorStation) just out of personal interest. Jason Blochowiak had talked to me about the advantages of Unix based systems from his time at college, and I was interested in seeing what Steve Job’s next big thing was. It is funny to look back – I can remember honestly wondering what the advantages of a real multi process development environment would be over the DOS and older Apple environments we were using. Actually using the NeXT was an eye opener, and it was quickly clear to me that it had a lot of tangible advantages for us, so we moved everything but pixel art (which was still done in Deluxe Paint on DOS) over. Using Interface Builder for our game editors was a NeXT unique advantage, but most Unix systems would have provided similar general purpose software development advantages (the debugger wasn’t nearly as good as Turbo Debugger 386, though!). Kevin Cloud even did our game manuals, starting with Wolfenstein 3D, in Framemaker on a NeXT.
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Over the entire course of Doom and Quake 1’s development we probably spent $100,000 on NeXT computers, which isn’t much at all in the larger scheme of development. We later spent more than that on Unix SMP server systems (first a quad Alpha, then an eventually 16-way SGI system) to run the time consuming lighting and visibility calculations for the Quake series. I remember one year looking at the Top 500 supercomputer list and thinking that if we had expanded our SGI to 32 processors, we would have just snuck in at the bottom.
6 AI agents playing a deathmatch using only rocket launchers in Visual Doom AI Competition @ CIG 2016, where AI agents can play using only raw visual input as the source of information.
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