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by hyperpallium
3404 days ago
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This is first class post-hoc bullshit. They weren't making prototypes or reusing code, they sure as hell weren't composing high-sounding principles. They just got on with it because they were talented experienced and motivated. For that reason, the rest of the talk is very inspiring - so listen to the hour-long video (half talk, half questions), and not the article which only has the post-hoc bits. https://youtu.be/E2MIpi8pIvY |
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Agreed and that's the whole secret sauce right there, combined with: no distractions (social media or indeed even "coding forums" with constant flame-wars on this and that language/stack/paradigm) and crucially also no distracting "stack" or APIs to speak of (bare metal coding literally "on top of the BIOS" in these days, no OS/GUI/multithread/GPU APIs).
The initial core team spent their entire youths 24/7 getting insanely good at ASM and C and numerous gfx tricks and then "they just played the piano" to the best of their accumulated abilities. Observe how much longer the Dooms took compared to Wolfenstein and priors, and how much longer the Quakes took them compared to the Dooms.. as they were slowly entering the age of Windows native & Internet multiplayer even they too got slowed down a bit (were shocked how for Quake "just waiting for 'ze engine' took a year"!) compared to the earlier works --- of course still managed to ship high-quality products, but still