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[John Romero] Setting the story straight: Multiplayer-Only Maps

ponpo

( ≖‿≖)
This is a funny story.

I had finished all my work on the shareware episode [of Quake] and because we had no design direction, we had all these fragments of maps. I came into the office one day and talked to John Romero and John Carmack. I said 'I've got this idea. I can take these map fragments and I can turn them into multiplayer-only maps, maps you only play in multiplayer.

Y..yeah..good one Tim.
 
That link... explains nothing.

Did you read the part where Tim explains how the company is better without the old guys and that John Carmack's tech was dumb? The guy is known for his revisionism and self cheerleading, and especially shitting on ids legacy to gain some face. Go make some Doom maps and shut up Tim.
 

*Splinter

Member
I could see this just being a misunderstanding. The conversation might be true, but both sides weren't on the same page during the discussion. Willits might have thought he was pitching the concept of multiplayer maps. However, the other two, due to being familiar with the concept, could have interpret the discussion to be whether to use single player assets for the multiplayer maps and quickly forgotten the, to them, uneventful meeting.
Yeah this makes more sense to me just because it would be a ridiculous thing to lie about.

Also the actual self-quote by Tim talks about reusing "scraps" to make multiplayer maps. I can see that idea being rejected because uhhh yeah it's kind of shit? Why use scraps when you can just as easily start from scratch?

Mind you... Many multiplayer maps nowadays are very clearly based on sections from the campaign, maybe Tim was talking about that idea? I don't know if that was a thing in Quake though.

Tbh this whole thing has probably been caused by some shoddy reporting by whoever quoted Tim.

Good response from Romero anyway.
 
Tim Willits calling MegaTextures the “dumbest technology thing ever,” despite it remaining a core pillar for the studio's tech, is very stupid. [/URL].

I mean, we can quibble on the difference between "dumb" and "dumbest ever" certainly, since the latter certainly isn't accurate.

The thing is that Carmack created a technology that was problematic for game development processes at the time it was first used, couldn't be effectively implemented on current hardware, caused issues with other important rendering elements (like dynamic lighting), was actively unsuited to the direction the AAA industry was moving (i.e. broad, outdoor open worlds), and didn't even fully address the problems they were targeting. Virtual texturing is a useful tool, but id aren't the only ones to implement it and the version they shipped in DOOM has been modified significantly from the version shipped in RAGE. By the standards one would generally apply to this sort of technological evaluation ("Did it make the resulting games look good?" "Did it make it faster or easier to develop the games?" "Did it enable the games to more effectively leverage resources to improve some other area?" "Did it avoid causing inconveniences and problems for the people playing the games?" it was unsuccessful.
 

Mr. Tibbs

Member
I mean, we can quibble on the difference between "dumb" and "dumbest ever" certainly, since the latter certainly isn't accurate.

The thing is that Carmack created a technology that was problematic for game development processes at the time it was first used, couldn't be effectively implemented on current hardware, caused issues with other important rendering elements (like dynamic lighting), was actively unsuited to the direction the AAA industry was moving (i.e. broad, outdoor open worlds), and didn't even fully address the problems they were targeting. Virtual texturing is a useful tool, but id aren't the only ones to implement it and the version they shipped in DOOM has been modified significantly from the version shipped in RAGE. By the standards one would generally apply to this sort of technological evaluation ("Did it make the resulting games look good?" "Did it make it faster or easier to develop the games?" "Did it enable the games to more effectively leverage resources to improve some other area?" "Did it avoid causing inconveniences and problems for the people playing the games?" it was unsuccessful.

As the Tweet above points out, the modifications to the id tech renderer we see in Doom (2016) contained significant contributions by the staffers who left in 2014, which once again is in conflict with the whole premise of PCGamesN piece on how id's better off without Carmack and those bad eggs.

“Certainly for the tech guys, the id Tech 6 stuff was entirely born out of that departure,” [Hines] points out.

Some were thrilled with how Rage looked and performed at launch, particularly on the consoles (definitely not PC AMD users), but the game was a grab bag of mechanics and poorly implemented ideas. The fact that it shipped seven years after Doom 3 isn't solely placed at the feet of id's technology. We can't forget that id's design team, which Willits helmed, was a shambles. They had abandoned two versions of the Darkness before even starting work on Rage, so it's not like the team had a clear vision for the game from the beginning that the tech was compromising.
 
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