John Romero just made him his bitch?
As a massive id fan, I can only say, I fucking hate Tim Willits.
For this alone? Or is there more to your specific disdain for the guy?
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.
That link... explains nothing.
Yeah this makes more sense to me just because it would be a ridiculous thing to lie about.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.
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?
Carmack's tech was dumb.
id tech 6 still uses megatextures.
This true statement does not materially impact my conclusion.
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.
Certainly for the tech guys, the id Tech 6 stuff was entirely born out of that departure, [Hines] points out.