id_notes/John C/1998-03-21_1998-03-26

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Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.4!

Name: John Carmack

Email: johnc@idsoftware.com

Description: Programmer

Project: Quake 3

Last Updated: 03/26/1998 12:29:07 (Central Standard Time)

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3/26

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I haven't even seen the "BeOS port of Quake". Stop emailing me about

aproving it. I told one of the Lion developers he could port it to

BeOS in his spare time, but I haven't seen any results from it.

--

There is a public discussion / compilation going on at openquake for

suggestions to improve technical aspects of quake 3:

http://www.openquake.org/q3suggest/

This is sooo much better than just dropping me an email when a thought

hits you. There are many, many thousands of you out there, and there

needs to be some filtering process so we can get the information

efficiently.

We will read and evaluate everything that makes it through the

discussion process. There are two possible reasons why features

don't make it into our games -- either we decide that the effort is

better spent elsewhere, or we just don't think about it. Sometimes the

great ideas are completely obvious when suggested, but were just missed.

That is what I most hope to see.

When the suggestions involve engineering tradeoffs and we have to

consider the implementation effort of a feature vs its benefits, the

best way to convince us to pursue it is to specify EXACTLY what benefits

would be gained by undertaking the work, and specifying a clean interface

to the feature from the file system data and the gamex86 code.

We hack where necessary, but I am much more willing to spend my time on

an elegant extension that has multiple uses, rather than adding api bulk

for specific features. Point out things that are clunky and inelegant

in the current implementation. Even if it doesn't make any user visible

difference, restructuring api for cleanliness is still a worthwhile goal.

We have our own ideas about game play features, so we may just disagree

with you. Even if you-and-all-your-friends are SURE that your

suggestions will make the game a ton better, we may not think it

fits with our overall direction. We aren't going to be all things to

all people, and we don't design by committee.

3/21 pt 2

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I haven't given up on rhapsody yet. I will certainly be experimenting

with the release version when it ships, but I have had a number of

discouraging things happen. Twice I was going to go do meetings at

apple with all relevent people, but the people setting it up would

get laid off before the meetings happened. Several times I would hear

encouraging rumors about various things, but they never panned out.

We had some biz discussions with apple about rhapsody, but they were

so incredibly cautious about targeting rhapsody for consumer apps at

the expense of macos that I doubted their resolve.

I WANT to help. Maybe post-E3 we can put something together.

The SGI/microsoft deal fucked up a lot of the 3D options. The codebase

that everyone was using to develop OpenGL ICDs is now owned by

microsoft, so it is unlikely any of them will ever be allowed to port

to rhapsody (or linux, or BeOS).

That is one of the things I stress over -- The Right Thing is clear,

but its not going to happen because of biz moves. It would be

great if ATI, which has video drivers for win, rhapsody, linux, and

BeOS, could run the same ICD on all those platforms.