rmitz

The old Carmack .plan We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers, etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it. https://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

Yes, Carmack did like NeXTStep a lot. With that said, most of his career Windows was his main dev box. Even post Doom he went back to Windows as his main desktop: "The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 / NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on win32 first." http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html And more importantly, as it relates to DHH's statement, excluding Windows developers isn't like some odd niche. It's probably a healthy percentage of the best developers in the world. Fortunately for DHH he's at a webdev shop where pure coding skill is probably less important than cultural fit.

Yep, I'm sure there are still great nuggets in the book. Unfortunately it looks like I'm not going to get my question answered about modern OpenGL books because everyone just jumps in and says that you should still read Abrash's book. John Carmack, for example, didn't write much of his games in assembler because he knew that he didn't have to. If you look at Doom, there wasn't a lot of assembler even back in the early 1990's. https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM And according to Carmack, he liked working in C and OpenGL. http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.opengl.html "With OpenGL, you can get something working with simple, straightforward code, then if it is warranted, you can convert to display lists or vertex arrays for max performance (although the difference usually isn't that large). This is the right way of doing things -- like converting your crucial functions to assembly language after doing all your development in C." I actually have done some basic assembler so I do understatnd the benefits of keeping values in registers, etc. A lot of stuff really is architecture dependent, of course. ARM vs x86 will make a difference. Anyway, where's the best place to start these days? Personally, I'd like to do some iOS stuff, and perhaps keep the same code running on Android.

TIL Tucker Carlson was mauled by a daemon. Another gem: https://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

I like to pronounce it daymon if only to avoid inferences made by the uninitiated. De(e)mon does have the devilish scent. Good story: "Are you a Satanist?" http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

Which is good in theory but fails flat when we put graphics and the required performance into it, as Carmack argued about. https://marc.info/?a=111558719100068&r=1&w=4 http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

I think John Romero is just glossing over the details since it's a (cray) Cray story. The PC was id's primary target platform and Carmack surely knew that Win32 is where things were headed. He ended up moving to NT as his development platform. Here's his .plan from a little later that talks about this in some detail: http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

Somewhat relevant: http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

The offensive content problem may even have something to do with the appearance of their "monster" character being confusingly similar to typical portrayals of the devil (red character with horns), which itself is can be an offensive image in many cultures regardless of context. That's why feedback is so important in these review processes, especially with something so subjective. As an aside, the devil thing isn't isolated to non-Western countries either. Linda Branagan famously recalls one instance of where the BSD "Daemon" mascot, which also looks devil-like, nearly got her into real trouble in Texas: http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

Here's a similar (and funny) story: http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

That reminds me of this story, about the BSD Daemon logo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bsd_daemon.jpg) on a T shirt in Texas: http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

The beams have crossed since http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/news/2009/03/04/0-9doom/

Sorry... http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html