[i_c_b]

Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash.

I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where had I heard the name mrelusive before? That sounds _really_ familiar.

And then I remembered - oh, right, mrelusive, JP-what's-his-name. I've read a huge amount of his code. When I was working on Quake4 as a game programmer and technical designer, he was writing a truly prodigious amount of code in Doom 3 that we kept getting in code updates that I was downstream of.

And he was obviously a terrifically smart guy, that was clear.

But I had cut my teeth on Carmack's style of game code while working in earlier engines. Carmack's style of game code did, and still does, heavily resonate with my personal sensibilities as a game maker. I'm not sure if that particular style of code was influenced by id's time working with Objective-C and NeXTStep in their earlier editors, but I've long suspected it might have been - writing this comment reminds me I'd been meaning to explore that history.

Anyway, idTech4's actual game (non-rendering) code was much less influenced by Carmack, and was written in a distinctly MFC-style of C++, with a giant, brittle, scope-bleeding inheritance hierarchy. And my experience with it was pretty vexed compared to earlier engines. I ultimately left the team for a bunch of different reasons a while before Quake4 shipped, and it's the AAA game I had the least impact on by a wide margin.

I was thinking about all this as I was poking over the website, toying with the idea of writing something longer about the general topics. Might make a good HN comment, I thought...

But then I noticed that everything on his site was frozen in amber sometime around 2015... which made me uneasy. And sure enough, J.M.P. van Waveren died of cancer back in 2017 at age 39. He was a month younger than me.

I didn't really know him except through his code and forwards from other team members who were interacting with id more directly at the time. But what an incredible loss.

[wk_end]

Just wanna say that I loved Soldier of Fortune. Lots of FPSs around that time felt really like and plastic-y. SoF was one of the few that made shooting a gun feel satisfying and visceral (and I’m not even talking about the gore, I played the censored version).

[i_c_b]

Thanks! That's really cool to hear, 20+ years later.

I actually did all the effects work on the weapons (muzzleflashes, smoke, explosions, bullet holes and surface sprays, and all the extensions to Quake2's particle systems to make that content possible) and all the single player weapons system game balancing, as a matter of fact. Both the sound design and animation / modelling on the weapons went through a number of iterations to get them really over-the-top and delightfully powerful / ridiculous, too - I was lucky to work closely with a great sound designer and a really talented animator on that.

[mentos]

My biggest takeaway from my time programming in Objective-C was not being afraid to name functions and variables more verbosely.

Curious to hear what aspects of Objective-C you feel influenced id?

[i_c_b]

Well, as I say, I'd been meaning to look into this in more detail because it's something I'd been long curious about. But I don't think I have time right now to dig into it.

[musicale]

> Curious to hear what aspects of Objective-C you feel influenced id?

Well, 'id' is the generic object type in ObjC. ;-)

[BigHatLogan]

Really enjoyed this comment--thanks for sharing. Game development really sounds like such a different beast from standard line-of-business programming. Always enjoy hearing stories about it and reading books about it (Masters of Doom comes to mind).

[i_c_b]

Thanks! I've been thinking a lot recently about maybe getting some of my own stories down. The late 90's were a really fascinating time to be in games.

And I loved Masters of Doom, too, although it was weird reading it and occasionally seeing people I knew show up in it, briefly.

[xeonmc]

Did you know where the idea of crouch sliding came from?

[i_c_b]

I ... hmm. My memory is really, really dusty on that.

I remember I had a handful of conversations with Bryan Dube during development about Q4 deathmatch. He was a super sharp game programmer / technical designer who had done a ton of the work on Soldier of Fortune 2 deathmatch previously, and had worked on the Urban Terror mod for Quake 3 before that. And he was much more focused on multiplayer than I was.

We talked a lot about weapons (as I had done most of the code side work on weapons in Soldier of Fortune), but I'm now remembering him being really keen at the time on adding more high skill play to Q4 deathmatch. We all loved rocket jumping, and I remember him really wanting to add other kinds of high skill movement.

So that much I definitely remember. More than that and my memory is kind of fuzzy. To be honest, lots of team members loved deathmatch and Quake, and all of us were of course talking about gameplay possibilities all the time, so it's possible the idea originated somewhere else on the team.