Why is John Carmack so revered?

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Reverend

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"Commander Keen", then "Wolfenstein", then "Doom", then "Quake", then... er, to be honest, my opinion is that it is subjective whether this list of 3D technology goes on beyond "Quake". But that's not the point of this thread.

Throughout the years, John has received many accolades and respect (printed or not) from both the public as well as his peers.

Which is the one thing John did that commanded your respect when it came to 3D Technology? IOW, what was his best 3D technology effort and why you think it so?
 
Reverend said:
"Commander Keen", then "Wolfenstein", then "Doom", then "Quake", then... er, to be honest, my opinion is that it is subjective whether this list of 3D technology goes on beyond "Quake". But that's not the point of this thread.

Throughout the years, John has received many accolades and respect (printed or not) from both the public as well as his peers.

Which is the one thing John did that commanded your respect when it came to 3D Technology? IOW, what was his best 3D technology effort and why you think it so?
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The fact that he has consistently opened his work (and thoughts) to the general public.

Without that, Michael Abrash would never have been able to write such ground braking articles about the development of the Quake engine. There must be tens of thousands of young computer enthusiasts who got their first exposure to BSP trees etc because of that. Such a thrilling time...
 
IMHO there is no The One thing that make him revered.

As he said before a good work is made of 500 small decisions well made and implemented, not one great idea. He consistently delivered good/usable technology before most other competitors.
 
Wolfenstein wasn't 3D and at the time it came out it was long surpassed by a real 3D engine, Origin's Ultima Underworld, which bascilly was even more advanced then the Doom engine.

It the end it comes down id delivering a open platform to the community. It's the mods that made the work great.
 
pascal said:
IMHO there is no The One thing that make him revered.
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That's not what I said.

As he said before a good work is made of 500 small decisions well made and implemented, not one great idea.
Click to expand...
That's not what I meant either (and I don't think that's what I posted).

He consistently delivered good/usable technology before most other competitors.
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Now we're getting somewhere! Can you name some of the technologies that more or less immediately comes to (your) mind? <-- this last sentence is what I meant and what I posted
 
As a non 3D expert what quicklly comes to my mind are:

Wolfstein3D - a usable FPS, 2 and half D color engine for 386 CPU
DOOM - multiplayer/mods/fps/2_and_halfD engine for 486 CPU
Quake - multiplayer/mods/3D/graphics_api/lightmap engine for pentium
Doom3 - pervasive DOT3 engine for the GF256/P3 and beyond.
;)
 
his engines typically have no or few bugs, high framerate / low system requirements. yes doom 3 has and always had low requirements in my mind given how well it runs on a gf4 and 512MB ram are more than enough. the doom engine and Q3 engine can also do great things on respectively a 486SX and a voodoo2.
 
Isn't this the totally wrong forum?

About JC: his work on the Q1-engine, because it was the first "real 3D" shooter. Second place: curved surfaces in Q3. Third: unified lighting in D3.
 
Reverend said:
"Commander Keen", then "Wolfenstein", then "Doom", then "Quake", then... er, to be honest, my opinion is that it is subjective whether this list of 3D technology goes on beyond "Quake". But that's not the point of this thread.

Throughout the years, John has received many accolades and respect (printed or not) from both the public as well as his peers.

Which is the one thing John did that commanded your respect when it came to 3D Technology? IOW, what was his best 3D technology effort and why you think it so?
Click to expand...

I don't revere him. I think he's one of the better programmers in the game industry. He has my respect, but not my adoration. There is no "one" thing that has made me respect him. It's the cumulation of all of his work. Had he only done a single impressive thing he would be no different than the thousands of other people out there that have had a good idea.

Having said this, I remember him mostly for his earlier work. Lately he's done some impressive technical things, but he hasn't really changed the industry the way he did with Doom. Still, that's ok. There are so many brilliant people in the industry now that you can't hope to be in the spotlight for any great length of time. There are just too many facets to game development and programming in general that make it impossible for a single person to master them all.

Nite_Hawk
 
It's because he's name is synonymous to FPS???

basically when people think of first-person shooters, his name comes to mind???
 
'revered'? Did you leave the 'n' and the capitalization of 'R' out? Nothing Freudian going on in this thread!
 
your question: what was his best 3D technology effort


_xxx_ said:
\
About JC: his work on the Q1-engine, because it was the first "real 3D" shooter. Second place: curved surfaces in Q3. Third: unified lighting in D3.
Click to expand...


what he said.
and why? because more gamers have played his engines then any other engine EVER created. period. more then halo or the unreal engines.
most popular demo of all time? wolf3d.
more people know of him thus he is the most famous. imo
can others be as good or better? yes very possibly. will they ever get the repect he has earned? no.
 
I think his early work kind of puts him out front. His later discussions about OpenGL and his input in DX probably gave him a fair amount of visibility.

His most recent work doesn't stand alone, but it's still pretty high-quality.

In the realm of web-nerds, however, I need only references this thread to show that Carmack literally has the biggest e-penis. ;)

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37994

It's not necessarily limited to 3D, but it transcends all kinds of geekdom.
 
I think he was one of the first to blog about what he was doing as well. And since he new what he was doing people paid attention. It also helps that his name is easy to remember.
 
I'd say it's roughly in part to the fact that most of what he comes out with is actually a collaborative effort from his entire coding team at Id, but you rarely ever hear much about them
 
He releases the source code to older titles, he's worked on some great games, he's responsive to people in general and does good interviews. He doesn't come off as a PR manager or corporate whore.
 
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