Jonathan

You know, I always figured terrible people with repulsive politics were overrepresented in the Doom community, due to its niche status attracting weirdos, but this thing makes me think they actually may be underrepresented compared to the larger gamer subculture. What really bewilders me about the entire GG thing isn't the trolls driving women from their homes - that's just seems like standard, horrible internet shit - it's the legions of people expending useful energy constructing and expounding these labyrinthine conspiracy theories around games journalism, and seeming to really, genuinely think they're of any importance. Is there a plague of paranoid schizophrenia amongst gamers, or something? Even if every rambling, circumstantial narrative of journalistic malfeasance spawned by GG was true, they still wouldn't be worth the time spent in reading, let alone forming a cult around to try and spread the truth. It's like the Dvorak keyboard shit again, or when some nut stops me on the street and tries to explain the baroque details of their obscure religion. I want to say, it's not even that I don't believe you, it's that I don't *care*. That's the truly damning thing about GG. Even if you accept these people's best explanation for what they're doing, they're still awful. They're people who are so myopically focused on their hobby, whose priorities are so utterly warped, that of the all the serious, damaging corruption, tyranny and poverty in the world, what bothers them and motivates them to action is the the thought that some indie games might have gotten too good a review.

Learning that, for every monster you kill, a sexually explicit text is sent to a random person on your phone's contact list.

I think there's a lot of undeserved mystery around the role of imagination and inspiration in art. All artists begin by studying and copying, either consciously or unconsciously, from existing art that inspires them. This is a good thing. If every artist in every field had to learn from first principles by trial and error, we would never have progressed beyond cave painting. So there is absolutely nothing wrong with finding inspiration for your projects in other maps that you enjoy. They are the most obvious and direct source of inspiration, and it's only natural that they would inform your work. The truth is that a great many artists, even very successful ones, never move much beyond this imitative approach. Think of the myriad bands whose sound resembles that of earlier bands, who in turn copied others. But if you want to move away from this type of direct imitation, it's possible to to use the approaches and techniques used by artists in other mediums. This is usually done in two ways: by improving your technical ability, and by finding other sources of inspiration. To improve your technical ability, as Phml said, a common technique is to start very imitative, by trying to completely reproduce something you like as perfectly as possible. You begin by studying it in exquisite detail. This kind of close-reading is very different from general consumption of art. A regular cinema goer might watch a hundred movies in a year, whereas a film student might only examine a couple, but in the process the latter would gain a much deeper understanding of things like story structure, lighting and cinematography. This in turn would allow them to make a much better quality film themselves than if you were to hand a camera over to the cinema goer, but their film would likely also be more creative, because they would have internalised the knowledge necessary to know how to express the ideas they do have: How to structure their story, what camera angles to use to express different emotions, etc. In the case of making maps, this process might involve taking a single map by an author you admire, the quality of which you don't think you could match yourself, and breaking it down piece by piece. For example, I might choose one of Ola Björling's Darkening 2 maps. Look at each piece: Doors, windows, ceilings, floors, traps, secrets, rooms, mazes, etc. How is it built? How would you build it yourself? How could you vary it? For example, when I started mapping in Doom, I kept seeing these cool, decorated barred windows in Gothic DM maps. I tried to make similar ones in my own maps, but they never looked as good. The problem was, I had been inspired by them and had a general idea of how they looked, but I had never actually paid close attention to they details of how they were constructed. So I opened up the original levels in an editor and worked them out, vertex by vertex. I then started a new wad, called windows.wad, that was just a huge, long corridor with windows along one side. Each one was slightly different in construction or texturing, and I would go back and add a few more every so often. They didn't all look good, but it was a great way to both practice my technique and exercise my imagination in a constrained way. And every window style I produced became an internalised part of my editing vocabulary, that I could apply in real levels later on. This process, of endless deliberate practice and relaxed experimentation, is probably the greatest "secret" to producing anything worthwhile. Like learning more and more complex words, it's about building a richer vocabulary that gives you a base to communicate your ideas without getting distracted or sweating over the smaller details, because you've already internalised them enough to apply them automatically, which free you up to concentrate on the bigger picture, which is where the real interest lies. The second technique for producing less directly imitative work is to find other sources of inspiration. Again, start small. Rather than a copying a Doom level, try a level from another game, perhaps from a modern title, or a very old one. How can you translate that into the Doom engine? Doing so will necessarily involve using your imagination to solve the mismatches that crop up the translation process. Next, move on to being inspired by real world architecture, working from photographic references or places you visit that inspire you. Here is where your technical skills really pay off. Without them, you might see a photo of a gloomy castle and think, "I'd love to build something like that in Doom," but wouldn't know where to start. But with your technique down, you'll immediately be able to see how to construct the various parts and achieve the effects necessary to produce the feel you're looking for. When I made my level for Crucified Dreams, I bought an expensive photo book full of high-resolution photos of gothic churches and buildings throughout Europe. I spend hours looking at it, and then hours more in the editor figuring out how to produce not necessarily the exact same look, but the same feel as in the photos that inspired me. Next, you can move on to more abstract sources of inspiration: Literature, music, art, or simply your own thoughts and emotions. The key to this approach is to have such a well developed technical sense so that there is stuff in your brain for these abstract motes of inspiration to latch onto. You'll never translate directly from a song to a Doom level, but it can be the spark of something that then takes on a life of its own. And finally, remember that the creative process is rarely one of sudden, fully formed inspiration arriving in a flash. Even at the best of times, it is usually one of steady work, iterative improvement and careful refinement. Whatever your rate of inspiration, the longer you work on something, the more ideas you will have. And even when you're not inspired, simple experimentative trial and error can be a way to move forward.

- Messy palette. You've got a limited number of colours, why waste any? - The bullet firing sound is too weedy. Pistol mods can improve the feel of the weapon considerably just by providing a beefier sound. - Reduced mouse accuracy optimisation in net and (particularly) demo play isn't worth it. - Arch-vile flame attack is too pixelated when viewed in first person. It should have been done as a HUD sprite instead. - BFG is overpowered. It should do wide area damage to a crowd of enemies or very-high damage to one enemy, but not both of these. Also, I'd have made it use all of your cells when you fired, giving damage proportional to the number you were holding, making it much more of a "last resort" weapon. And I'd have made the Spider Mastermind immune to it. - Partial invisibility power-up hampers skilled players. Perhaps it's speedrunner bias, but I'd have preferred a speed-increase power-up instead. - Poor allocation of art effort for Doom 2. We got a lot of new mid-range enemies, but only one new weapon, and no proper final boss? Did the world really need Pain Elementals that badly?

It's scary that anyone here could be so stupid and blinkered as to watch the linked video and think Obama is "mocking' Christianity. To be a Christian is simply to be guided by the teachings of Jesus Christ, not to blindly adhere to religious dogma or scripture and shun anyone who doesn't. If your faith is so weak that you can't stand to see a fellow Christian point out Biblical anachronisms, or champion the notion of separation of church and state, then you have more in common with the fundamentalists of ISIL than actual Christian values. Because that's really what this is about - fundamentalism. Obama is a pragmatic, centre-right politician, but if you view the world through a fundamentalist, black-and-white system, then you can't accept that. You have to believe he is a radical, crypto-Muslim, socialist bogeyman because there's no room in your world for moderate policies or non-extremism. What's more, you need to portray his centrist policies as crazy and extreme in order to try and make your own actually extreme positions look sane. So Obama champions religious freedom and pluralism, advocates separation of church and state, and points out that religious beliefs need to be translated into rational, universal values before they're applied to government. Basically he's saying theocracy, as practiced by states like Iran, is bad. But if you're a right-wing, religious fundamentalist, who actually *wants* theocracy, then you portray this as evil, heretical mockery of Christianity.

World of Warcraft? Starcraft? Both are going strong years after their initial release, and both sold far fewer copies than Minecraft. In terms of sales, Minecraft as already broken the mould. It's already the 3rd best selling game in history. That's especially amazing when you consider the top two spots are Wii Sports, which came bundled with a hit console, and Tetris, which also came bundled with a hit console and has been selling for a multitude of other platforms for thirty years. Well, franchise tie-ins don't necessarily have to be innovative to make money. Even wrapping some Star Wars decor around the basic Minecraft mechanics would probably sell very well. And there'd be a sliding scale of how far it could shift away from the vanilla Minecraft experience to include more franchise specific gameplay elements, which the game's producers would have to decide. I think it's a failure of imagination to pre-emptively declare that you can't make a Star Wars (or any franchise) flavoured version of Minecraft that successfully marries the strong points of both. But really, even if franchise tie-ins don't work out, there's still huge potential value in in-game purchases, custom game modes, sequels, merchandising, films, TV shows, etc. An audience of 50m addicted kids is valuable, however you manage to monetise it.

I think Phml hit the nail on the head here. Thinking of Minecraft simply as a game, or even a franchise where you churn out sequels, is to misunderstand it. It's incredible popularity, especially amongst kids, means it's transcended that. Something so popular and universal has the potential to become a self-sustaining medium - a canvas on which other franchises are built. In that situation, profits from the original game or retaining the creator are almost irrelevant. The obvious comparison is Lego. Lego's success is based on not just being a toy, but instead a medium for building toys and selling other merchandise. So there are endless varieties of Lego sets, and franchise tie-ins with Star Wars Lego, Pirates of the Caribbean Lego, etc. There are also franchised video games, movies, clothing, etc. Minecraft's potential is to become a similar medium for video games. The number of existing Minecraft clones and mods is a testament to the flexibility of its formula, and I expect Microsoft will look to exploit that by publishing a convey belt of officially sanctioned, polished variations. Imagine it: Pirate Minecraft - with ships and cannons! City Minecraft - with skyscrapers and cars! Fantasy Minecraft - with wizards and spells! And just like Lego, franchises such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings could release licensed Minecraft content. You pay a fee and you get a whole recreation of Middle Earth to wander around, digging in Moria while dodging goblins, or a recreation of the Death Star. It might seem unlikely, but who would have predicted Angry Birds Star Wars?

My opinion is that there's the germ of a good idea in there, but the execution sucks. Countless modders have proven that you can achieve breathtaking things through creative use of Doom's 2.5D geometry and two-sided lines. If you said to Scuba Steve or the Batman Doom guys, "make a level where a huge demon head has crashed through a wall and is spitting monsters at the player", I'm confident that they could build something way more impressive and real-seeming than the Icon of Sin. In fact, that would be a fun idea for an editing competition: Imagine you're an Id employee in 1994 and you've been assigned to create an end level for Doom 2 featuring a giant demon. What would you come up with? The winner being the most impressive and imaginative execution of the idea. Edit: Typos.

I can call up and see my doctor the same day, any time I like, or I can see a duty nurse, go to an emergency ward, or a drop in centre, call an NHS helpline, etc. No lines. All for free. I have never faced any delay for treatment in thirty years, and I've never paid more than 8 GBP (13 USD) for any prescription medication, ever. Plus, I can still get private medical insurance and care if I want it. But yeah, thank god you don't have any pre-conceived notions, eh?

Yeah, that's where I remember it from. I can't remember family birthdays, but I can remember the contents of ragequit screeds I read fifteen years ago. Thanks brain!

Didn't Carmack give Killough and maybe some of the other Boom guys access to the original source for reference purposes?

Capitalism fails because businesses deliberately destroy it. No anti globalization protester or left wing campaigner has ever been as determined or effective at disrupting and curtailing the free market as the management of large companies. Microsoft are the classic example in IT - their entire strategy in the 90s was based not just on beating the competition, but using all means available to ensure competition was impossible. But they're hardly alone, there is a massive, constant and concerted effort on the part of dominant businesses in every industry to manipulate the market, the supply chain and the legislative regime such that the free market breaks down and their dominant position is enshrined forever. It's amazing to me that business leaders in the west are so flagrantly, aggressively determined to destroy western capitalism by undermining the systems that underpin it. It's such an extraordinarily short sighted approach, and it plays directly into the hands of state capitalist regimes like Russia and China. They don't seem to realize that they're not playing by cold war rules anymore, and the economic ineptitude of non-western states is no longer a given. In order to succeed, they should be working to foster the market, to reduce corruption and improve democratic representation, because these are the advantages that regimes like China can't match. Becoming just as inefficient, uncompetitive and corrupt as them, but without even the strong, single purpose state directing economic development towards national goals, will only lead to their doom, and the decline of liberal western nations in general.

The Janitor? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373040/ "Lionel is a custodian that longs for more. Bombarded with daily disrespect and insults from his co-workers, Lionel sets on a path of revenge and begins to brutally murder everyone in his path."

Art is a category. Ignorance or misunderstanding of how humans categorise the world is the source of various pointless and rancorous debates over exactly what constitutes a "true" example of something, be it art, a game, a sport, a crime, a planet, etc. Often this stems from an over-simplistic view of categories that includes several fallacies: That categories actually exist a priori in the structure of the universe, that the boundaries of categories are fixed and precise, and that all members of a category are equally valid. In fact, all three of these are manifestly false. For example, every tree is individually distinct from every other tree, but due to shared characteristics we place them in a category called "trees". But the category "trees" does not actually exist in the world, it is a human idea, the same as the categories "plants" and "living things", into which a tree might also be placed. Similarly, the boundaries of the category "trees" are not always clear - one person might consider Bonsai as trees, while another might not. Or they might consider them as trees, but as a somehow less "good" example of a tree than, for example, an oak or beech tree. We can try to reduce these ambiguities by using scientific measurement and legalistic language to nail down the exact definition of a particular category, but for some categories this is impossible. Art is one, because it does not relate to a set of similar objects in the world about which we can measure shared characteristics and precisely define boundaries. Art is too abstract and metaphysical a category, and attempts to define it inevitably end up too broad ("art is anything") or too narrow ("art is painting, drawing, music and literature"). The answer is to realise that art doesn't need to be defined. It's possible to enjoy it and talk about it without nailing it down, and it's possible for me to consider something a great work of art that someone else doesn't consider to be art at all.

I admire it more as an accomplishment than I enjoy it as a game, although I do enjoy it. The fact that a team of volunteers could achieve a project of that scope and quality - even with its flaws - is very inspiring. Yet it seems to attract an unreasonable level of hate and vitriol from some portions of the Valve/Half Life fan community, which I find baffling. When a team spends ten years making a free game for strangers to enjoy, it seems churlish and petty to flame them for making design decisions you disagree with, or for being insufficiently slavish in copying the original game. It's represents the ugliest form of entitlement that sometimes rears its head in gaming communities. The arrangement around the retail version seems rather complicated. As I understand it, long ago, Valve agreed to let the project go ahead so long as they didn't have "Half Life" in the title, hence it became "Black Mesa: Source". A long, long time later, they finally released the project, sans Xen, which they said would come along later. They then set to work on finishing Xen, but beforehand decided to port the whole project to the newer 2013 version of the Steam SDK. Contemporaneously, they were one of the first projects that was green-lit on Steam, and thereafter reached a proper legal agreement with Valve which lets them sell the game, and also gives them complete access to the Source engine, the same as a commercial licensee would have. In fact, they were required to port the project to this newer version of Source in order to distribute via Steam, whether they sold it or not. So now they're in the middle of completing two porting efforts: The first to the 2013 Source SDK, which will be released as another free, standalone download like the first release. The second to an undisclosed newer version of the Source engine, which will be released as the retail edition on Steam, and which will have various additional features and enhancements above and beyond the free version. It sounds like neither of these versions may have Xen, which is still planned but will arrive further down the road. My guess is that they want to get a commercial release onto Steam, then use the revenue from that to reward the team and maybe fund some of them to work full time on Xen and other enhancements, but that's just my speculation. Like I said, it's complicated.

There is a beta called "IDKFA" that seems a more likely candidate to be Doom 4.

It makes no sense for any new transportation technology to involve human piloting. If "flying cars" happen, I expect it'll be in 30 to 50 years time, as an outgrowth of on-demand transport services like Uber and Lyft, and universal automated driving.

My friend is a waiter in the USA, he says moms are the worst customers, because all they ever leave is a weird old tip.

Nah, Facebook is doing fine. They have 1.23 billion active users per month, which includes 170m added last year - for context, Twitter only has about 250m users total - and they are making billions in revenue. Some journalists love to push a rise-and-fall narrative for companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc., but the inconvenient reality is than none of the tech giants, including Microsoft, is doing badly. There is so much growth in hardware, software, search, social, etc. that they all make ludicrous amounts in their core business areas.

Michael Abrash has joined Oculus as their Chief Scientist. He said this about the FB acquisition: So, he isn't worried, at least, and judging from the reaction to the news, it seems to have soothed a few people's worries. Time will tell, I guess. What's not clear is where this leaves Valve's efforts in VR. By all accounts they had some neat prototypes, but it's not clear they ever planned to productise them; their involvement was more a way of keeping Abrash engaged. Now he's gone, I doubt they'll stick at it.

Facebook uses PHP, but they've done a lot of work to make it suck less. They wrote a new VM called HipHop that JIT compiles PHP code. And yes, they recently released Hack, which is a superset of PHP that adds support features like type annotations, generics and lambdas. It's a both impressive and insane example example of what you can achieve when you have the money to throw world-class coding talent at improving a mediocre technology that you're stuck with for legacy reasons.

We are, although I am actually more positive about this deal that most people seem to be. As I see it, Facebook aren't stupid enough to screw up the Rift with excessive social "features" in its first iteration. By v3 or v4, it'll probably be tied in with various FB bullshit, but by then there'll hopefully be an established consumer VR industry, with competitors offering higher-end products aimed at gamers and people who don't want a load of social and advertising palaver shoved in their face. Right now though, Facebook provides Oculus with practically unlimited funds with which to hire the best talent and manufacture components to their own requirements, rather than relying on crumbs from the table of the ever-changing mobile phone industry. That should mean the Rift v1 is a far better and less compromised product, which can only be good for consumer VR in general. Also, Carmack is right that Facebook have a lot of skill and experience with really large-scale computing, and it will be interesting to see the kind of massively multi-user experiences Oculus can build with the data centres and bandwidth they now have to hand.

Any concerns I have about Facebook acquiring Oculus are more than compensated for by the schadenfreude of watching a million hardrcore gamer nerds raging in comment threads and threatening to cancel their preorders.

Build would definitely have existed in some form. Silverman's had already made Ken's Labyrinth, which was a Wolf 3D clone, and his history of the Build engine shows he was working on a next-generation engine before Doom was released. It's clear that Doom was an influence, and he mentions having a telephone conversation with Carmack who suggested the use of sectors, but most of the technical features of Doom - different floor and ceilings heights, angled walls, non-grid based geometry etc. - are the obvious next steps from a Wolf 3D style engine. Silverman is talented enough that would probably have gotten most of them implemented eventually (shame he seems to have mostly squandered that talent on dead-end voxel engines, though maybe something will come of VOXON).

As others have said, even it had been bad to play, Doom would probably have had a technical impact anyway. It's more interesting to speculate what would have happened if Doom had never existed at all, or any of id's subsequent games. Let's imagine that following Wolf 3D, John Carmack had an extreme religious conversion, quit programming, and went to live as a monk or something, which resulted in the swift disbandment of the company. How would it have effected the games industry? Id weren't the only people doing 3D engines. Ken Silverman's Build engine was contemporary, competitive, and developed independently of any Doom stuff, I believe. Games built on Build were successful anyway, and it seems likely they would have been even more so if Doom had not existed. It seems likely that Duke Nukem 3D might have been the first mega-successful FPS. However, it doesn't seem likely that Silverman would ever have been willing or capable of taking up a Carmack-like role in the industry, so Build probably wouldn't have progressed much further than it did. Tim Sweeney also developed the Unreal engine mostly independently of any of Carmack's work, I believe. Presuming Epic were inspired to make a shooter by Duke Nukem's success, then it seems likely that they would have still developed Unreal, or something like it. The Unreal engine would then likely have gone on to dominate in engine licensing even more than it already does. In all, I expect the non-existence of Doom would have set back the FPS genre, and 3D games in general, by a few years, perhaps 3-4. The bigger impact on the industry of there being no Doom or Quake would likely have been the absence of the the modding community during the mid to late 90s. Half-Life probably wouldn't have existed, or would have been different and various other companies formed by modders wouldn't have formed. On the other hand, there might have been a bigger modding community for Build and Unreal, but the shift of a few years would likely meant different people got involved. There's generally a sweet spot of your late teens and unversity years when you're likely to get heavily involved in modding, due to having acquired the necessary technical and artistic skills, having enough free time to devote to it due to lack of work and family commitments. It's likely that people like Iikka Keranen and the Casali brothers might not have ended up in the games industry. But on the other hand, other people would have done instead. In terms of games design, I imagine that absent of the heavy-metal, straight-forward action aesthetic of Doom, the more traditional RPG style of early games like Ultima Underworld would have stayed more influential. There would have been more complicated interfaces and gameplay tropes, with greater emphasis on NPCs, quests, etc. The more action-oriented end of the FPS spectrum would still have arrived eventually, but would perhaps not have been some dominant.