Carmack on Dread or Grind

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Yeah wrong John. Romero is the one who can't let the 90's go, Carmack is more worried about getting everything done that he wants to achieve before his mind goes. Hence he's now hammering on AI after his trip through VR space. FPS games are way, waaaaaaaaaay in the past.

If you ask questions about Doom to Carmack, he has a "let's get this over with" face. You ask Romero, he brings the beer.

Indeed. I enjoyed the Doom 30th anniversary talk between the two Johns, but it also made it very clear that Carmack has long moved on.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

if he did see Grind he would probably say "that's a great wolfenstien3d clone, not doom", because while amazingly impressive, grind is wolf3d not doom, the only reason its seen as doom is because it used to use doom assets.

I'd say the engine is in between those two games. It doesn't have all the Doom features, but it is quite more advanced than Wolfenstein 3D.

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by TCD

I'd say the engine is in between those two games. It doesn't have all the Doom features, but it is quite more advanced than Wolfenstein 3D.

Was going to write something along these lines as well.

Wolf3D had only one floor/ceiling height, and walls fixed at 90 degree angles.
Grind have 3 different Ceiling heights, and free angle for walls. Which make it look closer to doom.

What Dread/Grind is missing vs Doom, would be free variable height floors/ceilings, and floor/ceiling textures.

So as you said. something in between Wolf and Doom.

[Adropac2]

hmm levels in Grind and Dread also show more geometry besides just walls so very specific design that doesn't feature both at the same time would allow more ambitious level design I'm sure even on A500. Not to the extent of Doom's more elaborate use of all this but an expansion to Wolfenstein. In any case it does already feel more Doomy at the very least in the sense of the combat I would personally say and there's likely more refinements to come to the combat side as well

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TCD

It is 2024. There is nothing 'revolutionary' about a id Tech 1 alike engine on an almost 40 year old machine. It sure is impressive, but I really doubt you'd get more than 'That's nice' out of somebody who has been on the cutting edge of 3D game development for around two decades.

Although it’s true that Carmack is a person who can really focus on the present and let the past go, and stop caring about stuff he no longer finds interesting, he is also a person with a brilliant mind and good memory.
Ive rarely seen a person who can speak so coherently for hours. (Check the Lex Friedman intervju that goes on for 5+ hours)
Its likely he wouldnt say much more than ”That’s nice” but for sure he hasnt forgotten anything about the considerations of Doom on other platforms.

Just for the sake of it, and to make Amigans feel good about it, it would be cool to send him an A500 with 1MB ram and disk with Grind on and write a note ”In theory this could have happened in 1987” or something like that ;-)

[TCD]

I'm pretty sure that Carmack can be reached via email, so it would be interesting to read how he would react to a video of Dread/Grind.

[Dunny]

"Yeah I said that Doom couldn't be done on an Amiga and it looks like I was right all along"

Too many compromises had to be made to get it to run in terms of geometry, colour depth and resolution, and I'm not sure he would have wanted that for Doom.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Dunny

"Yeah I said that Doom couldn't be done on an Amiga and it looks like I was right all along"

Doom Attack and ADoom disagree

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by Dunny

"Yeah I said that Doom couldn't be done on an Amiga and it looks like I was right all along"

Too many compromises had to be made to get it to run in terms of geometry, colour depth and resolution, and I'm not sure he would have wanted that for Doom.

Except Carmack did not mean that Doom could not run on A500, he meant NO amiga at the time could run doom, not even a 040. Which of course was proven wrong some 3 days after the source code was released on Dec 23 1997.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.../c/MZb9cC0FMhw

"From jo...@idcube.idsoftware.com Sun Sep 4 02:52 EST 1994
From: John Carmack <jo...@idcube.idsoftware.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 94 11:50:23 -0600
To: G.San...@ais.gu.edu.au
Subject: amiga doom

The amiga is not powerfull enough to run DOOM. It takes the full
speed of a 68040 to play the game properly even if you have a chunky
pixel mode in hardware. Having to convert to bit planes would kill
it even on the fastest amiga hardware, not to mention the effect it
would have on the majority of the amiga base.

John Carmack"


https://doomwiki.org/wiki/AmigaDoom
"AmigaDoom was the first source port of Doom to appear on Amiga, seeing a 0.1 release on December 26, 1997, a mere three days after the official source code was released. Support for Retargetable Graphics (RTG) was added the following day"

[TCD]

Reading John's statement again one word strikes me: Properly. He never said it wouldn't run at all.

[dreadnought]

I have a feeling that the relation of how important the issue of "Doom on A500" is to Carmack vs Amiga fans is best described as inversely proportional.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I have a feeling that the relation of how important the issue of "Doom on A500" is to Carmack vs Amiga fans is best described as inversely proportional.

That's my hunch too, but I really hope that somebody steps up and asks him.

[Locutus]

I'd actually be curious to see how fast the original AmigaDoom 0.3 public release is compared to the later ADoom/DoomAttack. I tried to look but couldn't find binaries for it.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by TCD

Reading John's statement again one word strikes me: Properly. He never said it wouldn't run at all.

Sure, but 'run at all' isn't good enough. A 386sx at 16mhz will run the thing too, but who wants to play it on that?

[d4rk3lf]

We should be very happy and satisfied.

Having Dread/Grind running on A500, is like running good ports of Lionheart or Super Stardust Aga on some shitty EGA 286.
(which will never happen)

Amiga hardware is so rich of various possibilities for making various softwares, that impresses me over and over again.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

if he did see Grind he would probably say "that's a great wolfenstien3d clone, not doom", because while amazingly impressive, grind is wolf3d not doom, the only reason its seen as doom is because it used to use doom assets.

It *is not* a Wolf 3D clone because it does not use regular square grid based raycasting. It *is* a Doom clone because it uses a 2D BSP approach to visibility and columnar wall rendering of sectors. It also does have some height variations for ceilings, just not for floors yet as that feature was unfinished in the Dread Engine.

Carmack would definitely appreciate the difference.

[haps]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Carmack would definitely appreciate the difference.

Nice to know you can tell us what others would 'definately' appreciate.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by TCD

I'd say the engine is in between those two games. It doesn't have all the Doom features, but it is quite more advanced than Wolfenstein 3D.

Rise of the Triad

Nah that's still all squares. Surely there was something that was in between that I'm completely blanking out on. Marathon?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Rise of the Triad

Nah that's still all squares. Surely there was something that was in between that I'm completely blanking out on. Marathon?

I had a look at Marathon again and I think that's very close to what Dark Forces does. The Dread/Grind engine is quite unique Certainly based more on Doom than on Wolfenstein 3D.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Reading John's statement again one word strikes me: Properly. He never said it wouldn't run at all.

He said - "Having to convert to bit planes would kill it even on the fastest amiga hardware".

In fact it runs about the same speed on the A4000-040 as on a 25MHz 486, so Carmack was just showing his ignorance here.

This was even after being told that that the c2p problem had been 'solved via fast conversion routines' and that 'Many owners of Amiga 1200 have upgraded their systems with high speed accelerators, bringing... performance similar to the A4000'. He must also have been aware that PC users were running it on 386DX and even 386SX systems. The game's options to run in a tiny window and at lower resolution prove that he was willing to accommodate users of lower-end PCs, so why not the Amiga?

The reason becomes clear in his last sentence - "...not to mention the effect it would have on the majority of the amiga base".

The majority of the PC base didn't have a machine powerful enough to Doom properly either, but that didn't matter because the number who did was much greater than all Amiga users and growing every day, whereas Commodore was bankrupt and no more Amigas were being made. So even if Doom would run OK on an A4000 or accelerated A1200 etc., it wasn't commercially viable.

George Sanderson asked the wrong question. Instead of "Perhaps a port of Doom for Amiga would also be a good idea ?" it should have been "How much for the rights to port Doom to the Amiga?". Then we would 'just' have to find the $200,000 that Carmack would ask for.