If you’re willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.
Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn’t as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.
The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
It’s a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well...
The situation is so much better for programmers today – a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for.
If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!
I’d rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.
The Xbox 360 is the first console that I’ve ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we’ve had on PC.
Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don’t have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds.
Everybody’s saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.
An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?
At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can’t win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.
Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
Focused, hard work is the real key to success.
We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.
I like to think I’m pretty good at what I do.
I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn’t work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.
You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.
One of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!