You need the right products and services. If you know what those are, then you need employees to build them. Until you figure out what those are, you are (sadly) better off with fewer people.
I think Phil was pushed out by the complete failure of his strategic vision when confronted with reality. He had a vision of growth and prestige, and money would follow. I loved his vision in its grandiose and lofty goals, but he completely failed to capture any of the "how to make it happen". It stays a fantasy.
> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos
Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.
I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.
I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.
I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things".
Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.
You'd have the non-NDA, core stuff in the submodule. The submodule can then be referenced by the big, driving NDA repo. And maybe another repo with a non-NDA, likely simpler "shell" that lets non-NDA devs work with the codebase.
If you need to NDA the core stuff instead and thus can't pull it as a submodule, the only thing I can think of is to pull the core as binary/compiled artifacts.
It recovers when having 1.1 kids per person on average does not mean making substantial sacrifices in quality of life over your entire life. Since many people will still not have kids, that sounds like 3 kids per couple being affordable in a comfortable, enjoyable, not stressful manner.
Right now you can guess that for many couples, 2 kids becomes close to unaffordable, and 3 becomes nearly unmanageable. Individually, you will see couples choose to do it and even to do it in ways that others both envy and chastise; but overall, it's not happening.
It requires many things to change not just in economy, but in society as a whole. It's not going to happen in a society devoted to growth, that's for sure.
Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
For every ten kill X quests you get a Mankirk's Wife quest or a Hogger and it all works out great. 80% of almost everything is filler, like our bodies are 70% just water, but it's the taste that matters.
It remains to be seen how much of that social element is taken over by LLMs as well. There's already plenty of stories about people retreating into LLMs. Whatever shape and form this all ends up, we're just at the beginning, and the only limit will be how economically and socially sustainable it is (chances are: it's not).
For the record, there were constant-Z full 3D engines in the late 90s, which would find the correct axes on screen to render perspective-correct textured triangles using oblique spans of pixels. They were incredibly complicated and prone to holes at the slightest numerical accuracy, but they were a sight to behold. Constant-Z meant not just saving on perspective divides, but also easy Z-buffer and depth-based fog.
For floors the perspective divide is once per row, just like for walls it's once per column.
The BSP may have led to some floor subdivisions, especially as it needs convex sectors. I don't remember if the engine would coalesce adjacent floor spans into a single one, but I hope it did.
The business need of the games industry is making money selling games and content and ads, just like the business need of Netflix or Spotify is making money via ads and subscriptions for music or movies or etc.
It's a consumer business much like any other. Just like most startups and major companies, they are not necessary for the world in the way utilities for example are.
The problem of videogames compared to startups and SV tech is that the long-term money potential is very limited at best, and rapidly becomes very brittle. Most startups pay bigger salaries for much easier work, because they burn the money investors are betting hoping the company will crack a new long-term market, not because they make money themselves. There's very little games market to crack, very little chance to turn your product into a long-lived platform to built on top of, meanwhile the upfront investment is huge.
Hundreds of millions of people from abroad shared that belief up until 2 decades ago or so. I don't think they believe it anymore. It's been like watching your awesome high school friend throw away their lives over time.
> Fewer people applying for patents, because the minute you apply for the patent, it's available to everybody, which means every model can train on it
We know LLM companies have, for lack of a better word, "sidestepped" the copyright on millions of works with their "transformative fair use" arguments. Are LLMs also a way to sidestep patents?
Mostly because determinism is an all or nothing proposition. Either EVERYTHING in game logic is perfectly deterministic and isolated from everything else, or it pretty much as if nothing was. So if you want to commit to determinism, you have to be constantly vigilant and debugging these maddening types of bugs. Whether this investment is worth it or not is up to each dev.
Sometimes you can find small areas of the game that can be deterministic and worth it. In a basketball game I worked on in the 90s, I designed the ball physics to be deterministic (running at 100hz). The moment the ball left the player hands it ran deterministically; we knew if it was going to hit the shot and if not, where the rebound would go to.
Doom and Wolf3d and many other multiplayer games of the 90s (including some I worked on) were deterministic/lockstep and machines only needed to exchange inputs (in a deterministic manner ofc).
Quake was completely different. The client/server term was aimed at describing that the game state is computed on the server, updated based on client inputs send to the server, and then the game state is sent from server to the clients for display. Various optimizations apply.
Deterministic/lockstep games more often used host/guest terminology to indicate that a machine was acting as coordinator/owner of the game, but none of them were serving state to others. This terminology is not strict and anyone could use those terms however they wanted, but it is a good ballpark.