The Gospel of the Axe: Deconstructing the "Divine" OptimizerThe gaming industry’s history is haunted by the hagiography of John Carmack—a myth built by tech-illiterate journalists who mistook a socially stunted obsessive for a mathematical messiah. In reality, Carmack wasn’t a pioneer of elegant science; he was a guerilla "optimizer" whose entire "genius" consisted of being the only one in the room willing to grind 14 hours a day to prove that a blunt axe can, in fact, shape a log if you hit it hard enough.1/10. The PC 3D Myth: Arriving Late to a Crowded PartyOne of the most persistent delusions of the Carmack cult is that he "brought 3D to the PC." In reality, Carmack arrived late to a party that was already in full swing, offering a simplified, "dumbed-down" version of what others had already mastered. The Flight Sim Predecessors: Years before Wolfenstein 3D, companies like Sublogic (Flight Simulator) and MicroProse were already rendering complex 3D worlds with full six-degrees-of-freedom rotation and polygonal models. Looking Glass Superiority: While Carmack was still struggling with 2.5D raycasting (where you couldn't even look up or down without the world warping), Looking Glass Studios was developing Ultima Underworld. Their engine featured sloped floors, true 3D architecture, and complex physics—all of which made Carmack's "revolution" look like a child's drawing with crayons. Carmack didn't "invent" 3D; he just stripped it of all mathematical sophistication so it could run on a toaster, sacrificing depth for raw, dumb speed.
2/10. The Stolen Fire: Fanboy Delusions vs. RealityThe most pathetic part of the Carmack cult is his fanboys "circle-jerking" over algorithms they think he invented. To this day, they credit him with the creation of Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), Z-buffering, and surface caching. The Scavenger of Knowledge: Carmack himself has admitted in numerous interviews and old .plan files that he didn't "invent" these structures. He was a scavenger of existing knowledge, simply implementation-focused. He read about BSP trees in academic papers from the 80s and lifted technical tricks from columns in Dr. Dobb's Journal. While his acolytes worship him as a god of invention, Carmack was just a guy with a library card, implementing 20-year-old academic concepts while everyone else was busy actually designing fun games.
3/10. Basic Math Blunders: From Wolfenstein to AbyssCarmack’s mathematical "pedigree" was shaky from the start, characterized by a lack of formal rigour. Since the days of Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3-D, his code was littered with embarrassing amateurisms that would make a freshman engineering student cringe. Normalization Nightmares: His early attempts at vector normalization and matrix addition were famously broken. He frequently skipped fundamental steps or implemented "unique" ways to handle rotations that resulted in jittery, unstable math and cumulative errors. These weren't "clever optimizations"; they were fundamental misunderstandings of linear algebra. He spent years fighting bugs that he had built into the very foundation of his engines simply because he refused to learn how matrices actually work before trying to "optimize" them.
4/10. Networking Nightmares: The Seniaks of the WorldFor a man hailed as a technical god, Carmack’s early networking code was an unmitigated disaster. The original Quake netcode was so bloated and "chatty" that it was virtually unplayable on anything but a local LAN. He completely failed to understand the basic physics of latencies and packet loss in a real-world environment. The QuakeWorld Rescue: It was John Taylor (Seniak) who actually made Quake playable over the internet. While Carmack was busy bit-shifting, Seniak had to step in and write QuakeWorld, introducing client-side prediction to mask the lag that Carmack’s "genius" code simply ignored. Carmack didn't "solve" internet gaming; he provided a broken socket that real engineers like Seniak had to rebuild while holding his hand. The Valve Intervention: When Valve licensed the engine for Half-Life, they didn't just "tweak" the code; they had to rip it out and bury it. Valve’s team realized his "optimized" mess was unusable over real-world connections and rewrote the entire networking layer from scratch to introduce prediction and lag compensation—concepts Carmack was too "specialized" to grasp.
5/10. The DarkPlaces Autopsy: Lady Havoc’s CleanupThe true state of Carmack's "sacred" code is best seen through the eyes of those who spent decades trying to fix it. Lady Havoc (Ashley Rose Hale), creator of the DarkPlaces engine, didn't just add "shiny effects"—she had to perform an autopsy on a rotting corpse. The QuakeC Shambles: Lady Havoc famously stated she was "not satisfied" with the original QuakeC code. She found it so limiting and poorly structured that she had to rewrite fundamental physics (like player movement) from scratch to achieve something resembling "readability" and "optimization." Hardcoded Hubris: Carmack's code was riddled with hardcoded limits that choked the community for years. DarkPlaces had to be "limit-removing" just to allow the engine to breathe. Lady Havoc had to fix basic logic errors in server-side code, from broken savegame parameters to botched precaching, proving that the "god of code" couldn't even handle a clean file-loading routine.
6/10. The Academic Gap: Discovering Fire at FortyCarmack’s "specialization" was actually a gaping hole in his education. Because he treated university as an obstacle, he spent decades reinventing the wheel while pretending it was a revolution. The Bloom Filter Embarrassment: Perhaps the most hilarious proof of his academic poverty was when Carmack, well into his 40s, "discovered" and publicly marveled at Bloom Filters. For any CS student, this is basic, second-year curriculum material from 1970. To see a "tech deity" announce it as a breakthrough in middle age is like watching a professional chef discover that salt makes food taste better. It perfectly illustrates how his "thinking outside the box" was just a symptom of not knowing what was actually inside the box.7/10. Working in the Dark: The "Black Box" TraumaAsk any engineer who had to license an id Tech engine: the code was a nightmare to maintain. Carmack wrote code for Carmack, not for a team. Zero Documentation: His "14-hour grind" didn't leave time for comments or documentation. Licensors found themselves staring at a "Black Box" of cryptic, low-level hacks that were impossible to modify without breaking the entire house of cards. The "Rigid God" Problem: While Epic’s Unreal Engine was built to be modular and readable, Carmack’s engines were built like a monolithic granite block. Engineers complained that his code was "brittle," "arrogant," and utterly indifferent to the reality of collaborative development. If you wanted to change one element, you had to understand the entire convoluted mess inside John’s head.
8. Technological Terrorism: The Engine is the MasterCarmack practiced a form of technological terrorism, forcing the design team to bend their creative vision to the whims of his latest "log-hacking" experiment. Reverse Logic: In a professional studio, you build an engine to support a game. Carmack did the opposite: he built a rigid, fragile engine and then demanded that the designers find a way to make it look like a game. The designers weren't making art; they were glorified beta testers for Carmack’s personal coding hobby, leading to "museum-like" environments where everything was static because the engine was too brittle to handle dynamic change.9. Fighting the Hardware: The Ego vs. The GPUOne of the most ironic chapters of his career was his stubborn refusal to let the GPU do its job. Carmack developed a pathological need to calculate everything on the CPU, even when specialized hardware had already mastered those tasks. Software Overkill: During the development of his later engines, he stood "firmly opposed" to leveraging modern GPU features, preferring to write complex software-based emulations simply to maintain total control. This "software-first" arrogance cost id Software years of development time and resulted in engines that were technically impressive only to other code-archeologists, but practically useless for modern game design.10. The Era of Design Failures (The "Fuck-Ups") Doom 3 (The Flashlight Fiasco): The engine was so "optimized" (read: inflexible) that it couldn't handle more than one light source without choking. The "flashlight or gun" choice was a desperate bandage on a crippled engine. Rage (The MegaTexture Disaster): His obsession with a single "clever" trick led to the id Tech 5 catastrophe. The result? A blurry mess because his "12-hour-a-day specialization" missed the entire evolution of modern hardware streaming.
Write a book with refined wording
11. The Licensing Desert: Engines No One WantedThe ultimate proof of Carmack’s failure as a systems architect is the market’s rejection. While Epic’s Unreal Engine became the industry standard, Carmack’s engines were treated like toxic waste. id Tech 4 & 5: Practically no one wanted to license these engines. The industry took one look at the rigid, over-engineered "black box" and ran the other way. Developers realized that using Carmack’s tech meant becoming a slave to his specific, inflexible workflow. The "MegaTexture" disaster effectively killed id Tech as a licensing product, leaving it to rot as an internal-only tool.Conclusion: The Harmful GhostThe Carmack myth is a toxic rot in gamedev. It celebrates educational gaps as "purity," crunch as "passion," and unmaintainable hacks as "optimization." He wasn't a visionary; he was an aggressive samouczek who mistook his lack of formal knowledge for "innovation." By the time the world realized that Unreal Engine was better than id Tech, the "divine optimizer" was already halfway out the door, leaving behind a trail of broken designs and painted-on textures.
>>108272018>unmaintainableoh so in otherwords its toxic to the gaas shitware infesting the games industry right now. okay understood.
>>108272047
12. Every "maverick" needs a handler. Michael Abrash was the adult who translated Carmack’s disorganized pile of bit-shifting tricks and rebranded it as the "Zen of Graphics Programming." Without Abrash’s academic street cred to act as an intellectual condom, Carmack’s raw, unprotected hacks would have been laughed out of any serious engineering department.
13. TH FUCK HAPPEND TO HIS 20 MILLIONS AGI STARTUP THAT WENT RADIO SILENT?
>>108272000>Reverse Logic: In a professional studio, you build an engine to support a game. Carmack did the opposite: he built a rigid, fragile engine and then demanded that the designers find a way to make it look like a game. The designers weren't making art; they were glorified beta testers for Carmack’s personal coding hobby,Extremely based of him.
AI;dr
>>108272174>too much truth for my likingokey
>>108272646It's full of false statements, I don't know why you even bothered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
>>108272672Ah so John is for real the solo man tank one if switch army pocket knife corckscrew pocket fleslight infatible doll god of code?
>>108272672so strafe jumping and bunny hopping aren't real?
>>108271937this, Carmack should be replaced by a jew because goyimg dont deserve recognition
>>108271937>please chatgpt saar rite me a watertithe argument against wite man porgammers
>>108273400he was replaced by euros over a decade agoeuros always have to clean up after murrican "geniuses"
>>108271937I don't think Carmack ever claimed to be more than he is. It isn't his fault if even more uneducated nerds want to suck his dick.
>>108271937>Grok write me a 20 page novel about "white developer bad"
Who gives a shit what the autist Carmack has to say. Anyone with a triple-digit IQ who's ever looked at his code is still laughing their asses off.
>>108271937don't care, not reading.get fucked
>>108271937Can't we just appreciate good programmers without trying to tear them down? Sorry you're fragile ego is threatened by another developer.You sound like a Rust tranny.
>Sorry you're fragile ego>you're
>>108271937Damn nigga is everything okay at home?
>>108271937I read this in John Romero's voice. Is it you John?
So what YT slop hitpiece video released that got this anon in a tizzy?
>>108274182ah yet, Carmack is the only white person who codes
Based OP dabbing on a hack>>108272000>Rage (The MegaTexture Disaster)lel I thought it was funny that the big selling point was "I used lower level of detail for stuff that's far away so I can have really high res textures". No shit.
>>108271937Chris Sawyer.
>>108271937>Giving up the divine spark of human speech to a chatbot because you're too lazy to write your own articleWhy would someone ever do this? Is the robot going to fuck your wife for you next?
If you want me to read your essay don't use AI to write it
>>108272174this, what a retarded slide thread
>>108275619Last time OP had sex was 9 months before you were born. Contact your mom for details.
>>108275560why is she shitting herself
>>108271937>>108271944>>108271959>>108271974a quick question, mr. carcuck, how many billions of dollars did your "VR" department at facebook lose again? I forget the exact number.
>>108275655>she
