2/10. The Stolen Fire: Fanboy Delusions vs. Reality
The 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 Abyss
Carmack’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 World
For 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 Cleanup
The 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 Forty
Carmack’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" Trauma
Ask 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 Master
Carmack 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 GPU
One 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

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11. The Licensing Desert: Engines No One Wanted
The 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 Ghost
The 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
>unmaintainable
oh so in otherwords its toxic to the gaas shitware infesting the games industry right now. okay understood.

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>>108272047

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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 liking
okey

>>108272646
It's full of false statements, I don't know why you even bothered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

>>108272672
Ah so John is for real the solo man tank one if switch army pocket knife corckscrew pocket fleslight infatible doll god of code?

>>108272672
so strafe jumping and bunny hopping aren't real?

>>108271937
this, 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

>>108273400
he was replaced by euros over a decade ago
euros always have to clean up after murrican "geniuses"

>>108271937
I 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.

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>>108271937
don't care, not reading.
get fucked

>>108271937
Can'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.

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>Sorry you're fragile ego
>you're

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>>108271937
Damn nigga is everything okay at home?

>>108271937
I 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?

>>108274182
ah 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.

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>>108271937
Chris Sawyer.

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>>108271937
>Giving up the divine spark of human speech to a chatbot because you're too lazy to write your own article
Why 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

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>>108272174
this, what a retarded slide thread

>>108275619
Last time OP had sex was 9 months before you were born. Contact your mom for details.

>>108275560
why is she shitting herself

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>>108271937
>>108271944
>>108271959
>>108271974
a quick question, mr. carcuck, how many billions of dollars did your "VR" department at facebook lose again? I forget the exact number.

>>108275655
>she

>>108275674
This XD

just a reminder that troons are trying to rewrite history around Carmack because he called a man in a dress he

>>108276495
Sounds good. He deserves nothing less.

>>108276495
I didn't know David Kushner was trans.

>>108271979
>DarkPlaces is a high-performance, open-source game engine and source port for
Quake 1, originally developed by Ashley "LadyHavoc" Hale (formerly known as LordHavoc).

>>108271979
>she

this misses how the original doom net code used broadcasting and choaked local networks

i dont think it matters, john carmack never painted himself as a genius, he never tried to steal other peoples tech
he just wanted to make game engine and people believed in his speed philosophy and wanted to help make speedy games
they sacrificed their own visions to fit them into john carmacks speedy engine
there was nobody else doing it so he could make creative choices

the public glorified him as they are retards. so hating on carmack is fucking stupid

>>108271959
>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.
Kek based

>>108276964
we ar not hating on him, we are just pointing out how bad he really is at his job vs how public paints him to be a god of code

>>108276495
>a man in a dress
a catholic priest?

>>108277099
he shipped, you didn't. you're a nobody loser clawing at somebody as a result of your own inadequacies. he is definitionally better than you.

>>108277370
>you didn't
It's like autists like you cannot hide their condition; they HAVE to randomly project.

>>108277377
aww strike a nerve? little baby gonna cry? need his little diapy changed? how about you deconstruct your numerous mental neuroses and develop into a worthwhile human being you stupid faggot

>>108277402
>strike a nerve?
I seem to hate struck gold, thanks for asking.

>>108271937
Why have an AI write your intellectual qualms for you? It damages the backing of your argument...

>>108277402
Your mom used much friendlier language 9 months before your birth

>>108277564
what in OP's posts is supposedly not true?

>>108277590
I'm not educated on who Carmack is or was, so I don't know. My complaint lies in the use of AI tools (a practice which lacks intellectual merit) to launch a discussion about the intellectual merit of another man's work.

>>108271959
>characterized by a lack of formal rigour
AI and its users type like they smell their farts during dilation, truly a gospel of the faggot.

>>108277490
>>108277572
You weren't even a Y sperm 15 years back.

>>108271944
Let's see you implement something just from an academic paper.

>>108272096
Abrash was the one who optimized Quake for contemporary x86 processors. Here's his Graphics Programming Black Book from 1997: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/index.html. Calling him academic is an insult.

>>108277762
>Abrash was the one who optimized Quake for contemporary x86 processors.
youdon'tsay.avi

>>108277878
I was agreeing with you, but now I see you are deranged.

>>108277907
who told you that it was me? Voices in your head?

>>108277909
The only voice in anyone's head is the one that told you to troon out.

>>108277762
Wouldn't those optimizations involve binary operations or shifts as the mentally impaired OP said? The real hack was Abrash all along.

>>108275560
sauce?

>>108277956
bit shifts is an elementary school level of assembly programming
When Abrash was babysitting Carmack he didn't produce bullshit like Doom 3 lighting, or calculating triangulation of nurbs on the fly on cpu in Q3 (absolute wast of cpu cycles).

Carmack was also "abysitted" by Abrash before he mt him as he copied many things from his column in Dobb's.

Abrash's invovement deleyed "the clusterfuck phase" of Carmack into the '00s. If not him the music would stop playing during Quake 1 development already.

>>108278058
Absolute slop-English - OK.
But why post it?

>>108277175
>>108276545
His name was Bill not Becky :)

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>>108278058
>bit shifts is an elementary school level of assembly programming
Yeah, that's why there is an entire subchapter related to bit shifts and rotates in the Black Book.

>Carmack was also "abysitted" by Abrash before he mt him as he copied many things from his column in Dobb's.
A programmer uses knowledge gathered by others from a specialist magazine, save me niggerman.

>Abrash's invovement deleyed "the clusterfuck phase" of Carmack into the '00s. If not him the music would stop playing during Quake 1 development already.
Picrel.