Help! I've got an interview with a local games co.

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#41

[quote]While I can also understand where the COO is coming from with his warnings, he also made it sound as if working in gaming is absolutely horrible - full stop. Simply put, he didn’t address any perks at all (I wonder if he even knows there are perks besides “slaving like a dog and be happy doing that”).
[/quote]
I think this COO talked quite honestly and frankly to you, which is a good thing. :slight_smile:

For example the working conditions of my few years in the gaming industry (Europe) have been the worst I’ve seen in my career. I traded a solid and well payed but boring IT job for one in the gaming industry “just” to have much more to work, get much less paid (no perks and such, when it’s common in normal IT) and also to face the worst deadlines…
However, it’s also been the most interesting time in my career! I really didn’t want to miss it at all. Also it’s been very satisfying to work with a game fan team and produce a complete game, seeing all the other guys and gals working on the same title (the 3d artists have been my favs) - it’s kind of “dream come true”. I still enjoy to read forums when customers talk about our “baby” (=game) which took us years of nerves and stress. Today that’s over and others enjoy this formerly hard work, so everybody’s happy.

[quote]However, I must say that I am still keenly interested in gaming and nothing can disuade me from going that way since coding + gaming is basically my inclination - it’s just what I want to do.
[/quote]
Yes, go for this chance. At least for some years. :wink:
Later on, when you’re (getting) older, you can still move to a more solid and better paid IT area, or become a farmer, or a successfull independent game dev.

My conclusion: it’s a wave with a big amplitude, and such is life: where there’s much light, there’s also much dark, but the alternative is just a dull constant grey - no light, no dark…

#42

Theres no control between packages in C++. You use your “friends” and make everything private… beautiful. Of course, there might be some dark buried nuance of C++ that allows you to do this :slight_smile:

“friends” - a license to print your own stupidity.

Its almost poetic! And the gray sounds very familiar :slight_smile:

Kev

#43

Exposes it to everything in the package too.

Oh, C++ is no better at namespacing, definitely. I was just using java’s god-awful namespacing as an example of where it wasn’t planned with library dev in mind.

AFAICS it’s an oversight: the original designers spent all their effort planning the 1st-order OOP support (as we know well: much better than that in C++), and didn’t get around to really considering the ramifications this all had for higher-order OOP (i.e. they thought well about making classes and objects easy to re-use etc, but not how to do the same with sets of classes - when you get to more than a few tens of classes, java’s support to help you vanishes (for a start, you can’t explicitly create a data structure to record package information - IMO there ought to be source files for: “class” “interface” and “package”, there being a lot of very valuable things you could place in language-integrated package files - although I appreciate it takes some careful planning to avoid the worst mistakes of header files!; JAR’s have a hack to simulate some but far from all of this), and all your management has to be done externally. Witness the crappiness of the add-ons and hacks to JAR to make J2EE a bit more bearable (where you often have hundreds of classes to organize and maintain); the spirit of java is that such things would ideally have been included in the base language design, and have much stronger, more tightly integrated support).

#44

Heh, try reading his recent keynote stuff and see if you still think that: http://www15.brinkster.com/vigasotech/quakecon04_carmack_keynote.html
His attention to detail is immense really.

#45

Carmack is very talented and he’s a master in good timing (CPU/GPU and market wise). Have you seen Doom3? I totally dislike the game itself, but technically it’s just brillant and of course invents a new generation of real-time 3d-engines. Amazing. A pretty talented 3d artist I know summarized his Doom3 watch like this: I didn’t know it could look that realistic.

By the way: in short ID’s going to GPL their nice Quake3 engine (like they did with 1 and 2). Anybody wants to write a Java wrapper for it? :slight_smile: Yes, it’s old but still very solid (ask my Jedi Outcast II & III mates) - and it’ll be free.

Sorry for continuing off-topic stuff…

#46

Maybe carmack isn’t all that far ahead of other people writing 3d commercial games with practically unlimitted budgets, but there was a time when he completely revolutionized pc gaming, the only game that could even be remotely compared to doom was wolfenstein, which is like comparing the atari 2600 to nintendo, and seems like carmack was working for apogee at that time and probably had a lot to do with that game.

Carmack pretty much pioneered 3d gaming, in turn he probably had a pretty big influence on hardware and even might be partially responsible for some of the tools that make it possible for us lowly independant people to dream that we can create good games too, after all, opengl didn’t exist for doom, graphics cards were so much slower. Believe it or not, a 386dx 33mhz comp with 8 mb could run doom reasonably well and doom 2 ran even better, a low end 486 could run doom very smoothly. I tried to find a comparison benchmark of a 386dx to a modern computer (like say a PIII 500 mhz with a reasonable vid card) but couldn’t, but the numbers would be pretty crazy.

The only reason todays programmers can dog carmack is due to the tools and techniques that exist now that didn’t exist when carmack started out, if carmack hadn’t, someone else would have built a game that shifted things to 3d (apogee obviously was already working that direction, though maybe only because carmack was employeed there at the time did they even realize that it was possible to create 3d games at that time). Basically the tools that exist now have levelled the playing field a great deal. I’m looking forward to the next big change in gaming… I assume it’s going to be something of a virtual reality deal, probably the biggest hold up to that is the ‘controller’, I think I’d be willing to donate a 3x3 or maybe even 4x4 area of my office to some kind of ‘controller’ that would handle running, direction changes, and maybe some other things (I imagine some kind of full body suit that sends info about what you are doing).

#47

[quote]Maybe carmack isn’t all that far ahead of other people writing 3d commercial games with practically unlimitted budgets, but there was a time when he completely revolutionized pc gaming, the only game that could even be remotely compared to doom was wolfenstein, which is like comparing the atari 2600 to nintendo, and seems like carmack was working for apogee at that time and probably had a lot to do with that game.
[/quote]
Nah, go back and read your history books: Ultima Underworld was released in 2002 - at the same time as Wolf3D - with graphics the same as quake. Carmack was a big crappy suck-artist :stuck_out_tongue: who brought the right product to market at the right time: the main reason he made it big was that he accidentally discovered Deathmatch.

FYI for those not around at the time, Doom was getting free publicity to die for with e.g. corporate sysadmins banning it - at a time when no-one at corporates really thought about gaming at all, this was prior to the internet and web browsers on every desktop - becuase the amount of LAN bandwidth people were soaking up with deathmatch! (and networking hw was expensive enough back then that you had cheapo “ethernet” networks that would often crash if you overloaded them…bad news; very bad news).

Deathmatch was an accident, and nothing else in the entire gaming world came close until EverCrack found a sweetspot with “Level Treadmills”. Arguably, EverCrack’s treadmills still come second in terms of comparitive (adjusted) commercial success: they’re more like Pokemon’s optimizing of the “collectable” addiction … not quite as powerful as the lure of deathmatch mano-a-mano gaming. Doom had the first truly world-changing game style since Tetris, and it was all an accident (early versions of doom did NOT have deathmatch in, at least not as we know it. They tweaked it, hit the perfect combination, and BOOM!)

#48

Doom 3 looks good. But it doesn’t take “a master” to do it. I know people that could do the same if they had the same luxury as he had with time and resources - with graphics card vendors giving him the latest stuff, and changing their hardware to fit his needs. Seems the timing is adjusted to suit him rather than the other way around. And a lot of that can be scaled at the last part of development to fit the hardware that is available when he wanted to release. Keep in mind that there is no Graphics card that can run D3 in all-out quality mode - which is good, but is that how Carmack timed it, or just a consequence of him having to scale back because the hardware wasn’t ready?

The Doom3 engine was the only piece of code (other than his rocketry stuff :slight_smile: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/) that he’s had to write for quite some time, and basically 3D engines is all he has done for 10 years.

The only thing that seems new with the D3 engine is the better dynamic lighting, the rest was done by the artists, with better textures, use of bump mapping etc.

Looks awesome, but Carmack is just one of many that could put that sort of engine together. I bet there are a couple people on these forums that could have done it had they been in his shoes.

#49

I know this is an off topic forum but what would it take to cut out the c++/java library discussion and the doom/carmack analyis into separate threads? Its a shame this stuff gets buried… You guys are some off-topic-fiends. :stuck_out_tongue:

#50

Yeah, sorry :)… mostly my fault. I won’t respond on this thread anymore :slight_smile:

#51

I’VE GOT THE JOB AND I LOVE EVERYONE! ;D

#52

Woot!!
Congrats dude!

#53

Now comes the vertical learning curve of not only game programming and SDLC stuff, but also picking up C++ quick enough to pull my own weight in a months time.

I really want to THANK the people in this forum for helping me get here. I don’t know you guys, but I say this in all sincerity - ALL of you here have helped me get here one way or the other. :slight_smile:

#54

All our off topic conversation has finally paid off. Congrats on the job.

#55

Yes Congratulations!

#56

Sigh, lucky sod…

Cas :slight_smile:

#57

Wahooo for you!! :smiley:

Great work! Keep us posted about how things go for you.

Just remember not to be too hard on yourself when you are starting out. Your peers will understand you are in a learning phase and they will expect you to make mistakes and not know everything.

Kudos!

Dr. A>

#58

Congrats!! :smiley:

// Gregof

#59

Congrats!

#60

But darnit, tell us what you wore! :slight_smile:

Bill