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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Brian Hook leaving Id 75

Posted by Hemos from the going-going-goe dept.
bjb writes "It appears that Brian Hook is leaving Id software. " Well, departing seems to be the theme of this week, at least this depature is more amicable then the other.
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Brian Hook leaving Id More

Brian Hook leaving Id

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  • I've seen some of the maps they've worked on, and some of the stuff that zoid is doing for the new CTF and the 2 maps included with q3test are NOTHING compared to the stuff that they have coming. The arcitecture (sp?), special effects, etc are absolutely amazing... the engine is awsome.

    I think that id did good in sticking with what works. TF/TF2 is a different kind of multiplayer; q3 is straight deathmatch, and nothing more. And IMHO, q3 will (or has) raise the standard once again for 3d engines.

    ObJobPlacement: Perhaps he's going to Valve? Anyone thought of that?
  • He worked for 3dfx before (He is the man that wrote Glide) and wan't very happy. I bet it's one of smaller 3d chip makers. Rendition maybe?

  • It might be likely that Brian could go to NVIDIA, considering his past experience with 3DFX and his previous .plan's extolling the company's virtues. But personally, I think he might go to a game company where he has more of a leadership/architectural position. 911 Studios with EverQuest? Doubtful considering the game's done and mostly upgrades are all that are left.

    I do have some lovely "overheard" conversations to back up my claim. A few months ago during the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Jose, Brian was heard to have made a few cracks about how great it is to be at the GDC; mainly because when he goes back to ID, he's Beta Male to John Carmack's Alpha Male. It was a lot funnier the way he said it, and it sounded more joking than anything.. But with the recent events, perhaps there were seeds of wanderlust already sown by that time.

    BTW, he gave a great keynote/seminar on Q3A technology! Though Brian may not be the game architect/technologist that John C is, he's definitely no slouch in the 3D Programming department.

    Yw

  • Quote of Brian Hook from memory:

    "If you work for Microsoft for the money, even though you know what you are doing to the industry by working there, then we have a word for you. It's called a whore."

    I may have reworded the above quote a bit, but the point is I don't think he's working for Microsoft.
  • Half-Life is not a mod. Half-life's engine uses code licensed from id software and is loosely based on the quake engine. About 60% of that code is all new. Half-life was a standalone game and will not run with nor be proted to the Q3 engine. That being said, Half-life is still an incredible and original game which I would recommend ahead of Q3 for first time buyers.
  • Such a simple statement... =)
    Everyone I have talked to who has both played HL and Q3A agree that Q3A is just a little boring. TFC really rocks and TF2 is going to be better.

    So, first off:
    Everyone I have talked to... Q3A is just a little boring.

    So what? Is that one person? Two persons? Even if it were a hundred persons, what does it matter that 100 people or 1000 people think Q3A is boring compared to Half Life. Statistically, it could be explained by the fact that you and your friends like team play and coop more than free for all; it says nothing about the games or the market.

    Likewise, Q3A is unfinished, a test, not even a demo. There is no polished sounds, polished maps, polished models and animation, etc, etc, etc. You're comparing a polished and shipping product to essentially a technology test.

    TFC really rocks and TF2 is going to be better.

    Sure. What does this have to do with Q3A? How does your endorsement mean anything to anyone else? If you said TPM sucks, and Episode II is going to be worse, why should I listen to you?

    Not to say I disagree, necessarily, just that your logic, isn't logic =)

    TFC and TF2 have different play mechanisms than Q3A; in that respect, I can say I like coop better than free for all. It does not mean that coop games are 'better', just that *I* like them better. I happen to think that Q3A will be great, but that games based off of it's engine will be even better, because I prefer single play games most of all, like Half Life, Curse of Monkey Island, Jedi Knight.


    -AS
  • I fail to understand how you can receive an offer that could pull you away from id software. They definatly push the cutting edge of 3d technologies as well as internet conectivity ect. What could be more technically chanengling / exciting? As for the money stand point...I don't know where you could do better. With the growing finacial power of the computer games industry the returns have got to be well worth the time. Then when you come to realize that id stands as the industry powerhouse for 1st person shooters (the most popular of current games) setting the standard for all others to follow you know that all 15 employees are pulling plenty in their paychecks.

    In light of that I tend to look for another reason for his departure other than a better offer. I just don't see it. But then I don't work at id so maybe its not the all encompasing computer heavn that we all think it is.
  • har! obviously you've been paying NO attention to brian hook for the past few months, he absolutely ADORES everquest. hes written several in depth articles about it as well. its very obvious that his joining the everquest time is a possibility.
  • Well, Brian Hook has always had quite a mouth on him. From facing off against Alex St. John on OGL and DirectX, to his benchmarking controversies vs. Tom's Hardware, to basically any comment made in his plan, he's managed to piss someone off. I liked that :)

    Brian Hook has given plenty to the community. If you haven't read Ask GMB over at www.voodooextreme.com, now would be a good time to go check it out. It's become part of my routine, plus I've picked up some hot advice on everything from programming, to attitude, to women. It's rare for a programmer to give as much back as Brian has.

    I'm sure Brian won't be going far (perhaps some graphics company? He did work for 3DFX for a while). Good luck Brian, you will be missed at id, and by the Quake community. Don't stray too far, Paul Steed can only stir up so much controversy.

    As for id, they still have fine programmers in John Carmack & John Cash. They'll hardly miss a beat. Plus, the Q3 engine is looking pretty solid as it is.
  • I never once mentioned money as the motive.
  • When he used to work for 3dfx, he was one of (if not the only) the original creators of Glide...built most all of the API...worked on the chip emulators, before there were even chips. So, he has had a "small" contribution to the 3D graphics world.
  • Here [planetquake.com] is an old PlanetQukae interview with Hook...has a bit more of his background.

    And here [bootnet.com] is an interview on bootNet with Carmack and Hook....it's got pica and opinions.
  • I do not work for a game company, but I have worked on a mod for quake2. As I understand it, Half-Life is a quake2 super-mod, it runs on the Quake2 engine so for all intents and purposes it is quake2. As far as I know quake3 will support quake2 mods with a small designer side adjustment time. So Half-Life for quake3 should come out some time in the near future. Probably a few months after the final release of quake3. Check out our quake2 mod at:
    www.aracnet.com/~jblabs/lox
  • hrm... what does transmeta have to do with Unix? Think about it.
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • TF2 has far more in common with Starsiege-Tribes than Battlezone, Uprising or Urban Assault. It really belongs in the First Person Shooter category as this is the market it sells to. Don't let the addition of strategic teamplay elements confuse the issue. Q3 will probably have the lock on "deathmatch" style play but TF2 will bring some really cool teamplay to the competition.
  • Hrm... wasn't half life based on he quake1 engen?
    wait I already know the answer to that... it was!

    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • Moderating this response because it was offtopic is stupid. Granted, the original post about the typos can be considered to be off-topic. But having the top article moderated out, will moderate out the rest of the tree, so it's simply a waste of moderation points to go any further. Also, in this case the response was a valid one, given the subject of the first one.

    Suppose someone makes an off-topic remark that initiates a very intesting discussion (about that off-topic topic). Should that all get moderated down? Can only Rob and Hemos set the subject??

    People are just moderating for the sake of it. You get 5 points and only a few days to spend them. If you don't ues them you'll lose them. So people moderate like crazy.

  • The link is to a page that outputs the results of a "finger bwh@idsoftware.com".

    I fingered the account manually just because I've barely used finger since everyone disabled their finger daemons pursuant to the whole big "Flash" scare in '94. Call me a geek but I got a kick out of it.

    Remember when you could get the Neilson ratings by fingering some account @ halcyon?
  • A double-negative (from my understanding...I'm not an English major) is a sentence that uses two negatives instead of one (i.e. "That doesn't make no sense"). In such a case, the negatives "cross-out" kind of like math ( --1 == 1), which is obviously not the intent of the sentence. If that was the intent, then the sentence could be written without the negatives (i.e. "That does make sense").

    However, neither of these cases apply to our friend's sentence. An incorrect double negative means that one of the negatives should be removed to correct the sentence. It is impossible to remove any of the negatives from the sentence and retain the intended meaning:

    "When you figure this out and correct the misspelling you will not appear to be someone who doesn't care if he can't write basic sentences without making spelling errors."

    does not equal

    "When you figure this out and correct the misspelling you will appear to be someone who doesn't care if he can't write basic sentences without making spelling errors."

    nor does it equal

    "When you figure this out and correct the misspelling you will not appear to be someone who does care if he can't write basic sentences without making spelling errors."

    nor does it equal

    "When you figure this out and correct the misspelling you will not appear to be someone who doesn't care if he can write basic sentences without making spelling errors."

    The last one may seem a little fuzzy because the negative associated with "can" doesn't seem contribute to the sentence. Is "I care if I can fly" the same as "I care if I can't fly"? The difference is small, but I'm pretty sure that it's there (like I said, I'm not an English major).

    Hope this helps. BTW, if there *are* any English majors out there, could you help us out by confirming or correcting my conclusion (after writing code, the English language seems fuzzy)?
  • (from a -1 post thread)
    Moderating this response because it was offtopic is stupid. Granted, the original post about the typos can be considered to be off-topic. But having the top article moderated out, will moderate out the rest of the tree, so it's simply a waste of moderation points to go any further. Also, in this case the response was a valid one, given the subject of the first one.

    Suppose someone makes an off-topic remark that initiates a very intesting discussion (about that off-topic topic). Should that all get moderated down? Can only Rob and Hemos set the subject??

    It seems that Rob has made -1 posts (or perhaps posts below your threshold (mine's at 0)) disappear, and its descendants go up a level. The post above was a reply to a -1 reply to a -1 post, and so got moved up to the top level.

    Certainly, this is a move in the right direction, so well done Rob, but it might be improved somehow, although I can't see how.

    As for wasting mod. points on offtopic posts, I don't think that posts that are on the offtopic topic should be moderated down, only flamebait, redundant posts etc.

  • Transmeta mayhap?
    But would that be an offer he couldn't refuse?

    i don't know if hook is a transmeta type of guy. i think it's more likely that he goes off to work on everquest.

  • I've been a diehard reader of ID Plans from before Hook joined ID Software. Judging by his work on GLide being far superior to Redmond's work on Direct3D at the time, and showing up Microsoft again with Quake 2, the first all-OpenGL hardware accelerated commerical game (GLQuake 1 was an unsupported download) I am willing to wager someone at Microsoft would want this man to fill the shoes of, say, Alex St. John. Farfetched, perhaps. However, Hook has managed to keep his mouth shut in his .plans representing ID software for the past year or so. This is something that Alex St. John could not do, and was fired from Microsoft.

    I wish Brian good luck, but I would not be surprised if he shows up at Microsoft, and we see a drastic improvement in proprietary 3D. If that ever happens, I would have wished that it was someone still working at ID calling all the shots on the Direct3D team. :)

    More food for thought: This wouldn't be the first ID employee to make the shift over to Microsoft. Abrash did so on the release of WinQuake 1.0.

  • Re:Where's Brian going? 989 studios (Everquest) (Score:4)

    by jwag ( 4557 ) on Wednesday June 02, 1999 @05:39AM (#1870816)
    I think he will go work on Everquest. Here is a long article he recently wrote on how to improve part of that game:
    http://www.voodooextreme.com/ask/editorial2.htm

    He has also written about how much he likes the game.

    I don't think he will go back to 3dfx. He has written that he left there for good reasons.

    I don't think he will go to Transmeta because he has written some derogatory things about Unix in the past.

  • my take is that he isn't interested in the ui at all. from linux-g200 mailing list it seems that his goal is (direct quote):

    "I think we have an honest shot at matching (or even exceeding) matrox's win9x driver. Currently, they are over 2x as fast."

    i don't even think he plays it in windowed mode, so while he is testing he doesn't see any ui, while coding he just sees the IDE.

    code is code, but once you get used to an environment it's hard to change (i can't code in anything but emacs and have no interest in learning any new key bindings)

    henri
  • Since Brian is so hooked with Voodoo Extreme my money is on 3dfx.

  • I think he will go work on Everquest. Here is a long article he recently wrote on how to improve part of that game:

    http://www.voodooextreme.com/ask/editorial2.htm
  • Sorry, but TF2 is not deathmatch.

    Q3 will excel in the deathmatch arena, and depending on it's bots, may do well in CTF.

    I think TF2 will carve it's own niche.

    I wouldn't be surprised if Q3Arena doesn't do so hot, due to all the competition, but I don't imagine there will be a lack of licenses. It's a damn beautiful engine.


    -AS
  • Transmeta mayhap?
    But would that be an offer he couldn't refuse?

  • Umm... no. Team Fortress Classic is TF with minor engine based differences, and its free (as in beer). TF=free mod for quake, TFC=free mod ported to half-life.

    Team Fortress 2 is a standalone game based on a greatly modified version of the Half-life engine. It is highly anticipated in the 3Dfps industry and probably the biggest threat to Q3's domination.
  • Linux newbie? I guess that isn't totally inaccurate. He's not interested in OS politics, or shafting The Man, or going revolutionary, I guess. If I read the man right, Carmack is interested in what works, what works well, and what he can do with it.

    I mean, he was champion of OpenGL before it gained any acceptance, he loves the NeXTStep programming and user interface, and he believes in cross platform capability.

    He doesn't care overmuch about the socio-political issues of using an open vs non-open OS, though it seems he knows of the advantages of open source. He's not an advocate, per se, but an excellent poster child.

    "I use Linux because it works. And when it doesn't, I can fix it"

    However, as long as a *real* better alternative exists, I don't imagine him taking the effort to deal with Linux overmuch. As he states, it is now almost an alternative to his much loved NeXTStep, and definitely to WinNT. I would be careful about his advocacy, however, as MacOSX may usurp Linux in his heart, seeing as how much of it is actually NeXTStep based.


    -AS

  • Maybe he just doesn't have the Linux spirit, I would have expected him to write something he likes

    Umm...the Q3Test is out. Quake3 is due to be released shortly. Now, I've never worked in a commercial software house, but is this really the sort of time that the main programmers decide to start writing a new window manager? :-)

    dylan_-


    --

  • Posted by Dr Evil:

    THAT is what he is good at, being right. Even when he is wrong, he is right.

    However, I personally think he will go off to be a television evangelist. :)
  • He worked at 3dfx before. Maybe he's going back..
    Another wild guess... Nvidia. He has praised the quality of their driver writers several times in the past, and they're about as committed towards OpenGL as anyone in the industry.

  • Dunno... do you know anyone who could turn down an offer from Transmeta? Besides, we all know that having Linux running on your platform from the day it is released is not 1/2 as important as running Quake in the office before release :)
  • Seeing as how they have different play styles, I don't see how one can dominate another, excepting that there may be people who enjoy both playstyles... and then wouldn't they play both games?

    Now Unreal Tournament, that might be the logical challenge to TF2, what with it's bot code, it's CTF and other coop modes.

    Is anyone making a deathmatch game anymore? I thought id was the only one; AvP might be, I guess, but it seems better suited for coop and teamplay, as soon as the patches are out and the editors are released, and I'd think that UT may have good enough free for all to compete against Q3A...


    -AS
  • All I ask is someone make a conserted to take a very professional looking page one step further. If nothing else, read the post as you type. Take a few seconds to fix the spaceing

    Sorry, but I do find this quite funny. The hypocrisy of all these people ranting and raving about spelling and grammar has reached ridiculous heights. We should make a "conserted" what?

    --

  • Just one more comment: It seems that "upgraded" posts are sent to the bottom of the page, after all the posts that originated on that level, ie this post comes before the upgraded posts, even though it was posted later in time (which is the normal ordering basis)
  • Abrash was working on Natural Language Parsing at Microsoft, the last I hear. THink of the auto-summarize feature in MS-Word, or the ability to find a word in the spell checker from a wrong word in the document.

  • TF2 = Multiplayer Action strategy.

    And we know how well Action/Strategy games do in the market. The most excellent best-game-of-1998 Battlezone tanked, as did Uprising and Urban Assult. TF2 has a following, but outside of those who grok it already, it's going to be a hard sell. Q3's very virtue and marketability come from the fact that it's a "simple, shallow arcade game" (John Carmack).

  • Posted by Dr Evil:

    I thought he was hired by Intel?
  • Brian certainly knows his 3D, and he has a strongly held set of opinions about color depth and graphics APIs. But it's very strange the he's considered such an all-around expert in the game field, especially considering that:

    1. He's never actually architected a game engine.
    2. He's never actually designed a game.

    He did write a book about 3D graphics, but he's obviously no Abrash. It's mostly average C++ code with a bit of thin commentary.

    He also writes a Q&A column for Voodoo Extreme, but he sounds like an old man, constantly ranting about the same issues and never putting things in a new light. He seems very close-minded, certainly not an innovator.

    He's damn good at self-promotion, though! Sour grapes? You betcha! :)
  • He's already worked at 3dfx, and doesn't quite mesh with them, as evidenced in age old plan files. Not unless something radical has occurred. But hey, they're still using the same technology in their V3 cards as when Brian worked there and helped to write Glide.

    Software startup is a blind guess, though prolly not Ion Storm.


    -AS
  • According to abrash's book and the article "the ego's at id" that was in wired just before quake 1 came out abrash was hired away from microsoft to begin with. Apparently with Carmacks shift to opengl Abrash felt his optimizing skills weren't needed and he's working now at microsoft optimizing some sort of voice recognition software.
  • Brian never "bashed MS" - he bashed their attitude towards OpenGL etc. They still could hire him to work at OpenGL (it looks like they have not enough resources for 1.2 implementation for W2K) or GDI team (they are currently working on GDI++). Don't forget - Mike Abrash also left id several years ago and was hired by Microsoft. Anything can happen...
  • http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990603/ca_verant__2.html
  • The most interesting part of this post is where Brian talks about getting "an offer he couldn't refuse". As nice a gig as working at a game company like id would be, there was one thing he was never going to get...ownership.

    I imagine whoever has made this offer to Brian has either included some kind of ownership stake, or huge wads of profit sharing.
  • John Carmack's finger info has some great stuff about Linux and Open Source in it.

    http://www.Q3Arena.com/cgibin/finger.cgi?login=j ohnc@idsoftware.com

    toolz
  • Posted by Guilt:

    Now don't get me wrong, I worship Carmack as much as the next programming-wannabe, but his comments about Gnome and the other UI stuff sounded pretty naive (spelling?). I know I'm not near the genius he is, but it sounds like he wasn't willing to get his hands dirty and actually try.

    Maybe he just doesn't have the Linux spirit, I would have expected him to write something he likes (the only thing I would trade E for is a completely 3D E, now that would rock; I still have my old Nintendo glove, I'll write a driver for it :)

    Anyways, the moral of the story is, johnc is a pretty hefty computer-user, but he seems half there in an aspect: "I have never been able
    to stand vi or emacs for long enough to become proficient in them." Code is code, right?

    -Guilt
  • Posted by |ZigZag|:

    I bet he too has been sold to AOL. ;)
  • That's completely off the topic! But you're right. It drives me nuts. It takes me twice as long to read things as I have to figure out what the author is _really_ trying to say. It really doesn't help one's cause if one doesn't communicate properly: some might say the message is more important than the accuracy of the grammar, but there are huge differences between all the different versions of English around the world, and bad grammar, colloquialisms, etc make it harder to cross these boundaries. It's a fact, readers get turned off by poorly written stuff.

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