I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.

It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do. It costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world.

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!