Matt Hargett

I'm heartbroken to hear about the Microsoft layoffs that have hit id Software. This triology of Doom has been incredible and wouldn't have been possible without these talented people. If you need some incredibly talented folks on your team, I have linked who I can so far below...

We’re introducing Sniffler, a tool for JS and TS teams with large E2E suites. It takes changed files, traces import/export relationships across the codebase, and identifies the E2E tests those changes can affect. The goal is simple: stop defaulting to full-suite runs when the change only touches a small part of the app. The article covers why we built it, how it works, and where we want to take it next. Learn more 👇 Link below

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days. Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters. I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points. On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better. One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on. We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t. Sorry, Sandy.

Improved it further this weekend. I’m laying into the “trophy showcase” aspect of this app Even though it’s limited to 200,000 gaussian slats per instance, this allows you to performantly open multiple splat models at once And again: they stay persistent next to your other apps

I finally found and fixed the last ADPCM bug in the Sega Pico core and now all the games and audio seem to work great. Time to clean this up and backport the fixes to the MiSTer core and probably migrate to the Nuked MD core.