Id's John Carmack on: NEXTSTEP
Sean L. Hill
.....[little introduction chomped]
We are all experienced developers here. We developed lots of
products under dos (mostly borland c++), and never want to again.
OS/2 development fixes most of the run/reboot cycle of dos
development, and provides a stable OS most people are comfortable
with. MPW development has a nice tool based framework, but the mac
only masquerades as being stable. X/unix is robust and powerful. I
still use different tools when apropriate.
But NEXTSTEP rules.
What do we get out of it?
A user environment that our non-technical people can be easily
productive in, using our custom apps, bundled apps, and shrinkwrapped
apps. Everyone here uses it, including our artists, designers, and
technical support. Rule out X/unix.
A stable environment for developing new core technologies. This
involves a lot of program crashes. Rule out everything without
memory protection: Dos, windows, and mac.
An application building environment for our custom apps. The
development tools for games are often larger than the games
themselves. We went through five major iterations of our tools under
DOS, and they are all junk below our first iteration of NS tools. I
can't catagorically say that there is no better environment to
develop a MCCA on. I haven't kept up with the windows tools in the
past year, but I do know a valuable thing when I see it.
You can't really just point at specific things and claim superiority.
It is the complete package that has the appeal. It is a wonderful
environment to grow under, and I have learned a lot in the last two
years of working with it. I am looking forward to the work on our
second generation of NS tools, which will be built on top of a
distributed objects framework.
NS is the best tool I have found for MY development work. I usually
reccomend that developers work under OS/2 if they don't have the
money or courage to go with NEXTSTEP.
Of course, it is a good idea to do a reallity check now and then to
make sure you aren't getting tunnel vision and missing something
important. We have two teams working with our DOOM technology (NS
development based) to produce additional games for us to distribute,
so I asked the programmer for one of the groups what he thought about
developing under NS (he has a dos/windows/os2 background). His
response:
"I was not prepared for how cool this is!"
John Carmack
Technical Director
Id Software
ps: The next generation game technology is going to have the sound
and music developed under NS as well, so the NS beta will have
everything functional... The sound code in DOOM was developed
entirely under DOS, which is one of the reasons it gave us trouble.
I will probably get around to integrating the sound support into the
NS DOOM sometime...