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> Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...

By Doom 3 NeXTSteps were way obsolete and the company had already been bought by Apple long before. He did show the Doom 3 tech first on a Mac at a WWDC though (and later did the same for Rage).

NeXTStep was used for Doom 1 and Quake 1 but by Quake 2 they had switched to Windows NT based computers (with a second Win95 computer for testing - and some artists still used DOS-based software like Deluxe Paint).

> I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling.

AFAIK Romero wrote the editor for Doom and previous games but Carmack wrote most of the editor for Quake (the whole "brush" idea was Carmack's). Romero has mentioned a few times that he wasn't happy with the editor's usability. AFAIK by that time Romero spent more time on working on the levels (which were more time consuming to make than the Doom ones) and the QuakeC scripts.

> have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.

Indeed, i have read MoD, it is a neat book. One of these days i want to also read Romero's "Life in First Person" too.

> I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13

It was a little more involved than that, there is a blogpost series[0] about it from someone who tried to reverse engineer and reimplement the original qcrack (which calculated a decryption key). The original qcrack was made almost instantly though.

IIRC from Masters of Doom, Carmack didn't really like the idea (most likely he expected people to crack it quickly).

[0] https://faehnri.ch/finished-with-qcrack/




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