Dave Taylor | |
|---|---|
 Taylor at QuakeCon 1997 | |
| Occupation | Video game programmer |
Dave D. Taylor is an American game programmer, best known as a former id Software employee and noted for his work promoting Linux gaming.
Dave Taylor | |
|---|---|
| Taylor at QuakeCon 1997 | |
| Occupation | Video game programmer |
Dave D. Taylor is an American game programmer, best known as a former id Software employee and noted for his work promoting Linux gaming.
He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1993. [1] Prior to working for id, he was a member of The Kernel Group, which worked on Unix kernel debugging. [2]
Taylor worked for id Software between 1993 and 1996, and was during the time involved with the development of Doom and Quake . He created ports of both games to IRIX, AIX, Solaris and Linux, and helped program the Atari Jaguar ports of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D . [3] He also considers himself to have been the "spackle coder" on Doom, for adding things such as the status bar, sound library integration, the automap, level transitions, cheat codes, and the network chat system. [4] On Quake, he wrote the original sound engine, the DOS TCP/IP network library, and added VESA 2.0 support. One of the musical themes in Doom II, "The Dave D. Taylor Blues", was named after him by Robert Prince. [5]
The 2003 book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture mentions his habit of passing out from motion sickness after prolonged playing of Doom, and how the other employees would, after such incidents, sketch a body outline of his unconscious form with masking tape. After the success of the game, they bought him a couch to pass out on. His attempts to "talk up" Quake on-line, his purchase of an Acura NSX with Doom money, his friendship with American McGee, and his eventual departure from the company are also mentioned. [6]
Taylor founded a small game company called Crack dot Com from 1996 to 1998. Crack dot Com released only one game, Abuse , a PC platform shooter. In a 1997 interview, he claimed that he wasn't particularly proud of Abuse, and that "he set out to prove that a person could sell 50,000 copies of a so-so game." [7] He then led the effort to build Golgotha , a first-person shooter / real-time strategy hybrid, [8] but the company folded before its completion. [9]
Between 1998 and 2001 he worked for Transmeta. [10] He was president of Carbon6 from 2001 to 2002, there also working as lead designer and producer for the Game Boy Advance game Spy Kids Challenger . Since 2002 he has been vice president of Naked Sky Entertainment and since 2003 also an advisor and freelance game designer. [11] He is also willing to act as a Linux game porter for pay projects. [12]
In 2009, he produced Abuse Classic [13] for the Apple iPhone and Beakiez for the PC. [14]
id Software LLC is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack.
Quake is a first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. The first game in the Quake series, it was originally released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux in 1996, followed by Mac OS and Sega Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998. In the game, players must find their way through various maze-like, medieval environments while battling monsters using an array of weaponry. Quake takes inspiration from gothic fiction and the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
John D. Carmack II is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.
Alfonso John Romero is an American director, designer, programmer and developer in the video game industry. He is a co-founder of id Software and designed their early games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), Doom II (1994), Hexen (1995) and Quake (1996). His designs and development tools, along with programming techniques developed by id Software's lead programmer, John Carmack, popularized the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Romero is also credited with coining the multiplayer term "deathmatch".
Loki Software, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Tustin, California, that ported several video games from Microsoft Windows to Linux. It took its name from the Norse deity Loki. Although successful in its goal of bringing games to the Linux platform, the company folded in January 2002 after filing for bankruptcy.
Doom 3 is a 2004 survival horror first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. Doom 3 was originally released for Microsoft Windows on August 3, 2004, adapted for Linux later that year, and ported by Aspyr Media for Mac OS X in 2005. Developer Vicarious Visions ported the game to the Xbox, releasing it worldwide on April 4, 2005.
Quake 4 is a 2005 military science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Raven Software and published by Activision. It is the fourth title in the Quake series, after the multiplayer Quake III Arena, and a sequel to Quake II. Raven Software collaborated with id Software, who supervised the development of the game as well as provided the id Tech 4 engine upon which it was built. The game has an increased emphasis on single-player gameplay compared to previous installments; its multiplayer mode does not support playable bots.
Quake is a series of first-person shooter video games, developed by id Software and, as of 2010, published by Bethesda Softworks. The series is composed of Quake and its nonlinear, standalone sequels, which vary in setting and plot.
Katherine Anna Kang is an American video game designer.
Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997. The game's source code, along with some of the shareware content, has been in the public domain since the late 1990s and has been ported to Linux and many other platforms.
SVGAlib is an open-source low-level graphics library which ran on Linux and FreeBSD and allowed programs to change video mode and display full-screen graphics, without the use of a windowing system. Alongside X11 and the General Graphics Interface, it was one of the earliest libraries allowing graphical video games on Linux.
Crack dot Com was a computer game development company co-founded by ex-id Software programmer Dave Taylor, and Jonathan Clark.
Golgotha is an unfinished video game that was being developed by Crack dot Com prior to shutting down in 1998. The game was to be a real-time strategy game, with elements from first-person shooter games. According to Dave Taylor, the game's name came from Shakespeare's King Lear tragedy, wherein Golgotha was a massive plain and a future battlefield.
id Tech 4, popularly known as the Doom 3 engine, is a game engine developed by id Software and first used in the video game Doom 3. The engine was designed by John Carmack, who also created previous game engines, such as those for Doom and Quake, which are widely recognized as significant advances in the field. This OpenGL-based game engine has also been used in Quake 4, Prey, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Wolfenstein, and Brink. id Tech 4 is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible.
Hopkins FBI is a 1998 point-and-click adventure game from MP Entertainment, most famous for very large amounts of gore. A sequel titled Hopkins FBI 2: Don't Cry, Baby, involving Hopkins having to rescue the President's daughter, was announced but never released.
Linux-based operating systems can be used for playing video games. Because many games are not natively supported for the Linux kernel, various software has been made to run Windows games, such as Wine, Cedega, and Proton, and managers such as Lutris and PlayOnLinux. The Linux gaming community has a presence on the internet with users who attempt to run games that are not officially supported on Linux.
id Tech is a series of separate game engines designed and developed by id Software. Prior to the presentation of the id Tech 5-based game Rage in 2011, the engines lacked official designation and as such were simply referred to as the Doom and Quake engines, from the name of the main game series the engines had been developed for. "id Tech" has been released as free software under the GNU General Public License. id Tech versions 0 to 3 were released under GPL-2.0-or-later. id Tech versions 3.5 to 4.5 were released under GPL-3.0-or-later. id Tech 5 to 7 are proprietary, with id Tech 7 currently being the latest utilized engine.
Timothée Besset is a French software programmer, best known for supporting Linux, as well as some Macintosh, ports of id Software's products. He was involved with the game ports of various id properties through the 2000s, starting with Quake III Arena. Since the development of Doom 3 he was also in charge of the multiplayer network code and various aspects of game coding for id, a role which had him heavily involved in the development of their online game QuakeLive. Since departing id in January 2012 he has worked as a software contractor, including for Valve Software.
