The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)

Amazingly brilliant work, especially given the CPU capabilities at the time. Carmack's use of BSP trees inspired my own work on the Crash Bandicoot renderer. I was also really intrigued by Seth Teller's Ph.D. thesis on Precomputed Visibility Sets though I knew that would never run on home console hardware. None of these techniques is relevant anymore given that all the hardware has Z buffers, obviating the need to explicitly order the polygons during the rendering process. But at the…

> So Carmack ... started reading research papers. This in itself is a superpower, especially in computer science where history is considered a waste of time. This is commonly even true in actual research computer science, where you'd think papers were crucial. Nowadays with the flood of "PR" preprints particularly in machine learning, it would be impossible to keep up and so nobody tries -- most of those papers write-once-read-never. When I moved out of computing into biochemistry and medicine…

While I am sure Carmack is a great programmer, this constant hacker hero worship is grating. The post is fawning over Carmack for using BSP trees but barely gives enough credit to the inventor of BSP. The same thing happened where Carmack was credited with inventing the sqrt fn, until it turned out that he did not. We could use less hero worship on hn.