LinuxGames: Interview with id Software’s Timothee Besset

“What was your first game development project? Radiant
or?

“I had done a few other things; my first really serious one was
QERadiant, and that was writing content-generation plugins, because
we were at that transition from software to hardware renderers
where we started to realize we could be putting a lot more
triangles in the games, so suddenly people were looking at creating
new shapes that have more triangles: a plugin that can make some
stairs, or make a sphere, cones, and all kinds of shapes that just
looked nice and had a lot of triangles. So I started with that,
just basic geometry algorithms to generate shapes and manipulate
them. And that’s how I got to know Robert Duffy, until he finally
got hired (because he was a contractor for Quake 3 development on
the editor) and needed someone to take over on the public tools
release and support the community. At that time I was still either
in school or I had spent a year and a half in a
software-engineering company. So I was doing that on my free time;
it never got really serious until I started as an official
contractor in 2000, when I took over after Loki’s demise on Quake
3. That’s where the transition really happened, where I decided
that may be what I really want to do…”

Complete
Story