3D engine design isn't rocket science – it's far more complicated than that.

I vaguely remember Mike mentioning in one of our group therapy sessions that, he thought 'software programmers are like the industrial revolutionary engineers of our generation'. (probably horribly misquoted, but they were words to that effect.)

The cause of this flashback was an article on guardian.co.uk. This one to be precise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/11/3d-engine-videogame-technology.

Although around five months old now it is still fairly current for a mainstream newspaper, who often tend to treat video game articles as a novelty. Rather like the a story of a German Shepard becoming a surrogate mother to a trio of piglets, you'd expect to hear at the end of a news broadcast.

“Today some of the most brilliant minds in the world – physicists, mathematicians, architects, aerodynamics experts - are working on video games” The question is why? Turns out that the amount of programming and the difficulty that it entails means that this may be even more challenging than there chosen professions.
Software used for games companies has been used to power everything from the New York Stock exchange to a democratizing tool, so if someone in a village in Suffolk doesn't like the bench the council want to put in the park they can design a new one.

So it seems that software is the new iron and steel, not only of this country, but of the whole world. Anything is possible.

“John D Carmack, the programming legend behind the Doom and Quake games runs an aerospace company as a relaxing diversion from his role as technical director at games developer id. Which goes to show that 3D engine design isn't rocket science – it's far more complicated than that.”