John Carmack .plan Archive
Overview
This is a collection of all the .plan files for John Carmack I could manage to scrounge up. Most of them were parsed out of doom-ed's awkwardly unusable archive. Pre-1997 logs were found at the Difference Engine's Quake page and from Blue's News Archives, as all public .plan trackers still in existence don't go back that far.
A simple parser was run to format them to HTML and extract possible titles from the start of the entry. The rule is a title was present if there was a single line of text no more than ~90 characters long followed by 2 line feeds. A couple posts have either had titles inserted or lines re-arranged to provide an appropriate title, but 90% of them are untouched. You can also download the plaintext archives if you would like to do anything with them on your own.
There are a few plans that contain code or some other kind of formatted text, which have been embedded in "[code][/code]" tags so the parser can present them properly.
Note: in his earlier plans, Carmack uses a simple notation scheme to indicate what he has done that day. The explanation is as follows:
When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day.
Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don't
fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before
they get fixed.
Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things
I have since fixed.
Later entries may use:
A * entry was completed on that day
A + entry was completed on a later day
A - entry was decided against on a later day.