John Carmack Leaves id Software 154
jones_supa writes "John Carmack has left id Software completely. 'John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio,' id's studio director Tim Willits told IGN, and continues: 'John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id's tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well.' Carmack, a co-founder of id, recently joined Oculus VR as Chief Technology Officer, and at the time remained at id Software in some capacity. Earlier this year, id president Todd Hollenshead departed id as well."
Remember to celebrate the 10th December (Score:2, Informative)
20th Doom Anniversary. December 10, 1993 was released
Re:The end of an era. (Score:5, Informative)
He's the CTO for Oculus, developers of the Oculus Rift VR HMD. He already has his plate full, and the writing has been on the wall since August when he joined Oculus. Gaming has much more to gain from him now that he's no longer tied to the past and can put all of his effort into VR gaming.
Re:Damn, that sucks. (Score:2, Informative)
Or voodoo, or 3dfx, or creative, or.......
Yeah you're just wrong. sorry.
Re:Oculus Rift! (Score:4, Informative)
Grasshopper is SpaceX's first stage landing test bed. Armadillo's landers were named Pixel, Texel, Mod, Supermod, and Stig, among other things.
Re:Buying iD was a massive mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Grid that axe all you want, just not with revisionist BS like that. Duke3D took 2.5 years to launch after DOOM. And then only 5 months after Duke3D landed Quake dropped. Build was fun, but as a technical competition it was no match for what Carmack was doing.
As for hardware, the first useful consumer 3D hardware didn't land for months *after* Quake shipped, when the Verite boards appeared in stores. And Quake supported them very early. And Carmack was also the primary independent champion of Voodoo, and those were the products that grew that market. So if you want to say he failed by missing the PC 3D hardware revolution, then you're arguing that 1) he missed the revolution he was key in making happen, and 2) he doesn't deserve credit for the revolution he did so much to popularize. More bull.
And Unreal always had its own renderer. Why would anyone expect them to drop their homegrown tech and adopt a competitor's? Not every designer jumps engines every 4 months. (Is that you, George?)
Lay blame wherever you want to for iD's modern malaise, but denying their groundbreaking early achievements is just absurd.
Re:Buying iD was a massive mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Oh for crap's sake. I know i'm answering to a troll here, but if you don't understand how pivotal was Quake with its "out-of-date" software rendered back in the day then you clearly didn't live the 90s, where the only widespread GPU product out there was the S3 ViRGE. It single-handedly revolutionized the game industry and started a trend to use 3D, without GPUs... which didn't really become popular until Quake 2 showcased what could be achieved with them. 3DFX owes them pretty much all of their business, as everyone else then followed suit, including Romero which had to (yet again) rewrite his glorious Daikatana.
Give credit where due. "Humiliates himself"? This guy was the major driving force for the FPS genre and the adoption of GPUs, and was coding state of the art game engines while you were still picking your nose. Doze off. Maybe 5 years for now you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are.
Re:Buying iD was a massive mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Holy shit someone needs to mod the parent down as over-rated for their trolling ...
Many of us older /. folk DO remember Michael Abrash from his "Graphics Programming Black Book (Special Edition)". "... the FDIV to calculate the reciprocal of 1/z is overlapped with drawing 16 pixels, taking advantage of the Pentiumâ(TM)s ability to perform floating-point in parallel with integer instructions, so the FDIV effectively takes only one cycle."
* http://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch70/70-04.html [phatcode.net]
Can you name one programmer who has open sourced their games MORE then Carmack? Yeah,I thought so.
WinQuake was replaced with glQuake which supported the 3Dfx Voodoo pretty much the day it came out. How did that S3 ViRGE decelerator work out for you again?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_ViRGE [wikipedia.org]
Hell, there is even an algorithm named after him: Carmack's Reverse
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume [wikipedia.org]
Carmack has always pushed the technical boundaries. While he doesn't understand what makes a FUN game he certainly as hell know how to a TECHNICAL game. He has inspired many generations of programmers.
What have *you* done for the graphics and gaming community Mr. AC aside from bitching about someone's "mistakes" ???
--
"It is far easier to destroy then to create -- which is why everyone on the internet bitches about somebody else's work instead of making their own masterpiece."