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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Carmack Speaks 113

Posted by Hemos from the commentary-from-smart-people-==-good dept.
mbell writes: "Eurogamer.net's coverage of Razer-CPL has a write-up of a workshop that John Carmack gave on 3d games and hardware. Pretty interesting article, including some talk about id's next game." Kudos to Katherine (Don'tcha love alliteration?) for buying the round of drinks -- and the hints about the potential next game are cool. Think "Not Quake."
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Carmack Speaks More

Carmack Speaks

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  • Re:how good is the human eye? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ``...the human eye cannot really tell the difference after about 60 fps. It's hard enough to tell the difference between 48 and 51 fps, but above 60, you pretty much can't tell the difference, unless your animations are keyed on frame rate...'' (OpenGL SuperBible, 627)

    ``The reason the movie or television image is so smooth at such a low frame rate is because each image is actually a combination of the images preceding and following it. Motion blur and your eye's persistence of vision blend the frames together, providing a higher quality illusion.'' (OpenGL SuperBible, 607)

    It then goes on to talk some more; I'll paraphrase:

    Basically, on a computer, to get the effect a TV has, you need to motion blur all your frames. This does create smoother animation. However, motion blur requires multiple versions of the image be rendered. In that case, you're basically rendering >= 60fps anyway, but only displaying 30. Why not display all 60?

  • feel it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    its not only the human eye. i'm not sure if you can *see* the difference between 60 and 100 fps but you can definately *feel* it in the controls.

  • Re:id's next game... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't forget that Carmack has stated an interest before in making Stephensons Metaverse real, so it is not that far fetched. That would be a worthy feat for tha master :)

    Seriously, if anyone has the potential to make a Metaverse, it's Carmack.

    Secondly, it is not that certain that it would be a Massive Multi-Player, if he is doing a Metaverse it is more of an engine that allows people to bring their own dreamworld to reality. Don't flame me on this though, it's been some time since I read SnowCrash....

    // Hp

  • Interesting point (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I note that when Carmack was talking about these possible advances, he didn't say he was afraid he'd have to hire more programmers, but more artists. Writing a game engine is only a small part of the picture, these days -- you'll spend more time and effort on the graphics than anything else. I'm involved in a project to write an opensource game similar (but far better to ;)) Master Of Orion; the engine is coming along fairly well, but we're really lacking in the graphics department. I've noticed that with a few exceptions, programmers don't seem to make good artists (lord knows I don't). How do you fix this problem for an Open Source game? Where do you find the artists? Shalon Wood http://universe.pele.cx (rebuilt from a partial mirror when the original hosting site went down, so may be partially broken)

  • Re:how good is the human eye? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's a simple test to prove the the human eye is very good at detecting high frame rates.

    Shut off the lights in the room where your computer is. Set the refresh rate to 120hz. Move your hand around in front of the screen. Notice how you see a series of distinct crisp outlines of your fingers.

    To me this is fairly good proof that we can make out individual samples of a moving scene at more than 100 frames per second, although at more than 100fps, it becomes harder to tell that the framerate is actually changing.

  • Re:id's next game... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jorrit Tyberghein's Crystalspace (hosted at our very own linuxgames.net (crystal.linuxgames.net)) has been working on an implimentation of just this nature for some months now, and has a whitepaper and protocol drafted, as well as preliminary coding underway. The engine (titled CrystalSpace) is already fully featured and chock right full of all kinds of yummy features and eyecandy.

    Oh, did I mention all this was open source?

    Too Lazy To Log In, Or Link,
    AC
  • Ok this is interesting but somewhat vague for some of us. Is there a more in depth report written by someone who isn't a hardcore gamer and just skims the topics mentioned?
  • Hardware texturing in current 3D drivers is atrocioius. They cache textures on the card using a Least Recently Used algo (look it up if you don't know what it is).

    What this comes down to is if you render the level in the same order on every frame, you will end up having 100% cache MISSES if your scene uses more texture memory than the card has. Textures on the second pass will push textures needed later on the second pass right out of the cache, so you end up not using texture cache memory at all.

    Whether he wants to have no repeat textures or not (just not combining the vis'd lightmap at runtime, mostly), changes in the way they handle textures is desparately needed for all games using more texture than they have memory on the card.
  • Yes, actually. And that should be "Right". Just because you don't understand what it means, or you think it's obvious doesn't mean it can't be profound, or important.

    For a deeper understanding of this, read about The New Jersey approach [jwz.org]. That's why Unix is more popular than Lisp machines, nowadays; sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • I don't think it's completely accurate to say that the human eye doesn't see *any* difference past 24-bit colour. I've heard that the human eye can see anywhere from 15 to 25 million colours. It's not difficult to find a two colours (usually in the greens) that differ only by one RGB value, yet you can distinctly tell the difference between them.

    Anyway, 32-bit video cards were created to speed things up. It's a lot easier (and faster) to just grab and dump 32 bits than it is to grab 32 bits and then carefully slice it up so you can place it in a 24-bit buffer without corrupting it. All the one's I've ever heard of just ignore the final 8-bits, anyway. I suppose you could do cool things with those 8 bits like opacity or Z-ordering or something. Alternatively, you could try to get them to do 30-bit RGB (10 bits per channel), but that can be annoying sometimes (anyone remember 15-bit colour?). Or you could try and do 32-bit colour by doing a 10-12-10 split (anyone remember 16-bit colour?). Either way, I guess 24-bit colour is "good enough".
  • > Since memory manager is one of few things every
    > operating system provides

    Well, MS DOG has a memory manager, but he's a PHB :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • cool, indoors. Reminiscent of Duke 3D (which I find more entertaining than Quake for single player play. More plot and character. Admit it, you've quoted Duke Nukem :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • No no! much better, remember the swordfighting in "the secret of monkey island" (adventure game). I can't wait to see Carmack's version of the swordmaster's insults :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • Doesn't it work under dosemu? Duke 3D does :) No need to get all fancy here.
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • The Marine Corps has a very nice FPS where you get to fly a chopper. It's in a very large room in a building out at New River Air Station and I got to play it for a few minutes one afternoon this past summer. Hardware costs are kind of steep, though. Cheapest thing there is an SGI box.
  • Well, if you're the sort who views an operating system as a religion, then that might be a good option. For me, however, I have a TNT2 and I have a copy of Win98. This combo does a perfectly good job of running all the various Quake incarnations. I just can't see dropping a couple hundred bucks just so that I can play the same game under a different OS.

    When I play Q2 or Q3, it's typically a several hour activity, I don't feel like a quick reboot into Windows is really that much of an inconvenience.

  • What, you run around hugging bunnies with an assortment of different compliments at your disposal that you can pick up during the game?

    You sick bastard!

    :-)

    Serious, though, they may be going back to their "cuter" era, such as the one that begat Commander Keen. In the meantime:

    Little bunny Foo Foo

    I don't wanna see you

    Pickin' up the field mice and bonking them on the head...

    --Joe
    --
  • Level designers don't like radiosity lighting? Well, here's one who loves it. I've been doing some level design for Half-Life [man.ac.uk] and I must admit that radiosity lighting is probably one of my favourite features. It makes ultra-realistic lighting embarrasingly easy to do.

    I don't know what these claims of 'fuzzy shadows' are about - I get nice, sharp shadows where I want them, and diffuse shadows where I want them. And simulated diffuse reflections off floors, light underneath tables, light going round corners, indirect lighting, smoothed lighting around 'curved' objects... And all by placing a couple of light textures in relevant places.

    I'm amazed that radiosity lighting was dropped from Quake 3. The poor lighting in Quake was one of my least favourite features (simulating radiosity lighting with multiple light entities wasn't fun, and no inverse-square was a joke).

    Oh well... Time to wait for Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2. :-)

    Ford Prefect
  • I would've hoped it'd be "go around gibbing bunnies". Have you seen "Santa Slayer" ? Lousy gameplay, but boy was it funny ! Maybe he's going after that genre.
  • What do you think? He probably doesn't have the right video card. That's my situation. I'm not hard-core enough to shell out another one or two hundred bucks for a Linux-supported video card, when my Permedia 2 is adequate. It's still a pain in the ass to have to reboot whenever I want to play Q3 or Unreal Tournament.
  • He did say he was toying with the idea...

    Here's a dream idea: Whip up a top-notch CGB emulator, then sell the ROM.

    Likely? naaah...
  • Voodoo 2 cards can be had for reasonable costs, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't mind supporting an evil company like 3dfx. :-)

    It's not as if these games are cheap, after all.
  • Quake 2 Linux binaries were available, and Quake 3 retailed for linux. Why would you have to re-install Windows to try it?

    id was doing linux (unofficially) before Loki ever existed.
  • Don't forget Wolfenstein!

    However, don't forget Commander Keen either! :-)

    Now, that would be fun! Run around blasting 3D rendered Vorticons!
  • the new voodoo cards will come with hardware motion blur.
  • In Halo and Tribes 2 you get to drive vehicles and fly choppers, and in team fortress 2 an engineer can build a machine gun, then two other players operate it (one loads it, the other one shoots).
  • Not to mention Doom and Quake original.

    That was kinda intresting... Doom was out for Linux before it had a Windows port.
    :)

    Anywhoo... ID looked at Linux a long long long time ago and said "That would be a cool operating system to run our game"...
    (Our game "Doom" not "our games" as ID produced many but Doom was the first Linux port)
    That is thinking ahead :)

    It was probably an easy port...
    I was told Doom was made originally on the NeXT and ported to Dos (the Doom Operating System) to reach the widest market posable.
    Then they made a Mac version and finnaly a Linux version.
    That was when Linux was "that hacker Unix thingy" Solarus didn't exist yet and Windows still had to compeate with OS/2 and Mac (It was allready "preinstalled" and allready had significant marketshare)

    Sadly my box wasn't letting me install Linux...
    (A technical problem with my box it probably would have similer problems with Windows)
    So my only exposure to Linux was from a friend of mine..
    That was then.... :)
    That box has been scrapped...
    Today my computer happly runs Linux...
    But not Windows...
  • sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive...

    Well, to me that sounds like a "good reason" to do it wrong.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • "John explained that there are 'two reasons for not doing the right thing - you don't
    know how to do the right thing, or you choose to do it wrong for a good reason'."

    So one of the two reasons for not doing something right is that you have a good reason not to do it right. Wow, that's profound. Let me write that one down. Nothing against Carmack (or you), but this wasn't really all that great of a line.

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • You have to set the timezone to EDT yourself in the user preferences.
  • He has also talked a lot about Snow Crash, specifically, that he knew he could do most of it. cue a Homer drool: "agggllraglrlalgrlallagr...."
  • Oh come on! Just because he wants to do something a little different from the mindless gameplay of Quake does not mean that he will be making a product that is suitable for little children. Some of the most disturbing (in a good way) games I have ever played are RPGs, not FPSs, because they actually create situations which draw you in and make you really think about what is happening rather than simply present you with graphical violence that is so over-the-top that it becomes more comical than realistic. Have you ever played Planescape: Torment? A game like that makes the frags and gibs of Quake seem quike tame.

  • And to be fair ... many people (upwards of 10% of the population) can see individual frames in movies, in spite of the motion blur. Movies have settled on 24fps because of equipment/cost issues, and because it is adequate to satisfy most of the population. I personally hope we get movies on the new 48fps standard soon, because the current speed bothers my eyes with the flicker. I can't watch long movies without getting a headache.
  • <rant> I noticed that Carmack finally cut his hair. He looks more respectable now :)

    I remember reading something somewhere saying Carmack was interested in making more decent immersive environment stuff, sounded a lot like what The Street was in Snow Crash. Although if the next project is going to be a story based single player thing then maybe the one after will be The Street. :) That would be cool.

    Now I have to go and find out what a V5 needs an external powersupply for ;) </rant>

  • Yes, but early indications are that Voodoo's motion-blur sucks.
  • That's just a strobe effect. Let's say your eyes can see ten frames per second. Let's say your monitor refreshes at 100 frames per second. Now let's say you move your hand across the monitor.

    For one human-eye-frame, there will be 10 monitor frames, each going on and off very quickly.

    So in that one frame, you will see 10 silhouettes of your hand. In 1 second, you will see 100 silhouettes of your hand. In other words, the framerate of the eye doesn't matter. Only the monitor frequency matters.

    If you increase the monitor refresh rate to 1000 Hz, you'll probably just see a blur. That's because you can't move your hand fast enough to generate significantly different silhouettes.
  • It was kinda vague... a bit interresting... but no enough "meat' hehe ;)
  • I've read some of his referneces to this before as well. (Most likely in his .plan file.) Seems very neat.

    One other idea I remember he had was to take the headtracking from the cam and map it to the model's head. So if you moved your head in front of your screen, so would your "avatar" in the game.

    The parrallax effect seems even neater though. Sort of like what the MS freestyle pad does for people that shake the pad while playing.
  • I think it was Romero who was incessantly spouting off about Quake being a cross between what we now know as Quake and Everquest.
  • who cares if you get 150 FPs at 640x480x16? How about 50 fps at 1280x1024x32? With full-screen anti-aliasing, 32-bit textures? The eye can tell the difference there, that's for sure.
    That's a good point, I tend to forget simple things like that in the middle of the night.
  • >>Isn't anyone else sick of first person shooter games? Every one is the exact same thing, except for having, say, a rapid laser gun instead of a machine gun, and to be "good" you need a $40/month line and about $200 worth of extra equipment just for the game...<<

    I play games to have fun. Once I've played one FPS for a while, I get bored of it. If a new FPS looks different, especially if it's better, I'll play it for a while.

    You do not need good hardware to be a good player. To compete in multiplayer, a decent net connetion helps, yes. But Q3A was plenty of fun single player; I couldn't beat any of the levels in nightmare mode; with more practice, I probably would have been able to.

    Also, if you don't like it, don't play it. Don't comment on it, and get on with your life.

    I don't go around to wine drinkers boards and say "I don't drink alcohol; aren't you bored of drinking wine yet?"

    In other words, what slashdot needs more of is a healthy sense of "Mind Your Own Business."

  • Persistence of vision (i.e no percieved flicker) is somewhere around 25-30Hz. It is still possible to spot events that take less time. I wonder how the latency between rendering a frame and displaying aframe is affected though.

    I don't quite understand this wondering of yours. But if this is useful... A technique is used, where you draw everything to a canvas (any area of memory, capable of holding enough info) and then dump the canvas to the screen. The area of time between being done painting that canvas and then displaying it to screen is pretty minimal.

    The software guesstimates the amount of time that passed from the last frame to calculate how much the objects of the screen should have moved... This is much larger than the time it takes to copy the final canvas to screen.
  • 32-bit "color" provides 8 bits of alpha transparency. So for something that's 32-bit, it's 24 bits of color and 8 bit of alpha transparency. For 24-bit, I believe it might be 16 bits of color and 8 bits of alpha transparency. Althoug it might also be just 24 bits of color, straight.

    Chris Hagar
  • The human eye can see 30-40 fps. There are a number of reasons for these topnotch video cards.

    First of all, the average fps of a card goes down dramatically when you top on the features, color depth, resolution, etc. So this 100 fps average you cite doesn't work when you've got all the features turned on. This feature issue is also one of the reasons people pay so much money on video cards. New features appear in the each latest generation. These are features that, regardless of fps, improve the gameplay experience.

    Secondly, this is the average fps. Sometimes when there are no other mobiles on the screen and/or you're in a dark hallway or somesuch, this fps can go way up. Conversely, when there are a bunch of other characters on the screen and/or you're seeing a huge number of effects on the screen, it's no good if you've got this 40 fps average video card. The fps will go way down on such a card, to 10 or 15.

    Also, buying the top-of-the-line video card today can ensure a longer life for the card. In the future, games will have more features packed on which will stress the capabilities of today's video cards. The time when that happens with your video card all depends on how powerful the video card is now.

    And of course, bragging rights ;)

    Chris Hagar

  • That's right, one of the biggest innovations he mentioned is the trashing of precomputed lighting. Every FPS I can think of since Doom has featured a very static lighting model, usually through lightmaps.
    Carmack said that in the next iteration of his engine, all lighting (and shadows) will be generated in real-time. From a game-geek perspective, this is a huge step forward.
    Assuming he can pull it off, imagine the simplest scene with dynamic lighting... a plain room with a chair and a bare lightbulb overhead... as the lightbulb swings back and forth, the shadow of the chair crawls across the floor and up the wall a bit...

    It's going to be pretty sweet.

    erik

  • The upcoming Voodoo series cards will use their own power line direct from the power supply because some motherboards (Athlon) are unable to provide the stable high current that newer, high-power video cards (GeForce) demand through the bus. This may be exclusive to Athlon + GeForce owners right now, but at the rate video cards are going, this kind of problem will appear on other systems, too. It's only seen now because the motherboard must supply power to two high-current demanding components, the Athlon and the GeForce. I get the impression that, without this dedicated power supply, the V5 would have a similar problem on all motherboards, not just Athlon. Don't quote me on that, it's just speculation. The dedicated line provides a stability and performance boost to the card. The formerly neglected power supply is about to become a house-hold word. No longer will people buy the cheapest peice of crap 250W they can get their hands on! ;)

    This is a clear sign that the video card is becoming a whole new monster in the computer. It sounds corny, but the idea of a GPU is far more accurate for the next breed of cards. I expect NVidia's next generation to implement this type of power solution, as well. It just makes sense. The GeForce on Athlon systems has proven that it's needed. If it doesn't, my upgrades next year will not include an NVidia card.

  • Don't forget Wolfenstein! However, don't forget Commander Keen either! :-)

    Anyone remember the DOOM II secret levels w/ Wolfenstein textures & enemies? In the end of the second level you had to shoot several hanged Commander Keens...

  • I respect John Carmack's work as a programmer, but I really don't like what id games and other companies have done to computer games.

    We now have games which have a very realistic simulation of a real world, and what have game companies done with it? A series which by now must number into hundereds of games in which the totality of play involves running around and killing stuff. Maybe with a few frustrating "puzzles" involving finding coloured keys behind secret doors.

    I find there are few games around which are really entertaining and fun for more than a few hours. And none of these use highly sophisticated 3D graphics. I really hope that id's next game isn't another "twitch kill" gorefest, it would be really nice to find a game I can actually play for a while and not feel like I wasted the money.

  • Didn't Carmack mention in a /.interview that he was considering doing a Keen for color gameboy?
    Or am I imagining things?
  • Your third point is what Diablo II seems to be all about. I read the review at firingsquard [firingsquad.com] and although the graphics aren't going to be that much better than the older one, the game is going to sell like crazy anyway because its a GREAT game.

    I personally won't buy it if there's no linux version, but it will be a great game that demonstrates that you don't need cutting-edge graphics to sell a game. It's just gotta be addictively fun and reach out to the beast inside of all of us.

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

  • On a serious note, I don't think Johnny C. can keep away from the FPS games. He's just as addicted to them as we are! I betcha the next game will be strikingly similar to Quake, but maybe just in a totally different setting. :)

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
  • Some people need to realize the sheer brutality the human body goes through during programming ANYTHING, not just large games. Carmack kicks ass at what he does, and should be commended for it, not dissed because he used big words. Not to say its a bad article, but really, a great movement that needs to happen is education in this country, especially in the geek community. Sure many people know a little about lots of things, but we all need more focus, including me.
  • PNQ - PNQ's Not Quake.
  • from my old animation days. it's about 60fps, but since animation is perceived at around 12 people use different tricks. for instance.

    movies: 24fps
    tv: 30fps
    cartoons/animation: drawn a at 12fps, then doubled. sometimes at 24fps, depends on the scene.

    -Jon
  • Some of the techniques for acheiving true 3D imaging, where the scene appears to be "floating" in front of you, use eyeglass-and-shutter type technologies to create two slightly different images. This gives the illusion of true 3D, but if I remember correctly, the shutters alternate between eyes.

    So, if the frame rate/refresh rate is divided in half, in those cases, 120 frames-per-second would appear as two slightly different 60 frames-per-second images, one for each eye.

    That's at least one explanation for needing >100 fps from our graphics cards and monitors... arguments about the brain's image processing power and variation between people aside.

  • Keep in mind that Carmack is also an all around nice guy (tm). Take a look at this [gamedev.net] site detailing his relationship with the Starlight foundation. Not only does Carmack give back to our (gaming/coding)community, but he's also been pretty good to the community at large.


    43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
  • ...well, his Ferrari anyway. check it out at Elves on Tricycles [elvesontricycles.com]...Lord Carmack's Twin Turbo F50.
  • the Quakes and Unreal can both be done like this, it just makes for shitty play at the current level of hardware.

    The RuntFest map for Quake3 looks to have a lot of unique textures, although the wall+ceiling+floor use repeated textures. The map is 10mb _zipped_. Most maps even for Quake3 stick to around 2mb. And if you're computer can churn up and spit out q3 levels with 32-bit high resolution textures and all the fixings, for heaven's sake, send one my way!

    To repeat: mappers *can* do unique painting of entire levels with any of the 3D game engines currently out -- it's just not practical.
  • It's 60 fps and it's for bragging rights;)
  • I'd say that all of id's releases are still fun games to play Heh, I just installed VMWare for the sole purpose of playing Commander Keen.
    --
  • Another reason for higher frame rates: to achieve consistently adequate frame rates throughout gameplay. Let's say you have a 3D card that can give you about 40fps in Quake 3 most of the time. But then you get into the heat of battle and four or five guys explode, leaving trails of blood that bring your card down to its knees (maybe around 15fps). You try to look away from it all to gain your faster frame rates again, but in the meantime someone else has taken advantage of you with a rocket. You're dead. If you had a good 3D card that gave you 100fps normally, then the blood trails would bring you down to say around 50fps. It's still an acceptable framerate. So average FPS measurements for cards don't tell you how well your card will run 100% of the time, just most of the time. A 30fps card just won't cut it, because you're relying on the game not having any graphics-intensive events every once in a while. Having higher fps cards also means you can turn on more graphics goodies in the game to look prettier ;)
  • I thought that there is thing (three-blade shutter) similar to a fan that rotates in front of the film and each frame is covered and then shown by the shutter three times. At least that's what they told me in my graphics class a few weeks ago...
  • People pay more money for better video cards so that they can run the newest games at a high FPS (and high resolutions)... a Voodoo1 was adequite for Quake, but not so for Quake3. I have a TNT2 that runs Quake2 very smoothly at 1600x1200, but I run Quake3 at 1024x768 to get the same results, and the next generation of 3D games will require me to run at an even lower resolution, with more options turned off.


    He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
  • 100 is the average fps. When things get really busy, that number drops dramatically. Ideally, you want a system which gives you >30fps when the shit hits the fan at the absolute best possible resolution. This usually means >100fps on the benchmarks.
  • ...can barely render that link under Linux. I wonder why. It can hardly scroll it.

    Oh well. I think it's pretty cool to go out and talk to gamers that way and give them tips, etc.

    It would be nice to see more people doing this; I know I get more productive after sitting through one of these guru speeches. Seems to fire me up.
  • I would like to point out as delicately as possible that this article is under the "Quake" topic. If you don't care about these games, as you seem to indicate, remove the topic from your profile.

    I just came home (today!) with a copy of Quake3 for Linux. I don't really play FirstPersonShooters much, but every now and again it's just what I need. Besides, it came in a really neat tin can that reminded me a bit of Spam.
  • I would, but I like whining about crap.
    Oh. OK, then. ;)
  • One extreme example is the idea of "painting" an entire level with unique textures rather than using a few small repeating textures, which John described as "crappy texture compression". Artists would also be able to go in and edit the lightmaps by hand, as they can on computer animated movies.

    hmm... doesn't Unreal already have all of this?

    He also said that it isn't likely to be relevant to competitive gaming, and that id are taking a "somewhat different direction" with the game. What that direction is exactly though, they aren't saying, but a return to single player story-based action and more interactive scenery is likely on the cards.

    now that's much more interesting... honestly, I have been only playing UT to check out new levels and their visual beauty, not for real deathmatch.

    Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
    He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio

  • Play Rogue Spear. Its not my cup of tea, but if you want realistic AI and meeting people sitting in chairs and diving for cover and stuff, play that. Or it's predecessor, Rainbow 6. I'll just still to Legacy Doom, thanx.
  • You make a cheapass set of graphics with what you can get, then make a easy-to-use and efficient system for plugin graphics, and hope that your gameplay is good enough to attract artistic geeks. Or you can learn to draw. I am an artist, and a programmer, and I can tell you that the coding is the fun part, even though I normally enjoy art. Art in video games is 10 seconds of creativity followed by 2 hours of menial gruntwork.

  • Re:how good is the human eye? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, I believe the reason we care about FPS over and above 60 would best be described as "performance potential." To say that you are achieving a 109fps score in a q3 timedemo rougly translates into performance consistency; When you have 6 monkies hopping around in your FOV firing plasma guns at you that framerate isn't going to sag to it's knees. Ironically, some of Quake's more celebrate players, IE "Thresh" have steadfastly claimed to notice the difference between 60 and 100 fps. Having played since qtest, without claiming to be Thresh caliber, I tend to agree. Perhaps some people's brains process visual information faster. The scientists who have bothered to study professional baseball players all seem to agree that consistent hitters seem to posses the ability to process visual information far faster than us mere mortals. It is a matter of true urban legend that as a party trick, Babe Ruth would read the label on spinning 72 RPM records. Perhaps all human noggins, like video chipsets, are not created equal. 7-Granny
  • hardware accumulation buffer, not hardware motion blur. All it does is let you put several 'snapshots' in one frame - it really doesn't give you any benefit because it is just a 'mouse trail' type of repeated, dimmed image - not a real 'blur'
  • One thing I like about Carmack, besides the sheer programming skill and geekiness, (he's wearing a Dust Puppy shirt!) is the generic quotability.

    John explained that there are "two reasons for not doing the right thing - you don't
    know how to do the right thing, or you choose to do it wrong for a good reason".

    See? Microsoft has *no* excuse!

    (*please*, Bill, tell me the reason... oh wait, NT is looking more like Unix every day... :)

    Hey, let's have an "Ask John Carmack" on Slashdot, so we can find out how to find the cool chicks, like Katherine. I don't need that sort of advice, but some ACs on this thread sound like they need some help. :)

    As to the rest of the article: Id is taking a new direction, not to "twitch" games, but back to single person stuff?

    Hmm. All those in favor of Carmack making a *pretty* role-playing game, and giving Square a run for their money, say "Aye".

    ("Aye!")
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • <i>Anyways, on a serious note, hopefully graphics support under Linux will be up to par when this game is released.</i>

    Btw. this just came up on the DRI devel list:

    Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 00:00:49 -0400
    From: Kevin E Martin <kevin@precisioninsight.com>
    To: DRI Development <dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
    Subject: [Dri-devel] Rage 128 3D beta release

    Beta release of the Rage 128 2D/3D DRI driver
    ---------------------------------------------

    1. Beta Release

    This is a public BETA release of the Rage 128 2D/3D DRI driver. It is
    fully functional and is intended for testing and gathering feedback.

    2. Supported hardware

    The following hardware is supported in this release:

    * Rage Fury 32MB AGP
    * XPERT 128 16MB AGP
    * XPERT 99 8MB AGP

    Other Rage 128 cards will be supported in future releases.

  • For those of you curious about what John was diagraming on the whiteboards, let me be of assistance

    • The three circles, decreasing in size from left to right, should actually be the same size. John was drawing a map of his last game of "hunt the wumpus" for his "research", but his hand got tired. As you can probably tell, he doesn't get much exercise or sun.
    • The second pic on the first page that looks like a hamburger is actually just that, a hamburger. Everyone was getting a little sleepy at that point, so John started talking about Burger Time strategy just to see if anyone was still listening.

    Hope that helps!

  • We now have games which have a very realistic simulation of a real world, and what have game companies done with it? A series which by now must number into hundereds of games in which the totality of play involves running around and killing stuff. Maybe with a few frustrating "puzzles" involving finding coloured keys behind secret doors.

    Mmmkay, but we also have The Sims, Crazy Taxi, Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid, Messiah, Homeworld, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Drakan, Asheron's Call, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Deus Ex.

    Nonetheless, I allow that you probably have your own particular tastes and frustrations with current games. If you are truly committed to it, I am sure that I will some day have the opportunity to play a game of your own conception. In short, if what you want to play doesn't exist, make it yourself.

  • <i>I was told Doom was made originally on the NeXT and ported to Dos (the Doom Operating System) to reach the widest market posable.
    </i>

    Almost correct. DOOM was developed on NeXT and consisted of 98% of portable C code and 2% assembler, which was the main reason for high portability. Now, the term 'DOOM Operating System' was used because JohnC had to do a weird hack to ensure DOOM runs fine on 4Mb RAM PCs (few people could afford to buy RAM for $40-50 per 1 Mb back in 1993). Since he used DOS4/GW DOS Extender which only could use extended memory (ie not the first 640k, thereby limiting memory to 3Mb on a 4Mb machine), he wrote his own memory manager to use base memory (what was left out of 640kb). Remember line saying XXX Mb allocated to zone during the start-up? Since memory manager is one of few things every operating system provides, he called it DOOM Operating System.

    IMHO.
  • There's a couple differences between the 20-30 frames per second the human brain can distinguish (movies, for example are 24 fps), and the people like Thresh being able to notice the difference between 60 and 100 fps in a game.

    The main one has to do with motion blur. This has a lot to do with how the brain "fills in the cracks" when there is a fast motion from one position to the other. When an actor moves their arm quickly, there will be blurred motion between the "key frames". Noticeable doing frame-by-frame on VCR's. (not sure about DVDs). This allows a relatively slow moving format appear to be smooth to the human eye.

    By contrast, computers don't do this. They need to render every frame as a static image. This means that when something is moving *really* fast in a computer game (ie, a swinging sword, a player in quake), it will still appear jerky as it goes through your FoV (if you even notice: it may just be there for one or two frames). The higher your FpS is, the smoother the motion of even fast-moving objects will appear.

    There is hope however. This is supposed to be one of the key features of the new Voodoo4/5 cards. (Last I heard anyways, not sure if this is stil being implemented.) 3dFX are keying some of the features to the way the human eye actually operates. This means not only a more realistic looking picture, but also smoother gameplay even when the framerate would normally be in the tank. No hope for Ultima Ascension. 10fps still looks like crap.

  • The difference between 30 and 60 *is* very noticible--a side-by-side test makes this obvious--but in the end it depends on the type of game. There's a large contingent of "60 fps is pointless" ranters, but I fear that mostly comes from people who don't want their PC to be outdone by a $200 console.
  • Hmmm...this is maybe the first time I've heard of id being a front runner in the gameplay department.

    First and foremost, id took 25+ years of graphics research and started using it in computer games. Carmack wasn't the first to do this, as there were dozens of 3D games in the seventies and 80s (Tailgunner, Battlezone, I Robot, Tempest, Stunt Track Racer, Encounter, Mercenary, Flight Simulator, Zenith, Stunts, and so on and so on). But he was the first to get people on the path to doing honest-to-goodness 3D and not just trickery. In general, even basic 3D concepts were foreign to 95% of game programmers when Doom was released.

    Second of all, id took a stand against rising development costs and fluff and concentrated on the games themselves. DOOM didn't even have a menuing system with flashy graphics, just text overlaid on a replay. Quake wasn't filled with cutscenes and dialog systems and RPG elements; it was just a shooter.

    Third, id started a particular type of game and the culture around it. In some ways it's sort of depressing that many game companies are still chasing after the "ultimate first person shooter" rather than trying to be original, but that's how it goes.

    I think these are the three legacies of id. You can't generalize backward in time and act like id was revolutionizing the 2D platform game market, because Commander Keen was, what, seven years after Super Mario Bros. And when Commander Keen was released, there were some really sophisticated games out there already, like Microsoft Flight Simulator. So let's not go overboard with the praise, okay?
  • Okay, maybe not - I'm really just kidding. But, I must say, I'm very glad they're not thinking about doing another first-person shooter. If this new game is any good, I may consider *gasp* re-installing windows. I've got 9 gigs on this drive wanting to be burned... ;)

    Anyways, on a serious note, hopefully graphics support under Linux will be up to par when this game is released. Most of my computer-literate friends love my computer(Linux-only), and they tend to use it whenever they come over. But, they're unwilling to give up their Windows boxen because of their games. Ah well, c'est la vie :)

    Dave
  • Here's the page:

    http://www.avault.com/razercpl /index.asp?p=workshops [avault.com]

    That has the above linked MP3 of Carmack, and also a talk by Romero, which may or may not be as interesting.
  • Human perception depends on the overall conditions. So if it is very dark in your room your visual acuity is less than when the room you are in is very well lit. In a dark room you can probably not see flicker above something like 50 Hertz. In a well lit room you need a refresh of about 75 Hz. And by the way movies do refresh at 24 fps, but you don't see flicker because each frame is displayed 3 times, thus achieving an effective refresh rate of 72 fps. TV refreshes at 30fps, but since the frame is created in two passes (interlacing) the effective refresh rate is 60 fps. In general if you refresh above 85 fps, you can be confident that most people will not see flicker under most lighting conditions.
  • I think there has ben a bit of a clash at id, Carmack who knows the problems of game development wants to keep the games simple to be able to advance rendering technology, but the rest of id wants to make some thing more down the line of half life.

    We must remember that id is a really small development house and the reason they have bean able to keep it small is because they make simple yet fun games. If Carmack had he's way we would most likely se some kind of follow up to q3arena but he isn't the "boss" of id. This tells me that id may have a very difficult time ahead.

    I think that Carmack would like to push the no repeat texture idea, but the question is will the hardware people agree to he's ideas on driver texture handling. I talked to some people form 3dfx and Nvidia about it and apparently he has bean lobbying for it.

    The mentioning of shadows will most likely be stencil shadows (read more on opengl.org) my biggest question, will he be using all the new hardware specific, register combiner hardware to do per pixel lighting? will he go for subdivision surfaces?

    The hardware industry doesn't really know what the next big thing is going to be, And im not shore Carmack knows either but is he does he's got a great opportunity to push the industry in that direction. My guess is hardware shadows, but who knows.

    Eskil
  • The actual threshold is somewhere between 60FPS and 100FPS. Showscan [showscan.com], which uses 70MM film at 60FPS, experimented with this years ago. Most people can notice a difference up to about 60FPS, and almost nobody can tell 100FPS from higher speeds.

    Right now, Showscan is as good as moving images get; wide screen, 70MM film, and in some installations, motion platforms for the seats.

  • I've noticed that Carmack has mentioned the 'texture painting' idea a few times. However, each time he's made sure to point out that he's not so sure the benefits of totally unique textures outweigh the hell it would take to get them.

    Not only would bitchy driver issues need to be solved, but as he stated, you'd need a much larger artist staff to be able to actually do that sort of thing. That's not something he wants, it'd create a large enough group of people that politics, yes even at id, would begin to come into play. It'd get in the way of coding, which as people have so eloquently put it before, is Carmack's religion.

    I do agree with the idea that Carmack has a lot of new ideas for rendering. Realtime shadows is one, but if you want a few more ideas, just go check out his .plan archive. Hell, maybe once again Father Carmack is gonna push the industry, which.. as Not Good as that is (the fact that we need Carmack to kick industry ass into doing common sense), I suppose some advance is better than no advance.

    I don't think Carmack wants to make a followup to quake III. He's stated for a long time before it was even close to finished that There will be no quake 4. I can't even pretend to have any idea of what's going on inside id, or his head. I'm pretty sure at some point here, he'll let us know here.

  • A little offtopic here, but a little anecdote. I was sorting through some old floppies and managed to find my backup of Keen.

    Yes, I actually registered and got Keens 2 & 3.

    Well, to bring back the nostalgia, I fired it up, without even thinking about needing to run moslo or something similar to cut the 400MHz down a few notches. Guess what folks, it ran just like on my 386. Smooth as butter and not even a touch of mad-crack-induced speed that most old games tend to get when I run them. THAT is nice work ;)

    So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to driving everyone insane with the weird noises from my PC as I go prove that Mr. 314 is still damn good.

  • Imagine entering a room to see three people. One seated, the two others standing over the seated person. The walls are covered in book shelves. The standing person closest to you pulls a gun and dives behind a couch as he shoots at you. The other standing person pulls a gun and starts to aim it at the seated person.

    Think about a FPS game where you have much wider environment to work in, and much more complex tasks to perform. Solve puzzles, fly a chopper, etc..

  • how good is the human eye? (Score:3)

    by MuteflY ( 36859 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @09:28PM (#1130359)
    I read somewhere how many "frames per second" the human eye can actually differentiate in life but I don't remember the number anymore. I dont think it was anything close to 100fps so why are we paying so much money on our vidcards again?

  • id's next game... (Score:3)

    by My Third Account ( 78496 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @09:07PM (#1130360)
    The end of the article says to expect a return to single player...

    But I would be less surpised to hear that Carmack is working on something massively muti-player. We've heard him mention EverQuest before, and the man is a network coding GOD as anyone who has played Q3 knows. A MMP game need not be EQ or Ultima-ish. Remember a long long time ago when Carmack speculated about quake being a persistant game with servers controlling certain regions, and moving out of that region and into another would transparently move you to a different server?

    The technology is available now to render large outdoor scenes, as well as networks that can handle thousands and maybe a million (ten-six?) simaltaneous users. I wouldn't be surprised if Carmack and his designers set their sights to a cross between everquest and quake -- in other words, how he ORIGINALLY envisioned Quake.
  • actually with video games it does make a difference.

    with a tv we can handle low refresh rates because the exposure time is longer and so the pictures are a little bit blury where there is motion. The eye interprets the blur as motion.

    with a video game you don't have any blur and so you need a higher refresh rate to get the same feeling of motion.

  • Re:how good is the human eye? (Score:3)

    by WickedDyno ( 107606 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @09:57PM (#1130362)
    We can't really tell the difference after somewhere between 30 and 60. But that's not the real reason to get, say, a voodoo5 6000 -- who cares if you get 150 FPs at 640x480x16? How about 50 fps at 1280x1024x32? With full-screen anti-aliasing, 32-bit textures? The eye can tell the difference there, that's for sure.

  • Re:how good is the human eye? (Score:3)

    by luckykaa ( 134517 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @10:30PM (#1130363)
    Persistence of vision (i.e no percieved flicker) is somewhere around 25-30Hz. It is still possible to spot events that take less time.

    I wonder how the latency between rendering a frame and displaying aframe is affected though.

  • Re:Interesting. (Score:3)

    by jon_adair ( 142541 ) on Sunday April 16, 2000 @04:11AM (#1130364) Homepage

    Nobody seems to be picking up on the stuff he was saying about tracking head motion (well, except for the sick f-ers moderated down to -2). After he wrapped q3a, there was a .plan update where he said he was interested in spending some time playing with cheap webcams and computer vision.

    Wouldn't it be interesting to plop a $30 cam on your monitor and have it track the rough position of your head? You move side-to-side and the scene changes. It's amazing how effective this is in making things look 3-D. Try closing one eye and moving your head around. You can figure out a lot of depth information without stereo vision. And, unlike all the stereo vision rigs, it doesn't cause and worse eyestrain than usual quake sessions.

    It might not be that hard to do a quick and dirty head motion tracking inside a game like that, given the CPU cycles. We did stuff like this in grad school a few years ago with machines that were a lot slower.

  • MP3 Recording of Speech (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16, 2000 @03:30AM (#1130365)
    Avault has posted an mp3 [avault.com] of the workshop for those who weren't able to attend (including myself :/).

  • "Not Quake" ? (Score:4)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @09:06PM (#1130366) Homepage
    What, you run around hugging bunnies with an assortment of different compliments at your disposal that you can pick up during the game? ;)

    Something tells me Carmack may be feeling a little guilty for all the bloody years. Heh.



    Bowie J. Poag
    Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda [unc.edu])

  • Re:Not quake! ??? what then... (Score:4)

    by luckykaa ( 134517 ) on Saturday April 15, 2000 @11:08PM (#1130367)
    ID's next game will be a totally original departure called PaqMan. This will involve guiding a tough yellow circle around a maze, and blowing the hell out of ghosts.

  • Why Gaming is important (Score:5)

    by bmajik ( 96670 ) <matt@mattevans.org> on Saturday April 15, 2000 @09:54PM (#1130368) Homepage Journal

    We should all remember to thank carmack and id for a couple of reasons

    • The reason PeeCees have respectable mainstream gfx hardware is because gamers wanted it. Multi-thousand dollar gfx cards have always been available for PeeCees, but now you can get a $200 board that outclasses all but the biggest/newest SGI boxes in terms of low quality poly-pushing power. Gaming has created the demand for faster/better gfx hardware, better memory busses, faster CPUs, etc. Nothing stresses the capabilities of hardware (and software!) more than gaming.
    • A great deal of the clueful computer population got their start playing games... perhaps even id/apogee games. I remember the days when you could buy the Commander Keen source code for like $400 or so to see how to write your very own EGA/VGA side scoller with pc beeper sound. id, computing, and the state of game design has come along way since then
    • Finally, everyone and their mom is cranking out games these days, but the _fun_ of the games isn't getting all that better. If not with technology and visual dazzlement, the place where id consistantly helps the gaming industry push forward is with the sheer fun value of the products they develop. When it comes down to it, a game is worthless unless its been play tested for months and still shown to be worth playing. I'd say that all of id's releases are still fun games to play, regardless of how long ago they were originally written.

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