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Games Entertainment

Carmack About Q3A On Dreamcast 100

Posted by Hemos from the humiliation! dept.
andr0meda writes: "C|Net's GameCenter recently interviewed John Carmack about Q3A's Dreamcast conversion. The interview was conducted after the QuakeCon talk John gave last weekend, which was Slashdotted earlier. Here are both parts of the lengthy interview: [1,2]"
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Carmack About Q3A on Dreamcast More

Carmack About Q3A on Dreamcast

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  • Re:The PS2 Is Screwed (Score:5)

    by John Carmack ( 101025 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:35PM (#859964)
    Make no mistake -- the PS2 is definately more powerful than the dreamcast. For some types of things, it is easier to get a dreamcast game to look better due to a better back end filter, autoamtically working mip-mapping, and larger addressable texture space, but the second generation PS2 games should really start showing off the increased power. Dreamcast should be able to undercut the price, but I don't know how significant that will be. There are few things that I would really call "revolutionary", but that doesn't mean that Sony didn't build a good machine. It just happens to be built with a set of tradeoffs that I don't completely agree with. John Carmack
  • There will be a keyboard and a mouse that you can attach to Dreamcast, they were shown at QuakeCon

    Carmack brought up a great point tho. Adding the keyboard and mouse admist all the joystick players might be deadful... Picture all the non-pc type people attempting to play on a server and having one of the "lpb's" jumping all over the place schooling everyone with his keybaord and mouse combination. People might get discouraged and not play...

    OH welps, maybe there could be a setting to play against only those people or what not... never know. I'd rather play with a keybaord and mouse ANY day then a cheeey joystick. I love my Dreamcast, but I love my Quake-style games.

  • ... if I hadn't been both a 32x and Sega-CD owner. Serves em right.

  • Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3)

    by __aaedhn419 ( 14610 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:42PM (#859967)
    "Can you seriously imagine playing multi-management games like Civilization, Myth 2, or StarCraft without a mouse and keyboard? "

    Perhaps if strategy games did not involve so many redundant repetition, and allowed you to concentrate on strategy, you would not need very many controls.

    Really, why can't you tell the UI/AI you want marines in perpetutity with a 1000 credit reserve, and forget about it?
  • I don't think this is how Vector Quantization works. Each texture is broken down into 4x4 blocks, which is true, and then it is analyzed. Two "best" colors are picked out for each block, and then 2 or more bits/pixel are used to blend between the two colors. It is called "Vector Quantization" because you are quantizing pixel colors at points along a vector in color-space. For two good overviews of the prevailing texture compression standards, see
    http://www-dev.3dfx.com/fxt1 or http://linux.3dfx.com/open_source/fxt1/technical_s pecs.htm and
    http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/p rint/140/
  • Whoops, I mean utah-glx [sourceforge.net]. This is what happens when I don't paste urls.
  • right at the start:

    The first real-time 3D environments were pioneered by the house of id...
    um ... no ... that would have been Descent by Parallax [pxsoftware.com].

    And with Quake's robust networking code, action gamers went head-to-head on the Net for the first time.
    um ... no ... many people played Doom over the 'net (it was an ugly hack [gamers.org], especially compared with 'net games today, but it did work).
  • I do not believe you guys give the 'joystick' playing mindless drones enough credit'

    I give credit where credit is due. There are a hell of a lot of good players out there using joysticks, but I'm talking about the average Joe...

    I sat one day trying to play Quakeworld online and was wondering how the hell people were killing me from every single angle in the world... Finally a friend taught me how to use the keybaord and mouse combination and I've been blowing people away ever since. I'm talking about the majority of players tho... I taught a few friends the keyboard and mouse combo and after 10 minutes they increased their skills very much...

    OH well, I think it'll be intersting to see... I never even saw a Dreamcast keyboard in stores yet... of course I never really looked either. Wonder how much they're priced at...

  • I do not believe you guys give the 'joystick' playing mindless drones enough credit'

    some of the absolutely best players I have met in Quake used a Joystick or a gamepad, not all but some.. anywhu

    Jeremy


    If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
  • You mean the next Bulky Drive...;)
  • the TCP stack under freeBSD is GPL-ed? really? that somehow doesn't make any sense to me. i assumed the BSD folks would prefer the BSD license .

    if someone knows for certain, please post. it'll be really interesting if it is GPL-ed. everyone pretty much is using the BSD stack, which wouldn't make any sense if it's GPL-ed becuase corporations wouldn't be into it.

  • well, you're wrong on quite a few of your points.. Turbo Graphix 16 was never a real big success in the states, but in Japan, the PC Engine (same machine, different name) and its cd add-on were one of the best selling/longest running systems of the time.. and the people who did buy it here, had a pretty loyal fanbase to it.. jaguar did have 64 bits, kinda.. it was 4 16 bit processors running parallel ;P Virtual Boy was the worst bomb I can think of, worse than CD-I or 3D0.. I believe, 10 games (and I'm being generous) were released for it before it died.. 3D0 at least had good ports of Super Street Fighter 2 and Samauri Shodown 2 going for it ;) and Neo-Geo's home systems never were very big in the states or elsewhere due to the price ($200+ a game!), but they've been a common sight in video arcades for at least 7, 8 years.. the hardware is still pretty much the same (I believe there was a video upgrade or 2 in there..), but up until they shut their doors just this year, they put out games.. King of Fighters ran up til 1999.. Sega CD did have way too many FMV games, but it also had quite a few good games.. the most notable in my mind was the perfect port of Secret of Monkey Island.. I still dig out my sega cd to play that one ;D If you want a bomb of a system, look for the one NEC put out around '92, I believe it was called the PC-FX, or something like that.. I think they had 3 games out for it that played more like a demo movie.. it did have fairly revolutionary graphics capabilities for its time, and was 32-bit.. came out about a year before saturn or PSX too.. but, it never got support and eventually died.. I'm sure theres some others I'm forgetting, but no system's ever bombed as big as the Virtual Boy did.. only system I've ever seen that one week was selling for $180, and the next was selling for $19.95 ;)
  • when we say "real time 3d environment" we mean something generated by a computer from 3d wireframes and texture maps, in real time, as the client requests each frame. real time 3d requires either immense processing power on generic hardware/software (e.g. "software" mode in quake 1), or specialized 3d hardware (e.g. voodoo card).

    you seem to think it's an environment that can be navigated in 3 dimensions, like duke nukem 3d. duke nukem was a 3d environment hacked into a very 2d game. it looked like you could walk over/under things, but that effect was created using 2d objects, sprites, and textures.

    if you understand this distinciton, then you'll understand that wolf3d and doom were 2d games, where descent and quake were 3d.
  • Somehow, I doubt the *real* Yu Suzuki wrote it, more like some Suzuki fanboy who registered his name on /. wrote it.

    I can just imagine Yu Suzuki thinking "What to do...Virtua Fighter 4? Shenmue 2? Daytona on DC? nah, I'll write an amusing article on slashdot!"
  • .. YOU would prefer being able to take code and
    use it anyway you want.
    The author doesn't, and therefore uses the GPL.

    I just don't understand your argument.
    It is like saying that the author of a book
    is an asshole, because he doesn't allow you to
    copy it. Tough luck. You have to respect the authors wishes.
    If YOU creates opensource software, then YOU get
    to choose.

    The GPL and BSD -license caters for different kinds of wishes. Neither is better than the other,
    they are just different. Can't you people accept
    that?
  • Yes, the keyboard and mouse are already around. I don't know when they will be in (or if they are already) in stores, but I've used one on my set5 (Dreamcast dev box) for the last few months.

    I believe a prototype ethernet adapter has been in some developer's hands for a while now also, although you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get it to work. As I recall, you can't just hook it into an existing LAN - you have to set up a box running a tunnel connection (PPP) as its gateway. Linux or FreeBSD are recommended for this task.

    I'm a bit confused about Carmack's apparent show of support for the x-box. It seems to me that the x-box is just another attempt by Microsoft to lock people into their (usually pretty bad) APIs, so that they won't go and do nasty things like port their games to Dreamcast or Be or anything else.
    Does the x-box claim to support OpenGL, or is Quake going to become a DirectX-only game now?

  • I didn't offer Wolf or Descent as an example of what might have been the first "real time 3d environment". So I'm not sure why you foolishly assume I am talking about those games.

    I think where you are confused is that the original quote in the article (which was mirrored here) didn't make the distinction that they were talking about "real-time 3d enviornments for mainstream PC games".

    Real-time 3d enviornments (with real 3D) predate Quake or Descent (or hell even Wolf3D or Duke Nukem) by more than a decade. 3D game programmers (even Carmack) are mostlystanding on the shoulders of people who researched this technology many many years ago (of course, they weren't exactly using mainstream PC hardware at the time).

  • "PS, what sort of storage system will the Dolphin have when it ships?"

    The Dolphin will have near identical storage (DVD), memory (32), and speed (200mpoly) as the PSX2.

    Source: games.ign.com

  • "Quickly clicking can queue up far more units than you'll ever use. "

    But the game is still so stupid it will consume all my resources and time in order to pump out 100 marines and nothing else I want.

    Prioritization! Intelligence!

    "If the most complex part of the game is the sequence of triangles and circles I push to get my unit to perform a complex move, I'm not interested. "

    Sid Meier's recent game civil war game, Gettysburg, has no resource management and only 10 buttons.

    10 buttons for formation, attacking, regrouping and retreating.

    Fun games are simple and deep, not complex and shallow.

    Anyway, I agree with the rest of it.

  • History [slashdot.org]
    This OT post is just to cool to let die...
    Normally I dislike trolls but this one did a really good job :)
    Thhht! :)
  • Well. The PS2 might be a bit more powerfull, but it lacks texture filtering and fullscene AA and the fullscene AA makes the DC games look very cool. Also, reports from my collegues around the world suggests that the PS2 is harder to program than the Saturn and that's baaaaaad. The flickering in the textures on Tekken Tag Team is also horrible to behold :) We want XBOX now!!!! Best Regards : Odin Jensen R&D Programmer ITE ApS, Denmark.

  • Last time I looked Carmack was one of the main developers on the utah-glx [sourcefourge.net] project. I believe that he's been involved in bringing GLX support to Linux, writing an X server for MacOS X and releasing games under the GPL.

    Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake 1 are all released under the GPL.

  • Two things (Score:5)

    by jfedor ( 27894 ) <jfedor@jfedor.org> on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:43PM (#859986) Homepage
    Many people don't realize that:

    - There will be a keyboard and a mouse that you can attach to Dreamcast, they were shown at QuakeCon (here [shugashack.com] is a pic of the mouse and you can see the keyboard here [shugashack.com]).

    - Sega does plan to release a "LAN adapter" that will allow LAN/DSL/cable modem connection, as stated in this interview [stomped.com].

    Just wanted to clarify on that.

    -jfedor
  • It looks like you need to change the post drop down box next to "preview" from Extrans to Plain Old Text.

    If you do that, your line breaks will be preserved.
  • Well, Sega blans to bring the eathernet module by the end of this year (my guess is october).

    As well, Sega will be releasing a mouse for the Dreamcast. The Japan mouse was used for the Q3 Dreamcast Demo. They were a little smaller than what were used to, but North America will get a larger version to accomidate our hands.

  • I wasn't sure if it was flamebait or genuine stupidity. But, never forget the old maxim, Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.
  • You can hear Carmack say all the same things, sometimes nearly verbatim, in the recordings [linuxgames.com] of his QC workshop (especially in recording #1 [3ddownloads.com]). Beware the murky sound quality, though it's a vast improvement over the first attempt to release these .mp3s.
  • J. C.: Yeah, the network stuff did not go as smooth as could have been with Sega. [...] They couldn't tell us when anything was gonna be done, and we basically said, "Look, if you give us the specs for the modem DSP we can write our own TCP stack. I can just take some FreeBSD code and we can have something together and just get it done."
    Let's see a GPL'd TCP stack do that. Sure they didn't actually end up using the FreeBSD stack, but at least they could have. Although I basically agree with the GPL it can at times get in the way of "just getting it done", which I think is what most programmers really want. I really don't care if information wants to be free, I just want to get stuff done.
  • Any knowledgable gamer knew the 32X was going to fail. It was an america only console add-on. Which was like three strikes in one sentence... America because (especially back then) most game where developed in Japan. It tried to be a console in itself but was essentially an add-on.As an add-on it was alright sales wise but Add-ons never sells well(Watch out for the PS2 hard drive/NIC it WILL be the next 32x). As for Sega CD it was a success by my standards it had a long run for an add-on had lots of great games and was well support for an ADD-ON. You are just regurgitating the same biased complaint every magazine has brought up for the last five years... Get over it! Khalai
  • I would have to argue that sarcasm does *not* suck. I find it an amazing way to communicate with people - it can make for very interesting (vs. bland) conversation, and at the very least, sarcastic people seem to be brutally honest. It can also be very entertaining (although sometimes frustrating) with people who don't understand the concept.

    In conclusion,
    sarcasm: YAI! fake people: BOO!

    Love legolas

    i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...

  • life after games for id? (Score:3)

    by imac.usr ( 58845 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @07:05PM (#859994) Homepage
    You gotta love somebody who's willing to REWRITE the networking code for a console game system just to eke out better performance. Question is, will John ever get tired of writing games and turn that brain of his towards writing something like a financial planner package or some other business-oriented software?

    Hell, if he can port X Window System to Mac OS X in his spare time, why couldn't he work for a few weeks on StarOffice and turn it into an Office-killer?

  • Heheh, its funny... While I'm a longtime PS fan, Squaresoft RPGs and EA Sports games are the two largest categories of games that I avoid like the plague. Long live esoteric oddball deathmatch games (Armored Core, Unholy War, Critical Depth, ect).
  • Amen. I noticed the Descent-ignoring right off, and even Descent is really the only the first textured 3d environment. While Carmack did make many achievements (damn good 3d engines) gameplay wasn't usually high on that list. I mean, Doom was innovative, a good approach to making a pseudo3d engine that was still fast on a weak box, allowing for 3d gameplay in 2d graphics. By the time of Quake, it was "Oh, doom with 3d models and internet play. Neat!" Not to slight his talents, making a hit game that had such a tremendous impact is no small feat, but don't try to paint him as some godly innovater. Quake was a synthesis of its surroundings, not an original concept. He's a damn good programmer that we (the gamers) are lucky to have in the games field.
  • It's hard for Carmack to comment on the Dolphin since no development kits have been released and all but the barest details about the system's processor has been said. We don't even know Nintendo's full online strategy yet.

    I would doubt an N64 port would be very fruitful. Getting all those textures to fit on one cart would be hell.

  • That's an interesting comment. What real advantage does m/kb have over an analog controller? You can get quite good with those things, and in many ways the cross-pad is better for moving around than the standard ADWS keys.
    //rp

    FPS comic [spaceninja.com]
  • Yeah! AC scores a well deserved 5 thanks for the lesson. dw
  • The need for console ports is simple. Right now, there is no better way to entertain guests (particularly friends) by sitting around the TV and playing video games or watching videos. The game companies know this: that's why 3 of the 4 upcoming next-generation systems support DVD playback (Sega is considering an add-on for Dreamcast).

    The PC has been repeatly touted to "merge" with television, but it just doesn't happen. I don't think it ever will. The ultimate computers of the future will be like X-Box or PS2: a centralized box that can serve as entertainment, internet, and eventually a server for the whole home.

  • been there, done that.
    i still have it in me to be very sarcastic and/or cynical and/or pessimistic.

    but all it ever did for me was alienate myself from others.

    sarcastic humor is ok sometimes, but it's all too easy to get carried away with it. if you're not careful you could end up criticizing everything around you, which accomplishes one thing:

    it alienates you from everyone else.

    luvv,
    warren

    btw, what makes you think that non-sarcastic people are "fake"? sarcasm is the only way to be honest? hah! you have a lot to learn.
  • John said once he is considering programming in the aerospace field. But, a couple million dollars and a new red Ferrari hedge my bets toward "no". :)
  • VQ is used in a lot more area's than graphics, and in general it just means that you approximate multidimensional vectors by taking one set of vectors (the codebook) and approximate all the others by whichever one in the set closest to them.

    If 3dfx is using the term to describe their S3TC (which was itself an offshoot of a small part of MPEG-2 BTW) offshoot they are bastardizing the term, it wouldnt be the first time.
  • hi,
    heh... no, i didn't say that non-sarcastic people were fake. i just indicated they were a better target to say 'sux' then the poor, poor sarcastic cynics. ;^)

    personally, i find sarcasm a great way to express what i really feel, instead of being fake on the outside. yes, it is easy to be carried away, but people can know that when i say something, i'm not lying to them.

    and, also, sarcastic conversation (between many people who enjoy it) can be quite enjoyable. it turns a bland business meeting into exciting free-for-all. i have to pay close attention to make sure i'm not suckered into the sarcasm. good fun.

    my conclusion (this time):
    boring conversation = :(
    fake people's conversation = :(
    exciting, sarcastic conversation = :)

    love legolas

    (ps argh... apple must die for the crappy keyboard on this ibook. the shift, ctrl, and apple keys are barely working. must ship it back to tx =^/ )

    i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...

  • Again, I wonder if we could get Rob to start a "best of /." archive for this kind of stuff.

    --
  • I just don't see why the future of entertainment is supposed to converge on ANY single do-it-all device, either for geeks or for average folks.

    Geeks will have computer(s), game console(s), TV and DSS, while regular folks'll have their entertainment centers with TV, VCR, DVD, DSS and all manner of audio, plus their console(s). Only big diff is that geek DVD will be on the computer.

    Who the hell is likely to consolidate to one box for everything? I think it's nothing more than a marketeer's dream to sell everybody new devices all over again, just now with the supposed convenience and coolness of all-in-one. BS. Unless it's designed by B&O and engineered by McIntosh (not Apple) and costing two or three months' pay, it's gonna inflict its compromises on ALL your devices now instead of just the one. There always have been good reasons for separates.
  • Carmack didn't say that; he admitted that PS2 may well be the most powerful console. He said he was disheartened by Sony's huge marketing push for PS2 and that that encouraged him to develop for others.
  • The advantage I see is that if I'm chasing you with a plasma gun and you are turning left while falling, I can EASILY keep the crosshairs on you, whereas the constant turn rate of the directional controller and the difficulty of precisely changing aim in two axes at once means you'd have a very hard time doing the same thing if the situation was reversed. Plus snap-shots at suddenly-appearing enemies just do not happen with d-controllers. "Lay waste" was the term JC used. :o)
  • Surely if you....have.............dvdonacomputer......you`ll .....get.......that......shitty........u neven.....frameratetodealwith ?
  • well, how much is your Psx worth compared to your Saturn?
  • I`m not sure i see the connection between features and success in the marketplace? Care to help me out here?
  • This is great. Let's post the link again so we can Slashdot them another time.

    kwsNI

  • It's because the product with the most bells and whistles tends to succeed in the consumer-level high-tech marketplace. Companies hype features because they sound cool, reviewers focus on features because feature comparison charts look neat, and consumers focus on them because they're features! The Software Conspiracy, a book often-mentioned here, goes into some more detail.

    Personally, I'd rather that good, solid products succeeded. But what can you do? Well, funding education properly might be a start, but anyway...


    -RickHunter
  • There are a few significant issues here.
    • The Saturn was very difficult to program. It was a very strange environment that forced programmers to jump through many hoops and have lots of special case code to do such "simple" things as texture mapping.

    • The PSX had, by far, the best development system at the time. It shipped with libraries, a C compiler (unheard of at the time), and (I believe) some art tools.

      The net effect of these two issues was that there were a lot more good games for the PSX first. Remember folks, it's ALL about the software.

    • The PSX came out waaaaay before the N64. Not only that, most people don't want to pay a premium price for their games on a ROM instead of a CD. I honestly think that was one of Nintendo's biggest mistakes ever.
  • 1)sarcasm sux
    2)different website
    3)who cares if they're slashdotted. gamecenter is run by cnet. they can handle an extra 30,000 hits a day.

    luvv,
    warren

    p.s. conversion to a different platform does not make a game fun ;)
  • So it sounds like hardware needs to have a way to support different types of compression simultaneously. Why is that not particularly surprising?

    The real question is, when will the first silicon ship that supports VQ and something like S3TC or FXT1 (or whatever it is)?

  • Well, i think theres some truth to your statement, but i`d tend to disagree too. I would draw a distinction between `bells and whistles` and the actual technical ability of the device. I mean, i can see what so called hifi equipment can come with flashing lights and all sorts of crap, and be totally outclassed by proper equipment, which will generally just have an on/off switch (talking about amps here, for example, or cd players).
    But i was talking more about consoles, and the fact that its more down to marketing and reviews and god knows what else, not how many triangles it can draw in a second. The saturn/psx isnt the best example, as it was pretty close, but i`d say that it doesnt matter how close it is, it`ll make little difference in the long run if the marketing/cost isnt right.
  • Each Q+A is on a different page. It's sad how some companies try to get banner impressions. As far as play on dreamcast goes, I wouldn't be interested until Sega gets off their asses and gets us an Ethernet module (yay 30ms ping on SDSL) for network/internet games. Also play on the gamepad could be difficult, but couldn't you use the dreamcast keyboard that sega.net/AT&T provides? If I buy a DC, it will be for games like Crazy Taxi, not Q3A.
  • I love this quote from the last page... I wish I could've used it in a thread a few days ago where I was explaining how gamepads are shite for FPS games:
    The only issue, again, is that people that are used to playing with a mouse and keyboard--their first reaction to playing with a game pad is not gonna be good. . . . You go online and you play people playing with joypads, and then people who have gone out and bought the mouse and keyboard--given equal talent they're going to lay waste to the joypad people.
    Heh heh heh...

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • Descent wasn't the first 'real-time 3D environment' either. A lot of qualification has to go into that sentence whether you are talking about Wolf3d, Descent, Doom, Quake... There's been plenty of 'real-time 3D environments' years -- hell decades, before any of these games came out.
  • Game design for joypads is different. For one thing, driving and flying simulators are nearly unplayable on joypads.
  • Sarcasm? What's that? I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here. Is it anything like irony? Because that's another conecpt I've never really understood.

    (Along with subtlety.)

    Hey, come back! I'm being completely serious!

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • this is the first time I've seen a post actually acknowledge that there is such as a thing as the "slashdot effect".

    Well, judging by your UID, you've been reading /. for about a week, so give it a while. ;-)

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • By the time the Xbox is released, the PSX2 will be in the same position as SNES is today. It makes no sense to compare today's consoles to a product which currently consists of little more than several marketing campaigns. No matter how l337 the Xbox will be when released, the PSX2 is available now . And no matter how many multiple orgasms Carmack has when talking about the Xbox, it's still vapourware. :-)

    Ahem.

    If it doesn't impress Carmack, meaning that he doesn't think it's revolutionary and that he won't develop for it, it's a sad statement for Sony.
    As awesome as Carmack is, I wouldn't bet the future of a gaming platform on one man's opinion. PC games are what bought Carmack's Ferrari's, not console games. I mean, no offense to Carmack, but I don't think he's the most qualified person in that arena.
    I think Sony will get a taste of its own medicine with the torrential $500 million marketing campaign for the Xbox.
    I seriously don't think Sony has anything to worry about WTR Microsoft. Sony will have a very profitable two years (at least) before they should start worrying about marketshare, and what then? How many gamers are going to buy into a completely new platform from a completely new console maker? And who knows what form(s) Microsoft will be in two years? Even if by some chance Redmond managed to take half of the Sony's console market, Sony has years of experience in other markets: music, electronics, computer hardware, entertainment, and of course, AIBOs. Put it this way: I'm sure Sony will still be a big deal in ten years. And I'm not so sure about Microsoft.

    Aside: I thought those Dreamcast screenshots looked pretty weak. Looks like the models use about half the polys of the real Q3A. I guess you get what you pay for; you can buy the console and the game for the price of a modern top-o-the-line graphics card. But then again, the Dreamcast and PC versions probably have a largely overlapping target audience. If you have both a semi-decent PC and a Dreamcast, is there any question which you should run Q3A on? If you want a good Dreamcast game, wait for the domestic release of Shenmue.

    Maybe Carmack will help write the inevitable bundled Xbox game. (Which would of course be... Xtreme Minesweeper 2005.)

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • Wow, Sega CD! I'm trying to remember the games they had for it... (never played 'em)... Sewer Shark? And that Top Gun game, right? And the Western shoot-em-up game (precursor to the FPS :)... oh, and I seem to recall some zombie/vampire/sorority chicks game that ended up being banned in the UK or Canada or someother backwards country. [/me ducks]

    Who else remembers Turbo Graphix 16? I think only the Atari Jaguar bombed worse than that. (Which was interesting because IIRC the Jaguar had 64-bit years before Nintendo.)

    Actually, no, wait... I think Virtua Boy (sp?) probably did worse than both of 'em.

    And while Neo Geo never never really caught on in the states (I only vaguely remember Samurai Showdown) I think it sold respectably in Nihon.

    What am I forgetting? The Phillips system... and the original non-Sony PlayStations... what else?

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • I'm saying that a BSD licensed piece of software is more useful to ME than a GPLd piece of software. If the author doesn't care about making his software more useful for other people, but instead prefers to limit its usefulness for ideological reasons that's fine. I think it's stupid but it is up to the author.
  • SIG:
    Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?

    CowboyNeal!
    Who's the white uber-geek who we all know as SuperFreak?
    CowboyNeal!
    He's one baaaaad mutha -
    Shut yo' mouth!
    I'm just talkin' 'bout Neal!
    We can dig it...

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • And how exactly will I know who it is stomping mudholes in me? You got a big mouth for such anonymous jellybean balls.

    (I know it's a troll, I just don't understand what satisfaction there is in such a no-content post, even for lemurs like this. I guess for some people, clicking "Submit" and having others read your drivel contitutes a life.)
  • That's why you need the N64 controller. It's great for flight sims and racing games, infinately better than a keyboard. The analog stick is the best, I can barely play those games on anything else anymore, it just feels too unresponsive. But I will give it to you that it's not as good for first person shooters. You can aim far quicker with a mouse than with the analog stick.
  • Are you going to go to school tomorrow and brag to all your friends about how cool you are because you corrected John Carmack's spelling? Just remember, before you get too cocky...his car is a hell of a lot faster than yours. He gets more hott chix. He can probably beat you at Quake. And his mom can kick your mom's ass.

    That means he's cooler than you, and will remain so until the heat death of the universe renders us all much cooler than we want to be.
  • Hmmm. After doing a little more research, I find that your are generally correct. Image compression by S3 and 3DFX is a special case where you don't compress the whole image at once, but compress 4x4 or 4x8 cells. The "codebook" for each cell contains two "codewords"; the voronoi diagram for each region is a plane in color space. It probably should be called something besides "Vector Quantization" since there is additional information stored to interpolate between the two codewords. On the other hand, PowerVR does use real VQ, see
    http://www.pvr-net.com/hardware/compression/vect or.html
  • N64 has no memory, and no mass storage, which I think makes it almost impossible to port a game from the PC (which is really what the article was about...the way Carmack can use his PC programming expertise on the next-gen game consoles). Right wrong or indifferent, the N64 programming and playing environment is a Very Different Thing. It's a very very different type of console than the ones being discussed. Don't get me wrong, there are some brilliant N64 games out there (I for one LOVE Diddy Kong Racing, and Crash Team Racing is a pale imitation), but switch-hitting between N64 programming and PC programming would be like switching from baseball to sailing.

    And I hate Nintendo's business model, but that's neither here nor there.

    PS, what sort of storage system will the Dolphin have when it ships?
  • That begs a very curious question:

    How good is John Carmack's quake-ness? I mean, does he usually win in office tournies, or beaten to the ground by the textures guy on the G3? :)

    Simon

    --

  • I'd let him beat my ass at Quake all day if he'd let me drive his car. It takes MOXIE to take your Ferrari F50, say it's not fast enough, and install turbochargers. Here's an interview with the car. [elvesontricycles.com]
  • What do you think has been happening since the days of the NES? Nintendo was VERY strict in keeping developers only on their console. They even went to court over this a few times. Nothing new.

    Regardless, Square goes where Square wants. Same goes for EA, who have developed N64 games in the meantime. Sure, it sucks for Sega and I feel for them, but its business as usual...
  • well... freebsd's tcp/ip stack has an open enough license for apple to use it in OS X, so I assume it's BSD.

    contrary to popular opinion, the GPL is more restrictive and less free than the BSD.

  • Vector quantization compression? (Score:3)

    by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @01:58PM (#860037)
    Does anyone know where the advantages of vector quantization compression are when it comes to storing textures for a game (as mentioned on page 2 of the article)? Can they be decompressed very fast? Can different levels of detail be accessed easily to be mapped to surfaces at varying distances?

    As it seems to be implemented in hardware in this case, is there a software package of some VQ compression algorithm that comes close to wavelets or similar state-of-the-art compression? I just wonder because lately anyone seems to use wavelets...
  • I don't know how often this happens, but this is the first time I've seen a post actually acknowledge that there is such as a thing as the "slashdot effect".

    Thanks Hemos, you're OK in my book.

  • Re:Vector quantization compression? (Score:4)

    by mmp ( 121767 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:08PM (#860039) Homepage
    For the purposes of texture compression, the basic idea behind VQ is that the texture is broken into (e.g.) 4x4 blocks and each of the blocks is analyzed. The algorithm finds n blocks of 4x4 pixels that "best" represent the overall texture. These are stored in a codebook. Then, each 4x4 block of pixels in the original texture is encoded by finding the one of the n codebook blocks that is closest to it in appearence; all those pixels can thus be represented by a single block number.

    This is obviously a lossy compression method, since the total number of blocks in the codebook is much less than the number of blocks in the original texture.

    There is some interesting trickiness in figuring out what are the best n blocks to store as well as given a region of the image, which codebook block to represent it with.

    VQ tends to take a long time to encode--it's a CPU-intensive pre-process. However, decoding is *really* fast (just a table-lookup) and it can have very high compression ratios. For both of these reasons it fits well with graphics hardware.

    See "Rendering from Compressed Textures" [stanford.edu], a paper from SIGGRAPH '96 that talks about VQ for texture compression and introduces some clever things that can be done with mip-mapped VQ textures.

  • The Xbox does not yet exist.

  • OT: History of the World, part N+1 (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:12PM (#860041)
    2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.

    100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.

    10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.

    3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.

    2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.

    1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.

    490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".

    399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.

    336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.

    4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.

    A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.

    A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.

    A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.

    A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.

    A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.

    A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.

    A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

    A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)

    A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.

    A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).

    A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.

    A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".

    A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."

    A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).

    A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.

    A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.

    A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.

    A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.

    A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

    A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.

    A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.

    A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.

    A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.

    A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.

    A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.

    A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".

    A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.

    A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.

    A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.

    A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.

    A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.

    A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.

    A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."

    A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"

    A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".

    A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.

    A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".

    A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".

    A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net

    A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"

    A.D. 2000: On January 1st Microsoft NZ web site is first to announce that they have survived year 21000 bug. Slashdot community rejoices and lots of people swear the new millennium starts next year. ESR agrees that /. "gets it".

    A.D. 2001: Mozilla release is expected during this millennium, although plans are to integrate it with the upcoming linux-2.4.0-test92-pre17-ac3.1-25.9, which would mean a slight delay.
  • i feel that consoles and pc provide different gaming experiences. there are lots of console games that would not make good pc games due to the control.(same goes for pc - console ports) games like cool boarders and tony hawk for playstation would not work on pc because of how they use controlls. fps have many gameplay difference on consoles. medal of honour(also for playstation) is a great game. it could be played on pc without many gamplay changes. the reason it is a good fps on a console is because the game was designed to be played with a simple thumb controled anologe joystick and 8 buttons, the gameplay is good becuase it is well paced for the fact that it lakes a crosshair and freelook. were as quake3 is made for a mouse and even though the dreamcast controller has enough buttons for movement and fireing location and type of the buttons is what matters. i think quake3 on dc will play different then on pc. more gameplay emphasis will be on the plasma gun,lightning gun, and shotgun becuase the other weapons need to be aimed up or down(aim rockets at feet) and the rail gun will be damn hard to aim. and fighting games are the ones most likely to hurt a non-console gamers fingers. racing is probably the easiest on fingers to play. anyways my rant is done
  • since squaresoft and ea make some of the best games and there playstation franchises have huge established fan bases it shouldn't matter if they are tied down to ps2 because those two company's can make it a successful system. just look at what final fantasy 7 did for playstation. i honestly couldn't care about the xbox it is quite aways away, by the time it gets out ps2 will probably have market dominense and many top quality titles.

  • ...with more memory, an internet connection, hard drives and what not is an exciting development, but look at Carmacks' experience with Sega - they won't even give one of the best PC game programmers some info on a piece of peripheral hardware! He was polite about it, but they're just being silly.

    An interesting side point is that whatever hacks people do manage to carry out on these consoles could end up providing a ready-made excuse for poor market performance, whether or not console hacking makes any real effect on profitability. It seems to me it's a question of whether the manufacturers have the balls and foresight to provide in a positive way for the inevitable fact that people will find ways into some of these new systems. As far as Sega are concerned the answer appears to be no. Personally, I'm hoping Sony will do a Net Yaroze-like program for the PS2! It's not implausible, considering the fact they're licensing out the CPU and graphics chips. I'd pay for one. Hobby games ahoy!

  • Well, it's not the full stack, but-
    Sun doesn't seem to have a problem with the GPL. [sun.com]
  • Um... that's part of the point of the GPL. GPL authors don't think people should be able to take their code and pack it into a proprietary program.

    It's one of the primary ideological differences between BSD and GPL license.

    That's like saying "Let's see red paint be blue"
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This got to be the scariest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I feel to anger towards the person who wrote this -- I feel genuine pity. What kind of terrible, traumatic experience creates people with such warped hysteria? "BETTER DEAD THAN RED!" This person is genuinely paranoid. He must've watched the McCarthy trials to closely as a child, as he really believes that "Reds" are behind GPL and that they are out to get him. I just thought I'd comment on this, seeing as nobody else has.
  • Help me through college please!

    Oh, and while you're at it, help me pay for my Grandma's operation - Drink Pepsi [pepsi.com]!!

    (sheesh...)

  • ever watched Daria (sp?) ?
  • Actually, the system specs for the jaguar were:

    1 64bit GPU
    1 64bit Blitter
    1 32bit DSP
    1 16bit Motorolla 68k

    It had 2 megs of ram.

    All processors were connected through a 64bit bus.

    Each processor was independent of the other -- ie: it was an SMP like system. The people who knew how to program the system generally turned OFF the 68k (because of the way it controlled the bus (could only transfer 16bits at a time; nothing else could hit the bus while it was xfering data; bascially killed system performance); finally a use for the HALT instruction ;).

    The clock speed of everything in the system wasn't spectacular though. I think everything was slower than 20mhz. It was still good enough to do doom better than most 486's could (think back to 1996; P90's I believe were the high end gotta pay $4000 for one machines).

    It was a very cool system; the games for it blew everything else at the time out of the water (well, the good games like t2k, AvP, and such ;)). It's a shame that the mismanagement of Atari caused it to flop so bad.
  • this makes me wonder if the ps2 will be worth 2x as much as i paid for my dreamcast ?

  • Re:Vector quantization compression? (Score:5)

    by John Carmack ( 101025 ) on Sunday August 13, 2000 @08:29AM (#860053)
    You have confused two different forms of compression.

    S3TC is a modified form of block truncation coding (BTC), which involves selecting two colors and generating two other colors by interpolation. This is done with 4x4 blocks, giving very nearly 4 bits per pixel. This is nice because it doesn't require any additional tables.

    Vector quantization is a general process where you try to take a large set of number strings and pick some subset that can be used to aproximate all of them reasonably. In the dreamcast's case, you specify 256 2x2 blocks, so each pixel is represented by 2 bits, but you also have 2k of codebook overhead. This works out pretty well for smaller textures, but large textures often come out badly because there just aren't enough codebook entries to reasonably aproximate it.

    John Carmack

  • If I recall correctly, the original PSX had very few "revolutionary" features. But it still managed to beat out the N64 and the Saturn. Do I remember right?


    -RickHunter
  • You're right that UI in strategy games is sorely lacking. Actually, it's lacking in almost all games except those where the UI is open (quake). Interesting...

    However, for describing locations, pointing devices are critical for speed. Moving from base to base with a gamepad would be easy, but telling your troops to patrol between two points without a pointing device would be agrivating at best, and tediously slow at worst. There's just no getting around that a mouse is the easiest way we currently have of describing relative locations to a computer.

    As for the need for keyboards, I demand more from my games than a little action. I want complexity and lots of customization. I want my games to be as flexible as my OS (unix). I want to name my cities in Civ, I want macros in Quake, I want to be able to type numbers in for quantities, I want my games to have consoles (Quake, Dark Reign 2, etc)... I don't play Street Fighter or any other games that can be condensed down to a pad of a few buttons. If the most complex part of the game is the sequence of triangles and circles I push to get my unit to perform a complex move, I'm not interested. In fact, I want the ability to bind a single key to a complex move, not be forced to enter a complex string of keys to perform a simple task. I also want to pick which key does what.

    Also, you can tell some strategy games to keep producing units continuously. Look at Dark Reign, and Dark Reign 2. Both have "shift click" to add 5 to the number of a unit you want. Quickly clicking can queue up far more units than you'll ever use.

    So far most games seem to focus on one part of the experience at a time: interface, gameplay, graphics, networking, story, etc. If anyone ever does get it all right, I'll be surprised. It'll probably be a community project. :)
  • Thanks for the correction. I'm really only familiar with block truncation, but I did some research, and now am familiar with VQ as well :) I guess in the image domain the easiest way to imagine it is palettizing an image using multiple-pixel blocks.

    Do you think there's a future for VQ texture compression? As you pointed out, for bigger images you will need a larger codebook to achieve acceptable quality. What is the hardware overhead of having that extra indirection to lookup the pixels in the
  • Come on, give Carmack a break. He spends all of his days creating the games that YOU play.
  • Maybe six months ago, I was this close to just wanting to say, "I'm going to take three months and write a Game Boy Color title." I was going to take our old Commander Keen game, because I was into that kind of, "OK, I've been programming this high-level API where one texture is more memory than all of our old games put together used to be."

    Ooh ooh! That would be so cool! Heh, I'd love to play Commander Keen on a Gameboy Color... I'd buy one expressly for that purpose. Erm, I'm sorry, got a little bit nostalgic and stuff... But I think a Commander Keen GBC game would kickass and sell a lot, too :)

    Ports are cool.

    -tsunake

  • What's the big deal? (Score:4)

    by american_bongo ( 219162 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:21PM (#860059) Homepage
    Not be cynical or bent on criticism, but what's the big deal about q3 getting onto a dreamcast? It seems like a logical step as a software company looking to capatalize on a most likely popular gaming system. In the interview, Carmack states that porting from the DreamCast to the PC and vise versa are very simple, and to me, it seems very logical, because the DreamCast is just a PC in a smaller box with a controller.

    Personally, I don't understand why people believe that the Dreamcast and furthermore, any other console will cause the end of the PC as a viable gaming system. Can you seriously imagine playing multi-management games like Civilization, Myth 2, or StarCraft without a mouse and keyboard? Or a game that requires precise placement like Quake 3 being played with a controller? I had enough trouble playing Street Fighter 2 on my SNES, and any game more challenging will just cause blisters and frustration, not a genuine challenge. Both the PC and console markets have niche games that suit both systems, and I believe that the convergence two will promote creative game design, not hinder it.
  • Re:"goddammit you are annoying"

    Sooner or later, in this discussion, some clueless ms lemming will say . . ."yea but the Xbox kix ass!" and this little fact that it doesn't exist is a preemptive strike.

  • The PS2 Is Screwed (Score:5)

    by tealover ( 187148 ) on Saturday August 12, 2000 @02:22PM (#860061)
    If it doesn't impress Carmack, meaning that he doesn't think it's revolutionary and that he won't develop for it, it's a sad statement for Sony. I think the Xbox is going to whup up on the PS2's ass. It's going to be easier to develop for and it offers more avenues for developers to explore.

    I agree with John that it is a shame what Sony has done to the Dreamcast with its incessant and unwarranted hype of the PS2. I think Sony will get a taste of its own medicine with the torrential $500 million marketing campaign for the Xbox.

    Any way this shakes out, competition is good for us. We'll get cheaper consoles faster and better games. I just hope we don' get into the stupidity that Sony began with locking down developers to one console. EA and Square made a deal with the devil. I hope it doesn't turn around to bite them in the ass. Actually, being a Dreamcast owner, I hope it does.
  • Carmack commented on all the consoles in relation to his next porting job.

    Dreamcast: Good thinking to include modem. Not enough memory.
    PSX2: Not enough memory.
    PSX: Cool architecture. No memory.
    XBox: Little cramped on memory but obviously easy to port for.
    Dolphin: Not mentioned by interviewer. Doh!
    N64: Ditto gamecenter ignorance.
  • ...that it's bertter than most fps console ports. I for one don't think I would play w/o a mouse and keyboard, but maybe if it works well enough...but there are few sucessful fps's on the console anywya, and ports are usually worse than the rest I'm praying they can pull it off!!!

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