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Graphics Software Entertainment Games Hardware

John Carmack Talks Graphics 71

Posted by Zonk from the he-is-so-good-at-the-shinies dept.
Next Generation is running a short piece detailing some highlights of an interview with John Carmack, set to run in the February issue of PC Gamer UK. From the article: "For the last year I've been working on new rendering technologies. It comes in fits and starts. Our internal project that'll incorporate it hasn't been publicly announced. We're doing simultaneous development on Xbox 360 and PC, and we intend to release on PlayStation 3 simultaneously as well, but it's not a mature enough platform right now for us to be doing much work on."
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John Carmack Talks Graphics More

John Carmack Talks Graphics

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  • Now thats a nice advertisement.

  • Great News. (Score:4, Funny)

    by irn_bru ( 209849 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @10:41AM (#14607032)
    Now, DON'T forget to work on the GAMEPLAY too, eh?
  • The article has so little content, it is hard to discuss. The only tidbit is that the X360 development kit is very usable.
    • I'd say the blurb about the PS3 dev kits being too immature to develop on is pretty big news considering that Sony would love for us to be anticipating its "imminent" release.

      • Re:article too short to discuss (Score:4, Insightful)

        by apoc06 ( 853263 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @12:51PM (#14608396)
        carmack is used to developing for the PC. the xbox1 was basically a pc specialized for games. x360 builds on the xbox1 ideologies.

        microsoft built half of the tools that carmack's crew is used to using. of course the ps3 is going to be "immature"; specs were only finalized last year. sony is starting from the ground up. big shocker here: "pc game developer sides with microsoft and plays it safe with the company that all of their products depend on rather than side with sony a company that they have no loyalty to. news at eleven!" =)

        microsofts development goal was always to make things easy for pc developers to port things over to the xbox line. if its easy, carmack just needs to shovel his latest and greatest hit to xbox and voila! instant profit. hey, it worked for the unreal, doom, far cry, halflife franchises.

        look at quake4. if it was /that/ easy, why does x360 quake4 suck so badly? a rush job will always suck, no matter how easy the development tools are to use.
        • //plays it safe with the company that all of their products depend on

          >>haven't all of iD's games since quake been multiplatform at or very shortly after launch?
          • of course. but which platform does he develop first and foremost? id has never supported a console as heavily as they have [and plan to] for the MS consoles.

            which multiplatform versions of their computer games make id the most money?

            for all we know carmack could hate windows AND bill gates' guts for that matter... but you cant play ball if you never invite the kid that owns the ball; at the end of the day its all economics and finance.

            im really not trying to imply that carmack is on the take. im just saying
            • If you look at the Doom 3 SDK, there is little love of the windows platform in the comments. Granted, im sure none of them are Carmacks, as he probably works entirely in the rendering area, which is definitely not in the SDK.
  • He doesn't say much about graphics, except that it is about the same on both PC and consoles, considering nvidia and ati are on both sides, this isn't real suprising.
    I do like that he says that the console cpu numbers are inflated.
  • I am amazed at how little progress has been made in the game graphics and gameplay since the original Doom. It would seem that the ability to churn out hundreds of millions polygons per second should make a lot of difference compared to the Doom's no-3d-hardware-requiring graphics engine, but somehow it does not. Despite all the antialiasing, mip-mapping, landscapes in today's 3d games sometimes look less realistic and/or less interesting than some levels in Doom. This is disappointing, and I have no explan
    • > Despite all the antialiasing, mip-mapping, landscapes in today's 3d games sometimes look less
      > realistic and/or less interesting than some levels in Doom. This is disappointing, and I have
      > no explanation...

      All the triangles in the world aren't going to make games less boring. I wonder how many triangles John can plot in a second now. 100 million? A billion? A thousand billion? Who cares? Graphics are good enough now - look at Call of Duty, Battlefield 2 etc. Why not knock the render-rate wil
      • While hardly an avid FPSer, I do play occasionaly... and I've noticed a lot of improvement lately.

        First few times I played FEAR at my friends I tried using the old tactics that'd work for the old single player FPSers I'd played before and guess what... the enemy was smarter than them. The AI wouldn't blindly charge at you through a choke point, it would have some of it's units keep you engaged on one front while others would flank around behind you. It would use cover. And while I didn't play it enough t
        • > If FEAR (and what I've heard about BF2) is indicative of anything it's that
          > we're probably going to be seeing a lot better AI in the near future.

          The bots in BF2 are rubbish. I used to be in a BF2 clan so usually I played multiplayer, but bots never have a clue.
    • I would rather play on a Doom 1 engine graphics with fully damageable, realisticly architected environments, then the indistructible ply wood and forced path games of current, well pretty much ever...

      I think something like ut2004 except instead of trying to shoot the power generator of the base you literally try to blow the base apart piece by piece. With towers and walls collapseing when enough under structure was destroyed. People could get trapped inside and have to blast thier way out or die inside.
      • I agree. On the other hand, according to a quote recently made here on Slashdot, realistic physics in games will never catch on: Lara Croft will keep falling over forwards.
        • I don't mind realistic physics, but I do want 100% or atleast high 90% interactive environments, with close to realistic looking, persistant dents, holes, damage and structural integrity.

          If my grenade lands under a jeep I want to see the jeep blown partially apart not just have some black spot on it that goes away when I look away and back. I want to be able to blast a hole in a wall with a rocket launcher and walk through it, or watch the entire structure begin to crumble.
      • Fully destructible environments would be frickin awesome. I'm reminded of the work Ken Silverman (of BUILD engine fame) did with voxels in his somewhat recent Voxlap [advsys.net] engine demo. I'd love to see a game made based on this technology. Who knows, maybe someone will take a stab at it? Mr. Silverman has been kind enough to release his source code to the public.
    • I think the major limiting factor in game rendering systems at the moment isn't the programming, but the content.

      Where a room in a Doom map could have been a single rectangle with simple textures on the walls, floor and ceiling, a single lighting value and a simple sprite-based barrel for decoration, an equivalent room in a modern FPS might have thousands of triangles, per-pixel lighting from multiple light sources (each placed manually for the best visual effect), high-resolution textures with multiple com

      • Re:Too little, too late? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by 2008 ( 900939 )
        What I'd be interested to see would be a game with relatively simple textures, geometry and so on, but rendering so much of it that it actually gives modern hardware a decent workout. Wild examples - a game where you're trying to escape a crime-scene in a city with realistically busy streets; FPS games with genuine swarms of monsters (instead of methodically shooting individual enemies placed by the designers, perhaps you'd be carefully clearing your route, blocking potential entrances where monsters could
        • You just described GTA 3, Serious Sam, and World of Warcraft.

          GTA 3-nowhere near realistic crowds/traffic/city "life"

          Serious Sam- You run in one direction killing tons of monsters, I think he was looking for a game where you have mulitple paths and don't have to (maybe can't) kill everything in your way.

          World Of Warcraft- please...again with the nowhere near crowds/realism...
    • Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).

      The real limiting factor is development time. The more stuff you build into each level, the more time and money it takes. The brown boxes in Doom were pretty easy to make, but these days they won't do at all. You need to add details like windows, roofs, etc.

      • Re:Too little, too late? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by slackmaster2000 ( 820067 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:17PM (#14608708)
        Agreed!

        I still have vivid memories of Wolfenstein 3D looking so amazing. The same with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But load one up right now and there's no comparison with today's graphics. Heck, you don't even have to go that far back. Even Unreal and Quake II look silly compared to games coming out today. The graphics we'll be seeing five years from now will make today's games look corny. That's the way it goes.

        The problem here for people like us who have been around this long is that we're, ahem, growing up. I've really started to notice that the older I get, the more it takes from a game to hold my interest. It's an odd moment when you're playing Monopoly with your kids and you suddenly realize: "what the hell did I ever like about this game?"

        And yes, of course some of this has to do with the rehashing of old game ideas. If come across another jumping puzzle in an FPS game at this point it'll probably sour me on video games for the rest of my life :) But really, I can enjoy a game that uses the same old FPS model as long as the content is interesting enough.

        P.S. - I really wanted to like Second Life, but...what the heck? The ability for the players to create all the content is pretty amazing, but after that it's like a giant chat room with...3D graffiti.
        • Like I said, it's a 3d MOO. Pretty much a social environment with building permissions. If you want to beat up monsters it's not the right game for you. If you want to build some weird funky piece of art or even just your own house from basic shapes, then it's worth a second look.

          It's also perhaps the best game out there for explorers. The game map is about 2/3 the size of Washington DC, and if you only want to explore then the account (and game) is free. There is a monthly fee if you want to start bu
      • I agree with you that some of Doom 2's maps were kind of bland looking, blame Sandy Peterson for that, but Romero's eight map magnum opus that is Episode 1 of Doom has yet to be topped in terms of level design, in my opinion. And I guarentee you that most any Doom 1 or 2 map was more interesting and fun to play and explore than Doom 3's linear, boring, monster-closet-a-thons.

        Second Life. Great concept, aboslutely ruined by the people. With no such thing as protected speech, if you create something funny
      • Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).

        A year ago, I dug up Rise Of The Triads, which I used to play with a few of my buddies in multiplayer mode. It used the same 320x200 mode that Doom I & II used. I had a hard time navigating, figuring out where the walls started and the floor ended. I was comple

  • Why Carmack impresses me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @12:00PM (#14607851)
    What impresses me the most about John Carmack, besides his obvious ability to write kickass graphics code, is the fact that he's stuck with it so closely for so long (Wolf 3D came out a LONG time ago). I'd have burned out seven years ago, but he keeps on cranking.

    I guess a continuous flow of thousand dollar bills might have something to do with it...

    • I suspect it's more to do with the fact that he loves graphics coding, and is good at it. If you were great at something you loved doing, and you were your own boss, why would you burn out? IIRC he lives quite a humble lifestyle apart from his cars.
      • I suspect it's more to do with the fact that he loves graphics coding, and is good at it. If you were great at something you loved doing, and you were your own boss, why would you burn out?

        I have no idea why burnout happens, but at least for me, whether I enjoy what I'm doing or not really doesn't seem to make much difference. I enjoy programming in general, but working too long on any one problem, no matter how interesting, eventually gets tedious.

      • This is completely offtopic, but speaking of burning out on things... I browsed your home page and I see you like to climb on those pointy hard things commonly known as "rocks." Right on. Now there's something I'll never burn out on.

        I don't think rock climbing is the most common of the Slashdotter hobbies.

  • What Carmack means to me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Taulin ( 569009 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @12:28PM (#14608137) Homepage Journal
    When I see a game uses an id engine, I can be pretty damn sure it will work on my system with very few problems. It is because he writes very VERY tight code and they do a great job testing it before giving it to the public. Sad to read that it looks like they are now going to be concentrating on the 360.
  • I just read this the other night. Its going to be in the latest issue of PCGamer. It says "Interview with Carmack!" on the cover. It is fairly short. Basically says that he's still developing games. The only big surprize is that he says that id is bacically primarilly developing for the 360 rather than the PC.
  • Bad news for Sony it sounds. I think it's obvious that they're not launching in the Spring like they were saying last year.

  • dev time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @02:05PM (#14609244) Journal
    I'm waiting for some engine developer to write a combined physics/visual engine for which you have a world of inherent objects, each with visual (color, texture, etc) and phsyical (mass, etc) characteristics.

    It used to be it took a few hours to whip up a level in Quake.
    With each generation though, the time to make a single room of any reasonable quality has at least doubled, if not trebled. The "community" production of user-made levels has dropped by orders of magnitude each generation as well.

    Really, the concept of building a map in N-space from basic polygons should be dead - If you're going to build a "house" in a new 3d engine, you should be able to literally BUILD it of materials like you would a real house - pieces of wood with a resistance to force LIKE WOOD, a flammability LIKE WOOD, so your final wall would 'behave' in-game like a wood wall, and you don't have to program in the properties from scratch every time.

    Think about how hard it is to model a good-looking coffee cup from polygons and curves. A biatch. Why not an engine that comes with a Sears-catalog (or Home Depot, or whatever) of pregenerated stuff that you can edit generally (changing color, length, whatever) and then plop into your world? Coffee cup? Pick that hefty one. Make it black. Glossy. Now 'pour' in liquid. Boiling hot. If it gets knocked over (or shattered), the liquid pours out onto whatever surface it's on/above, and then flows to the lowest point.

    So I guess for me it's not the rendering tech per se, it's that we keep getting the engine without the car, or even the parts to build the car. We should be past that.
    • This would be great because everyone could be making maps in a short time frame and that is good for the game players.
    • Why not an engine that comes with a Sears-catalog (or Home Depot, or whatever) of pregenerated stuff that you can edit generally (changing color, length, whatever) and then plop into your world? Coffee cup? Pick that hefty one. Make it black. Glossy.

      What you don't realize is that commercial game developers are not overly interested in seeing lots of high-quality content released for free on the net. Community-driven game mods are usually seen as some "cute extra" which may keep players toying around with

  • i can think of a huge interview with carmack before doom3 went live, when he said, that the doom3 engine will be "about his last new engine". all the follow ups will be improvements only from that on, because there won't be anything groudbreaking to do. yet the article speaks of a "new engine" in it's intro. so, is he working on new groundbreaking stuff or not?

  • The real news for programmers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by try_anything ( 880404 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2006 @01:26PM (#14617854)
    John Carmack is, among other things, a performance expert, and the most interesting thing he says in this article is this:

    "The difference between theoretical performance and real-world performance on the CPU level is growing fast. On, say, a regular Xbox, you can get very large fractions of theoretical performance with not a whole lot of effort. The PlayStation 2 was always a mess with the multiple processors on there, but the new generations, with Cell or the Xbox 360, make it much, much worse. They can quote these incredibly high numbers of giga-flops or tera-flops or whatever, but in reality, when you do a straightforward development process on them, they're significantly slower than a modern high-end PC."

    He's putting programmers on notice that the days of writing single threaded code for a simple virtual von Neumann machine are over. The hardware designers bent over backward for years to support that programming model, and they've given up. They've hit the wall and moved on to other things. The smart programmers (like John Carmack) are figuring out how to follow them.

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