Post by trog @ 10:48am 06/08/11 | 19 Comments
Carmack gets up and talks for around an hour and a half, expounding on his enthusiasm from Rage - heavily focusing on its departure from the usual simplicity of id first person shooters.
Another interesting piece of news is Carmack has announced that the source code for the Doom 3 engine will soon be released, continuing id Software's incredible tradition of giving their technology back to the gaming community. There's no set date for the release but it is planned to happen before the end of the year.
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Posted 01:15pm 06/8/11
*Lots of s*** about how bad consoles are and holding back what they want to do and how they coped with writing on consoles that are 1/10th the power of PCs. Admits on how you break rage... ralk backwards through a level, use high sesitivity on mouse and turn around really quickly... all the smarts they spent the last 6 years on wont work and itll look HORRIBLE... but normal playing, this wont happen (LOL?)*
37:00 ... VOXELS,splat,raytrace etc for next engine?? ;)
39:00 ... confirmed hes going to do more research engines especially 'infinite detail' engines
40:40 ... doesnt beleive in adding dx tessilation as 'bolt on' ... no dx11 tessellation in rage :(
42:40 ... LOL he would love to go back and program on a atari 2600 with 16bytes of ram ... to test some ideas but has no time... goto love this guy!
43:00 ... rewrote the texture compiler to use a server he built with 192GB OF RAM IN IT!!!! LOL
46:00 ... rage doesnt have high res textures close up. putting your face on a wall will look BAD ... he admits that.
49:00 ... 1 tb of source art for each blue ray/3xDVD.
51:00 ... turning on noclip and looking at stuff your not meant to usually be able to look at (or they thought you wouldnt look at) will mean the textures will be s***** due to the way they calculate what you should look at in the singleplayer to fit it on the blueray/3xDVDs. So mods could mean people are going to be seeing s***** stuff.
52:20 ... john doesnt really like post-processing as it loses detail etc... but he lost that argument with the artists
57:00 ... tried using a tool like 'Creverity' to count lines of code and analyse it but was going to cost $50,000 so didnt bother... found a version for the 360 (Called 'Analize') that was really awesome and gave some really unusual things like many null pointer references etc!
1:01:00 ... started static analysis of his own code.. logged every time he made a error.. found some very interesting programming error statistics over 6 months! errors that dont break things but were still errors such as alpha channel errors that he would have never noticed. found trends and ways to fix them etc!
1:03:00 ... john loves the microsoft xbox 350 analyser so much that he has 'warnings as errors' turned on and his programmers cannot compile without everying being OK, if they have to explain it to the analiser then they would have to explain it to a another programmer, thats not ok.
1:07:33 ... trying to write squeaky clean code from the beginning. using microsoft analyse, pvsstudio and pclint
1:08:43 ... wants code quality control through static code analysis before compile
1:13:00 ... talks about the fact they could have shipped 2 games in the last 6 years instead of just 1 (rage) if they had set their goalposts to 90% of what they wanted. that extra 10% took them 3 more years.
1:14:00 ... qa+production stuff under the ID roof is awsome. 200+ people now!
1:15:00 ... talks about going from young genius to old master... (take tickets on yourself much?)... but doesnt consider himself nostalgic... moving on and being mobile is what he likes, old stuff is boring and means little to him.
1:19:00 ... talks alot about resource constrained programming. thinks young programmers who dont touch the hardware directly have alot to learn about programming on platforms that are resources constrained but isnt a grumpy all fart who things all young kids need to go program on 16k of memory to be good programmers, rather the opposite, what kids have now allow them to do more.
1:22:00 .. talks about staff joining ID and being very sink of swim... many have used large SDKs like unreal engine... but id has none of that... and many people come to id and either thrive quickly by teaching themselves via their own unit tests ... or they sink and hate it. talks about the modding community falling and the doom 3 source code being released this year! BIG programs though that prey 2 and bring that both use (heavily modified) id tech 4 engines... so could be a law suite lol
last edited by gamer at 13:13:12 06/Aug/11
last edited by gamer at 13:15:45 06/Aug/11
Posted 12:52pm 06/8/11
I guess he just speaks English which only further proves how good he really is at what he does
Posted 01:19pm 06/8/11
Posted 03:08pm 06/8/11
Looking forward to the Doom3 source. I think it's at least the second time where Carmack has created a programming language and compiler tool-set solely for use in one of his games (C++ related language in D3, QuakeC in Q1).
Posted 03:32pm 06/8/11
(he mentions software is 'meant' to be either work or fail but thats not really true when you go BIG with software. aka millions of lines of code. he likens it to metal fatigue - his work with rockets showing through...)
.. anyways he mentions that (for the next game? you kinda dont know if hes talking about rage PC before its released or the next game) ... he wants to create 'the game' in 95% custom 'script' ... a type of C++ that only has Java functions where nothing can be unassigned and is forced to be cleaned up etc...
anyways i didnt really understand it all but have a listen... aparently doing that will ensure good strong QA of a large project... but will mean they have to write 95% of the game code in 'script'
Posted 07:00pm 06/8/11
Posted 08:22pm 06/8/11
No, he didn't say that at all. He said he'd played all of their games to degrees, and he wasn't the kind of person to play deathmatch for 10 hours straight.
Posted 08:53pm 06/8/11
Posted 04:05pm 08/8/11
Posted 12:58pm 10/8/11
Posted 01:28pm 10/8/11
He seemed to have the utmost respect for the people that worked on this game, creative and technical
Posted 01:30pm 10/8/11
So Tech 5 is Rage and Doom 4, I wonder what he's going to do with Tech 6?
Any idea on the system requirements to actually play Tech 5 games? Historically I've always found the graphics card I've had at the time of an id Tech release is woefully inadequate - for example, I had a Riva 128 when Quake 3 came out (then saw Python playing it on a GeForce at I think Big Day In)... then my GeForce 5700 just died trying to play Doom 3 and Quake 4.
Use of Octrees will be interesting - I've been playing around in my spare time with similar structures that are sorta a bastardardised hybrid of an AVL Tree and an octree, which fit nicely in to 64 bit words and can be sorted stupidly fast using SSE4's PCMPEQQ and MPSADBW. It's been really interesting the performance you can force through a GPU with 100+ cores and now being able to do similar stuff in the CPU (in i7) which you'd previously want CUDA for.
Posted 02:33pm 10/8/11
Posted 02:37pm 10/8/11
Posted 05:48pm 10/8/11
Posted 05:56pm 10/8/11
Posted 12:30am 11/8/11
Posted 09:10am 11/8/11
Absolutely. I watched the entire 1:30 and you can still see his enormous passion for his craft. He has all this great information tucked away in his head and he has a great love for sharing the it.
I find people that I meet that are very good at their job share this kind of passion.
Posted 01:38pm 11/8/11
He's come a long way. He used to hate it - think back to when Hollenshead came out for AGDC here in Melbourne years ago, around that era Carmack was one of those guys who really only super-techies could want to sit and listen to, and IIRC he used to dislike public speaking too.