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John Carmack Interview
Iconoclast writes "There is a very good interview over on FiringSquad with his holiness John Carmack. The article gives you a good look at the geek behind the coding machine, and includes some talk about his love for Linux. "
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2000 17:09:58 -0600 From: John Carmack To: darwin-development@public.lists.apple.com Subject: X windows update
I have a good, functional X windows port running under OS/X right now. I just need to get the keymappings fixed up and test some more, then I will release a patch for public consumption.
It only works in 15/24 bit true color modes. I am morally opposed to color lookup tables for desktop environments. It uses the resolution and color depth you already are running in OS/X (8 bit will be reset to 16 bit color).
It only works on a single screen, but you can tell it to start on any screen number. The multi-screen support is pretty nice -- when you move your cursor onto the X screen it just picks up as an X cursor, and when you move it back to a mac screen, it turns back into a mac cursor.
It probably isn't a real good single screen app for OS/X, because there isn't any way to flip back and forth between X and the mac desktop, but being a mac app was never really the goal.
It will probably take me another weekend to get everything all cleaned up and ready for more general use. I will try and fix problems with it, but I am learning as I go with X windows right now, so I can't guarantee really great response times.
After that, I will be on to bare darwin development work. The last time I played with bare darwin, I saw the video driver and mouse driver code, but I never tried to actually hook anything up to it.
Has anyone read mouse events or reset a video mode from a user space app with darwin? The default video mode is 640x480x8 bit color, which I will be wanting to get out of ASAP.
If necessary, I can write my own kernel drivers, but that would probably be a waste of time.
John Carmack
Isn't he on his honeymoon with Anna Kang (Carmack now?) right now? Can nothing keep this man from programming? Not even sex??
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I am really sort of curious why you say he wouldn't make a decent father. I mean most people can make decent parents (perhaps not great ones) with no trouble.
Secondly I don't understand why you, or the other posters, think he is arrogant. I was actually quite impresed by his humbleness. This is a man who is virtually worshiped by a large segment of computer gamers probably the most succesful programer in the world from a pure sales perspective (not IPOs - gates and company coded only small parts of their programs). The potential to let this go to your head must be huge.
Now Carmack recognizes he is good but that isn't the same thing as being arrogant (he is good after all). If he really was arrogant he would have been going on about how college would have been a waste of time etc.. etc.. like some previous slashdot stories. Stick up his ass? Where? Did you people read the entire interview or all you all just misconstruing that first quote about marriage?
If there was anything I found kinda strange it was critisizing his mother's raising in print. But to each his own.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Is interviews with 'those kind' of people, without any introduction. Talk to Carmack, or Ellison, or hell, even Gates, but don't tell anyone who it is.
Talk about things that won't immediatelly betray identity: "So, unintroduced person, how's it feel to have written Perl?" just ain't gonna do...
And then leave it to the readership to figure out who it is. Sort of like a secret Santa inteview.
Hey Rob!! You listening?? Can we have mystery guest Slashdot Interviews?? With beanie-prizes for the first person to correctly identify the interviewee?
And what a challenge it would be to come up with interview questions... Heh!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This struck a chord with me. I remember at eleven to fourteen or so thinking that to be a great hacker I'd have to have produced something by sixteen, and feeling genuinely worried about it. It makes me laugh now, particularly seen I never put in the work to be a junior uberhacker - I was far more interesting in looking than doing at the time, and the hacking I did (C64 display interrupt tricks and the like) was far more investigative than doing. But at the time, it looked like you had to have done something by the time you were sixteen or eighteen to be a great hacker. I hope no one ever felt like I did and got put off hacking because they couldn't measure up to the super high standards. Some people must feel the same way looking at Anna Kournakova (sp?), or worldclass youngsters in their fields of interest. Our Western media cult of celebrity means we often get hellishly high standards shown to us.
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
What you have to understand about John Carmack is that programming is his religion, and he won't let anything else get in the way of it. Programming is the most important priority in his life.
I think this is the reason I admire him without wanting to _be_ him. There are parts of my life which are more important than programming, and I'd give up programming for them if necessary.
-Ted
FS: I've read some earlier interviews where you said you were into bombs and stuff. You were a miscreant kid, right?
John: Yeah in a lot of ways...I looked back and I was an arrogant little jerk when I was a teenager. I matured over the years and when I look back now, I don't think THAT highly of myself as a teenager. I mean, I was really smart, I was already programming computers in a lot of ways. But I was amoral at many times.
This doesn't exactly HELP those of us who are in school and being prejudiced against because of our geeky ways...
It's also nice to see that the money can come not only to a diabolical, evil, Bill Gates type, but also to the cool, small-team programmer type like Carmack, just so long as you have good ideas and pull them off well.
In fact, the original story of Quake was supposed to be an RPG, well not an RPG exactly, but a fantasy game.
Heehee, think about how THAT would've changed the world of first person shooters as we know them today...
Right now, I'm spending more of my time in this lull or break, working on some things in Linux. One of the things I've done is written two 3D drivers for Linux or done a good chunk of the coding on them.
...
There are a lot of zealots in the Linux space that just don't have rationality in their viewpoints, but there is some truth behind the hype on how good it [Linux] actually is.
Comments like this, and programmers like Carmack bode well for the future of Linux as a desktop OS.
All in all, this was a very thorough and interesting article. I suggest anyone who hasn't clicked through the link yet to do it. You'll find it interesting, even if you aren't a hardcore, or even casual gamer.
---------------
Yes! That guy!
There has to be something that you wanna just go out and do. People don't play softball because they want to beat the game of softball; it has to be an action that's fun by itself. I think that we succeeded in a lot of ways there. We expected and did receive a lot of feedback from the incestuous core of our fanbase.
Now, while I agree with these statements at face value, and also disagree with them, I felt it was a rather interesting way to paint a picture of the difference between what Halo will be, and what Quake (is and) will be.
Carmack's 100% accurate in the first sentence in that second paragraph. A game *has* to be fun from the get-go. One needs to be able to dive in, be it via a tutorial or a skirmish mode, and be able to get something done in the game. That's what games are for; entertainment. If one has to work too hard at it, it's no longer entertainment.
He goes on to explain how a certain percentage of folks like complication; that makes sense too. At a few points in my gaming past, I've nudged into that field.
Therefore, on the surface, Carmack is 100% accurate. Yet, he's also obviously missing something. He claims that putting a story in the game is "imposing" it on the player. He suggests that it's a burden, and you have to beat the game in to submission to get the story out of the way.
I suppose that's a valid view, but look at it as a question of longevity. Humans are pretty well known for enjoying a good story; we like watching (or reading about) a protagonist battling an antagonist (of whatever form) and solving a problem. Tragedies are popular, too.
Look at it this way: What sticks in your head longer? A day watching a baseball game, or reading a good book?
Five years after the fact, I'm still pondering plot elements of Marathon. Doom, in my memories, is just a game with a lot of monsters running around that you get to shoot. Both obviously have managed to stick in my head, but I value Doom far less than Marathon.
I'm not suggesting Carmack was stating that "dear god games with stories suck and they need to die." He was actually pretty fair in his statements; he's just expressing his feelings. However, I did want to counter that by saying games that "impose" a story on us tend to be held a bit more dearly in a person's thoughts.
They just have more staying power.