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Carmack Speaks
mbell writes: "Eurogamer.net's coverage of Razer-CPL has a write-up of a workshop that John Carmack gave on 3d games and hardware. Pretty interesting article, including some talk about id's next game." Kudos to Katherine (Don'tcha love alliteration?) for buying the round of drinks -- and the hints about the potential next game are cool. Think "Not Quake."
Actually, I believe the reason we care about FPS over and above 60 would best be described as "performance potential." To say that you are achieving a 109fps score in a q3 timedemo rougly translates into performance consistency; When you have 6 monkies hopping around in your FOV firing plasma guns at you that framerate isn't going to sag to it's knees. Ironically, some of Quake's more celebrate players, IE "Thresh" have steadfastly claimed to notice the difference between 60 and 100 fps. Having played since qtest, without claiming to be Thresh caliber, I tend to agree. Perhaps some people's brains process visual information faster. The scientists who have bothered to study professional baseball players all seem to agree that consistent hitters seem to posses the ability to process visual information far faster than us mere mortals. It is a matter of true urban legend that as a party trick, Babe Ruth would read the label on spinning 72 RPM records. Perhaps all human noggins, like video chipsets, are not created equal. 7-Granny
hardware accumulation buffer, not hardware motion blur. All it does is let you put several 'snapshots' in one frame - it really doesn't give you any benefit because it is just a 'mouse trail' type of repeated, dimmed image - not a real 'blur'
See? Microsoft has *no* excuse!
(*please*, Bill, tell me the reason... oh wait, NT is looking more like Unix every day...
Hey, let's have an "Ask John Carmack" on Slashdot, so we can find out how to find the cool chicks, like Katherine. I don't need that sort of advice, but some ACs on this thread sound like they need some help.
As to the rest of the article: Id is taking a new direction, not to "twitch" games, but back to single person stuff?
Hmm. All those in favor of Carmack making a *pretty* role-playing game, and giving Square a run for their money, say "Aye".
("Aye!")
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Anyways, on a serious note, hopefully graphics support under Linux will be up to par when this game is released.
Btw. this just came up on the DRI devel list:
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 00:00:49 -0400
From: Kevin E Martin <kevin@precisioninsight.com>
To: DRI Development <dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Dri-devel] Rage 128 3D beta release
Beta release of the Rage 128 2D/3D DRI driver
---------------------------------------------
1. Beta Release
This is a public BETA release of the Rage 128 2D/3D DRI driver. It is
fully functional and is intended for testing and gathering feedback.
2. Supported hardware
The following hardware is supported in this release:
* Rage Fury 32MB AGP
* XPERT 128 16MB AGP
* XPERT 99 8MB AGP
Other Rage 128 cards will be supported in future releases.
For those of you curious about what John was diagraming on the whiteboards, let me be of assistance
Hope that helps!
Mmmkay, but we also have The Sims, Crazy Taxi, Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid, Messiah, Homeworld, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Drakan, Asheron's Call, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Deus Ex.
Nonetheless, I allow that you probably have your own particular tastes and frustrations with current games. If you are truly committed to it, I am sure that I will some day have the opportunity to play a game of your own conception. In short, if what you want to play doesn't exist, make it yourself.
I was told Doom was made originally on the NeXT and ported to Dos (the Doom Operating System) to reach the widest market posable.
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Almost correct. DOOM was developed on NeXT and consisted of 98% of portable C code and 2% assembler, which was the main reason for high portability. Now, the term 'DOOM Operating System' was used because JohnC had to do a weird hack to ensure DOOM runs fine on 4Mb RAM PCs (few people could afford to buy RAM for $40-50 per 1 Mb back in 1993). Since he used DOS4/GW DOS Extender which only could use extended memory (ie not the first 640k, thereby limiting memory to 3Mb on a 4Mb machine), he wrote his own memory manager to use base memory (what was left out of 640kb). Remember line saying XXX Mb allocated to zone during the start-up? Since memory manager is one of few things every operating system provides, he called it DOOM Operating System.
IMHO.
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
The main one has to do with motion blur. This has a lot to do with how the brain "fills in the cracks" when there is a fast motion from one position to the other. When an actor moves their arm quickly, there will be blurred motion between the "key frames". Noticeable doing frame-by-frame on VCR's. (not sure about DVDs). This allows a relatively slow moving format appear to be smooth to the human eye.
By contrast, computers don't do this. They need to render every frame as a static image. This means that when something is moving *really* fast in a computer game (ie, a swinging sword, a player in quake), it will still appear jerky as it goes through your FoV (if you even notice: it may just be there for one or two frames). The higher your FpS is, the smoother the motion of even fast-moving objects will appear.
There is hope however. This is supposed to be one of the key features of the new Voodoo4/5 cards. (Last I heard anyways, not sure if this is stil being implemented.) 3dFX are keying some of the features to the way the human eye actually operates. This means not only a more realistic looking picture, but also smoother gameplay even when the framerate would normally be in the tank. No hope for Ultima Ascension. 10fps still looks like crap.
--sugarman--
The difference between 30 and 60 *is* very noticible--a side-by-side test makes this obvious--but in the end it depends on the type of game. There's a large contingent of "60 fps is pointless" ranters, but I fear that mostly comes from people who don't want their PC to be outdone by a $200 console.
Hmmm...this is maybe the first time I've heard of id being a front runner in the gameplay department.
First and foremost, id took 25+ years of graphics research and started using it in computer games. Carmack wasn't the first to do this, as there were dozens of 3D games in the seventies and 80s (Tailgunner, Battlezone, I Robot, Tempest, Stunt Track Racer, Encounter, Mercenary, Flight Simulator, Zenith, Stunts, and so on and so on). But he was the first to get people on the path to doing honest-to-goodness 3D and not just trickery. In general, even basic 3D concepts were foreign to 95% of game programmers when Doom was released.
Second of all, id took a stand against rising development costs and fluff and concentrated on the games themselves. DOOM didn't even have a menuing system with flashy graphics, just text overlaid on a replay. Quake wasn't filled with cutscenes and dialog systems and RPG elements; it was just a shooter.
Third, id started a particular type of game and the culture around it. In some ways it's sort of depressing that many game companies are still chasing after the "ultimate first person shooter" rather than trying to be original, but that's how it goes.
I think these are the three legacies of id. You can't generalize backward in time and act like id was revolutionizing the 2D platform game market, because Commander Keen was, what, seven years after Super Mario Bros. And when Commander Keen was released, there were some really sophisticated games out there already, like Microsoft Flight Simulator. So let's not go overboard with the praise, okay?
Okay, maybe not - I'm really just kidding. But, I must say, I'm very glad they're not thinking about doing another first-person shooter. If this new game is any good, I may consider *gasp* re-installing windows. I've got 9 gigs on this drive wanting to be burned... ;)
:)
Anyways, on a serious note, hopefully graphics support under Linux will be up to par when this game is released. Most of my computer-literate friends love my computer(Linux-only), and they tend to use it whenever they come over. But, they're unwilling to give up their Windows boxen because of their games. Ah well, c'est la vie
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Here's the page:
/index.asp?p=workshops
http://www.avault.com/razercpl
That has the above linked MP3 of Carmack, and also a talk by Romero, which may or may not be as interesting.
Human perception depends on the overall conditions. So if it is very dark in your room your visual acuity is less than when the room you are in is very well lit. In a dark room you can probably not see flicker above something like 50 Hertz. In a well lit room you need a refresh of about 75 Hz. And by the way movies do refresh at 24 fps, but you don't see flicker because each frame is displayed 3 times, thus achieving an effective refresh rate of 72 fps. TV refreshes at 30fps, but since the frame is created in two passes (interlacing) the effective refresh rate is 60 fps. In general if you refresh above 85 fps, you can be confident that most people will not see flicker under most lighting conditions.
I think there has ben a bit of a clash at id, Carmack who knows the problems of game development wants to keep the games simple to be able to advance rendering technology, but the rest of id wants to make some thing more down the line of half life.
We must remember that id is a really small development house and the reason they have bean able to keep it small is because they make simple yet fun games. If Carmack had he's way we would most likely se some kind of follow up to q3arena but he isn't the "boss" of id. This tells me that id may have a very difficult time ahead.
I think that Carmack would like to push the no repeat texture idea, but the question is will the hardware people agree to he's ideas on driver texture handling. I talked to some people form 3dfx and Nvidia about it and apparently he has bean lobbying for it.
The mentioning of shadows will most likely be stencil shadows (read more on opengl.org) my biggest question, will he be using all the new hardware specific, register combiner hardware to do per pixel lighting? will he go for subdivision surfaces?
The hardware industry doesn't really know what the next big thing is going to be, And im not shore Carmack knows either but is he does he's got a great opportunity to push the industry in that direction. My guess is hardware shadows, but who knows.
Eskil
Right now, Showscan is as good as moving images get; wide screen, 70MM film, and in some installations, motion platforms for the seats.
I've noticed that Carmack has mentioned the 'texture painting' idea a few times. However, each time he's made sure to point out that he's not so sure the benefits of totally unique textures outweigh the hell it would take to get them.
Not only would bitchy driver issues need to be solved, but as he stated, you'd need a much larger artist staff to be able to actually do that sort of thing. That's not something he wants, it'd create a large enough group of people that politics, yes even at id, would begin to come into play. It'd get in the way of coding, which as people have so eloquently put it before, is Carmack's religion.
I do agree with the idea that Carmack has a lot of new ideas for rendering. Realtime shadows is one, but if you want a few more ideas, just go check out his .plan archive. Hell, maybe once again Father Carmack is gonna push the industry, which.. as Not Good as that is (the fact that we need Carmack to kick industry ass into doing common sense), I suppose some advance is better than no advance.
I don't think Carmack wants to make a followup to quake III. He's stated for a long time before it was even close to finished that There will be no quake 4. I can't even pretend to have any idea of what's going on inside id, or his head. I'm pretty sure at some point here, he'll let us know here.
Yes, I actually registered and got Keens 2 & 3.
Well, to bring back the nostalgia, I fired it up, without even thinking about needing to run moslo or something similar to cut the 400MHz down a few notches. Guess what folks, it ran just like on my 386. Smooth as butter and not even a touch of mad-crack-induced speed that most old games tend to get when I run them. THAT is nice work ;)
So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to driving everyone insane with the weird noises from my PC as I go prove that Mr. 314 is still damn good.
Imagine entering a room to see three people. One seated, the two others standing over the seated person. The walls are covered in book shelves. The standing person closest to you pulls a gun and dives behind a couch as he shoots at you. The other standing person pulls a gun and starts to aim it at the seated person.
Think about a FPS game where you have much wider environment to work in, and much more complex tasks to perform. Solve puzzles, fly a chopper, etc..
I read somewhere how many "frames per second" the human eye can actually differentiate in life but I don't remember the number anymore. I dont think it was anything close to 100fps so why are we paying so much money on our vidcards again?
The end of the article says to expect a return to single player...
But I would be less surpised to hear that Carmack is working on something massively muti-player. We've heard him mention EverQuest before, and the man is a network coding GOD as anyone who has played Q3 knows. A MMP game need not be EQ or Ultima-ish. Remember a long long time ago when Carmack speculated about quake being a persistant game with servers controlling certain regions, and moving out of that region and into another would transparently move you to a different server?
The technology is available now to render large outdoor scenes, as well as networks that can handle thousands and maybe a million (ten-six?) simaltaneous users. I wouldn't be surprised if Carmack and his designers set their sights to a cross between everquest and quake -- in other words, how he ORIGINALLY envisioned Quake.
Nobody seems to be picking up on the stuff he was saying about tracking head motion (well, except for the sick f-ers moderated down to -2). After he wrapped q3a, there was a .plan update where he said he was interested in spending some time playing with cheap webcams and computer vision.
Wouldn't it be interesting to plop a $30 cam on your monitor and have it track the rough position of your head? You move side-to-side and the scene changes. It's amazing how effective this is in making things look 3-D. Try closing one eye and moving your head around. You can figure out a lot of depth information without stereo vision. And, unlike all the stereo vision rigs, it doesn't cause and worse eyestrain than usual quake sessions.
It might not be that hard to do a quick and dirty head motion tracking inside a game like that, given the CPU cycles. We did stuff like this in grad school a few years ago with machines that were a lot slower.
Avault has posted an mp3 of the workshop for those who weren't able to attend (including myself :/).
What, you run around hugging bunnies with an assortment of different compliments at your disposal that you can pick up during the game? ;)
Something tells me Carmack may be feeling a little guilty for all the bloody years. Heh.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
ID's next game will be a totally original departure called PaqMan. This will involve guiding a tough yellow circle around a maze, and blowing the hell out of ghosts.
We should all remember to thank carmack and id for a couple of reasons
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.