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."

Comments

It's about time that FPS sooting games evolve.

[Bryan Andersen]

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..

how good is the human eye?

[MuteflY]

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?

Re:how good is the human eye?

[Error27]

actually with video games it does make a difference.

with a tv we can handle low refresh rates because the exposure time is longer and so the pictures are a little bit blury where there is motion. The eye interprets the blur as motion.

with a video game you don't have any blur and so you need a higher refresh rate to get the same feeling of motion.

Re:how good is the human eye?

[WickedDyno]

We can't really tell the difference after somewhere between 30 and 60. But that's not the real reason to get, say, a voodoo5 6000 -- who cares if you get 150 FPs at 640x480x16? How about 50 fps at 1280x1024x32? With full-screen anti-aliasing, 32-bit textures? The eye can tell the difference there, that's for sure.

Re:how good is the human eye?

[luckykaa]

Persistence of vision (i.e no percieved flicker) is somewhere around 25-30Hz. It is still possible to spot events that take less time.

I wonder how the latency between rendering a frame and displaying aframe is affected though.

id's next game...

[My Third Account]

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.

Re:Interesting.

[jon_adair]

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.

MP3 Recording of Speech

[Anonymous Coward]

Avault has posted an mp3 of the workshop for those who weren't able to attend (including myself :/).

"Not Quake" ?

[Bowie J. Poag]

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)

Re:Not quake! ??? what then...

[luckykaa]

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.

Why Gaming is important

[bmajik]

We should all remember to thank carmack and id for a couple of reasons

• The reason PeeCees have respectable mainstream gfx hardware is because gamers wanted it. Multi-thousand dollar gfx cards have always been available for PeeCees, but now you can get a $200 board that outclasses all but the biggest/newest SGI boxes in terms of low quality poly-pushing power. Gaming has created the demand for faster/better gfx hardware, better memory busses, faster CPUs, etc. Nothing stresses the capabilities of hardware (and software!) more than gaming.
• A great deal of the clueful computer population got their start playing games... perhaps even id/apogee games. I remember the days when you could buy the Commander Keen source code for like $400 or so to see how to write your very own EGA/VGA side scoller with pc beeper sound. id, computing, and the state of game design has come along way since then
• Finally, everyone and their mom is cranking out games these days, but the _fun_ of the games isn't getting all that better. If not with technology and visual dazzlement, the place where id consistantly helps the gaming industry push forward is with the sheer fun value of the products they develop. When it comes down to it, a game is worthless unless its been play tested for months and still shown to be worth playing. I'd say that all of id's releases are still fun games to play, regardless of how long ago they were originally written.