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John Carmack On Consoles Vs. Personal Computers
Dave 'Fargo' Kosak writes "John Carmack addressed an audience of roughly 1,000 gamers this past weekend at QuakeCon 2000. This year he decided to speak on the issue of PCs vs console gaming -- and he proceeded to do so, for nearly an hour and a half, sans notes. He also discussed id Software's plans regarding the new console generation, the X-Box, mod-making, different operating systems and more. GameSpy has posted a full four-page
writeup."
With that said, there will always be certain genres of games I will want to play on consoles rather than PCs. Sports games, racing games, and 2 person fighting games, I'd much rather play on a console. Real Time Strategy games (ala Starcraft), First Person Shooters, and adventure games, I'd much rather play on a PC...I mean seriously, how on earth can you play a RTS or FPS on something with no mouse and low resolution??
Ahwell, I suppose all those damn Pokemon games will keep the consoles indefinitely alive, and in fact, twice as popular gaming platforms as the PC.
At 32, I'm already something of an old fogie, relative to many of my peers in the PC game business. I've been a programmer ever since the day I first got my hands on an Apple ][+ at the age of 14. Even with the threat of encroaching senility on the horizon, I can still remember debating the merits of 8-bit home computers vis-a-vis the primitive game consoles of the day. Those debates sounded an awful lot like the debates we're having today. The ultimate answer back then was that most gamers were better off keeping both platforms handy. I think that's still true.
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There were giants in the earth in those days. The "PC" platforms were the legendary 8-bit Apples, Ataris, and Commodores, while the "console" guys owned Colecovisions, Intellivisions, and Atari VCSs. The IBM PC platform hadn't made any significant inroads into consumer space by the early 80s, at least not in my neighborhood. Just as today, though, practically all of the people who had a home computer also owned a home videogame console. And just like today, you'd crank up your Atari if you wanted to play certain games (Missile Command, Space Invaders) and you'd boot your computer if you wanted to play others (Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, MS Flight Simulator). I don't remember anyone complaining about not being able to play a decent game of Zork on their Colecovision or Kaboom! on their Apple. Games that required more than the 'twitch and dodge' level of user interaction were played on the home computer, while those that relied on bright, colorful animated sprites were a natural fit for the consoles of the time.
I was (and am) different, though -- I didn't own a console as a kid, and never felt the slightest stirrings of desire for one. Still don't. When I wasn't playing games on my Apple, I was either cracking their copy protection and disassembling them, or making lame-ass attempts at writing my own. I learned how the Bresenham line algorithm worked by poring over the entrails of Ultima II's DNGDRAW.OBJ, and Karateka taught me what good sound and animation code looked like. When my friends and I would discuss the relative merits of console versus PC gaming, it would always come down to that: my platform of choice was a genuine creativity tool, and the other was just a thing they hooked up to their TVs to play a bunch of games I sucked at.
I could not have become a professional programmer and game developer if my folks had bought me a Colecovision instead of an Apple for Christmas in 1982, and neither could Carmack, Romero, Garriott, or many of the other eminences grise currently duking it out on JeffK's SmartyMan Gaem Designar Survivor Island. We all got our start more or less the same way: by making the most of an open platform.
So it's with some regret that I see PC game developers flocking to the PS2s and XBoxen of the world, cheerfully paying Microsoft and Sony ten bucks a box or more in hopes of deliverance from the PC's tech-support hassles and platform variability. The magic of the Apple ][ was that it was a general-purpose computing device that could do anything you wanted -- you could run the assemblers and editors you needed to build your game on the exact same piece of hardware that Nasir Gebelli, Richard Garriott, or Ken Williams had on their desks. There were no excuses -- you could do anything those guys could do, assuming you didn't suck.
Fortunately, that's still true of the PC world today. Even though our machines are close to five orders of magnitude faster than the old 1 MHz 8-bit home computers, any high-school kid with a PC still has access to an inexpensive, ubiquitous, open platform fit for nurturing new talent. (Microsoft bashers may object to my application of the term 'open platform' to a Wintel PC, but as far as I'm concerned, any machine I can write and sell code on without paying platform royalties is 'open' enough.)
My lengthy rant will have served its purpose if it inspires some of the die-hard console advocates out there to give a second thought to their own history. Few games more interesting than Super Mario Brothers really owe their origins to the proprietary arcade/console side of the business. Almost all the good stuff came from some bored, geeky kid fooling around on a home computer, or from college students with more access to general-purpose computer hardware than their professors knew what to do with.
I don't think PC gamers and console gamers are genuinely trapped in an us-versus-them situation, but if I'm wrong, and we really do have to draw battle lines in the sand, I know what side I'm on.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Yes, the linux sales figures were low. Low enough that they are certainly not going to provide an incentive for other developers to do simultaneous linux releases, which was a good chunk of my goal. The sales would cover the costs of porting, but they wouldn't make a bean-counter blink.
I think Loki did a fantastic job - they went above and beyond what was required, pestering us (a good thing in this case) about the linux deliverables, taking pre-orders, doing the tin box run, shipping CDs first, then boxes when available, etc.
There are a number of possible reasons why you might not have bought the linux specific version:
You couldn't find the game in stores near you. This is going to remain a problem for quite some time.
The game is available earlier for windows. Even with a simultaneous release, this is going to continue. Big publishers making large lot runs get priority, and that is just life.
The game costs more for linux. This is probably also not going to change. The wholesale prices are probably the same, but big stores severely discount popular titles and advertise them to bring customers in. This won't happen with linux versions.
Configuring 3D on linux is a significant chore. I expect this will largely be gone by the time we ship another game. As the DRI drivers mature and XF4.0 becomes standard in distributions, people should start having out-of-box 3D support.
The game runs slower in linux than under windows. While we did have a couple benchmark victories on some cards, the general rule will still stand: a high performance card on windows will probably have more significant effort expended on optimization than it will get from an open source driver. Nvidia's drivers may be the exception, because all of their windows optimization work immediately applies to the linux version, but it is valid for most of the mesa based drivers.
Trying to change this would probably have negative long-term consequences. There are certainly coders in the open source community that are every bit as good of optimizers as the driver writers at the card companies, but I have always tried to restrain them from going gung-ho at winning benchmarks against windows. Mesa is going to be with us five years from now, and dodgy optimizations are going to make future work a lot more difficult.
Loki's position is that the free availability of linux executables for download to convert windows versions into linux versions was the primary factor. They have been recommending that we stop making full executables available, and only do binary patches.
I hate binary patches, and I think that going down that road would be making life more difficult for the people playing our games.
That becomes the crucial question: How much inconvenience is it worth to help nurture a new market? We tried a small bit of it with Q3 by not making the linux executables available for a while. Is it worth even more? The upside is that a visibly healthy independent market would bring more titles to it.
The fallback position is to just have hybrid CD's. I'm pretty sure we can force our publishers to have a linux executable in an "unsupported" directory. You would lose technical support, you wouldn't get an install program, and you wouldn't have anyone that is really dedicated to the issues of the product, but it would be there on day 1.
John Carmack