Carmack About Q3A On Dreamcast

andr0meda writes: "C|Net's GameCenter recently interviewed John Carmack about Q3A's Dreamcast conversion. The interview was conducted after the QuakeCon talk John gave last weekend, which was Slashdotted earlier. Here are both parts of the lengthy interview: [1,2]"

Comments

Re:The PS2 Is Screwed

[John Carmack]

Make no mistake -- the PS2 is definately more powerful than the dreamcast. For some types of things, it is easier to get a dreamcast game to look better due to a better back end filter, autoamtically working mip-mapping, and larger addressable texture space, but the second generation PS2 games should really start showing off the increased power. Dreamcast should be able to undercut the price, but I don't know how significant that will be. There are few things that I would really call "revolutionary", but that doesn't mean that Sony didn't build a good machine. It just happens to be built with a set of tradeoffs that I don't completely agree with. John Carmack

Two things

[jfedor]

Many people don't realize that:

- There will be a keyboard and a mouse that you can attach to Dreamcast, they were shown at QuakeCon (here is a pic of the mouse and you can see the keyboard here).

- Sega does plan to release a "LAN adapter" that will allow LAN/DSL/cable modem connection, as stated in this interview.

Just wanted to clarify on that.

-jfedor

Re:Vector quantization compression?

[John Carmack]

You have confused two different forms of compression.

S3TC is a modified form of block truncation coding (BTC), which involves selecting two colors and generating two other colors by interpolation. This is done with 4x4 blocks, giving very nearly 4 bits per pixel. This is nice because it doesn't require any additional tables.

Vector quantization is a general process where you try to take a large set of number strings and pick some subset that can be used to aproximate all of them reasonably. In the dreamcast's case, you specify 256 2x2 blocks, so each pixel is represented by 2 bits, but you also have 2k of codebook overhead. This works out pretty well for smaller textures, but large textures often come out badly because there just aren't enough codebook entries to reasonably aproximate it.

John Carmack

The PS2 Is Screwed

[tealover]

If it doesn't impress Carmack, meaning that he doesn't think it's revolutionary and that he won't develop for it, it's a sad statement for Sony. I think the Xbox is going to whup up on the PS2's ass. It's going to be easier to develop for and it offers more avenues for developers to explore.

I agree with John that it is a shame what Sony has done to the Dreamcast with its incessant and unwarranted hype of the PS2. I think Sony will get a taste of its own medicine with the torrential $500 million marketing campaign for the Xbox.

Any way this shakes out, competition is good for us. We'll get cheaper consoles faster and better games. I just hope we don' get into the stupidity that Sony began with locking down developers to one console. EA and Square made a deal with the devil. I hope it doesn't turn around to bite them in the ass. Actually, being a Dreamcast owner, I hope it does.