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VoodooExtreme Interview With John Carmack
We've had quite a number of submissions concerning the VodooExtreme interview with John Carmack. Day One is on the site as well Day Two. Day Three goes up (Surprise!) tomorrow - so check back there tomorrow, 'cuz I'm not posting it again. *grin*
Well, today we learned:
Nobody understands the need for a DVD full of Linux apps
There's legal liability in having a web site
Voodoo cards sure are zippy
"Hackers" is an old book, and we don't care anymore
CueCat is as doomed as everyone thought it was
Stuff's still happening in the Mozilla world
The FBI is evil
Robots are cool
OS-X has a BSD kernel, which should be nifty
Geeks live in houses that any right-thinking person would avoid
AMD proves that Moore's law ain't croaked yet
John Carmack is brilliant. That really doesn't need to be said. He's a top notch programmer, and a 3D graphics expert. He exerts great influence over PC video hardware. He brought 3D graphics research from decades earlier to the PC. He came up with some cool ways of getting high-end looking graphics on fairly low-end PCs.
Obviously, though, this is all very technology oriented. There's more to games than that. It gets tiring to read interviews in which he is called the Top Dog of computer games, and all the questions are about 3D APIs and which video card is best and what console has faster hardware. In short, he's The King of 3D Tech on the PC, but this is being equated with the driving pulse of computer games. In a way it's sort of depressing that PC gaming has been reduced to video cards and benchmarks. This isn't Mr. Carmack's fault, of course, but it all feels very materialistic and empty.
LOL. I don't think the moderator realized this was satire.
To the uninitiated: VoodooExtreme is a news collection site. While it produces some of its own content, much of it is just links all over the web. You know, like slashdot. They excuse it by giving credit to all the contributors.
It's a thin line, though, between performing a service by seeking out cool stories, and just ripping off other sites' news. This point was best made by OldManMurray, who just linked to all of VoodooExtreme. It used to be at this link to "marvin sedate", but that gave me some odd redirect to here, so they probably stopped doing it back in February, which is what the latter links to. Still funny.
PVS was The Right Thing when level geometry counts were much lower. With tens of thousands of polygons in a scene, creating a cluster tree directly from that becomes completely unrealistic from a space and time perspective.
The options are to either do PVS with a simplified version of the world, or ignore the geometry and just work with portal topology.
Unreal used a scan-line visibility algorithm, which crippled it's ability to have high poly counts or high framerates with hardware accelerators.
Tim Sweeny knows full well that the architecture is very wrong for modern systems, but many of the original decisions were based on earlier software technologies. Unreal was supposed to be a "killer app" for the Pentium-200 MMX processor.
I have a lot of respect for Tim and Unreal, but the visibility algorithm in Unreal turned out to be a bad call. He is changing it for future work.
John Carmack
Though it may be worthy of trolling or flamebait.
GPL is meant to allow people the freedom of using code. It means anyone anywhere anytime can use and hack and play with the code to suit their needs, to scratch their itches.
It just so happens that GPL would not help id. It would not even help the community, I think, because anyone who can casually jump in and 'browse' and edit and play with the code, would probably be able to write this kind of stuff from scratch in the first place. It's highly specialized, highly tuned, highly precise code to do things tight and fast.
I guess it would benefit non-owners/writers of code if we could look through it and learn from it, but that is almost exactly why he GPLs his old out of date code. It's more useful as training material than it is for release/sales.
If someone wants a GPL high performance 3d engine, there is Crystal Space. Otherwise, ID owns Quake3, and can decide *when* and *if* to GPL it. No one else.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Without the 'technology as game phase' we wouldn't have the Half Lifes and Hexens, would we?
ID does what it does well, and everyone else mooches off them. If no one is doing what you need, in terms of games, then go do the noble, honorable, open source thing, and go scratch your itch. Buy a copy of Quake[123] and go brew your own game. Code your own logic, make your own models, map your own levels, monsters, weapons, stories, etc. And then release it/sell it/distribute it. Because others are just as weary as you are, and will give you much praise/wealth/accolades for your contribution to their life.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
If John Carmack isn't the founder of modern gaming, I don't know who is.
Let's think about this. There were 3D games in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Remember Atari's Hard Drivin' coin-op from 1989? Fully 3D polygonal graphics, including realistic physics (and physics didn't start becoming a buzzword until 1997 or so). I could name dozens more 3D games released before 1992. The Wolfenstein 3D graphics technique of ray casting was used in a couple of games from 1983 (Way Out and Capture the Flag). There were multiplayer networked games before Doom and Quake, too. You need to learn your gaming history!
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom jumpstarted 3D gaming on the PC. There were 3D PC games before that, but John Carmack did a bang-up job of bringing us all up to date. Doom and Quake (which, remember, had John Romero as co-designer), are linked to the rise of 3D graphics on the PC, and the rise of the First Person Shooter Genre.
The mistake you are making is saying that gaming can be equated to these items. No, it cannot be. Consider Civilization, The Sims, X-Com, all the Ultima games (including Ultima Underworld), everything Sid Meier has done, everything Shigeru Miyamoto has done, the Freespace games, the Final Fantasy series, The Need for Speed games (which started before Quake, BTW), and so on and so on.
A classic fanboy mistake is thinking that not only are the Quake and Unreal engines the epitome of 3D technology, but that the development of these engines are the foundation for gaming. Neither of these is true. It's just that all the other 3D game developers out there aren't poster children for PC graphics card manufacturers.
Am I insulting John Carmack? Certainly not. I'm insulting the fanboys who insist that Carmack and Sweeney are the Sole Carriers of The Gaming Torch, well, that's just misguided.