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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.
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