Carmack: Lord of the Games

seer writes: "This article on Red Herring is a nice look at the interworkings of id software, most specifically their famous employee John Carmack. It delves deeply into the fact that id has stayed a very small company and dabbles with other topics such as Carmack's tendency to stay away from Microsoft 'standards' and the whole DooM ]I[ debacle. An interesting read."

Comments

Not another Java

[Hentai]

There was a point in id software's evolution where John Carmack almost adopted Java as the "scripting language" for Quake 3. This got abandoned REAL quick when it wasn't fast enough.

Java is all about interoperability, then ease of design, then speed.

Id software's game engines are all about speed, then interoperability, then ease of use. All the same, they STILL tend to be pretty easy to use, since they aren't motivated by business decisions as much as they are by making a really, really cool game engine [while this has positive business ramifications, obviously, that's not why they do it].

Quake 3 is a SUPERB game engine on all platforms. I can write my own game as a Quake 3 mod, and without any recompiling, have it instantly work, at high framerate and with no bugs or glitches, on three different platforms. Show me how Java can do that.

Id software's game engines ALREADY surpass Java. It's not going to get worse from here; it's going to get better.

Re:Directions for Id

[MajroMax]

Money not a major motivator? I wonder how honest that statement is. More importantly, where can Id be going with Carmack's other "attitudes?"

You may be missing the bit that says "Mr. Carmack, a multimillionaire."

Once you're able to buy just about anything you want, the ability to buy more stuff isn't that attractive. Beyond that, "more money" would come with an inevitable loss of control -- to take ID Software to a large company would mean hiring legions of programmers and managers.

At that point, it becomes what most large buisnesses become -- merely brand names. When that happens, it's no longer Carmack's baby, and it probably wouldn't be something he enjoys.

Ergo, ID Software stays small.

Could they use actual technology names?

[roystgnr]

To this reporter, Carmack isn't using OpenGL, an existing 3D graphics standard which Microsoft refused to adopt in favor of their (for years inferior) attempt to lock programmers in to DirectX, he's using "his own graphics technology" which is "almost like a religious thing for him".

Gameplay vs. Technology

[Y-Crate]

But Mr. Carmack and his company have their critics. Their games are bloody and repetitive. Many former Id employees moved on because they tired of making the same game where players shoot anything that moves

Which is why I'm glad that the've decided to keep all the engine work in-house, while farming out a lot of the actual game development to more qualified parties.

By the time Quake 3 Arena came out, I think a lot of people realized that id had basically become a brilliant game engine company that should just cast off the illusions that they were experts in creating innovative gameplay. Because I think, while you can debate the merits of the technology behind id's products until the end of time, it became clear to many that the innovative gameplay was happening somewhere else. While the engine was brillaint, Quake 3 the game was the same old, same old. Deathmatch in a brown castle.

While many people had not-so-kind things to say about the multiplayer aspects of the origional Unreal, when Unreal Tournamnet came out, Epic was pushing the bounderies of online gameplay, while id was left in the dust, cranking out the same thing yet again.

Not to say Quake 3 was a crap game, a hell of a lot of people enjoyed it then and enjoy it to this day. I'm just saying that it was part of a downward trend at id, one that they seem to have addressed, and I commend John Carmack for that.

A few corrections

[John Carmack]

A few corrections to the article:

"My own graphics technology"
is OpenGL.

"Mr. Carmack also plays computer games in the office with his coworkers"
I played Q3 quite a bit, but not much since then. The team focus of TeamArena and Wolfenstein just isn't my favorite type of game.

"Polygon counts"
The Doom engine is not an ultra-high poly count engine, because it is built around dynamic lighting and shadowing, but it is still a large step up from our previous games. Typical scenes will have around 150,000 polygons, versus 10,000 for Q3. There will certainly be other games with higher raw polygon counts, but that is really focusing on the trees, not the forest (image quality). The large numbers that have occasionally been tossed around are the polygon counts for the high detail characters that are used in the generation of normal maps for the real time rendering. Some characters are over 500,000 polygons in their original form.

"It looks like the type of game that is so thrilling to play that gamers will do so over and over again, even though it lacks a narrative plot."

Unlike everything we have done before, the new Doom actually DOES have a real plot, and I think it is going to be presented well. I don't really expect most people to believe us at this point, but wait and see...

"The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3"

It is designed for full impact on a GeForce-3, but it still runs on a GeForce-1 or Radeon.

They didn't reproduce the graph of our revenues from the print version, but that was also way off base. I guess they estimated them based on our title sales, but while Doom II remains our best selling title, we have much better royalty arrangements now than we did back then, so we make more money today.

John Carmack