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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."
Mr. Gates sent a video with congratulations that teased, "I just want you to know that I can write slicker and tighter code than John."
This is the funniest thing Bill Gates has EVER said.
Mr. Carmack is unique in another way. His success demonstrates an alternative path for entrepreneurs. Id Software, in Mesquite, Texas, started small and self-funded, and is staying small even as it rakes in tens of millions of dollars from its games and game-technology licensing fees. "All we could get out of growth is more money," says Mr. Carmack, a multimillionaire. "More money is not a major motivator for me."
Money not a major motivator? I wonder how honest that statement is. More importantly, where can Id be going with Carmack's other "attitudes?"
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
From an employee who watched 3 years of development die in 6 months because their entire company programming changed to java.....I second the uh-oh notion.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
he is a god amoung men and is the main contributing reason as to why i no longer have a social life.. long live john carmack
... are you still dating him ?? :)
so
Please, somebody, mod this as funny for the first time on my life !!!!
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
" The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3."
I am thoroughly confused...
"He told a faithful crowd that the new Doom will have images comprised of 250,000 polygons, compared with only 10,000 or so in Quake III. That's not far away from the 1.5 million- polygon characters in the animated film Shrek, which set a new standard for realism for computer-animated cartoon characters."
So basically they only need a six-fold increase in polygons to reach what Shrek had- not to mention that the environment is constantly changing as characters interact with it, whereas Shrek was always the same. Oops.
No sig for you.
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".
...since the eighties? I seem to recall that he has not, but I could be mistaken.
I'm the stranger...posting to
This article is the most motivating article I have ever read. He not only tries to write code that will port well in order to insure his product gets to as many people as possible, but unlike other stupid software companies he refuses to overextend his company to more the 17 people.
I've worked at alot of companies and one thing is for sure. Everything starts to go to shit when you can't walk over and talk to all the other developers.
This would be the ideal company to work for and they make the ideal product. Then they let the community do the beta testing. I love this man. His ideas are harsh on the MS way to do things which is probably why they work so well. Instead of employing rediculous amounts of people inefficently turn a mediocre product and then either market it to hell and back to make everyone think they need it, or force all of their existing customers onto it.
They keep a small number of really smart people in one room and turn one of the best products out, and let the product practically sell itself. This is how things would be in an ideal world, but the idea of making the best product so that people will pick it over others is wearing thin, esspecially now that Microsoft has bought most of the GL patents from SGI.
This is really an unfair comparison -- you're comparing oranges and apple pie.
From a compatibility perspective, Java is all about cross-platform-binary-compatibility. To do that, it essentially needs to emulate a consistent set of machine-interfaces -- that's where the Virtual Machine comes in. Beyond that, Java is also supposed to be a "next generation" "idiot-proof" language, and to that end it sacrificed speed for safety (of code).
Carmack's code is about source compatibility. So far as I know, the primary language for ID Software's 1st-person shooters is C/C++. That language, to the bane of novice programmers everywhere, has a tendency to make absolutely no assumptions for you, and as a result well-written code can be highly efficent [gaining an immediate speed advantage over comparably well-written Java code]. Of course, it does mandate some level of system-speficic code somewhere in there, but a good programmer (like, for example, Carkack) will encapsulate it behind an #IFDEF or two.
The only thing that really stops people from writing cross-platform code is system-specific libraries (Like DirectX). Once your code is built around something that tends to be as fundamental as DirectX, a transplant to another library for a different platform is no easy task.
Carmack's "common code," is therefore merely smart design. As the article says, he shies away from the system-specific libraries, so porting becomes a much easier task.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Having seen Shrek, I know there is more onscreen at any given moment than a single character.
Those apples are nowhere near the size of those oranges.
I want bells and whistels to go off on my computer whenever Mr Carmack posts a message to /. :)
:) :) :) :) :)
Seriously, this would be cool. Shoot, granted already his postings make front page news on many gaming news sites (yes the front page news thing is a joke, of course it is on the front page. ^_^ ) but I want to know RIGHT AWAY!
*IDEA!!!*
Hey, how about we all get some funds together and pay Mr. Carmack to develop the next version of Nethack?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I couldn't help but be distracted by the author's tendancy to introduce people, then refer to them as Mr Surname, as if we've stepped into some Charles Dickens novel:
..
Mr Carmack, Mr Spock, Mr Jobs, Mr Gates, Mr Hollenshead, Mr Steed, Mr Cloud.
They forgot Mr Ego, but then he has been missing from Id for a little while now
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
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.
I dunno. John Romero looks like he should be posing for Playboy. ; )
Even thou FPS games dont make the level of sales of everquest or pokemon, ID game engines are the best for FPS shooters.
The norm at Lan parties are mostly ID engines based games. RTCW, MOHAA Demo, Q3A, Q3A Urban Terror, Action Quake2, the only 2 games that wasnt, where Counter Strike and Ghost Recon. The main game for money was CS, but we had so much fun playing Q3A UT, we had to push back the CS tourney.
-
Amiga OS is out for your x86
But as the article stated, Id makes roughly $1 million per employee... hell, at that clip, Carmack can buy back John Romero's car.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Catacomb Abyss Released: Dec 1991 The first FPS. All the rest are ripoffs of the gameplay, get key open door, see monster, shoot it.
develop the next version of Nethack? :)
With significant respect to mr. carmack... no. He's welcome to design supsersexy fps or whatever interface, but I (and I think a lot of nh players share the sentiment) like nethack just the way it is. The current interface really can't be beat for straightforwardness. Besides, we all know that it's not appearances that matter.
And the devteam does a damn fine job on their own.
:) Excuse me. I'm... easily excitable... about these things.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Take a look at the FTP site: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 are all available. You still have to have the map files and other game data from a "real" copy of the game in order to play it, but all of Carmack and Co's magic is up there for study.
In short, they have quite a history of "giving back to the community." Even for games (such as Q3) where the full source isn't released, id always releases SDK's (for lack of a better term) to allow anyone that wants to the chance to create add-ons, extensions, and "total conversions" -- new games based on the existing code.
Very, very, cool.
You are uninformed why John Carmack did not use Java. FlipCode had the following pertaining to Carmack's view on Java: John Carmack considered using Java in id's Q3. He discusses several pros and cons. His biggest problem with Java was (believe it or not) portability -- It seems that Linux's and Solaris' implementations of the JVM are lacking (with respect to JNI) as compared to Windows'. However, John does say at the end of this interview, "As for embedding... If I did want to go off and start fresh, I would likely try doing almost everything in Java." John Carmack considered using Java in id's games for quite some time, "... I want Quake 3: Arena running on every platform that has hardware- accelerated OpenGL and an Internet connection.... I had been working under the assumption that Java was the right way to go, but ... The programming language [used in Quake3] is interpreted ANSI C. The game will have an interpreter for a virtual RISC-like CPU." (Unreal followed a similar approach.) ...
"When it comes around to the next development cycle, I will make the Java decision again." As for embedding: "We are still working with significant chunks of an existing code base. If I did want to go off and start fresh, I would likely try doing almost everything in Java."
-- Game Developer Magazine, July 1999 issue. As more and more developers start taking advantage of all that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has to offer game development, extensible Java game objects may become the norm. More advanced players may even start to demand it - who wants to learn a proprietary script syntax for each new game they want to extend? If Sun delivers what they've promised, Java may (in time) become the de facto standard. Or not... 8-)
Besides, there already is a graphic, SDL-based version of nethack: Falcon's Eye.
Last time they did this we got Java. And look what it has done for our web browsing experience! Oh wait, you don't like lag?
Java is (sort of) slow because Java uses a virtual machine, basically emulating everything. Id Software's code runs natively on each platform, so it runs at full speed. It's easy to port to new platforms, because it's designed with cross-platform compatibility in mind from the beginning. Some other games and apps are written just for win32 on x86 with no thought given to other platforms, so when they decide it'd be nice to have a Mac or Linux version, major chunks of code have to be completely rewritten. Companies like Loki and MacSoft specialize in exactly that. Ever notice that a lot of games are released for win32 6 months before other platforms? Quake 3 was released simultaneously for win32, Linux and Mac OS.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I quote, "Thanks to profit sharing, some employees make $450,000 to $600,000 in a good year. With such pay, the company expects employees to put in long, hard hours, says Todd Hollenshead." That's why no one ever wonders why John Romero no longer works at id.
My guess it that would be done like teh "loaders" where done in the doom/aliens total conversion.
Hey, at least it would still be portable. :) Ok not the same immense portability that the current Nethack has, but hey, it would work on at least 3 OSs. :)
:)
Make him keep the current game design, just have him write an underlying graphics engine, hehe.
Actualy the original Quake (and Quake 2?) have been shown to be able to run in text only modes, so hey, a Carmack version of Nethack may very well support terminals as well!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Carmack and Torvalds should have a child...
I actually thought Adrian Carmack was Johns brother as I remember reading it somewhere, one of the articles was obviously wrong. I'm sure someone will give an autoritive answer on that one.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Or at least that's what my local MSCE believes...
Turambar
------------------------------
Common sense is not so common.
--Voltaire
This sounds weird to most native English-speakers, but not putting in an appropriate address (Mr., Dr., Ms., etc.) may be construed as an insult in Japanese society. Dean Takahashi is probably just being polite.
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, Ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-Microsoft-ishi amal fauthut bur
And speaking of politeness, it was rude of you to write this language here. (Even though it's completely true...)
Turambar
------------------------------
Common sense is not so common.
--Voltaire
By Dean Takahashi
February 1, 2002
...
The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3.
I would argue that when it comes to tech matters, it often takes a nerd to write news for nerds. This guy's so far from any real understanding of the tech world that what he says, well, just doesn't matter.
"Microsoft tried to launch a graphics standard for PC hardware in the early '90s" We'd be talking 96 here, not early 90's.
"is sticking to his own graphics technology" It's called opengl.
I didn't bother to read further, obviously the article is written by someone who is clueless.
Althought, it may be more accurate to say "he programs governments now."
Anyone want to make guesses at how many hours Bill Gates has spent playing Carmack's games?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Deus Ex
Java, on the other hand, is a GENERAL PURPOSE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. You could use it to write ANY of the above kind of games, or a client-server application, or a spreadsheet, or pretty much anything else.
You also need to remember that the Java Programming Language and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) are totally and completely different things. Java source code can be compiled into native machine code, which will run as fast or faster than comperable C++ code. Other languages ( like Python) can be compiled into Byte Codes and run under the JRE
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
GeForce4 is set to be announced at the 5th of February by Nvidia.
...if I can find multiple things they got wrong on things I know about, then I seriously doubt they're getting the stuff right that I don't know about.
Mr. Carmack, cofounder and lead programmer at Id Software, is sticking to his own graphics technology. He is an absolute techno-purist who seeks to produce a common code that can run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems--something he can't do with Microsoft's technology.
It's not his own graphics technology, it's OpenGL, which is used by many programmers around the globe. And he doesn't do it because he wants to have portable code. That's a part of it, sure, but he uses OpenGL mainly because it's easier to code, which means less development time and less debugging time. Also, it allows for greater flexibility. Not to mention, with Direct3D, can we say, "namespace pollution"? I thought so.
And by being such a purist, he delights hard-core gamers and graphics experts.
Oh yes, I get every id game simply because he "sticks to his own graphics technology". Did the author actually consider that he delights hard-core gamers simply because he creates realistic games that have fun gameplay and stunning visuals?
The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3.
Newly released about a year ago...
He told a faithful crowd that the new Doom will have images comprised of 250,000 polygons, compared with only 10,000 or so in Quake III. That's not far away from the 1.5 million- polygon characters in the animated film Shrek, which set a new standard for realism for computer-animated cartoon characters.
Notice he said "images comprised of 250,000 polygons", and "That's not far from the 1.5 million- polygon characters in...Shrek". This isn't like comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to Mack trucks.
No comment.
Id can produce an action game with a minimum of man hours. I think once you start to move into say, the RPG genre the man hours increase significantly.
Think of all the media that comes with a Square game. CGI movies, voice acting, the presence of a script with dialogue, a plot, the list is very long. In order to do something like this Id would have to expand, which they're very much against. In short, don't expect Id to change genres anytime soon!
?-|||-----x<*))))><
Ummmm... nope. She's actually an ex-id employee. Who had quite a hand in their business development. And now runs a production company.
I'd write more, but I'm sure Carmack could correct this himself. You did know he reads this site, right?
I suppose if you insist on bashing KillCreek's not-so-impressive surgical augmentation, that's your thing. But ripping on Carmack's wife, in a thread about him? Man, that's low....
WRONG! Try Descent.
The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3.
Did they mean GeForce4 or are all the GeForce3 cards on the market right now fakes?
"It legitimized the shareware movement, starting in 1993 with progressive releases of the Doom franchise, which generated more than $100 million in revenue (even though roughly 15 million copies of the original were downloaded for free). "
Now if only the RIAA and other places would read that and understand that sometimes when done properly that such things do work in a internet world.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
I seem to remember SpectreVR came out before Stellar7.
...
Also, it was one of the first (if not the first) multiplayer LAN games, too
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
this article does have a bit of a point. If GLQuake never came out we'd have seen an onslaught of Software REndered crap. GLQuake made the relatively big push to hardware rendered3D which gave us 3D chips in even the cheapest piece of junk today.
Although I think that's more of Romero's fault IIRC.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Remember when they were talking about Quake coming out, and the battles were supposed to be akin to Virtua Fighter? That would be really wild! And you could supposedly pick up bodies, stack them, use them as shields...
Or when id software made Commander Keen, it took some wild imagination to come up with levels and ideas for that game.
id has a lot of imagination and I only drool at the possibilities, I wonder what their next game will be like after DOOM, since I'm sure they will have perfected the FPS genre! (Although a lot of us thought that when Quake 3 came out ;)
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
And so the poor man who just wants to be left alone, and not a cult icon...
... is written about, and posted on slashdot.
most of my web lag is from ad servers
http://www.junkbuster.com will fix that for you.
and aggressive Flash animations
And this too, if it's flash included in the ads.
Even on my DSL connection, Junkbuster makes most pages on news sites and such load literally twice as fast as they would otherwise.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Alright, all these replies telling me he concentrates on game engines. Fine. I know.
If Id's actually going to sell games to end users, though, then they should expect to face criticism for them. The engine's nice, no argument about that. But the game themselves are extremely repetitive, which is why so many people have left Id after getting bored with the Same Old FPS With Better Graphics©.
And to everyone complaining about how Carmack himself would rather focus on game engines, please note that I didn't name him in my post; I criticized Id.
I can agree that a business publication would want to avoid technical discussion, I think you're missing the tone that the article presented. Read it again:
The message is plain. Carmack avoids an industry standard developed by Microsoft called DirectX. Everybody else uses it. Instead, Carmack is some kind of technological religious zealot who uses his own system.
Granted... the article does go on to point out that his decission allows his software to run on many platforms. Something Microsoft's technology does not allow. But its possible that someone unfamiliar with the industry might miss this message and attribute Carmack's refusal of microsoft as another aspect of his ecentric personality.
It would be different if the writer had reported Carmack has adopted an open graphics standard over a more restrictive standard provided by Microsoft... despite Microsoft's professed incredulity over the choice.
Isn't Elite the first 3D game? It's the first i ever saw anyway
From the article: "That's not what we're doing," Mr. Carmack says. "We're doing entertainment. Saying it's art is a kind of sophistry from people who want to aggrandize our industry."
I totally disagree with this statement. I view coding (particularly coding for games) as something that straddles the gulf between work and art. It may not be 100% pure art, but it's certainly not aggrandizing to say that there is a fair amount of artistry in well conceived and written code. The first 25 years of my life was spent pursuing a variety of artistic endeavors (writing, music, visual arts) and I get nearly the exact same feeling in me when I'm writing code as when I'm composing music or drawing. There is definitely some link between those activities. I feel the same creative impulses firing when I'm programming as when I'm doing any other art form and I feel that same sense of artistic fulfillment or satisfaction when I'm finished with a project. It probably sounds a little fruit-loopy, but it's the truth. There is an element of artistry in writing code. I have no doubt about that.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
From the article: In 1996, Id created the first true 3D game, Quake[....]
I guess this depends on your definition of "3D" in games. I was under the impression that true 3D meant that passages and rooms could exist on top of each other, creating true multi-layer scenarios. This is something that Doom could not do, but that Bungie's Marathon did. By that definition, Marathon should get the honor of being the "first true 3D" game. Marathon was released well before Quake, although I don't have the exact year at hand.
I suppose the author is probably referring to (or maybe being confused by) the fact that the monsters in Quake are models as opposed to sprites. IMO, true 3D would mean a true 3D environment not monsters. Oh well... nitpicking, I suppose.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Yes! Exactly!
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Maybe this belief expalains why he told IBM that 640k of memory was more then any one would ever want.
I have 640M of mem and still want more
-Trevelyan
Yeah, Q2 did suck, i never played q3 full but the demo wasn't all that great. I disagree about MOH though. MOH is a good game, its not great but makes for a very fun single player game. Except for that god damn sniper mission. Wolf was just bad.
Probably the best FPS to come out last year would be Serious Sam, thats what Doom 3 really should be like, but it won't. Doom 3 will end up being like Quake2 but with much better graphics and probably better AI.
The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3
Obviously Nvidia is lying, when they claim to have already released this chipset. :)
Not quite. Descent was out before that, and it is even more 3-D than Quake.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Actually, he's building a spaceship.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
For my graphics class in college we had to write an Asteroids program in OpenGL. I decided that it was kind of lame to do all the work to render asteroids and ships in 3-D only to shoot them in a 2-D plane. So I implemented a 3-D space shooter involving asteroids. It soon became apparent that in order for there to be enough asteroids to hit you there had to be A LOT of asteroids. The number that sticks in my head is 400. Since shooting 400 asteroids was pretty dumb I added some Tie-Fighters to the mix and had the objective be to shoot the Tie-Fighters.
All the work in this class was done on Macintosh computers. I was the proud owner of a Mac Performa 6200. It ran at 66 MHz, with no 3-D graphics card. I actually got my little game to run at a reasonable speed on it. Everybody else in the class wrote games that were played in a 2-D plane and many of them didn't run fast even on the brand new G3s that were showing up around campus.
Now for the point of my story. After graduation I went to work for a certain company and they gave my a nice laptop. It ran Windows. I decided it would be nice to try to play my game on it. The port was EXTREMELY easy. I had to add a crappy Win32 main and I had to replace the keypress codes since I hadn't used GLUT for kepresses since it didn't work with multiple keypresses. I also yanked the sound code out since it was Mac specific. But it took only a few hours to have the game up and running.
If you want to see the result you can get it here. Source is there too.
I later loaded Linux on my laptop and ported the game to Linux. It took a bit longer to find working keypress calls. I ended up using SDL without porting the whole game to SDL. The result was a little ugly but the game worked just fine. I haven't invested the time needed to polish up the Linux version is all.
Looking back I know that it would be very easy to write this OpenGL based game in such a way that it would run on all three of these platforms with a simple recompile if I had used #IFDEFs. Being lazy and busy with other things I haven't done that. But it is impressive how portable a game written in OpenGL can be.
Lasers Controlled Games!
he can do it all in 640k of memory, too!
"The new Doom likely will require a no less powerful chip than the soon-to-be-released Nvidia GeForce3. "
?? This is a *NEW* article?
I am utterly sick of these silly, superficial and sycophantic articles. There is simply no reason for them to exist. It seems that a pragmatic analysis of id and its employees has yet to be written. It's one thing to see stupid 'fanboyism' (E.g "UNREAL SUX0RZ!!!111") posted by the shallow morons who buzz around the VoodooExtreme comment boards like flies around shit, but another thing to see it on supposedly reputable and objective news sites.
I strongly disagree that John Carmack is id. What he is is a very intelligent and motivated individual that has been in the game industry for a very long time. Thus, he has a great deal of power and leverage over other companies. The fact that id created a great many 'firsts' (or at the very least evolved previously foetal genres to an acceptable level) compounds this. However, there are many other people in the game industry who are equally skilled. They, however, may not be in the position to fully exploit their talents. They may be employed by a company that has the technological ability to make 'quantum leap' titles, but a lack of inclination. Managerial oppression is epidemic wherever you look, much to the detriment of many companies. When you are management, things are much easier (Granted, id is more of a 'flat pyramid' than most companies. So, things aren't as simple as one might assume).
Indeed, the real 'computer graphics experts' don't work in the game industry. The best opportunities are actually found in disciplines like professional flight simulation or non-real-time graphics technology development (E.g Renderman), not game creation. People like Alan Watt, Jim Blinn and Eric Haines (Slap yourself if you said "Who?") work at companies like Pixar, SGI, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Autodesk. It is these people who develop new techniques, publish them at SIGGRAPH and provide game developers (among others) with algorithms with which to implement in their engines. That isn't to say that game developers simply perform implementations, innovation is essential for any kind of specialised task, but it is the work of many hundreds of individuals (most of whom the average Quake player has never heard of) that has produced the plethora of techniques that the game 'Gods' rely on.
When articles assume that 'John Carmack is id' blame and praise are grossly misattributed. Of course, there is a great deal of overlap in the roles of team members, but praising John Carmack for the finely balanced weapons in Quake3 is utterly ludicrous. In this case, id's creative team (Robert Duffy etc) miss out on the recognition they deserve. If John Carmack were really the hyper quick, hyper intelligent polymath that people make him out to be, id's employee list would be one person long. It isn't. id is (take a deep breath, this may shock you) a team of highly skilled individuals that when working in concert have the ability to produce great games. Each should receive the recognition they deserve.
Consider this, would people idolise John Carmack if id's games were terrible?
I remember seeing posted somewhere, maybe a on usenet or something, a long time ago. Pretty funny, I guess.
Subj: Wolf-3D Section: Action/Arcade Games
From: Ty Graham 72350,2636 # 191387, * No Replies *
To: Id Software 72600,1333 Date: 24-Jul-92 18:27:27
Jay, just thought I'd drop a note to let you know how popular Wolf3D is
here at Microsoft. It seems like I can't walk down a hall without hearing
'Mein Leben' from someone's office. I hope you guys are getting revenue
from all this.
Anyway, we were sitting around talking the other day, discussing games for
Windows, and someone said 'What are those cool guys at Id doing?'. So how
about it. Are you guys looking at Win games at all? Win32?
In a perfect world, I'd have you guys port the Wolf engine to a multiuser
maze game for Windows for Workgroups. We need a good M'user Win game.
Anyway some thoughts.
Ty Graham (Microsoft)
Wolf3D in Windows for Workgroups? Sitting next to the Microsoft Hearts Network? Hah.
J
FWIW, Plan 9's source has no #if's and there are no machine dependent #ifdefs in any of the source[1] and it runs on a bunch of architectures.
Plan 9 successor, Inferno, has no #if's and no #ifdef's[2] and runs on even more architectures.
In fact Plan 9/Inferno compiler suite doesn't even support #if [1].
-rr
[1] http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/plan9c.html
[2] The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike
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
That's some very useful information. I feel more productive at work already.
I know the article is about Caramack, but it was such a good bedtime story, I was wondering whatever happened to the fired Mr. Steed.
Anyone know whether he was asked back, refused to come back, or still holds a grudge?
In the PC game arena, No one other then Carmak really. GL would probably still be used in simulators and other high-end, non-pc apps. But I don't think SGI or anyone really, other then carmak, is really pushing GL on the desktop.
The success of GL on the desktop is really mostly because of what Carmak has done with it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You could write the games, they'd just be slower. Duh.
Now, lets see you write a webserver in QuakeC, how about a relational database, or a P2P app. And do it quickly. Yeh, you can make your own game in Quake. Who cares. In java, you can do anything.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's always best to get the straight poop. (I especially liked the idea :) that OpenGL=id proprietary!) Your plans sound great. As a misanthrope, I'm particularly glad that there will be less teamplay emphasis and more plot. Escapism is best when there's some discovery and surprise.
Keep up the great work!
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
carmack is cool in that he's one of the last bastions of hope for non microsoft controlled game development (i.e. he uses open gl).
long live open gl (hopefully)!
"I guess this depends on your definition of "3D" in games. I was under the impression that true 3D meant that passages and rooms could exist on top of each other, creating true multi-layer scenarios. This is something that Doom could not do, but that Bungie's Marathon did. By that definition, Marathon should get the honor of being the "first true 3D" game."
:)
You are right that Quake wasn't the first true 3D-game, or even the first true 3D-Shooter. If true 3D means objects and world made of filled polygons, games like Driller would surely qualify. It might even qualify as the first FPS.
Marathon, however, used a technique called Raycasting for the environment, and sprites for the characters/objects, and this is also the case for Doom, Wolf3D, Duke3D etc. Raycasting works by having a two dimensional map(or several maps above eachother, as done in Marathon and Duke3D to create rooms above rooms), and then scan what is within the players field of view from his current position/direction.
A Very simplyfied explanation:
Imagine a chessboard where all the black squares exept a small rectangle in the middle of the board are replaced with white squares. You are in one of the corners, and are facing the oposite corner. The engine scans what you can see within your 90 degrees field of vision , and whenever it "hits" a black square or the walls of the chessboard, it stops and put a wall-texture there. White squares are ignored. What you would see from your position in the corner is a square room with a small stonehengeish rectangle in the middle of the room. Ofcourse, the Marathon engine is far more advanced, but the Wolf3D engine actually used squares with either an CLOSED(wall) or OPEN-state.
I'm not sure, but I think I have read somewhere that John Carmack was the first to use this technique in the game Hovertank (minus textured walls) that was released in May 1991.
I wish my english was better... This page has working code for a raycasting engine, and explains the consept far deeper than I am able to.
I propose to organize a match between the two code champions Mr. Gates and Mr. Carmack, which would allow Mr. Gates to prove that he is neither a coward nor a liar.
STratoHAKster
"The low unit sales may be due to the type of game being produced, but this must be discouraging to the many independent studios."
I don't think that shows licensing. For instance, there has to be a lot of titles licensing Quake 3. Elite Forces, Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune, Alice, etc.
If your not making The Sims, the latest Tycoon game, or Everquest in PC gaming your not breaking $100 mil. And none of the people working on those are getting $500k profit sharing, I guarantee it. Most of the developers with the exception of that Rollercoaster tycoon guy aren't even working at their respective companies, they all moved on because the corporate machine has a way of taking over when the money comes in.
So my point is, There is no money in PC studios unless you own it yourself and $20 mil is bank to you.
Whomever modded all my posts down on this thread is an odd, vindictive little creature. How does a person get to be so petty and vicious? Parental abuse? Why does slashdot tolerate such blatanly unfair/unreasonable nonsense?