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Carmack GDC Keynote Rambles Fascinatingly On Re-Use
Thanks to GameSpy for its coverage of id co-founder John Carmack's keynote speech at Game Developer's Conference. Ideas discussed include the now-dismissed concept to do a 'Quake 2 remix' - "to rebuild the game using all-new assets and technology", as Carmack pointed out: "...even the idea of just reskinning an old game brings with it the problems that as we have newer graphics technology, media creation demands get worse and worse." Of follow-ups to DOOM 3, Carmack also mentioned that "they were hoping to re-use some of the assets created for DOOM 3 to help speed up development of whatever they do next, but even that would have a tradeoff."
In general, I'm all for remaking classic games... but Quake2 isn't one of 'em. People are already grabbing the old code and makeing not-for-profite rebuilds of the venerable older iD engines, such as the tenebrae project on sourceforge for Quake1.
I'd love to see some remakes or re-releases of various RPGs and console games, but to stay afloat the PC Market basically needs to be constantly defining the upper limit of graphics, AI, sound, interface, gameplay, and every other "aspect" you could assign to videogames.
That's where I've always seen iD as shining anyway. They're responsible for bringing shareware and 3D gaming to the mainstream, back in the day. They made vastly popular "true 3D" graphics (yes, I know there were other true 3d games, hell, I loved Descent and that one was perhaps MORE 3D) introduced colored lighting to the world, did some neat things in Quake 3 with texture effects... I buy their games so that they can keep making the engines that modders and other game developers then turn into fun products. And that's the niche I'd personally like them to continue to fill. Make a good engine, at the higher end of the technology curve, that others can play with.
http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2004/view .asp?SectionID=4
I started with the original wolfenstein and I've played doom, all of the quake series, almost every mod released for the quake series, half-life, unreal, duke so so many FPS games I probably can't remember and for some reason, to this day quake 2 CTF is the one game I really wish would get the upgrade to current technology.
I was ecstatic when I heard that ID software themselves were going to undertake this and upgrade all the technology while leaving the gameplay untouched. Now it's just heartbrake.
John Carmack, if you happen to be reading, please reconsider.
Sure, there are other fun genres too and I don't play much quake 2 anymore simply because I like to see eye candy when I play. I like the easy to read HUDS better overall display and communications of more current games also.
But I have a feeling that even 5 or 10 years from now, I will still get that nostalgic feeling that leads me to bust out my old quake 2 cd and download the latest linux version, pop it in and realise that gameplay like that is a rare thing.
Liberty.
somewhere in the new Doom is a secret level that looks just like the original Doom! Or maybe a monster that is a nod to the original Graphics style of the original Doom.
That was the first and last FPS that I could say I truely loved to play.
In case of Slashdotting or some other tomfoolery The article in Richtext format (with Pictures!) http://homepage.mac.com/ike6116/carmack.rtfd
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
I think he raises some pretty good points. You've got to wonder, with increasing development times, how long are companies going to keep reinventing the wheel for each game? A step forward was engine licensing but reusing level design elements would probably be a large step in the right direction as well...now all they need to do is license objects and generic levels.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Switching gears, Carmack touched on the subject of audio in games, saying that if you wanted to spend all the computing power currently available, you could do just about anything with audio in games. The question at the moment is whether it's worth devoting that much effort and horsepower to audio. "It really doesn't pay off in the current generation to put that much effort to it," said Carmack, "but give it a couple more turns of processor generations, and audio will be just be 'done.'"
IANAGD, but this seems short-sighted to me. The state of audio in games nowadays is incredibly primitive. There are a limited number of sound effects and every time an event occurs you always hear the exact same thing. This is like saying that since the sprites in Mortal Kombat are photorealistic, graphics will never improve much more than that.
A truly advanced audio system will dynamically generate sounds that are uniquely appropriate for the corresponding event. So when an object falls into a body of liquid, for instance, it takes into account the object shape and size and speed and density and the viscosity of the liquid etc. The Half-life 2 engine seems to do more or less do this, but it's not out yet. And I think it just calls upon a large database of sound effects rather than generating something truly unique.
Another thing is that right now every single line of speech in a game has to be recorded and stored, which a herculean effort for a large RPG, and generally limits the possibilities of conversation. Hearing the same stupid bark every time you encounter a character in Deus Ex 2, for instance, is badly grating. Ideally, designers will be able to just write dialogue (or better yet design an AI which dynamically generates dialogue), add a few parameters for inflection and rythm, and have a text-to-speech engine take care of the rest. Considering how non-real-time state of the art text to speech is laughably bad, I don't see how throwing more computational power at the problem is going to solve it.
And then there's the problem of creating music which reflects the onscreen action. Just looping the same music over and over works OK if the music is well-written, but ideally it should be responsive to what's going on in the game world. This isn't just a technical question - how do you even compose music or bits of music that flow together seamlessly and in any order? An then how does your engine call upon these bits of music? Or do you create an algorithm to randomly generate music? In general, random content generators, whether level design or art or music doesn't come anywhere near the level of quality of hand-crafted material, at least for any algorthm that I've seen.
All that said, I do believe that Carmack's main point that the cost/benefit of developing an advanced audio engine is not nearly as important as graphical innovation. People notice graphics much more than audio and you can get away with a relatively crude audio system if the graphics are pretty. Also a good audio engineer (like Eric Brosius who did the audio for the Thief games and SS2) who creates fantastic music and sound effects is far more valuable than highly advanced technical engine. I just think that there are a lot of serious technical and artistic innovations that can be made, even though they may be subtle and initially underappreciated by the average user.
The notion of re-use is good from an economic perspective, and in some ways, it might even be good from a gamer's point of view. But I'm as interested in the gameplay as I am in the degree to which the game is immersive- the more it can draw me into what's going on (awesome graphics, good animation, etc.), at least in my book, that's a positive part of the experience.
Many people are awaiting the release of World of Warcraft (me being one of them). The huge worlds inherent in these kinds of games impose certain limitations on their design - namely the poly counts used to model characters, the level of detail of certain kinds of effects (or the absence thereof), etc. The downside to re-use is that it may prolong these limitations.
Yes, new, cutting edge graphics cards are expensive. But the technology eventually migrates downward, and I'd rather see this, and a steady progression in the quality and depth of the gaming experience, than any artificially-induced constraints imposed by re-using older technology.
Someone needs to write a tool that has an enormous database of architecture "primitives" that can be easily connected and then skinned/themed/scaled/transformed/and otherwise adjusted. Obviously, the revolutionary (difficult) part would be the ease of connecting and seperating these building blocks. Not outside the realms of possibilty, but I can't imagine the complexity of the algorithms needed to join that kind of geometry.
45 minutes? When can I have a complete transcript? Darn, I am wanting.
Carmack is the most important voice in the business. This is because he is intelligent and honest.
If one hopes to sort hope and hype from reality, then a quote from John Carmack can be relied upon to be spoken in integrity.
It is fasinating to hear what the concerns are that Carmack is focusing on.
Curious to me is the concept that iD games are constrained by the lowest common denominator of the technology at hand.
The need for a consistant in-game experience means that the most graphics intensive scenes must be as playable as the most physically active scenes. Thefore the graphics must be compromised to favor the physics, and also the physics compromised to boost the graphics.
The magic of iD games is actually the consistency.
Raising the level of the compromise is what Carmack and iD are famous for. But, as with every other medium, it is the audience that provides the "realism" through their own imagination.
That said, I get the impression that I enjoy iD games a lot more than John Carmack does.
Doom was great, Quake 1 was great, Quake 2 was great, and Quake 3 is the best.
I play Quake 3 a lot. From my point of view Quake 3 is the best online game that exists, even after having been released four years ago.
Lots of other games have come and gone in the meantime. Only the Q3 based games are worth playing. This seems quite strange to me, because I really thought a newer better game would have come out by now. Especially since the way was
paved.
After reading the sparse report on John Carmack's presentation, why do I perceive that iD folks are still wistful about Half-Life? Half-Life was the best Single Player game experience that has ever been done. Quake 2 as a Single Player game was lame in comparison to Half-Life. Same technology, but Valve owned all.
As good as Half-Life was, it is now history. Quake 2, and then Quake 3, created a world-wide, 24/7, online competitive phenomenon. Surely the success of Quake 3 is much greater than Half-Life's success was, by any measure.
As much as I enjoyed Half-Life the game, that was a passing fad compared to Quake 3.
By the way, what Valve did in Half-Life was to lower the graphics/physics compromise level, down to the point where it matched the behaviour of the other characters in the Single Player game. Characters and items all seemed real because their behaviour was consistant with the rest of the game. Call it the monster level. Valve lowered the graphics/physics level to the point where they had consistant graphics/physics/monster capability.
Note to John Carmack and iD: Rather than remake Quake 2, consider letting form follow function. Use the best technology at hand to provide us with the next Quake 3 Arena.
How about just finishing Doom 3 by this decade.
Does Id have infinite budget or something? How the hell can they stretch a project forever.
And why remix Quake 2? If anything remix Quake 1 or 3, both of which are more popular by all accounts.
if you wanted to spend --all-- the computing power currently available
note: he meant that if you could put every single clock cycle into audio of a current high-end CPU (no game, no graphics, just audio) you could 'solve' most things. While there is really no limit to how much computing power you can sink in fluid dynamics I have the feeling that creating approximate sounds dynamically would not be as computationally expensive. Games nowadays probably put only 1% or so of the CPU's computing power into audio I believe...
John also says talks about give it a couple more turns of processor --generations-- , this doesn't mean the 100MHz stepping changes that Intel/AMD are doing, this would mean the same difference in computing power between a p4 3.2GHz and a pentium 1 133MHz (3 generations roughly), I think it's fair to assume that if you had a p7 CPU clocked at 60GHz you could afford to devote enough computing power to sounds to be able to create fairly realistic synthesized sound effects for pretty much everything, not to mention fairly believable voices while having still tons of horsepower left for game logic, graphics and AI.
-- the cake is a lie
Carmack also mentioned that "they were hoping to re-use some of the assets created for DOOM 3 to help speed up development of whatever they do next, but even that would have a tradeoff."
How about lending some "assets" to 3Drealms to help speed up the development of Duke Nukem Forever. God knows, they're due for another engine switchover.
Dunno who has the rights to this at the moment, but I feel it could be a refreshing move for Id to do something other than a pure FPS.
If you want to play an updated Quake 2, try Quake 2 Evolved. I haven't tried it myself (no OSX version yet), but the screenshots and video look sweet.