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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.
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?
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
Its not like its THAT hard. Games aren't movies...and most of the time the audio isn't really that much of the budget -- those of us that work with audio engineers and sound designers always talk about being the first to get the budget pulled out from under them.
My company has licensed some sound to game companies in the past. Its sad, but most of them are happy with static samples.
With a proper gaming synthesis engine, a lot of the repetitive sound fx could go away. The use of envelopes, filters and pitching coulf do most of the work. Granular synthesis could do a lot -- especially with metalic sounds. Reverb is dead simple these days. One doesn't need convolution or IR reverb to show proper soundstage depth. Of course, a good simplified convolution verb WOULD be great...
Lots of ways to get decent sounding audio out of a game -- but most game designers focus on the graphics and would have NO clue as to where to go for the rest.
Uhh.. I daresay half-life + mods is vastly more popular than quake3/arena..