Slashdot Mirror
QuakeCon id Software Keynote Coverage
ruiner5000 writes "If you are not at lucky enough to be at this year's QuakeCon, then you might be wondering what John Carmack and crew are up to. Well, John is a father of a baby boy as of yesterday, so he was not here for his traditional talk on what id is up to. Instead, he appeared on pre-recorded video, followed by normal Q and A session with other id personnel. AMDZone has full coverage of the id keynote, including some pics for your enjoyment. If you want to know about the next engine, the Xbox, OS X, and Linux ports, id's standing on piracy, or Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering, then give it a read." S!: There's also continuing QuakeCon coverage over at GameSpy, including a long interview with Todd Hollenshead.
That AMDZone server took about a milisecond of slashingdoting to go down.
A baby eh.. that implies he has a girlfriend.. ueber-geek has girlfriend. Oh my god, there's something wrong. Did someone open a portal to hell or something??
Where's my duct-tape?
Cool, this will give me something interesting to read next week when their servers cool down. ;)
but id hinted not so subtly that the mac video cards royaly blow(cept for the ultra-expensive high end) by saying that the mac isn't as good as platform as the PC....
Hopefully since Apple finally dropped ADC, more manufacturers will be willing to make mac cards(basically pc cards with modified firmware). I am willing to pay a $25-50 premium, but the $100+ premium for current vid cards is just rediculous, a 9800 should not be over $300....
The doom3 SDK is gonna be a godsend to us modders allowing much more extensive changes to the game. I've completed doom3 and the lackluster multiplayer won't hold me. I'm allready building my own map based on the movie aliens. With the sdk major changes can be made such as implimenting pixel shaded water into doom3 as well as completly changing the gameplay. OH and theres a vehicle test map! AWESOME
As someone who thinks you come across as a good human being in spite of being in the public eye, congratulations on your kid, John. I know you read slashdot on occasion- hopefully this will get to you.
:)
Secondly... most really creative, innovative, and grand things are done by folks who don't have kids- not something that's talked about a lot, but this is a *general* fact certainly supported by history. I (selfishly) hope this happy event doesn't foreshadow a slowdown of Carmack's cutting-edge technology work.
He deserves spending time with his kids rather than coding if he wants, though. Meh. Who knows.
RD
the next engine,
working on it, won't be done before next year.
the Xbox,
Same demo shown as on E3, "The game, to put it simply, looks great, and it reminded me a lot of the recently released Chronicles of Riddick", dolby 5.1 sound, not as good as PC.
OS X,
Port runs, no plans for release, platform (I'm guessing they mean videocards) sucks too much.
Linux ports,
Linux server done, client will be out when Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
id's standing on piracy
It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering
next engine will be Good Enough.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Gabe Newell of Valce software recently gave birth to quadruplets.
Yeah exactly. Doom3 refuses to install if you have software it dosn't like. Cd copying stuff like deamon tools. Ironic considering the only way to bypass this if you have a legit copy is to download a cracked version.
Try running the game before commenting jack-ass
theres plenty of people who think doom3 didnt live up to the hype but the graphic quality is leaps and bounds ahead of quake3
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Site slow. Here's the text:
Quakecon 2004 is in full swing. id's baby Doom 3 has just been delivered, and yesterday id genius John Carmack became a proud father as his wife gave birth to their first child. This meant for the first time John was unable to give his traditional state of the id talk. Luckily a DVD was cut of his talk which was played for Quakecon attendees looking for their Carmack fix. This was followed by a question and answer session with questions taken on cards from attendees. What follows if our summary of Carmacks talk with a look at thoughtful questions from the Q and A. Expect hints and the new engine and game, Quake 4, and the dedicated Linux server, and Linux client port as well as id's view on piracy, and the further blurring of movies and gaming, and the tools that make them.
Carmack talked a great deal about the technical features of the Doom 3 engine to explain new features he is working on for the next gen engine. He explained features like floating point blending, and how he enjoyed the unlimited instruction count of modern video cards. He also touched on polygon count which used to be a limiter, but he says now and going forward that is no longer the case.
He also talked about the art and craft of game engine design. The complexity has changed tremendously and an important feature of modern engines he believes must be giving the designers the tools they desire.
He gave us a look back at the beginnings of the Doom 3 engine. He took the Quake 3 engine, and took out the renderer for the first steps of the new engine. While Quake 3 was written in C the core of Doom 3 is C++.
He began research on the new engine two months ago. He is pondering rendering image design issues. He stated that in theory all game engines should draw media from other engines. He believes that by years end they will be rendering scenes with the new engine, but the renderer will not be ready for a year.
Carmack believes that rendering has gotten to the point that it is approaching offline rendering that movie studios use. The new engine will be at that point. While is it has been revealed that Doom 3 can be used for machinima, it is not quite to the level that movie studios will have real interest. Perhaps this is the engine Red vs Blue may could move to?
Carmack pointed out that a single system could be built with multiple PCI Express cards that could rival some rendering farms thanks to much lower latency and could cost in the $10,000 range. Nvidia indeed revealed in their presentation Friday that they are working on solutions for more than 2 video cards in SLI.
When this hardware is available Carmack expects tv shows to implement it, and lower budget movies. He believes it will take more time to get the blockbuster big effect movies on board, but it is only a matter of time.
Much has been made of the new graphics engine for Doom 3, but Carmack expressed surprise on the interest in the new sound system. Carmack took over coding duties for the sound engine with a goal to make it as simple as possible.
When John took the reigns he cut the code to half of what it has previously been. He made a point of saying that the code was very simple, and it did what the designers wanted it to do. In fact the sound editing is fully integrated to in game. You can manipulate if fully and see the effects immediately.
This real time rendering is a goal for the new engine not only for sound but also for graphics rendering engine. Carmack wants the designers to have as close to real time manipulation of the engine as is possible. An example he cited was vis times for Quake 3 would be around 30 minutes, but in the Doom 3 engine it is real time.
Carmack next hinted at a timetable for the next game. He does not want it to take as long as Doom 3. For Doom 3 the designers had broken tools for a year, and that will not be the case with the next game.
The next game will have a single player focus with simple multiplayer added on with the mod and othe
It's that only one-fifth of their product line has upgradeable video hardware. You want to buy a Mac right now? With an upgradeable video card? You get a G5. You get a "choice" of how fast you want it, but the iMac, iBook, eMac, etc. barely come with enough VRAM to run Quartz Extreme.
.
Oh, and PCI Radeon 7000s with Mac roms still go for around 80$ on ebay (the last time I looked). Nevermind something like, say.... AGP. The pricing on Mac graphics boards is absoluttely disgusting
So as a mac user, your options are video that can't even run current games (my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better), or paying out the smegging nose for something that'll do the job.
Of course, once you have a decent video board, your game options consist of Blizzard, iD, Epic, and whichever of the various companies have ported the DnD games.
"I don't like team activities. Neither in real life, nor in computer games."
"I led a normal geek childhood... "
What's next, CowboyNeal on a date?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've already got the layout done for the smurfs village for a D3 tourney or dm map :) maybe ctf will be thrown in there, but you know? I've always wanted to fire a rocket launcher at papa smurf and his harlot.
take that you smurfing smurfed up smurfers!
Congrats on fatherhood John. Hope things are going well w/the family.
Well, I just went to idsoftware.com to see if they had an online payment option. All you can do is order the phyical game from id, and they want to charge $7.50 for shipping! Every other retailer on earth will send me the game for cheaper. I already have the game, I just want id to get their fair share, $55, not $62.50. Screw the shipping. They should set up an online payment option and just sell valid cd-keys for $55. This is really not much that different from how Doom 1 was distributed.
Wow...news to me (about Doom 3 refusing to install if it finds other software). You have a link to verify this?
Is there an audio record of what he said? It would be great to actually hear him instead of read someone's summary.
I had used clonecd in the past, had uninstalled it 2 years ago, and Doom 3 refused to install, claiming that it couldn't read the cd until after I regedited away the lingering registry entries from clonecd.
Completely bogus, especially because clonecd was not installed anymore, and I've never used it to make an unauthorized copy of anything (I use it so I don't have to expose irreplaceable game cds to my 4 and 1 year olds. They're bad enough on my disks, you wouldn't believe how many children's game cds and DVDs they've nearly destroyed (most can be fixed with a DVD doctor).
I had long ago switched to using Alcohol (even kids game cds now feature the most sophisticated protection methods)--and I promptly unloaded it and disabled the virtual drive it offered, but Doom III still insisted it couldn't read the CD until after I scanned my registry for clonecd-related entries.
I briefly considered returning Doom III, but my desire for virtual blood and gore exceeded my indignation at being labeled a pirate by id.
A Mac "gamer" asked about the port to OS X
Yes, that's right. It's not a Mac gamer, it's a Mac "gamer".
Thanks for the laugh, AMDZone.
CD protection schemes are useless against anyone who really wants to copy the game. My guess as to why there used, to stop amateur copies being portrayed as the real thing and to detur 12 yearolds trying to copy the game.
Professionals will have the equipment to make a virtually perfect clone of the CD which will get around any CD Protection. The ameturs which are over 12 years of age will work out how to get around the CD protection.
Personally once the first patch is out, I'm seriously tempted to install a CD crack anyway, annoying having to switch CD's all the time.
Copy/Pasted:
this is proof that carmack doesn't exist anymore. he uploaded himself to his computer to make the doom engine. my friends, this is how the matrix gets started.
There doesn't seem to be a mention of Armadillo Aerospace here, and since Carmack runs the company, I think it should be mentioned in a "what we're up to" story, even if the story is basically about id Software. So, here it is:
Armadillo Aerospace is based in Mesquite, Texas, and is a rocketry research firm that is one of those trying to win the X-Prize. The Armadillo prototype crashed during its last flight test and it doesn't look like they'll be able to compete for the prize because of what it will take to get their vehicle rebuilt and flying again (in terms of money and time), but they'll keep going and see what they can do to reach the point where they're ready to launch manned flights.
Armadillo Aerospace's X Prize Prototype Crashes
And there's a video available of the crash in MPEG format.
I'm still expecting the Scaled Composites team (led by Burt Rutan) to win, but I'm still intrigued by AA and the Canadian Arrow team; I'm still dubious about the DaVinci Project, which has yet to actually fly anything.
This is exactly what the X-Prize is meant to do, though: spur the development of a new industry by providing an incentive for privately held teams and individuals to step in and make space accessible to the public.
I applaud Carmack for not being afraid to try. It's amazing what ingenuity can do even when you don't have the deep pockets of government-funded space efforts. Or maybe especially when; necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
And yes, I bought the game; I'm proud to say that I, no matter if it was not done directly, helped to support an effort to put civilians into space with civilian launch systems.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Here's a link to download video I took of the id Software Q&A session which was right after Carmack's taped address. http://planetquake3.net/download.php?op=viewdownlo addetails&lid=2104
Errr...no. Adrian Carmack is a dude, and he's been with id since the beginning. The last name is a coincidence, he's not related (and definitely not married) to John.
Quote from the GameSpy interview:
"videogames are costing more and more money to develop, taking longer and longer"
Did Todd Hollenshead breath martian air?
Earth to Hollenshead (and other developers): You don't need to spend millions to develop a graphics engine. You donn't need to spend millions to create super-duper render videos.
Just create good games.
Dispite the technological achievment of Doom 3, it's just a OK game. I don't say that Doom3 is bad. It's just not that great.
High costs don't mean good games. Enter the Matrix is another example.
OTOH there are games like Pikmin. I don't think that the development of Pikmin was just as expensive as Doom 3.
Heck, Solitaire is probably the most played computer game in the world.
I don't say that developers have to make cheap games. No. It's OK when a game has high development costs, but nobody is forcing you that *all* games cost a lot of money.
It's unfortunate that all of their titles have been first person shooters..
Yeah, like Commander Keen..
Does anyone know what kind of system Carmack is developing on? Is it and AMD or Intel based system? Does he use a 512 MB graphics card? It would be nice to get some information on this.