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Carmack's QuakeCon Keynote Detailed
TheRaindog writes "In addition to announcing the Quake III source code's impending release, John Carmack's QuakeCon 2005 keynote also covered the programmer's thoughts on Microsoft and Sony's next-gen consoles, physics acceleration in games, and what he'd like to see from new graphics hardware."
http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=QuakeC onCarmackKeynote.zip
The actual keynote speech
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
His love for graphics is nice, but pity he lack s physics programming skills :)
That's why Jan Paul van Waveren takes care of it, in Doom 3 etc. Physics Middleware will be of big importance for next-gen consoles, and it will rock the world :)
http://www.continuousphysics.com/Bullet/phpBB2/ind ex.php
Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor
0 -2.ars
:)
Finally, proof that Apple is over priced, under powered hardware.
Why does Carmack hate Apple so much?
Read up on the flavor of PPC that is in the XBOX 360...
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox36
It's far different from the G4 and G5 that Apple currently uses.
BTW, if Apple loved PPC so much, why did they announce the switch to Pentium M ?
> ...as soon as the developers made their games multi-threaded
:)
This is considerably more difficult than one would think. Games typically have to perform tasks in a particular order, for example (extremely simplified): get inputs, move player, move AI players, move other objects, check for collisions, update parameters, display the next frame, loop.
Quite where we add this 2nd thread is difficult. Everything must happen in the same order in order for things like collision detection to function correctly. If we start a second thread to, say, calculate AI decisions and move the AI characters according to those decisions, we have to wait for that thread to complete before we can display the next frame. So it ends up that there are no advantages to utilising that second thread.
Now, I'm sure there are game developers on here who know how to utilise threads in games in a successful way. It'd be cool if one of them could inform the rest of us what the heck we're supposed to be doing with them
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
Ok, I'll feed you little troll....
Carmack came out against the current crop of PowerPC CPU's to be used in the X360 and PS3 that are very different from the CPU's that Apple have been using in their PowerPC based computers. The PPC's in the consoles do not support out of order execution and a raft of other features. IBM have designed simpler cores that are being packaged on multi-core chips that can be run quicker and in parallel.
Carmack has plenty to bash Apple for in regard to their OpenGL implementation I'm sure - just browse the Apple developers OpenGL mailing list sometime.
Procedural textures can go a lot further than you think. Take a look at how far you can go with Artmatic Pro, a 'procedural graphics synthesiser' for the Mac, written by the original author of the Bryce landscape generator, and it's landscape-generating cousin Artmatic Voyager. This can generate entire procedural planets, with no detail loss if you zoom into look at a single inch-wide rock. This entire planet is decribed in a few k!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Yes, things related to the drawing and basic movement of the character need to be done in sync in the main thread. However, the higher level reasoning of the AI can be done completely in a seperate thread.
Think of how multiplayer is done today. Low level stuff, including how the acutal character movements are done, are handled by the main rendering thread. But all the high-level decisions (where the player goes, does he shoot or duck, etc.) are done by seperate threads (the player's brains). It's not really any different with AI NPCs.
Carmack could have been working for NASA or the US military, but instead he simply sits around coding violent computer games.
Don't worry so much. Carmack's talents are not wasted. He is already in the space business with his hobby: he's leading Armadillo Aerospace to work "on computer-controlled hydrogen peroxide rocket vehicles, with an eye towards manned suborbital vehicle development in the coming years".