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Carmack's QuakeCon Keynote Detailed

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the more-than-just-games dept.

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."

2 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. A usefull link by FidelCatsro · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=QuakeC onCarmackKeynote.zip
    The actual keynote speech

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    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  2. Re:Dual-core CPU not that easy to take advantage o by fistynuts · · Score: 5, Informative

    > ...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 :)

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    "You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."