Slashdot Mirror
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."
Carmack doesn't deisgn games, he makes engines. Doom and Quake are tech demos for whatever his latest engine is. If you buy an id game expecting it to be anything else, you're doomed to disappointment. Even Id doesn't claim its anything else.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I found his views on dual core processers fascinating. Until now I had always believed they could give major boosts in performance in games as soon as the developers made their games multi-threaded. Maybe I should put off buying that dual-core cpu for a bit longer.
Working for the U.S. Military furthers the knowledge of humanity? (Yes.. I know.. taken out of context, *ducks and grabs fireblanket*)
It's worth pointing out that he doesn't design games because he's a renderer/technology programmer. Id (id? iD?) Software will have designers responsible for designing the gameplay and so on.
JC isn't really responsible for the shortcomings of the games *as games*, except in as much as the ability of the engines he makes for them limits & influences gameplay decisions by those designers...
Game dev and music blog
All kidding aside, it's amazing how "recreational activities" end up pushing the limits and levels of technology to a point that it can eventually be used for more "serious" purposes. Examples?
Pr0n had a lot to do with pushing the massive webserver throughput / broadband increases we've seen in the past several years.
Gaming is directly responsible for the graphics technology that can later be used in training simulations for going to Mars.
Of course, if NASA uses the Quake engine for training for trips to Mars, they may also need to equip the astronauts with railguns...
- Add to unprocessed que
- Grep for coded expressions
- add symbol to character action queue
Thread 2: Charactor Thread- read action queue
- publish action
- recieve reaction
- update state
Thread 3-100: AI Threads- Read viewable universe state
- Process against goals
- publish action
- recieve reaction
- update state
Please don't read this too literally, it only a slashdot post, but this is meta-outline of how I'd start thinking about the game universe in a multi cpu system. Of course it would run like shit on a single CPU (all those context switches (ugh)), but it would really utilize a multicore system.Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I think a good place to look for examples of how multithreading could be applied in a game is to the MMORPGs and other online "worlds". Most of these present a large world by placing a grid over the landscape and having each grid square run by a separate server. The servers then communicate with their neighbours for things such as object handover. If it can be done with completely separate computers then it stands to reason that it can be done with less overhead where there are multiple processors sharing the same data.
Although Mr.Carmack says physics in game engines isn't easily scalable for level of detail, there is ongoing research about this producing good results. I remember a video from last years SIGGRAPH that had hundreds of plastic chairs falling from the sky, and bouncing realistically. The important part was it employed a level-of-detail hierarchy for interacting parts (i.e. an object doesn't have much physical detail if you don't touch it), but it will be some time before we can see such techniques in real time games.
I think you're misunderstanding his point. When he talks about level-of-detail, this has more to do with game design than with algorithms. What he's claiming is that detailed physics has much more of an effect on actual gameplay than detailed rending does, and that it's harder to write a game which graceful downgrades the player's physical interaction with the world. But a graceful downgrading is necessary for people who don't have a fancy physics-accelerating card.
For example, you can take an older game and change its appearance by giving it higher resolution textures, more detailed meshes for the AI models etc., without having to redesign the actual gameplay. (e.g., the SHTUP and Rebirth mods for System Shock 2).
These steps are independent of each other and independent of the rest of the game. They can simply be dropped in, or not. The point is that if it's that straightforward to take a game forward in technology, it's even easier to go in reverse. So the player can choose low texture detail, etc., and the game may look worse, but it will still play the same.
The game physics on the other hand has historically been more closely connected to the way the player interacts with the world.. so it has a big effect on level design. If Half-Life 2 had a 'simple physics' option that would somehow revert the game physics to something equivalent to the physics in the original Half-Life (ignoring aside the difficulty in implementing such an option) then some areas would have to be substantially redesigned so that they would remain playable for people using the simple physics.
This is of course what he means by peripheral elements "such as flowing water" being accelerated. But I have two criticisms of this.
1) Yes, physics acceleration may affect mainly peripheral elements of the game. But in some ways, the same could be said about improved textures, filtering, etc. If it's done well, it can significantly improve the overall experience. If it's done poorly, the player will hardly notice.
2) As long as it's an upgrade of the basic design, it will probably be okay to let it affect critical elements as well. E.g.: due to the engine upgrade in the port of Half-Life to the Source engine, movable crates and such have a more realistic response than in the original implementation. It's not a big improvement, since the levels were really designed with that in mind. But it doesn't hurt.
For me, the real question is whether improved physics would really make a game more enjoyable. I think this depends more on graphics than on anything else. As objects are made to look more realistic, it becomes more satisfying for them to have real-seeming interactions.
If graphics get much better, accelerated physics will be important. But if for some reason graphics tend to stabilize (due to the end of Moore's Law, long load times caused by slow disk access, or whatever), then the usefulness of improving game physics is more questionable.
"BTW, if Apple loved PPC so much, why did they announce the switch to Pentium M ? :)"
/.), they buy them for OS X which far outweighs their very slight overpricing, IMO, and in the opinion of the fastest growing computer seller in the market right now.... That very slight "overpricing" is payment for genius design. I wouldn't want it any other way and neither should any other Mac user.
They didn't, they announced the switch to Intel.
And, BTW, people don't buy Macs for their hardware, wich I believe is much more slightly overpriced than you seem to think (spec it out like we have a billion times here at
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
ID softare especially doesn't want to add third party code into the engine, because that means it is another part of it that they can't opensource - the Punkbuster code already has to be removed from Q3 before it can go GPL, which is not a major part of the engine. What if the physics engine had to be taken out? They could still opensource it, but it would be dead on arrival, and would need opensource programmers to implement their own physics before the engine code could actually be put to good use.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Pssst...nobody has dev kits for the nintendo revolution yet so it will be pretty hard to comment on how good/bad it is.
Yes but can you image coding that in C? It would be a freakin' nightmare. I think that's John's real problem with threads and multi-core systems. It's probably why he's also down on ps3... for that you basically have to write small independent modules that work well in parallel; it's kinda the origami mindset... a Japanese developer might develop a beautiful, self-contained, self-directed NCP for ps3 whereas John's western mindset would make a page of AI code that gets everything sorta-ok.
What's needed for next-gen game programming is something like Java, where threads and game logic is ridiculously simple, but with the ability to micro-manage time slices and data formats. AFAIK a language like that doesn't exist yet. What's clear to me though is that if we start getting 4+ cpu machines game programming will be done in something besides C and C++, whatever that may be.
My humble opinion is that procedural textures (i.e. shaders) would be much easier to reuse. It probably doesn't make sense for a company to buy pre-made textures for its new game, because they would not mesh with the style well. But it should be relatively easy to design a professional shader with enough customizability that it can be easily added to any game.
Things like wood, metal, plastic, stone, grass, water, etc. can all be done once very well and then reused. This would help a lot to offset the huge costs of creating enough gameart for today's games.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Hm.
I've played such games (amoung many others) for decades, and I have yet to slay anyone.
In fact, violent crime is down (in the US).
True, I'd not want my child playing with violence until they understand the difference between play and reality. Nor would I want them playing with sex until they understand its implications better.
But that's called parenting. I prefer to do it myself and not sub it out to corporations and governments.
If you are one of the many (majority?) of parents that *does* sub your duty out, TS. I'm not going to rearrange my world just because you want to shove your responsibilities off onto the rest of "society".
"So what is the purpose of military research? Simple: to keep our killing tools up with our latest fashion in clothing."
Although I agree with your main point (military's purpose is to find better ways to kill) pretty much most of current evolutions in modern applications/devices have come from military innovations...
SO while many, many people have died because of militaries.. many, many, others have also had better lives because of it..