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John Carmack Talks Graphics

Posted by Zonk on from the he-is-so-good-at-the-shinies dept.

Next Generation is running a short piece detailing some highlights of an interview with John Carmack, set to run in the February issue of PC Gamer UK. From the article: "For the last year I've been working on new rendering technologies. It comes in fits and starts. Our internal project that'll incorporate it hasn't been publicly announced. We're doing simultaneous development on Xbox 360 and PC, and we intend to release on PlayStation 3 simultaneously as well, but it's not a mature enough platform right now for us to be doing much work on."

9 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great News. by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 2, Interesting

    John Carmack and the iD dont really NEED to focus on gameplay. The money they make from licensing the engine to clone makers, alone, makes the whole endevour worthwhile.

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  2. Too little, too late? by BritneySP2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am amazed at how little progress has been made in the game graphics and gameplay since the original Doom. It would seem that the ability to churn out hundreds of millions polygons per second should make a lot of difference compared to the Doom's no-3d-hardware-requiring graphics engine, but somehow it does not. Despite all the antialiasing, mip-mapping, landscapes in today's 3d games sometimes look less realistic and/or less interesting than some levels in Doom. This is disappointing, and I have no explanation...

    1. Re:Too little, too late? by Zangief · · Score: 1, Interesting

      In Doom the camera was fixed behind a weapon. You have a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a machine gun and two energy guns (one fast and weak, and the other slow but powerful). Also you could use a chainsaw.

      Today games have lost the chainsaw, and added a sniper rifle. So much for gameplay advance.

    2. Re:Too little, too late? by ArsonSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would rather play on a Doom 1 engine graphics with fully damageable, realisticly architected environments, then the indistructible ply wood and forced path games of current, well pretty much ever...

      I think something like ut2004 except instead of trying to shoot the power generator of the base you literally try to blow the base apart piece by piece. With towers and walls collapseing when enough under structure was destroyed. People could get trapped inside and have to blast thier way out or die inside.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  3. Re:article too short to discuss by CaseM · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd say the blurb about the PS3 dev kits being too immature to develop on is pretty big news considering that Sony would love for us to be anticipating its "imminent" release.

  4. Why Carmack impresses me by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What impresses me the most about John Carmack, besides his obvious ability to write kickass graphics code, is the fact that he's stuck with it so closely for so long (Wolf 3D came out a LONG time ago). I'd have burned out seven years ago, but he keeps on cranking.

    I guess a continuous flow of thousand dollar bills might have something to do with it...

  5. What Carmack means to me... by Taulin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When I see a game uses an id engine, I can be pretty damn sure it will work on my system with very few problems. It is because he writes very VERY tight code and they do a great job testing it before giving it to the public. Sad to read that it looks like they are now going to be concentrating on the 360.

  6. Re:Great News. by aztektum · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually a few years ago Todd Hollenshead said in an interview that they *do not* make the majority of their money from licensing of the engine. I can't remember which publication it was, but this was not too long ago (3-4 years max), when the Quake III engine was everywhere in games.

    --
    :: aztek ::
    No sig for you!!
  7. dev time by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm waiting for some engine developer to write a combined physics/visual engine for which you have a world of inherent objects, each with visual (color, texture, etc) and phsyical (mass, etc) characteristics.

    It used to be it took a few hours to whip up a level in Quake.
    With each generation though, the time to make a single room of any reasonable quality has at least doubled, if not trebled. The "community" production of user-made levels has dropped by orders of magnitude each generation as well.

    Really, the concept of building a map in N-space from basic polygons should be dead - If you're going to build a "house" in a new 3d engine, you should be able to literally BUILD it of materials like you would a real house - pieces of wood with a resistance to force LIKE WOOD, a flammability LIKE WOOD, so your final wall would 'behave' in-game like a wood wall, and you don't have to program in the properties from scratch every time.

    Think about how hard it is to model a good-looking coffee cup from polygons and curves. A biatch. Why not an engine that comes with a Sears-catalog (or Home Depot, or whatever) of pregenerated stuff that you can edit generally (changing color, length, whatever) and then plop into your world? Coffee cup? Pick that hefty one. Make it black. Glossy. Now 'pour' in liquid. Boiling hot. If it gets knocked over (or shattered), the liquid pours out onto whatever surface it's on/above, and then flows to the lowest point.

    So I guess for me it's not the rendering tech per se, it's that we keep getting the engine without the car, or even the parts to build the car. We should be past that.

    --
    -Styopa