John Carmack Talks Graphics

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."

Comments

Great News.

[irn_bru]

Now, DON'T forget to work on the GAMEPLAY too, eh?

Re:Great News.

[TheRealMindChild]

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.

Re:Great News.

[cornface]

Now, DON'T forget to work on the GAMEPLAY too, eh?

Picture this:

You're in a dark room full of crates...OH MY GOD A MONSTER!

Re:Great News.

[SydBarrett]

I'm working on a game where you break open monsters to find ammo to shoot crates with.

Re:Great News.

[hambonewilkins]

I really hope you make this game, because it would turn the entire industry on its head.

Seriously.

Re:Great News.

[aztektum]

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.

Too little, too late?

[BritneySP2]

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...

Re:Too little, too late?

[Da Fokka]

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.

I'm still waiting for the sniper chain saw. Now THAT's gameplay advance!

Re:Too little, too late?

[ArsonSmith]

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.

Re:Too little, too late?

[BritneySP2]

I agree. On the other hand, according to a quote recently made here on Slashdot, realistic physics in games will never catch on: Lara Croft will keep falling over forwards.

Re:Too little, too late?

[Ford Prefect]

I think the major limiting factor in game rendering systems at the moment isn't the programming, but the content.

Where a room in a Doom map could have been a single rectangle with simple textures on the walls, floor and ceiling, a single lighting value and a simple sprite-based barrel for decoration, an equivalent room in a modern FPS might have thousands of triangles, per-pixel lighting from multiple light sources (each placed manually for the best visual effect), high-resolution textures with multiple components (albedo, specular, normal maps), decal textures with complex shaders, and highly detailed barrels with thousands of triangles and their own unique, complex textures...

The rendering hardware might have become massively more powerful, but for a typical indoors FPS the environments haven't become any more complex in their layouts, only in the detailing. F.E.A.R. is a brilliant example of this - the demo brought my PC to a juddering standstill when rendering some incredibly lacklustre scenes - generic alleyways, rooms with pipes, warehouses...

Strip the fancy shaders, props and lighting away, and the layout is pretty similar to a game from perhaps ten years ago.

What I'd be interested to see would be a game with relatively simple textures, geometry and so on, but rendering so much of it that it actually gives modern hardware a decent workout. Wild examples - a game where you're trying to escape a crime-scene in a city with realistically busy streets; FPS games with genuine swarms of monsters (instead of methodically shooting individual enemies placed by the designers, perhaps you'd be carefully clearing your route, blocking potential entrances where monsters could get in); an RPG city with crowd scenes involving hundreds or thousands of procedurally modified characters (imagine Elite, but with people instead of star systems...)

Instead, we keep getting Doom with fancier graphics.

Re:Too little, too late?

[jandrese]

Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).

The real limiting factor is development time. The more stuff you build into each level, the more time and money it takes. The brown boxes in Doom were pretty easy to make, but these days they won't do at all. You need to add details like windows, roofs, etc... to make your maps compete with the rest of the industry.

That said, there are things that work better with raster graphics than they do on polygons. You can draw in lots of details like ammo packs, cigars, and the like when doing raster graphics that just look bad when plastered on a polygon.

However, there is a catch. As development tools get better and better you can create more complex scenes with less developer time, so over time the situation should improve. In fact I'd argue that this is already happening as you see games that look way better than stuff from even a couple of years ago.

One final note: If you really want to see what happens when you give your deveopers unlimited time to work on maps, check out Second Life, which is sort of a MOO with graphics. The world is almost entirely user created and the build system is powerful enough for people to do some fantastic things.

Re:Too little, too late?

[2008]

What I'd be interested to see would be a game with relatively simple textures, geometry and so on, but rendering so much of it that it actually gives modern hardware a decent workout. Wild examples - a game where you're trying to escape a crime-scene in a city with realistically busy streets; FPS games with genuine swarms of monsters (instead of methodically shooting individual enemies placed by the designers, perhaps you'd be carefully clearing your route, blocking potential entrances where monsters could get in); an RPG city with crowd scenes involving hundreds or thousands of procedurally modified characters (imagine Elite, but with people instead of star systems...)

You just described GTA 3, Serious Sam, and World of Warcraft.

OK, not exactly, but the essential scenarios are the same. These games do all have comparatively simple graphics with large environoments and lots of AIs (or actual people for WoW).

Re:Too little, too late?

[slackmaster2000]

Agreed!

I still have vivid memories of Wolfenstein 3D looking so amazing. The same with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But load one up right now and there's no comparison with today's graphics. Heck, you don't even have to go that far back. Even Unreal and Quake II look silly compared to games coming out today. The graphics we'll be seeing five years from now will make today's games look corny. That's the way it goes.

The problem here for people like us who have been around this long is that we're, ahem, growing up. I've really started to notice that the older I get, the more it takes from a game to hold my interest. It's an odd moment when you're playing Monopoly with your kids and you suddenly realize: "what the hell did I ever like about this game?"

And yes, of course some of this has to do with the rehashing of old game ideas. If come across another jumping puzzle in an FPS game at this point it'll probably sour me on video games for the rest of my life :) But really, I can enjoy a game that uses the same old FPS model as long as the content is interesting enough.

P.S. - I really wanted to like Second Life, but...what the heck? The ability for the players to create all the content is pretty amazing, but after that it's like a giant chat room with...3D graffiti.

Re:Too little, too late?

[Have Blue]

Try playing games that aren't first-person shooters (i.e. 75% of the libraries of current consoles and 99% of the libraries of the previous generation).

Re:article too short to discuss

[CaseM]

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.

Why Carmack impresses me

[pclminion]

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...

What Carmack means to me...

[Taulin]

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.

Re:article too short to discuss

[apoc06]

carmack is used to developing for the PC. the xbox1 was basically a pc specialized for games. x360 builds on the xbox1 ideologies.

microsoft built half of the tools that carmack's crew is used to using. of course the ps3 is going to be "immature"; specs were only finalized last year. sony is starting from the ground up. big shocker here: "pc game developer sides with microsoft and plays it safe with the company that all of their products depend on rather than side with sony a company that they have no loyalty to. news at eleven!" =)

microsofts development goal was always to make things easy for pc developers to port things over to the xbox line. if its easy, carmack just needs to shovel his latest and greatest hit to xbox and voila! instant profit. hey, it worked for the unreal, doom, far cry, halflife franchises.

look at quake4. if it was /that/ easy, why does x360 quake4 suck so badly? a rush job will always suck, no matter how easy the development tools are to use.

dev time

[argStyopa]

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.

The real news for programmers

[try_anything]

John Carmack is, among other things, a performance expert, and the most interesting thing he says in this article is this:

"The difference between theoretical performance and real-world performance on the CPU level is growing fast. On, say, a regular Xbox, you can get very large fractions of theoretical performance with not a whole lot of effort. The PlayStation 2 was always a mess with the multiple processors on there, but the new generations, with Cell or the Xbox 360, make it much, much worse. They can quote these incredibly high numbers of giga-flops or tera-flops or whatever, but in reality, when you do a straightforward development process on them, they're significantly slower than a modern high-end PC."

He's putting programmers on notice that the days of writing single threaded code for a simple virtual von Neumann machine are over. The hardware designers bent over backward for years to support that programming model, and they've given up. They've hit the wall and moved on to other things. The smart programmers (like John Carmack) are figuring out how to follow them.