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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."
Now, DON'T forget to work on the GAMEPLAY too, eh?
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!
I guess a continuous flow of thousand dollar bills might have something to do with it...
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.
carmack is used to developing for the PC. the xbox1 was basically a pc specialized for games. x360 builds on the xbox1 ideologies.
/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.
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
Agreed!
:) But really, I can enjoy a game that uses the same old FPS model as long as the content is interesting enough.
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
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.
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