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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."

4 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great News. by cornface · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  2. Re:Great News. by SydBarrett · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. 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...

  4. 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