Slashdot Mirror
John Carmack's QuakeCon Keynote Video
Donnie D writes "Video of id Software's John Carmack is available from his address to QuakeCon 2006 last week. It was comparable to his down to earth speech presented last year when he focused on next generation console gaming. This year, he focused on multi-processor support in games. Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition, vague details on id's next game, and topics related to his cell phone games. The video includes 1 hour and 20 minutes of Carmack's address."
I heard he wasn't feeling too well a while back.. has Carmack's condition improved?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
torrent here, if anybody is interested
The video includes 1 hour and 20 minutes of Carmack's address.
/.
So, I just got done watching this video, and I had to post this comment on
No, but seriously, since it contains 1hr 20 minute OF his address, does that mean it went even longer? I would never spend that much time listening to what he has to say.
So, if you attended QuakeCon, and therefore had an unusually strong interest in 1.) Quake, 2.) Gaming, 3.) id, and 4.) John Carmack, and you had in fact gone out of your way to fly to a different town and pay an admission fee to go to a convention where these things might be discussed, you would be disappointed if John Carmack spoke for more than 1hr 20 minutes? This was not a speech aimed at boring bank programmers, it was a speech aimed at people really interested in game engines and John Carmack.
There must be a fair number of slashdot's readers who don't even know who Carmak/Romero etc were.
Actually the id games usually support dual/multiprocessors and are thus multithreaded so please don't worry too much about John because is ahead of the curve. The hard part he discusses are the three different multiprocessor architectures he will be dealing with on the consoles.
If you have watched or about to watch the video, please make a bit of a transcript and post excerpts so other people can know what you are talking about and can make informed commentary.
Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition
Finally a good use for all the heat NVIDIA chipsets create. A four core GPU based rocket engine. Of course, rocket engines are traditionally somewhat quieter than NVIDIA's stock cooling systems so there may be some FAA/EPA regulations to overcome.
"Awww, did I hurt the liddle Quake fanboy's feelings!"
Antifanboyism is exactly as retarded as fanboyism.
"Meanwhile console developers continue crank out incredible games and graphics on the new systems..."
Based on engines developed by programmers like Carmack. I'm still missing where the developers are claiming that moving to the next-gens has been anything but a technical nightmare.
Two. 360 and PS3 are both multiprocessor, but the Wii is a single processor and single GPU.
> I'm still missing where the developers are claiming that moving to the next-gens has been anything but a technical nightmare.
What?
There are hundreds of companies and thousands of developers working on console titles right now. Outside of some vocal and well known in the pc game world having difficulty making the jump up to console development, where are these actual console engineers talking about this supposed 'technical nightmare'?
We've heard Carmack complain that he is having trouble and we have heard Valve complain.
Console/embedded developers have been writing for multi-chip systems with code running in parallel for a long time now.
I am sure it is a 'technical nightmare' if you are sitting at some pc focused development company with a decade worth of single threaded x86 code when faced with a modern graphics system like the PS3. But for those thousands of PS2 developers out there...
"Based on engines developed by programmers like Carmack."
Having written, used, and been exposed to a huge number of engines at a large number of different console development companies over the past 15 to 20 years I am absolutely astounded that anyone actually believes something so asinine.
John Carmack has come up exactly once in all my days doing console development and that was another senior engineer brought him up as a source of ridicule in a technical meeting.
...in the not-too-distant future where somebody snags the Quake or DOOM source code, uses it for medical research, drops me in first-person shooter mode in the midst of somebody's cancer, and I blast the disease to smithereens.
So who says The Carmack ISN'T curing cancer? =) One can dream...
Just thought that since I was there I would give my take on it....
As a computer scientist that works on large scale parallel code... I found his comments about parallelism to be spot on. I don't think most people understand just how difficult it is to write parallel code... especially for things running in real time.
It sounds to me like the PS3 is going to be a bitch to write for... the "acceleration engine" philosophy is just too far out there. From what Carmack was saying it seems that Microsoft went in the right direction with 3 identical cores. This gives some amount of parallelism while not being over the top... allowing for a smoother transition from the serial code that most programmers are used to writing. We'll see how this plays out in the market next year.
I was somewhat dissapointed by his statements about the Wii... basically he just doesn't like Nintendo (because of a prior falling out)... so we probably won't be seing id software games on the Wii anytime soon (which is a bummer... because I know Carmack could do some awesome stuff with the motion sensing technology).
Finally... I will say that I got to play with some of the cell-phone games that Carmack created... and man they were really cool. Specifically Doom RPG looked really good and played well. They are the first cell-phone games that have ever made me really want to do something on my phone besides use it to talk. He talked about possibly porting them to the Nintendo DS (probably through a third party) which sounds like a great idea.
Anyway... that's my take!
Friedmud
Today Carmack is just another programmer in a sea of much more talented and dedicated programmers.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
Whilst I'm not going to be as spiteful and condescending as you are towards Carmack, I do agree with your sentiments.
Yes, Carmack was at the top of the game in the 90's, but then so were quite a lot of other coders. One only has to look at what was coming out of the demoscene in those days. Nowadays, the barrier to entry for doing kick-ass graphics is a lot lower with simpleton API's like D3D and OpenGL so he doesn't appear to be as top of the game as he used to.
Having said that, you have to respect the man (and the other fellows at id then) for his accomplishments and the things that he continues to do, like releasing the source to his company's older games so others can learn, but I do not hold him in the esteem that I once did after hearing his opinions on game audio and console architectures.
I really don't see what's so hard about getting the console mindset. I also agree with you that the only people whinging about the paralellism of the 360 and PS3 are Xbox and PC weenies. (Interestingly, I came across an article on Ars Technica that was written when the PS2 was released. That Hannibal guy wrote about the difference between the PS2 and a PC and declared that PC's are big caches with narrow pipes while consoles are little caches with big pipes... which pretty much sums up the PS2. It's all about the DMA!)