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John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS
Via a Gamasutra post, John Carmack's comments on upcoming id choices. Game|Life has a few quick comments on Carmack's hope to bring Orcs and Elves to the DS. This would be id's first game on a Nintendo platform in some time. Likewise, he makes it clear that he considers the 360 the dev platform of choice due to the ease of development on the console. From the article: "the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we're not going to do much until we're at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We'll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It's not something we're going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one."
Mr. 'Makes Doom then Quake then Daikatana' Carmack?
Lordy, lordy. I think SA does it the best justice:
Here.
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
Oooh,*burn*!
kinda odd since tons of games outsource programming to asia and that's where Sony's based so their tools are more based on asian design and logic and all that and Microsoft is based here so most of their development tools are based on our culture and logic. But I guess Sony's tools can actually just be that bad.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
At least no one can say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. It's kind of hard to disprove that man's intellect when it comes to software development.
It'll be an instant classic! Take your standard fantasy world, pump up the most awesome elements (Orcs, Elves, bloody combat) add classic Carmack innovation (imagine the possibilities with the touch-pad) and boom: Instant Mega hit!
Demented But Determined.
I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
This is just my perception/opinion, but it sounds more like Carmac is getting old and lazy than any fundamental flaw with Sony's choice in processor. What we need is a new generation of developers to embrace the domain of parallel processing so that it can begin to realize its potential. I'm tired of the foot dragging and bellyaching about how different/difficult it is to multithread. Companies such as the previously mentioned RapidMind and PeakStream have made significant advancements in making multithreading more accessible, and if developers would put more effort into thinking in parallel rather than complaining about a changing environment, we'd be a lot farther along than we are now.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Game Informer met with id Software's John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead to talk about, well, a lot of things. In our hour-long talk, we talked about the state of PC gaming, QuakeCon and the pros and cons of developing for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We've split the interview into two digestible chunks. Part one appears here today, and we'll run the conclusion tomorrow. Enjoy.
Game Informer: First off, I just want to say congratulations on the awards. [John Carmack was just presented with a Technology Emmy award at CES for his work in 3D game engines, and id Software earned an Emmy for the company's rendering work.]
John Carmack: It still seems kind of a bizarre thing. I mean, whenever you hear Emmys and Oscars and stuff, you think high fashion and Hollywood, and that is so not what I'm about at all. And being honored with that--it's certainly one of the big-time honors that you're not going to turn down or are not going to step away from--but I never would have expected to receive something like this.
GI: After Enemy Territories: Quake Wars ships with the highly modified Doom 3 engine and the MegaTexture support, is it time for you guys to move on from that engine?
Carmack: Yes, the in-house development project that we've been working on is all new technology. It still has some roots in the Doom 3 technology, but almost everything is new in there. We're still not talking about exactly what the project is, but it's a new IP, it's diverting a little bit from the standard id formula and it's not just a first-person shooter. Technically, it's build around an advancement over the MegaTexture technology from Quake Wars. Where that was applied just to the terrain, the version of the new technology applies it into everything, so we can have that level of rich detail on all the surfaces on the entire world. That's the push that we're making with graphics technology. The gameplay is somewhat different from anything that we've of done before. The company is pursuing Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises with other partner developers and all, but we're trying to develop a brand-new franchise with this new one. Hopefully, we'll be talking about that sometime this year, and we'll be able to go ahead and come out of our own little cone of silence about it.
GI: Do you think that'll be at E3 or maybe the next QuakeCon?
Carmack: I would certainly expect by the next QuakeCon, but...when is E3 this year?
GI: July
Carmack: [pauses] I don't know. That's a toss-up. It kind of depends on what the business relationships and stuff are at that point.
GI: Are you planning on adopting DX10 for Quake Wars?
Carmack: Not for Quake Wars, for sure. It has come up as a question for our internal development projects, and we weren't even expecting to ask that question. There's no massive pull for me for DX10. It would be more a question of if we don't think we're going to get done until Vista is broadly adopted, it might just save us development and support things to say it's a DX10 game--but there's no huge thing where we're dying to use any particular DX10 feature. It would just more be a question about practically, is the market there where we can write off everything else? Quake Wars is definitely not DX10.
GI: Since you're moving ahead with the new technology within the Doom 3 engine, you're not worried about adopting that for DX10?
Carmack: No, because the DX9 stuff--actually, DX9 is really quite a good API [application programming interface] level. Even with the D3D [Direct3D] side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step--they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility--and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with.
GI: A lot of gamers are in the boat right now--and I'm in the boat as well
He added, "I've been pulling for Microsoft..."
I never thought I'd see a sentence start from Carmack with that.
The only "innovation" that Id ever did was putting the Doom "demo" up on the Internet.The rest is marketing hype.I have yet to see a 3D engine by them that is a cut above the rest. Now, Looking Glass... That was a company!
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=52467
This thread has been one of the funniest things I've ever seen. All the PS3 fanboys are bashing Carmack for his comments about Cell, despite the fact that it's quite clear none of them program at all, let alone program on asymmetric CPUs.
Hilarity ensues as people who would have been lauding Carmack to the skies if they'd seen only his gripes about the 360 CPU attempt to prove that he's totally irrelevant and afraid of learning about technology.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
And this would have nothing to do with a little visit by MS a couple of years ago, right?
How exactly is the XBox 2 ("360") going to run OpenGL code, Carmacks API of choice?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I happen to know that he uses OpenGL. Quake still works on Linux, even. This is odd, because Nintendo and Sony use OGL, which he (to my knowledge) does extreamly well. People say DirectX (used on XboX too) is easier and looks better but have you seen Quake4? If he could port his shooters to the Wii, that'd be awesome. With that Linux stuff, I would have though that by now he and MS would hate each other...
I wonder if they would do Doom for Wii so that I can really jump around and smash my wiimote into things it's never smashed into before.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
"It means he thinks it's dumb to have multiple differently powered cpus."
Well then he's going to hate AMD's upcoming CPUs then.
"But I think most people realize that CmdrTaco is a homosexual. I mean, let's be honest."
Nice one.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"(Of course I still say this will be a moot point once the tools catch up since they, such as advance compilers, will determine what is best to run on each processor)."
Well as the failure of the Itanium showed. Fosting too much onto the compiler has a downside.
Is that some kind of joke or yet another illiterate reporter ?
It just pains me to see possible innovation being killed because it's difficult!!! Is the PS2 tough to develop for, heck yes...PS3...even harder...remember when this was a good thing? The 360 is great, easy, straight forward and BORING!!!!!! Don't get me wrong, I like writing code for the thing, because it makes my job darn easy and I pretty much know what I am going to get on the back end.
But, call me crazy, I got into this business to innovate, not write mindless code and chase the same bugs. Heck if I wanted that I'd have stayed in the telecom industry.
In my time with the PS3 I've seen the potential to pull some amazing things out of it graphically and even moreso in AI; a lot more than the 360. This is what we developers asked Sony for when they were developing this thing remember. We wanted the most powerful box they could muster with capability to burn and we got it. Now that we have it it's too hard...WTF!!!!! With any new tech comes new hurdles, GET OVER IT!
Let's stop with the EA development mentality and remember why we got in this business.
Wasn't there some similar initial gripe about the PS2 architecture? I am not so privy myself to the details (so I actually am wondering), but I seem to remember there beeing some of the same types of comments about the PS2 hardware that, while maybe rightly so, seemed to be overcome. Also, is it plausible that it takes time, and that maybe the PS3 came out too soon? (Or that dev kits weren't in the dev's hands soon enough? Oh wait... thats a fact.) So maybe as the kits are out and people start figuring it all out, and the ceiling rises, we get to see what the hardware can really do? I own a 360 and am impressed by it but I cannot help but be curious as to what that sheer power in the PS3 can do, and can't help but think its a matter of time before uber programmers a la Carmack start to warm up to it. Thoughts?
art is science made clear. -cocteau
256KB of local storage should be enough for anyone...
most chose to develop for the slightly less powerful and far more developer-friendly PlayStation.
That is utter bullshit. The saturn was much better at 2D whereas the PSone totally trounced it in 3D. And 95% of the games were 3D.
You can probably get away with an "oddball" console architecture as long as the development pain is swamped by the reward in the market. When I was writing games (years ago) I used to say, "No one cares how much the developers suffer making a title." And it's true, to a point.
That point is reached when your multi-million-dollar budget is being blown up by a system that is quite, quite difficult to extract performance from. Schedule slips cost money, they always have, but now the slips are *real* money.
For what gain? If the oddball architecture isn't dramatically different from the non-oddball competitors', the oddball one loses out.
I look at the SMP on the 360 and think, "Cool, I can do that." I look at the DMA-driven dwarves and busted-up memory heirarchy of the Cell and think, "Thank God I don't have to program that thing." If you care to throw yourself into that particular meat-grinder then I wish you all the best, you can *have* my lunch there, life is too short to burn yourself out on a broken architecture for what appears to be very little real gain.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Game developers I know say the same thing. In fact they go further in claiming that the PS3 has serious GPU issues causing them to treat the PS3 inferior to the Xbox360 when it comes to programming for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, yeah, I truly do remember! When was that again... Oh, yeah, it was, uhm... never!
Why in the world would it be a good thing that the PS3 is hard to program?
There are actually quite a few Nintendo fanboys working in MS, since for years they were the "home team" when it came to video games before the Xbox came around. There are still a lot of folks working in MGS that respect what Nintendo has done (myself included). Sony, not so much, due to their increasing arrogance.
-- jchenx
Ease of development is definately a pro, but from what I understand, the PS2 was a pain to develop for. I've heard horror stories of development teams using Internet forums to do shop talk, because the official documentation was just utterly useless.
However, when you're the market leader by far, as the PS2 undoubtedly was, game companies will do almost anything to make sure their titles come out on that console.
-- jchenx
You're a fool if you think developers only want "the most powerful box". There's a lot more to the industry, heck software programming in general, than power. Also, you completely ignore the fact that if you were right, then you'd have developers flocking to the Xbox, since it was the most powerful console last generation.
-- jchenx
Sony's decision to use asymetic processors, and NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH DEVELOPER SUPPORT was a bad decision. If the technology could be used easily, it is some pretty cool stuff!
Uh the submitter that reposted the whole article inserted the text about CmrTaco into the story copy. And I'm the troll for noticing it?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Like the other system fanboys are any diffrent.....
Would this kind of stupidity sit well here if I linked to some Xbox or Nintendo forums? No matter what system it is, they all suffer from rabid fanboys making stupid comments.
I'm no programmer but I've played both the 360 and PS3. If the 360's power is easier to exploit, and the PS3 has a long way to go, then the PS3 seems like a better long term investment. Resistance just as good as the best 360 titles, and if, as Carmack claims, it was made with crappy development tools, imagine what late gen games will look like? John Carmack has always made his money developing games for Windows so I'm sure it's easier to port his PC games to the 360 rather than the PS3. But if the best PS3 shooters blow Carmack's creations away (Resistance is a million times better looking and plays better than Quake 4, a 360 game using the technology Carmack built, and both launch titles for their respective systems). So, it might be easier to develop for the 360, but I really don't want to play games made by people with that attitude (don't get into programming if you don't like a challenge). DOOM was cool back in the day but now I want games that make me think. I would rather play a game designed by Kojima and programmed by someone who slaves away for him than one designed by a programmer who doesn't know what a story or puzzle is.
You may think I "don't have the right" to contradict the great John Carmack because he's made 3D software engines and designs rockets for fun, but he's still financially bound to Microsoft, so that alone is enough to dismiss this as FUD. It sounds to me like future id games are going to be released on the 360 and every PS3 sold is a potential lost sale for id. You guys would acknowledge that if David Jaffe said the PS3 was the better development environment, that comment would be a marketing pitch. The same is true with Carmack, you guys have just dehumanized him in your geek worship and forgotten that just like every human he lies, makes mistakes, and exaggerates.
I know this is a gaming mag, but sweet Jesus couldn't they hire a decent photographer? Up the nose shots, unbounced flash, red-eye, shooting subjects with their eyes closed, subjects slouched, distracting elements in the frame... the only thing the photographer didn't do wrong was take a picture of their thumb!