Gamers Don't Need Vista or DX 10 Says Carmack

Freshly Exhumed writes "In an interview with Marcus Yam at Daily Tech legendary PC/Console game creator John Carmack holds forth on DirectX 10: 'Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there's a really strong need for it.' and then zings Microsoft's marketers over DX10's mandatory use of the Vista OS: 'Carmack then said that he's quite satisfied with Windows XP, going as far to say that Microsoft is artificially forcing gamers to move to Windows Vista for DX10.' There are a few good tidbits on Xbox 360 vs. PS3 development, and a fairly clear disinterest in Wii as a platform for his company's products is shown."

Comments

Not Daily Tech's Interview

[mewsenews]

This is a summary of an interview conducted by Game Informer.

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[AKAImBatman]

Why don't he push the graphical limits on cell phones then?

Um... he did?

http://www.doomrpg.com/

Here's an interview with him on his role in its development:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62 343

Re:Make up your mind, Carmack...

[ichigo 2.0]

DX10 by itself doesn't require Vista, but they decided to get rid of the legacy cruft and re-wrote the entire graphics system. This allows neat things like multi-tasking and virtual memory handling for GPUs, but requires completely new drivers. This also supposedly enables a much higher performance, a game running on DX10 should be a lot faster than the same game running on DX9, assuming that they both use the exact same shaders. So yes, they could port DX10 to XP, but this would require two different kinds of DX10, with different features (no virtual GPU memory on XP = lame), and with different levels of performance. IMO the clean break is a good thing, but the HDCP bloat makes me hesitate to upgrade.

Disinterested is a little strong

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

"You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that's going to have a larger benefit there.

"So I'm really pleased with what they're (Nintendo) doing with the Wii and with the DS-and they're doing innovative things,"

"But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren't going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform."

I think he is very interested in the Wii. Just the projects and engines they have are not a fit for the platform.

Personally I believe the GFX on the Wii are grand. I luv the controller and the who package is sweet.

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[Thansal]

Carmack: You know, we've never had a good relationship with Nintendo, from really early products we did a long time ago. And for the most part, we just said, "Fine." We're busy with other stuff, and we just haven't been that tight with Nintendo. On the up side, I really do respect what they're doing, where for years, I've been saying--you probably heard me at QuakeCon--I will go on about how IO devices are where the really big differences are going to be made in gaming. You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that's going to have a larger benefit there. So I'm really pleased with what they're doing with the Wii and with the DS--and they're doing innovative things. But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren't going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform.

Source.

This is actualy a dupe of an older /. report of the orginal article, as opposed to this one where it is a /. report of a summery of the original article.

So yes. Carmack (and thus ID) have stayed away from Nintendo because of bad dealings, and no real NEED to work with them. This time around he is thinking it might have been a bad idea to stay away from the Wii.

My bet is that once they have the current Tech that they are working on up and running he will look into making stuff for the Wii. And I for one look foward to it.

Also, he is looking to port Orcs and Elves to the DS. Source

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[UnknownSoldier]

I can understand John's sentiment. I just started doing Wii development this week. It doesn't have stencil support, pixel shaders, or vertex shaders -- even the PS2 had vertex shaders; which I'm already missing the general "funkiness" of the PS2. Faking the stencil with such hacks as the alpha buffer is getting kind of tiring.

One of our other developers jokingly called it a "GameCube 1.5" -- which is very appropiate.

The nunchuck (controller) is cool, and while it would be up to design to come up with some innovate uses, the hardware by itself, just isn't that impressive. Of course, it is always the games (or lack of them) that make (or break) a platform.

Cheers