John Carmack Not Enthused About Android Marketplace

An anonymous reader writes "During an in-depth and informative interview, Doom creator and id Software co-founder John Carmack opines on iOS game development, the economics of mobile development vs. console development, why mobile games lend themselves to more risk-taking and greater creativity, and finally, why he's not too keen on the Android Marketplace as a money-making machine. '...I'm honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it's going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.'"

Comments

Rage for Android?

[whiteboy86]

Carmack's Rage for iOS has been done alright, now I am eager to see whether it is even possible to port such a demanding 3D game to Android. There are lots of obstacles like the crippled NDK, hardware fragmentation, poor native audio support and boatload of other issues. If Carmack is taking a stab at it then I am really excited see the results. Also, pity the WP7 devices' capable hardware is DOA for such a development due to lack of native code support.

Re:Rage for Android?

[polyp2000]

"now I am eager to see whether it is even possible to port such a demanding 3D game to Android" ;

It Is absolutely possible , let there be no bones about it.
The hardware of latest iPhone is pretty similar to many high end android devices, in fact some Android devices actually have slightly higher specs in terms of horsepower.

Google have the market saturation now though - its time to reign things in a little bit and tighten things up. Perhaps they should consider some sort of
hardware rating system to help developers and consumers have some sort of target to aim for. Better still have some dialogue with luminaries such as Carmack and find a solution.

N.

Re:Rage for Android?

[icebraining]

Have you RTFA? He talks nothing about fragmentation:

The HD version of Rage is 1.4GB installed, and all the world geometry is using 2-bit PowerVR texture compression. If we went to one of the other platforms that's not PowerVR-based, we'd be stuck with a 4-bit texture compression format, and that pushes the size over 2GB. And the Android Marketplace doesn't even let you download more than 20 or 30MB, and you have to end up setting up your own server and doing your own transfer for all of that. Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary, tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally, but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to be involved in.

Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge.

Basically, he needs Steam for Android.

Re:Rage for Android?

[beakerMeep]

Which is why Value ate their lunch. As I said in another post: Valve/Bioware/Blizzard see opportunity while Carmack worries about it being hard or boring work.

Re:Rage for Android?

[ildon]

It costs money, it costs time, it costs support post-launch. Unable? No. Unwilling? If the return on investment (both monetary and effort) isn't there, then yes.

Remember that before Quake Live, Id games' online support basically consisted of a master server that just gave you a list of servers, and an FTP server with patches that relied on popular mirror sites to prevent it from going down due to demand (which it sometimes still did when new patches were released). They didn't even host their own servers, much less their own online distribution platform for the assets of the entire game. And Quake Live is basically an 11 year old game at this point. The size of the assets, method of distribution, and demand for the game are all going to be different (smaller) from a brand new AAA title like Rage is intended to be.

If Apple does the hosting for you, but Android does not (for files over 30 MB), that's a huge difference.

Re:Rage for Android?

[hairyfeet]

Who should you blame? Blame Intel for pushing Nvidia off the map for their uber shitty IGPs, that's who. Hell even the bottom of the line AMD machines have nice Radeon IGPs that play games just fine. Hell I played games like Bioshock and Swat 4 on the 780-VM chipset that came with my AMD. It is Intel who keeping pushing the crapola IGPs onto everyone. If someone as you pointed out buys Intel without bothering to check the chip, whose fault is that? It isn't like "Intel IGP = shit" is a secret. And it isn't like they don't have a choice, my oldest picked up a nice Turion X2 that does all his schoolwork AND plays his MMOs, all for just $500. Show me where I can get a new Apple laptop for that.

And what do you mean by "don't work out of the box"? Because frankly I haven't seen that happen in years. If you meet the system specs (which leaves out Intel) then it works, simple as that. and as for Apple turning out better equipment? look at the price of that "baseline Apple" and see what you get in PC hardware for the same price. I just got done putting together a triple core AMD for a customer, with 4GB of RAM, an HD4350, a TB HDD, and Windows 7 Pro, and the whole thing cost less than $500 bucks even after paying me. Add another $100 to that and you might get a Mini, maybe. Nope, my bad, they are $700, which for $40 less I built a quad with 8GB of RAM and a 4650 1GB.

As for TFA that is why I think it will end up with WinPhone 7 VS iPhone. MSFT did the smart move and set strict baseline requirements on devices using WinPhone 7 so they are easily update-able, and from my friends that have checked them out the new WinPhone 7 is actually pretty nice. I still see Android 1.5 devices on store shelves, and frankly the specs are just scary bad. Of course the average Joe won't know that and will just see the little green Droid on the box and think it is good, at least until they try to use it. Google really needs to put their foot down and have a minimum spec that you have to meet before using the droid logo, because the $100 iPad knockoffs being sold around town are covered with Droid logos and the specs are so low as to be worthless even for web surfing. If Google doesn't watch it the droids will leave enough of a bad taste in enough folks mouths that they will never touch another one.

Re:Rage for Android?

[anss123]

You can distribute only the exe through the Market which will download (during the first run) rest of application data to SD card.

The rest of the data still has to be served somewhere, somehow. Different methods may yield better result but does not solve the fundamental problem JC touched on.

Re:Rage for Android?

[mweather]

Armadillo has only cost Carmack a couple million so far. Rage cost him more than Armadillo has.

Re:Rage for Android?

[LWATCDR]

Yes but that is the problem with Android. I have a one year old Android phone. When I picked it because at the time it was the fastest CPU, had an OLED screen, and used stock Android.
Now it can not play Angry birds and is not getting 2.2 much less 2.3! This is not a super old phone but the Samsung Moment is is a dead end device.
It was the best phone I could get at the time. So if you were to write a game for Android what do you target as the lowend? The Droid? The Epic? The Nexus S?
I like Android but Google needs to "lock down" the manufactures a bit more IMHO. Right now I would buy a Nexus S if Google offered it on Sprint. I am tired of dinking about with vendors skinning Android and with Vendors and Carriers not updating the OS.
What I would like to see is for Google to certify some phones as Google Prime or some such thing. They would have stock Android and would get updates right from Google. Sort of a Nexus but one that any manufacture can make and any carrier can carry.

Re:Rage for Android?

[hedwards]

What Google needs to do if they want to support larger file sizes is change the mechanism completely. Probably make it a bit more like Jigdo, or a torrent without the p2p features or some other method of downloading and verifying in a piecewise fashion.

I've got a Nexus One and often times due to crappy reception the updates I'm trying to download will freeze out and have to be restarted. I would assume that Apple has a more bandwidth efficient way of doing it if they're allowing such large files to be downloaded. Even requiring certain ones to be downloaded via the computer or WiFi would likely go a long way.

Re:Rage for Android?

[hedwards]

And yet Apple seems to have figured it out to his satisfaction. I dislike the Appstore, but there's something fundamentally different about the Appstore to the Android Market in that the file size for the market is capped at about 30mb.

His main complaint and one that I can't argue with is that he can't serve the file through the market place and as a result he'd have to set up his own server and override the wisdom people have of not getting Android apps from unknown sources.

Re:Rage for Android?

[anss123]

I agree. karolbe, who I responded to, claimed that one could download an exe from the Android Market and then dl the rest of the data afterwards (from somewhere else). On appstore all data is stored on Apple's servers, which is what JC wants.

Re:Rage for Android?

[ColdWetDog]

The last... 50 or so (random number)... Windows games I bought, all worked out of the box. The last 1 Mac game I tried to play, didn't.

Of course they won't. You need a Mac to run it on.Sheesh.

And I thought that gamers were smart...

Re:Rage for Android?

[bonch]

So that's why Valve/Bioware/Blizzard have ported their games to Android...oh, wait.

Carmack's technology is on the cutting edge of real-time 3D rendering, so of course he's going to worry more about supporting hardware platforms and their specific features. Bioware targets consoles which are fixed in features, Valve targets hardware of yesteryear, and Blizzard targets hardware from the stone age, so their concerns are obviously going to be a little different than id Software's.

It sounds to me like some people are just annoyed that Carmack is being critical of their beloved Android platform.

Re:Rage for Android?

[thetoadwarrior]

But I can write code for the "Wii OS" and know it will work across all Wiis.Coding for Android and you either need to limit your market or cater to the lowest common denominator because you can't guarantee what controls hardware they'll have.

Re:Rage for Android?

[mattack2]

the phones that were sold with 1.6 can be upgraded to 2.2 for free by anyone who cares.

Really? Is it guaranteed that all phones can be upgraded? I've seen various CNET video podcast reviews of phones _recently_ that still shipped with 1.x (I think 1.5 or 1.6) on them. These were low end phones. Can they all be upgraded, even if there were phone maker upgrades (i.e. the various extra UI things they add on).

I'm just curious, I'm not going to get an Android phone. The CNET reviewers seemed surprised that phones were continuing to ship with these old versions though.

Message to Google HQ!

[polyp2000]

Google, are you listening? .. DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS !!!!

There should be no reason for to be grumbling about things like this - I would at least hope Google should be listening to when people like John Carmack have something to say. Particularly when there is so much of an opportunity here when other Android devices start hitting the shelves eg: GoogleTV may be a much more viable gaming platform. I say Fix this Meme - as soon as possible - a little brown nosing might be in order.

N.

Carmack Makes Other Valid Points

[polyp2000]

That which apply to both Android and iPhone.

In that touch screen interfaces are a burden to game design.
"You're somewhat hampered by the touch interface—there's a lot of places where tactile controls really are better—but you can definitely do a lot."

Its possible to get creative - but it doesnt matter how many polygons NG smartphones can push - a touch screen is not a good interface for Doom 3 for example.

Re:Carmack Makes Other Valid Points

[zigurat667]

The touch screen interface problem is what makes me wonder why the hell Carmack is so eager about iPhone development. It just plainly sucks to control a game by moving the device. For a FPS you want to look at the screen from the same angle all the time, no matter how good the screen may be.

Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's control

[perpenso]

For games that need more performance than a Java-like environment can offer ...

iOS has two advantages. A single native binary can target all iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices. There is a single digital distribution channel, the App Store.

With Android handset/tablet manufacturers are free to use different CPUs, GPU, etc. They may also be using different versions of Android. Different versions of the game may be necessary for the different permutations. This complicates the coding and testing. Having to deal with manufacturer specific stores might add to the overhead. These sort of problems are the "cost" of having an open platform like Android and there is not really anything Google can do about it.

Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro

[digitig]

High level languages need not be slower than low level languages?

Not that I believe that myself.

Although in theory low level languages can always be faster, the real-world situation is that a high level language with good optimisation is likely to be faster than the low level language because tweaking of the low-level code is limited by cost and timescale constraints.

Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro

[Narishma]

In my experience it's the other way around. In theory managed languages (stuff like C# and Java) can be better optimized since you have more information at runtime but in practice I've never seen any useful code written in those languages outperform similar stuff in C or C++.

Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro

[master_p]

It's the Computer vs Console battle all over again. In the end, someone came out with an API for games (Direct3d), and therefore the problem was minimized quite a lot. As handheld devices become more powerful, someone will introduce an API that makes game programming much easier for Android devices.

Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro

[tgd]

Why do you assume Google cares? You are not their customer (unlike Apple). The carrier is Google's customer. You are just eyeballs for advertising.

Google wins when every crappy phone has Android on it, regardless of the end user's experience. They don't need quality, they need quantity. Being able to use different GPUs and CPUs is critical because that is why you can find Android phones for 1/4 the cost of the high end smart phones.

Re:Don't download textures.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

.. and an ugly game.

He specifically mentions fragmentation

[bonch]

Uh, he specifically mentions fragmentation:

"Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions."

Steam for Android wouldn't magically solve that.

I agree with Carmack

[thetoadwarrior]

I own an Android phone and I love it but I'm not sure I could be bothered to develop for it. You can't guarantee what the user will have and you can't even rely on the store to show your product in the best light.

For instance, there was some fuss being made over Angry Birds. I decide to check it out. It shows up in my app market, there are no limits listed so I download it. It fails. No error message than it's not gonna happen. Was it a bad net connection or was my phone not up to it? Fuck if I know.

Google maps was updated and crashing constantly (like upon boot up) and as long as it went on I suspect it was only happening to older versions like mine (1.6). Another app bricked my Android and considering I mainly only use Google made apps and connect bot it's not like I'm downloading shit.

The hardware guys aren't willing to update my software and Google isn't doing enough to guarantee I only see apps I can run. That's shit and something like Rage would cause such a hassle for ID, imo, so I wouldn't bother if I were them.