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John Carmack Leaves id Software
jones_supa writes "John Carmack has left id Software completely. 'John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio,' id's studio director Tim Willits told IGN, and continues: 'John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id's tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well.' Carmack, a co-founder of id, recently joined Oculus VR as Chief Technology Officer, and at the time remained at id Software in some capacity. Earlier this year, id president Todd Hollenshead departed id as well."
Let's hope he sticks around somehow. Gaming would lose so much if he geniunely retired.
Is ID Doomed?
Does this mean he'll be spending more time with the Oculus Rift team? I'm pretty stoked about the Rift. One step closer to fully immersive video games. Imagine a game like Metroid Prime with this kind of tech. Man, that would be fantastic! Apparently HL2+eps is going to have support for it as well, that alone is probably enough to sell it for me.
They made their money. id got bought by ZeniMax, the destroyer of worlds. Now that they're no longer independent, they don't have the freedom to experiment that is the hallmark of Carmack's approach to engine development. The higher-ups are leaving for greener pastures and the rank-and-file devs are thrown to the wolves. I've lived through too many acquisitions to expect anything less. id's days are numbered and everyone at the company knows it.
20th Doom Anniversary. December 10, 1993 was released
I wonder if Doom 4 will ever see the daylight. Apparently the game has been considered being in a "development hell" for some time and Todd and John bailing out probably won't make things any better.
I just hope Quakelive doesn't die. I guess no programmer could do only one thing forever, the urge to solve other problems gets to you before you even know it.
Most employees are more or less replaceable, but John Carmack for all intents and purposes *was* iD, at least in the early years when 3D graphics engines were in their infancy. When he announced he was going to be CTO at Oculus, it was obvious that he was really excited about the prospects over there, and was going to be winding things up at iD sooner or later. But he chose not to leave his old company in the lurch, and he transitioned at a pace that didn't screw them over in favor of the new. This is John Carmack exiting graciously.
Or voodoo, or 3dfx, or creative, or.......
Yeah you're just wrong. sorry.
The work he's doing in Oculus must be 10x more exiting then building the next graphics engine for the next Doom or whatever. VR will be the next paradigm shift in gaming, such as 3D was once in the 90's. He was the pioneer in 3D FPS gaming then, now he will be the pioneer along with the guys from Oculus VR in the next evolution. I expect great things to come!
Who didn't see this coming? Carmack has been the BIGGEST problem at iD for almost too may years to count now, and Bethesda has a near impossible task in recovering anything profitable from its purchase of the company.
-Carmack was the genius behind Doom, a truly staggering achievement, but bested by far a few years later by the 'Build' engine created by Ken Silverman and used for Duke Nukem.
-Carmack and Abrash (the second name is ignored and unknown by too many of you) created the Quake engine, a project that most of you don't even know was designed to handle SOFTWARE rendering of 3D games with great efficiency on Intel's emerging PENTIUM family of processors. iD was taking advantage of the vastly faster FPU on the new CPUs, especially the floating-point divide unit required to do decent quality approximate perspective correct texture mapping.
Unfortunately, even before Quake came out, it was out-of-date. 3D hardware had started to appear for the PC, and this hardware SOLVED the perspective-correct mapping issue with an efficiency (and quality) that no x86 assemble-code could hope to match. It is notable that years later, when the Unreal games were still supporting a software-only render path, the high-quality render they used was NOT licensed from iD.
-Carmack never really recovered from a world where hardware was doing all the heavy lifting, and spent the following years seeking algorithms that he could design and implement on the CPU side. At first, this idiotic obsession didn't harm iD, as various versions of the engines behind Quake 1/2/3 were licensed for incredible numbers of projects by other companies. HOWEVER, most of this licensing success occurred because the clean code base could be heavily modified to add all the features Carmack never bothered to place in iD games. Tame local developers like Rogue, Ritual, and Raven did the work iD couldn't be bothered to do.
Most notably, Carmack expended a vast effort to add 'smart' curved surfaces to Quake 3, a complete waste of time because such software generated mesh data could not be properly interacted with, and could be better done with ordinary models and LOD by the hardware available at the time. At best, Carmack 'forced' competing engines at the time to waste time and money attempting to implement their versions of this 'feature'. Better by far was the introduction of 'shaders'- a method of forcing the hardware to render far more interesting surfaces (animated effects and the like) than the flat 'pictures' that had dominated 3D games for years before.
-Doom 3 was the final failure, and the proof that the age of iD was over. The brand new engine was a licensing disaster, and the Unreal engine took over the marketplace with a level of success that crushed any iD previously enjoyed. Carmack and co over-saw an unthinkably expensive attempt to resurrect the Wolfenstein success that followed Quake 3, but iD's two parts of that project were so bad, they never saw the light of day, and iD released for free the independently produced third part, Wolfenstein- Enemy Territory, the last genuinely good and popular game that iD would offer.
-And then, of course, we end with Rage, one of the biggest software failures of all time. Carmack was obsessed like never before with a 'problem' that didn't even matter- how to turn the entire texture data set for a game level and all assets into a uniform, general, 2D indexable data structure we know as MEGATEXTURE. Carmack was, by this time, so UTTERLY clueless, he had ZERO knowledge of state-of-the-art in AAA 3D gamine engines, and boasted he preferred to play Nintendo kiddie games with his family.
Megatexture has dozens of problems, but here are the two main ones.
1) The maths behind megatexture means that to have access to VERY poor textures, your data set, even at maximum feasible compression, has to be unthinkable large. Rage had putrid 'close' textures' and dreadful 'far' textures. Only in the mid-ground did megatexture textures look half-decent. If you don't 'bake' the light
It was a good game... well, a good HALF of a game. It really didn't feel complete.
That's probably because you didn't wait the requisite 5 minutes for all the textures to load when you entered each room.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
"Smoke crack much? Games have always been either NVIDIA or ATI (read AMD now) based."
Or Matrox, or 3Dfx, or PowerVR (Verite Rendition Quake)
I think you should be putting your crack pipe down, Mr. Ford.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.