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John Carmack Left id Software Because He Couldn't Do VR Work There
An anonymous reader writes John Carmack left id Software last year, more than 20 years after he founded the company. There was a lot of speculation as to why, and now an interview at USA Today provides an explanation. Carmack had become Chief Technical Officer for Oculus VR a few months prior, and he was excited about bringing virtual reality gaming into the mainstream. Unfortunately, he couldn't get id Software's parent company, Zenimax, onboard. He'd hoped they would 'allow games he worked on to appear on the Oculus Rift headset. Had the deal been consummated, Wolfenstein: The New Order — an upcoming sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, an early id release — could have been part of the Oculus' tech demonstration that earned raves and awards at the recent Consumer Electronic Show.' Carmack said, 'But they couldn't come together on that which made me really sad. It was just unfortunate. When it became clear that I wasn't going to have the opportunity to do any work on VR while at id software, I decided to not renew my contract.'"
If I had to make a list of people in the gaming industry who could make VR gaming a reality, John Carmack would be at the top of the list.
Good luck, John! We're all rooting for you.
The world will be better off without Zenimax. Everything they touch turns to crap. It's like they are the new EA. Maybe the complete failure of ESO will drive them out of business.
Not sure about cry...but let it be a(nother) warning to those who'd flip their startup for profit.
Once you sell the business to a bigger business, it's theirs and theirs alone, no matter their assurances otherwise, and they won't go your way on anything else from then on, except (co)incidentally. (See also jawed.) So finish all your goals there first.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Someone with his talent could do so many more interesting and innovating things... Oculus is just one of them, who knows what the future holds?
Zenimax not wanting their prized programmer to spend a lot of his time working on promotional material for his other business seems reasonable. I don't fault them for it, nor do I fault him for leaving to work on another passion.
Two things had become constants at id: the lack of interesting games, and the boundary-pushing tech. Lets be honest, the only thing at id that kept it notable was Carmack. And I say that with a crushed, broken heart, as one who's run a TF server, mastered the trick jumps, and played thousands of rounds well after Quake was out of its prime.
Carmack leaving id for Oculus will free him from the constraints of a big business and allow him to inject some of that coding genius into yet another promising, young, experimental industry. This is exactly where we need him, and where he'll be able to thrive.
Snowden becomes a woman and invests in Bitcoin.
Carmack produces shit without help from Romero.
And visa versa. Neither has done the same quality of work "alone" as they have done together.
Snowden is arrested, switches gender (but is denied a position in IT), changes the name to Chelsea and sues Assange over alleged rape (actually it's a Bitcoin trade that went sour).
In revenge, Lulsec-redivivus, the slovakian branch, breaks again the FBI site but NSA manages to capture and legally store the entire traffic.
It is unclear, however, if Google's recently purchased D-Wave is quantum enough to break the encryption; this letting aside Google ditched its Google Wave product quite a while ago, so only James Dyson remains to churn the waters over the engineering crisis in UK (controversial as they are, the UK equiv of H1B visas would be cheaper though)
FTFY - well... almost: self-citing /. links are still pending.
Their tech really didn't push boundaries that much, at least not usefully, in recent years. The measure of pushing forward with game engines isn't coming up with something new that doesn't work all that well on modern tech, it is coming up with new methods to make things look more real with existing tech. To make things work better, faster, etc.
So sure, the whole iDTech 5 "megatexture" thing sounds cool... But when you see it in practice it is less impressive than procedural techniques from other engines. On top of that, it requires server class hardware to build maps, whereas other engines feature tools that work on regular systems. Same kind of deal with iDTech 4's lighting model. Ya everything comes from a real light source is neat, but lacking radiosity or other kind of global illumination it ended up only working well at being dark and having extremely hard shadows. Other engines gave much more realistic looking lighting, even if the math was technically less correct.
To me, it seems like they've been too interested in playing around, and not in delivering useful products. Not that playing around isn't fine, but if you are going to make and sell games and game engines, you need to focus on delivering a good product.
Hence why iDTech 4 and 5 saw next to no licenses but Unreal Engine 3 saw hundreds. It had good tools, a good workflow, and looked damn good.
It's sad too because clever tricks to make things look better, even if it wasn't the "right" way of doing things is what made iD famous. Doom was a sea of compromise. It didn't actually have a 3d map, just height information, did clever tricks with the limited pallet to get distance fade, used shortcuts to make the math work fast enough on systems with no coprocessor and so on. Net effect was it looked better than people thought you could make a game look on the hardware of the time.
Now we have things like Rage. iD can crow on all they like about the technology, doesn't change the fact that Frostbite 2 (Battlefield 3) looks WAY better in actual operation and scales better too.
This is like the owners of Lockheed Martin vetoing a project that is military in nature and might result in an aeroplane design.
OK. It's even semi-relevant. Jeri Ellsworth is about to release a 3D VR/AR project that I think is WAY more exciting than Oculus, and it's completely novel (or at least I haven't seen anything like it). The glasses project an image out onto the world so 3D objects are "in" the real world - the beginnings of a holodeck-like technology. It's called castAR... check it out on YouTube, but you can tell from peoples impressions it's a genuinely fresh experience, not just 3D done over with new tech.
.... that's only useful for augmented reality. Something that wont be a real, actually useful thing, for years yet. Nor does it have anything to do with the kind of gaming that Oculus is targeted at. Apples and oranges. Oculus is not "just 3D done over" it's the first actual solution that will be widely adopted. Oculus is a killer app for simulation in particular. Augmented reality is worthless for that.
The castAR glasses also have an overlay which make use of the projector for more traditional VR.
You couldn't even read the first phrase of the summary?
"John Carmack left id Software last year,"
At least he can use hundred dollar bills as tissue to wipe away the tears before throwing them in the trash. If this is a warning to people, then I'd ask for my life to be another example in the same vein (solely because I care so much about others, and you can't have too many lessons.)
Am I the only one who finds interesting the fact that this article about why Carmack left a company 20 years ago, blaming Zenimax, comes out just at the moment the latest Zenimax game is ready to pre order ?
Seriously...
See, this is why I hate being a time traveler. I could have sworn I pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order months ago but apparently it hasn't happened yet. This timey-wimey shit can be a real headache sometimes.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Unless virtual sex is involved :)
Yes, because women automatically make everything better.. when a woman attempts something rudimentary and succeeds, it's an 8th wonder of the world.. when a man accomplishes something, he's told to get back to the mines and dig up another 20% on top of it.
Would it be fair to describe leaving Id as 'coming out of the monster closet'? Or have they done something worthwhile recently?
John Carmack used to post on /. semi regularly, it would be interesting to see if he chimes in here.
But really, it makes sense, making 1 game VR enabled is different than making VR a reality, and it sounds like Carmak wants to do the latter rather than the former.
If I was zenimax I would be worried about Carmack making his next game too dependent on VR tech, which would lock out a lot of the market who won't have an oculus rift right away, and if Oculus rift wants VR support for their new experimental hardware that needs to prove itself in the market place they should be the ones footing the bill, particularly for the time of someone as expensive as Carmack, who, lets face it, probably gets 10 or 20x what any other engine programmer does. Probably justifiably so, but still, none one us would be very happy if the next Wolfenstein or Doom comes out and looks like crap and then we blame Carmack for spending all his time on the VR version.
John Carmack left id Software last year? Is he still looking for a new job?
No, you're supposed to sit there behind your desk like a little bitch, do whatever they tell you to and forget about your own dreams, hopes and aspirations.
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Yeah, my thoughts exactly. That happened as soon as the VR competence ramped up quickly with CastAR and others entering the game hard.
Oculus has to justify the $16M of VC and were sleeping all this time well past a year of the kickstarter without even having still the specifications closed. Not to mention when the backers will see the product.
Seems more that some VC people hurried someone to work fulltime.
I lknew about him leaving like over month ago...
We're supposed to be sad that we won't get to see Doom on an Oculus Rift, because that could be amazing. Doom 3 was kind of boring, but Oculus Rift could have changed that and made it absolutely terrifying.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sounds more like Zenimax forgot rule number 1, keep the talent happy. id software without John Carmack is what, some intelectual property rights that they probably paid way over market value for. Sure they had other talent their, but how many of those people worked at id to work with John Carmack?
I bet John Carmack is kicking himself right now.
If only, at any point during the months and months and millions of dollars that went into the sale of his life's work, he'd asked what game kid (805301) had to say.
Holy shit I am stupid... And there I was, typing my comment earlier, thinking wow, 20 years ago he was onto VR already ? :)
Damn fever hit me harder than I thought.. Thanks for the civil answer though
And when it delivers 96Hz or faster screen with non-persistent image at 1080p resolution, it might be usable in VR.
- Raynet --> .
Maybe the hurdle was not Zenimax, but Occulus. It's obvious to me that Zenimax should profit from such a deal, as VR is clearly the future. But it's not so obvious why Occulus should tie itself to a single publisher when it's them who's got the "killer app".
And if for some reason the problem was on Zenimax' side...
If John Carmack tells you to do something, you do it, bitch!
The specs are pretty decent and probably exceed your expectations.
Didn't say the specs weren't bad, if they just could do something with the persistent image problem (only show the image for a fraction of the frame) it might be nice. And their field of vision is quite narrow still.
- Raynet --> .
You couldn't even read the first phrase of the summary?
"John Carmack left id Software last year,"
Last year was a month ago, now get off my lawn
I guess there are pluses and minuses to the technology they're using. They get no pixelated "screen door" effect, but can do less about the persistent image problem. I read something about tricks with narrowing of colour pulses, and some other things they could attempt. I'm not sure if they've even demoed the VR overlay yet, so perhaps they're still hashing it out.
From wikipedia: From wiAt QuakeCon 2010, id CEO Todd Hollenshead announced that while id Tech 5 could be shared with internal ZeniMax developers, the engine will not be available for external licensing.[8] On November 10 of 2010 it was announced that the first ZeniMax internal developer to work with the engine will be MachineGames.
So... the reason it isn't licensed... is because it isn't available for one?
BRILLIANT article otherwise. Pity about the facts.
2014-01-05 was last year?
I bet you don't need roads where you're going either.
Or maybe Zenimax are not too put out to see him go seeing as id haven't really produced a good game in the last ten years. I wonder if they even make a profit from id.
If they make anything at all, my guess would be from the licensing of various game engines...
I don't think many titles have licenced their tech either, especially compared to Cry Engine or of course to Unreal Engine which is dominant. It's kind of ironic because Unreal started off life as a Quake knockoff and quickly took on a life of its own.
John Carmack grandfather of 3D fps: "Hey, there's this new 3D thing I wanna do"
Zenimax: "Yeaaaaaah; we don't think 3D is really gonna take off. We're gonna need you to go ahead and not do that 3D thing"
Yup, it is good that there is couple companies hashing out the technologies. In couple years we'll have reasonable priced next generation VR goggles available and if we are lucky, they come with opensource SDKs.
- Raynet --> .
All that attention and hype for idSoftware's new game all wasted down the drain. Zenimax, why?
Carmak can always write a new "Doom" and probably make it a lot scarier than Id withot Carmak can.
I think VR is more of a Wii-U style gimmick than the future of gaming.
Think about it - do really want to wear a goggle headset every time you want to play a game? And if you're really doing VR righ then you also have something to hold in each hand plus you're standing up so you can operate a walking platform.
That is a lot of hassle for something I'm supposed to have fun with.
VR will make a splash, all the geeks and techies will have one, the fun will wane within one product cycle, and big screen TVs with controllers will be the norm again.
Back in VR's first heyday (the 90's), there were at least four id produced games (Doom, Quake, Heretic and Hexen) that were among the first to support the Forte VFX-1 VR headset. Quake even supported 3DOF head tracking and stereoscopic vision. The displays were pretty low-res, but for the mid-90's, the result was pretty mind blowing with the right games. I can't imagine he never experimented with at least Quake on these headsets. I mean someone wrote the stereoscopic code, and I doubt it was Forte!
Think about it - do really want to wear a goggle headset every time you want to play a game? And if you're really doing VR righ then you also have something to hold in each hand plus you're standing up so you can operate a walking platform.
That is a lot of hassle for something I'm supposed to have fun with.
And yet, the holodeck is every nerd's wet dream... Seriously, though, if the experience is sufficiently good, then yes. You could ask similar questions about the Wii's motion controllers. "Do you really want to have to stand up and flail your arms around just to play virtual bowling?" Actually, it's fun, so sure.
I use force feedback wheels with racing games, and yes they are a hassle to constantly mount and unmount everytime you wanted to play a game, but the experience is so much better that they're worth the hassle (actually now that I have a G27 I just leave it mounted to the desk).
And I already have to wear glasses every time I want to play a game, so if the goggles are comfortable and they work, then I don't see what the problem is. And games that involve walking won't need you actually to walk - controllers can handle that part. See this Quake 3 video - the head tracking seems quite responsive, and he's playing sitting down.
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Why would you want to cry? You got emotional problems you want to tell us about? You do want to read the article and think about it since that is the whole point of these sort of articles. He started a company, he left, people want to know why, its tech and gaming related so its totally relevant. So AC go off and cry about your lack of imagination and sense of interesting.