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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.'"
Waaaah are we supposed to cry about this or what?
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.
is obvious
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.
Let's all give a shit! On one, two, After the first quake.exe they all sucked.
Could we get some more articles on 1. Snowden 2. Bitcoin and 3. Women in tech?
Thanks!
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.
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...
Unless virtual sex is involved :)
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.
I lknew about him leaving like over month ago...
lost its ea8lier
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.
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"
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.
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!