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Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech
John Carmack made waves last year when he left id Software, owned by Zenimax, to join Oculus VR in order to help create its virtual reality headset. Now Zenimax has sent documents to Oculus's legal department claiming Carmack "stole" technology from them when he left. They said, "The proprietary technology and know-how Mr. Carmack developed when he was a ZeniMax employee, and used by Oculus, are owned by ZeniMax. Well before the Facebook transaction was announced, Mr. Luckey acknowledged in writing ZeniMax's legal ownership of this intellectual property. It was further agreed that Mr. Luckey would not disclose this technology to third persons without approval." Carmack says, "No work I have ever done has been patented. Zenimax owns the code that I wrote, but they don't own VR." Oculus was also dismissive: "It's unfortunate, but when there's this type of transaction, people come out of the woodwork with ridiculous and absurd claims."
Ah, John, you make deals with the devil... are you then surprised when he comes calling for repayment? It's unfortunate that so many smaller, independent studios are absorbed by larger companies, who then proceed to strip-mine them of their IP and talent, leaving a dessicated corpse of a company in their wake to be discarded at their convenience.
I'm sure their partership with Facebook will be *completely* different.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
What we're dealing with here is a trade secret dispute. Zenimax alleges that Carmack was privy to inside knowledge of Zenimax's work on VR tech while he worked there, and now he's allegedly run off with that knowledge and given it to Oculus VR.
Think of it like the formula for Coca Cola - it's not patented, never has been, but it's protected by trade secrets law. If someone works for Coca Cola and discovers/absconds with the formula, and then sells it to, e.g., Pepsi, then that person violates trade secrets laws by doing so. But if Pepsi independently discovers or reverse engineers Coke to discover the formula on their own, without relying on Coca Cola's inside knowledge, then more power to them.
Zenimax agreed with Carmack working with Oculus, while still under his original contract with Zenimax. Zenimax accepted that Carmack was coding for Oculus, and actually had a signed agreement with Oculus acknowledging that fact, and claiming ultimate ownership of that code.
Carmack and Oculus are more than happy to ensure that ZERO code owned by Zenimax goes into any future product- by all accounts the code was junk anyway, and every current significant promotion of Oculus Rift is done with other third party software, including code from Valve. Oculus Rift is literally STONE SOUP, which is why every informed person was amazed that the dummies at Facebook thought there was anything worth buying in the first place.
Zenimax chose NOT to have a payment contract with Oculus when they allowed Carmack to work there. This is 100% the fault of Zenimax. Now, after the fact, Zenimax wants to unilaterally set a payment figure, and base this figure NOT on the work Carmack did, but on the fact Facebook paid 2 billion to buy Oculus VR. This logic will crash and burn in court.
The real-deal is that Zenimax wants pay-back for their disastrous decision to buy iD in the first place. Zenimax is well over 100 million dollars down on that deal, and they'd like their money back "thank you very much". But everyone knew the hopeless state of iD before Zenimax wasted their money buying them. Carmack had ran the company into the ground, from a licensed engine perspective, with only one genuine OUTSIDE customer for the Doom 3 Engine, and no outside customers likely for the dreadful Rage engine. iD was desperate to sell, having sank their fortune into the horrible Rage game. Everyone knew iD couldn't design new games, and everyone knew that iD's main success, licensed game engines, was long dead as well. The only sane reason to buy iD was if Zenimax was convinced that it could exploit iD's IP, namely Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein- IP that even iD itself had failed to usefully exploit for years.
Every decision made by Zenimax after the purchase of iD got worse. They paid to buy the rights to 'Prey', the ONLY outside (non-iD financed) title that used the Doom 3 engine, and lost a small fortune there as well, when the Prey 2 project collapsed.
This has happened before...
http://scholar.google.com/scho...
This is why there is no CCR, and why Fogerty gave up music entirely out of disgust after this lawsuit. We missed decades of great music from a genius that we'll never get back. Remember this the next time a record company tells you that piracy is theft.
It sounds to me like Zenimax doesn't understand that in California, "no compete" carries zero legal weight. I seriously doubt Carmack stole anything, they just don't like that he's using his knowledge and experience at a different company.
The Rage engine was simply the worst generic engine ever developed- its single greatest failure is completely misunderstanding the work-flow of artists and others that produce the necessary assets for a game. With Rage, Carmack solved an interesting technical problem (that crudely became known as 'Megatexture') that no-one had ever requested be solved for modern game production.
Oh please. You sound like a disappointed, angry fanboy lashing out at the wrong thing.
Every time I've read anything Carmack's written about id Tech 5, he talks about how its design was driven by artist workflow. IIRC, they wrote tools which let artists edit world geometry and paint directly onto it, using the real game engine for rendering, in real time. That frees artists from a lot of extra work carefully splitting their artwork across hundreds or thousands of discrete textures, none of which has anything to do with the creative process. Instead, they can just focus on painting. It also frees them from needing to go through a long multi-step process to see how their art will actually look in-game.
Speaking of which, I work on things which require a significant fraction of a day (FPGAs) or a year (ASICs) between making a change and finding out how it works in the real world. Even when we use simulation, there's still a delay. So I speak from considerable experience when I say that this sucks. People in my profession would kill to have a nearly instantaneous feedback loop. I cannot imagine the artistic process is any different.
I can well believe that the actual tools id produced might not have been suitable for public consumption outside id, but that's a problem they always had. The operation they ran was so small and insular that their engines and tools were usually a little too specialized into the immediate needs of their one-game-at-a-time team, and they never tried to expand their operations to properly support external engine customers. That's why, even before Rage, they tended to lose the engine licensing wars to Unreal Tech and others -- support is at least as important as technology, if not more so.
Also, the only sense in which id Tech 5 answered a question nobody had ever asked (hint: this is not actually true) is that some people (you) are blinkered by the narrow technological valley most game engines exist in. You aren't even able to ask the right questions if you refuse to believe there's a world outside the valley.
After buying iD, Zenimax sank a new fortune into rapidly expanding the iD teams working on new games (what new games?). Rapidly, they discovered why iD had a reputation as the world's worst GAME designers. Carmack was discovered to be part of the problem, and the company was more than happy for him to "butt out" and go work with Oculus VR while still under his existing contract with Zenimax.
Your knowledge of this derives from... what, exactly? Internet rumors? The same hole you pulled your opinions about game engine technology from?
And if Zenimax actually did try to "rapidly expand" id's team, they were fools who hadn't been paying much attention. id had a long history of internal turmoil which would occasionally spill out into the public, and an equally long history of deliberately trying to stay very small. Many "id" games were actually produced by other studios (esp. Raven) because id did not want to be large enough to work on more than one game at a time. Regardless of what you think about that one team's competence as game designers, that culture was doomed to break badly if its new corporate masters did not use extreme caution when instituting major changes.
And it's fucking crazy to assert that Zenimax is truly happy to see someone like Carmack go. Your entire screed about Zenimax needing ROI on their purchase ignores that Carmack himself would have been a huge reason for valuing id Software highly in an acquisition. If you can't keep him around, you have lost a huge chunk of your potential ROI, period. Why the hell do you think they're pursuing this spiteful lawsuit?