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Where Carmack Goes Next

Posted by Hemos on from the with-the-end-of-q3 dept.

JayZee writes "The guys at Shugashack have word on John Carmack's plans now that Quake3 is finished. He's going to be looking into cyberspace virtual realities, and even better he's going to be working on open source projects like glx much more! " Well, that's a nice mix: Free Software projects and realizing cyberspace realities, combined with a man who can make them happen.

22 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Virtual computing by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

    That DOOM admin stuff was cool. It is sort of exciting to me to think that we could be moving to a new paradigm in computing...that a GUI would not be a mere /facade/ to the computer, but that actual actions in the virtual environment translate directly into actions on OS objects. (Plus I watched Matrix twice last weekend)

    --

    It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    1. Re:Virtual computing by jflynn · · Score: 2

      I agree that an OSes and filesystems just aren't a very good fit for virtual reality, they are abstractions by nature.

      To imagine a real application you have to think about e-commerce.

      Suppose businesses could design a 3d level that presented their products to customers, who could wander around thru rooms, looking at shelves, watching simulated demos, and adding items to their shopping basket. The potential for competitive creativity funded by huge advertising budgets is fairly interesting here. You may rue the commercialism, but it's a real application that will happen no later than the widespread adoption of broadband in my opinion.

    2. Re:Virtual computing by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      Well the MWI (mouse-window-icon) isn't that great either. Really, how much stuff do you actually DO on a desktop? The more stuff you try to fit into the metaphor, the more metaphor shear you get.

      Yes, DOOM admin was amusing in a "useless" sort of way, but there are some /real/ issues involved in 3D interfaces. For instance, in a 2D interface everything has the same visual priority. Screen space is precious, and useless things take up just as much space as useful things. Also, in a 2D environment, there is a limited number of ways you can "drill-down" to get to info. Everything must be encapsulated in a higher level of abstraction ("My Computer"->"Hard Drive C:"->"Folder 1", etc.). The hierarchy in the interface is entirely linear. It might be usefull to have a hyperbolic sort of hierarchy and interface, whereby more "important" things get a larger focus. This /can/ be done on a pure 2D interface, but since 2D is only 2D attempting to show multi-dimensional hierarchies gets very ugly. These are all valid human-interface problems. Scientists work and write papers on this stuff. Although I'm not suggesting it is a "cure-all", we should be moving in new directions now that we can. Who knows...if it hasn't ever been done before how do we know it's not better?

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  2. Woo! by rde · · Score: 2

    I think the cheap little web cams have some interesting possibilities

    It's innocuous little sentences like that that result in major paradigm shifts a couple of years down the line. This could be interesting.

    1. Sorry for saying 'paradigm shift'
    2. Am I the only one that had to change the character set so I could read this page?

  3. Off the rails at last! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    "He's going to be looking into cyberspace virtual realities, "

    This usually indicates the end of a productive career (although not, sadly, a lucrative one). I'll be happy to see Carmack buck the trend, but I'm skeptical.

    Virtual Reality appears to kill everything that touches it, from technical standards (VRML) to creative ideas (see n-thousand pointless 3D metaphors for filesystems and the like).

    That's not to say the field is a dead end - I'm aware of some truly useful projects - surgical training tools, and in the UK the fire departments in some cities are equipped with VR software containing detailed building plans. Flight simulators are virtual reality devices that have been around long before the trendy moniker

    But, at the moment useful VR seems to be only done using expensive closed hardware and software.

    1. Re:Off the rails at last! by MindStalker · · Score: 2

      And maby then I can finally get to "Be John Malchavich" (sporry for the mispelling). HEHE Have you ever seen that movie? its great!

    2. Re:Off the rails at last! by John+Carmack · · Score: 5

      Hey, >I didn't say "virtual reality"... I tend to agree with your assessment. VR is a term loaded with high-enthusiasm / low-results connotations. We have worked with a few VR companies in the past, and I have always found them to not have finishing ability. So much of the VR world (and much other academic style research) is high concept, but sketchy on the details. Most VR experiences are heavy on the "You are in a virtual world!!!!", but don't spend too much time on exactly what you are supposed to be doing there. Can you poke and prod to find interesting things? What happens when someone pushes you? Can you dodge something effectively? Are the controls linear, or integrated over time? etc. I think that one of my strengths is a blend of idealism and pragmatism that has resulted in good results over the years. In any case, of the half dozen things I listed, I am clearly not going to be able to do all of them, so it may be a moot point... John Carmack

    3. Re:Off the rails at last! by WNight · · Score: 2

      Actually, if you're looking for a well implemented third-person view game, Heretic II from Raven Software, using the Quake 2 engine is the best I've seen.

      Tomb Raider's camera shakes around too much for an action game, making it hard to see where you're going. If you're running next to a wall for instance, and turn away from the wall, your viewpoint tried to maintain a constant distance from you, can't because of the wall, and shifts off to an awkward angle. In Heretic II, the camera is linked much more tightly the direction the character looks, and it always gives a usable view, even in the middle of jumping and fighting.

      But, yes, an Avatar for something like a chat room would probably shift to third person view when you're talking, and to first if you were going to navigate the world.

      The Tomb Raider engine isn't much of an example of anything except the power of pixelated tits to sell an obsolete engine with a repetetive game.

  4. Velly interesting! by Ratface · · Score: 3

    This is good news. Since the early 90's, when VR suddenly went from being the latest buzz to being a dirty word, any projects that have tried to investigate new advances in VR tech have either been doomed to budget failure, or have had to cloeak the project in other terms such as 3D visualisation, or such.

    It takes someone like Carmack, who having completed 3 rounds of Quake (if you get my drift), have the time, inclination, clout and reasons to put some heavy duty effort into getting some real cool "3D visualisation" technology into the hands of Joe Schmuck (that's you and me :-).

    .. either that or perhaps the militay will hand us some of it's offshoots :-)

    --

    A little planning goes a long way...
  5. Hey! did you guys read the .plan? by Lonesmurf · · Score: 2

    "We will be supporting Q3 for quite some time. Any problems we have will get fixed, and some new features m[a]y sneak in. "

    Hehe. Unscheduled upgrades are always a welcome thing.

    --

    --

    rJames.org - illustration
  6. 'd:>mkdir research' by Hrunting · · Score: 3

    I'm not going to overanalyze Carmack's words and try to figure out what he's going to sink his fingers into next, but I will point out this little line in his plan. A lot of people on Slashdot flame MS as a user environment, as a development environment, and as a networking environment, but Carmack does indeed use NT for the majority of his development (and not because he's locked into it). It just goes to show everyone that they don't need to be tied to one OS just because they use one OS.

    Mark troll, flamebait, whatever.

    1. Re:'d:>mkdir research' by Bill+Currie · · Score: 2
      Actually, what I found interesting in that line was the `mkdir'. I'm pretty certain that most dos users used `md' instead of `mkdir' (infact, it was a long time before I knew about `mkdir'), and while MS supports both `md' and `mkdir', unix (ignoring aliases' only has `mkdir', I was suprised to see John use `mkdir'. I guess he was either being clear (`mkdir' is easier to guess the meaning of than `md') or he is in the habit of using mkdir from his unix experience (and I don't mean just his recent Linux use (glx)).

      I don't flame MS as a user environment: it's actually not too bad when it's not crashing; but as an admin environment, it sucks (95 and NT4 that is, 3.x wasn't too bad). For a couple of years I actually liked using Windows because it gave me a (pre-emptive) multitasking environment for my dos development. Yes, those dos boxes in windows 3.x were actually preemptivly task switched. The real windows OS was a 32 bit preemptive multitasking `os' (as such) with the windows everyone knew and loved running in one virtual machine (as a DPMI client) and each dos box in its own vm. This actually worked quit well so long as the dos programs were well behaved: security was almost non-existant.

      Windoes is ok, I guess, but it doesn't meet my needs (and I don't like it), so I will never willingly go back to it. The only time I ever use it now is to fill out my timesheet, and that's on someone elses computer:).

      --

      Bill - aka taniwha
      --
      Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak

  7. way to go carmack! by md_doc · · Score: 4

    First off for those people thinking carmack is selling out and not going to create another game... your on drugs. Carmack is one of the fastest and best programmers out there. Did everyone forget that GLquake was created in one day on a bet that he could not port quake over to using OpenGL in one day?

    Carmack just sees things different then everyone else and he wants to see if its possible to do some pretty sweat stuff. The really awesome thing that no one is even noticing is that carmack and id have million of "followers" if you will. With carmack doing some side work on opensoure projects this means only good news for the world of opensource because now the people who are hacking quake and quake2 and quake3 might think about getting involved in some opensource stuff which will be nice. Also note that carmack loves to do research and loves to just go and hide away from everything and everyone and just code for days and weeks even on things he finds interesting... its definitly fun to do if you can find the time to get away.

    Good luck with research carmack can't wait to see what you come up with. It always ends up being exciting.

    --MD--

    --
    --MD--
  8. More Open Source than we give him credit by Shaheen · · Score: 3

    I think that Carmack and company are actually more of an open source company than we give them credit. No, it may not be directly dealing with source code, but I think it deals more with knowledge with this company.

    id Software has always pushed the limits of 3D software and hardware acceleration, and they've also given a *lot* back to the community. Yes, they make money off of licensing their rendering engine, but (from what I hear), the id engineers are always willing to talk to you about how they accomplished certain tasks.

    Like a true geek, Carmack is proud to show off his algorithms to the rest of us - and he's not worried that someone's gonna go off and copy it and patent it and make him pay for his own inventions (like some patent-grabbing idiots out there). (BTW - if id patented their rendering algorithms, how much do you think the value would increase in today's market? Two fold?)

    id may not be Open Source in terms of giving all their source code away, but they give a lot of *knowledge* back to the community that keeps them swimming in dollar bills :) That's why I'm willing to put the $40 into QIII, because Carmack and company is a software firm I can trust to put something back into the community after they have made their millions.

    I guess I was rambling a bit much there, but that's just how I feel...

    --
    You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
    1. Re:More Open Source than we give him credit by John+Carmack · · Score: 5

      There have been a few things that didn't have prior art that probably could have been gotten past a patent examiner -- constant Z perspective texturing in DOOM, surface caching in Q1, and the overbright gamma table stuff to trade range for precision in Q3, for example. The patent issue came up at Id a few times until a made it perfectly clear that if the company pursued any patents, I would leave. John Carmack

  9. Some careful words on fame by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 3

    Let me add some thoughts for those people who may not be heavily involved in the game industry (or, more specifically, the 3D engine side of the game industry). I'm going to say this in a positive way, without any complaining. Do you know:

    1. Who wrote the incredible 3D engine for Descent 3, released a few months ago? (This game is flashier than Quake III, technology wise).
    2. For that matter, who wrote the 3D engines for Descent 1 and Descent 2?
    3. Who wrote the ultra-fast engine for the soon to be released Slave Zero (a Windows demo was released this past summer).
    4. Who programmed 1989's multi-processor 3D arcade game, Hard Drivin', which was so groundbreaking it even made it into the color plate section of many graphics texts?
    5. Who programmed the 3D Hard Drivin' inspired games Stunts and Stunt Driver, which were released for the PC before Wolftenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld? (These were "drive anyway, do anything" games, not "follow the track" games).
    6. Who conceived and wrote the engines for the following popular racing games: The Need for Speed, Daytona, Ridge Racer, San Francisco Rush, and Hydro Thunder?

    What's interesting is that none of these people are one hit wonders. All of them have stayed in the game industry and made huge contributions. But who do you hear about? Carmack and Sweeney. They may be the golden boys of publicity, but they're not alone in terms of technical prowess by any means.

  10. Web cams by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 2

    It could be a lot of fun if you e.g. could communicate with the computer through gestures. It would probably not do much to spreadsheets, but gaming and chatting might benefit.

  11. In previous interviews... by ywwg · · Score: 2

    Carmack has said that he read Snow Crash and said "I can do 90% of that." Maybe now he will :) Hey John, can I have access to those trapdoors?

  12. Carmack's tech and VR by Indomitus · · Score: 2

    I have always thought that if we were going to get good virtual realities like the ones we see in Snow Crash and Neuromancer the engine would come from games, not from weird VR experiments. VR experiments have given us VRML which isn't totally terrible but the way it's built isn't workable for large scale net environments. An internet ready engine like Q3 would be perfect. The net code in q3 is awesome and if anybody can hook it up to a nice interface for wandering around a world instead of just shooting at people it's Carmack.

  13. I want in! How can we help? by garyrich · · Score: 2

    I agree with a lot of the comments that John Carmack and a few others have the best position from which to develop useful VR environments that do something someone wants done. I'd be really be interested in how/where we can get involved - from a couple of perspectives.

    Would the work be inside of ID or as part of a new startup? I don't think ID is publicly traded so I can't invest in them and get filthy rich (PS: my corporate nanny firewalls their site and tunneling out and lynxing from elsewhere gives me "Eeek, No frames support. Please upgrade your web browser" --- don't do that).

    I can't code at John's level, but what could less genius hackers contribute to a project like this? I'll finish learning OpenGL and even....c++ if needed. Hey, if ID were hiring I'd even go back into software QA (Oh, God! did I say that out loud!?).

    Think of an open source component to the project. I can see a medium hard time convincing IDers and VC of a total open source vision for a VR project,but open sourcing big chunks and getting the community involved would make easy some things
    that are otherwise hard.

    Hey, he may actually read this. The "John Carmack" that made a couple of posts a half hour ago doesn't have a PGP key in his user page, but it does sound like him.

    garyr

    --
    -- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
    1. Re:I want in! How can we help? by garyrich · · Score: 2

      Actually, it's good advice...more recent versions of Lynx list the links inside of the frame, as well as the idiotic message the too-lazy-to-write-HTML-4 webmaster put there instead of doing the right thing

      true, but... I couldn't telnet to home because
      corporate firewalls ssh (I'm going to get mad at
      them one of these days) so I had to telnet to
      one of my domains at pair.com and use their
      installed lynx to take a quick peek at idsoftware
      and see if I can buy stock. I can't upgrade their
      lynx - or rather an email would probably get them
      to do it (they are pretty responsive) but I just
      wanted to peek at the "corporate info" page and
      it's not worth the hassle. I'm lazy, sue me.

      The sort of "unusual but it happens" scenario that
      nobody thinks about when they build pages that
      just flat break if your browser doesn't support
      feature 'X'. Not that I haven't done it myself
      after banging my head on the desk and chanting
      'No No No' at guys in ties hasn't worked...

      this has nothing to do with The Topic at Hand though.


      garyr

      --
      -- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
  14. Re:Keep in mind... by plunge · · Score: 2

    Again, before you go spouting off about what tech would be best for VR, you have to consider what you want the VR to do for you. I mean, if the focus is on interactivity, what exactly is the point of a large outdoor area? Sure it looks pretty and lives up to an ideal of a "virtual world", but pragmatically, you want the things you interact with to be at your fingertips, not thousands of virtual miles away. What interactive VR really needs is a good interface for immediate surroundings- traveling to different locations need not be a "see building in distance, walk for several hours to enter building" but rather "think of building, select it, teleport to location." A massive RPG, on the other hand, where aimless wandering and exploring is the whole point, would demand a more expansive terrian engine.