John Carmack Interview

http://www.nowgamer.com/print/feature/1308

by shawndumas • 15 years ago

148 19 15 years ago

nowgamer.com

johnyzee• 15 years ago

"I just turned 40 and I can be programming for another 40 years; there’s a lot yet to do!"

I love John Carmack.

seanalltogether2• 15 years ago

I'm always happy to hear when developers optimize for refresh rate over graphical complexity, especially if competitive play will be involved.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

Do you think 60Hz is the right rate? Just seems like such a huge jump over 30. Does 48 make more sense?

joeld42• 15 years ago

You can't control the actual refresh rate of the monitor or TV. The display refreshes at 60hz, you can draw every frame, or every other frame and have twice the time.

And yet, like he says, Rage looks better than most 30hz games.

icegreentea• 15 years ago

Depends on the game. For really twitchy FPSs, you'll want at least over 40. UT2k4 players (and others... just I had a lot more interactions with them) would bitch and moan about sub-60 fps.

The scary thing is that they weren't always bullshitting about that.

Also, as sister reply said, going at 60 means no screen tearing on -anything-. Don't need to vsync, or anything nasty. TVs, computer monitors, projectors, cellphones, whatever, one whole new frame per refresh. yum.

chipsy• 15 years ago

In competitive play it makes a big difference.

Each frame of a 60Hz game spans 16.66ms, while in a 30Hz game it's 33.33ms. Depending on how well the engine is coded, there will be at least one frame of latency between input and reactions, and maybe more. So we could be looking at the difference between 33 and 66 milliseconds of input latency, at least. This doesn't even consider latency from input to the computer, or from the computer to the display.

Now consider that we react to events within about 200-300ms. 66ms of latency on top is going slow things down considerably, and when games are poorly coded and dump a few additional frames on top - which could happen because of propagation through events and subsystems, network latency, or animation concerns - the control starts to feel "wrong" in a hard-to-identify way.

harto• 15 years ago

Out of interest, why 48 specifically?

jakelear• 15 years ago

I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Carmack recently (here's the photo proof: http://jacoblear.com/carmack.jpg ) and was able to listen to him talk casually, as opposed to in an interview or speaking event. He doesn't turn his brilliance on and off, it's there all the time.

When I was a kid, I wanted to do 2 things, make video games and go to space. Here we have a man who is a legend in the games industry, and also started a company sending rockets into space. He's awesome.

aresant• 15 years ago

This is why Carmack keeps shipping incredible products:

"I am more excited about what I’m doing and what I’m working on than ever before."

Great advice to those of us building companies, along the lines of the "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" quote banging around here recently

tszming• 15 years ago

"...At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space."

Interesting

TillE• 15 years ago

But...are there any $20+ games on the Android market? Are there any $20+ iPhone games, for that matter?

People will accept significantly higher prices for iPad games, because there's a different class of games that can be played on a tablet device. A phone's too small.

There's a bit of a catch-22 going on here in general, where Android users are spending less money on apps because there are fewer really good apps available. I'm one person who owns multiple devices. But I wind up spending lots of money on iOS because 1) there's plenty of good stuff, and 2) the app store is nicely designed to make me buy things.

pmh• 15 years ago

The question he asked at Quakecon 2010 was actually "who has spent at least $20 on the Android app store?"[1], not just on a single game. Your catch-22 scenario still holds, though I think the quantity and quality of free apps in the Android app store has also raised the bar for pay apps.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=playe...

McP• 15 years ago

Apple are very good at getting people to hand over their credit card details before they even intend to make an app store purchase. Then, when it comes to buying something via an Apple store it doesn't require filling in any annoying forms to make the payment. On Android meanwhile, once you see something you want to buy you then have the tedious task of typing in numbers and for a trivial app many people will feel it's not worth the effort.

John Carmack Interview

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