John Carmack "not all that excited" by next-gen hardware

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-06-19-john-carmack-not-all-that-excited-by-next-gen-hardware?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=european-daily

by shawndumas • 14 years ago

123 69 14 years ago

gamesindustry.biz

MPSimmons• 14 years ago

Not to be cynical, but if I'd just released a 3d VR headset, I'd be pitching it, too.

slurgfest2• 14 years ago

And if I were as wealthy and respected as Carmack in the industry (and as sharp) I would also be building rockets, supporting Linux gaming and similarly quixotic but awesome enterprises.

its_so_on• 14 years ago

I love that supporting Linux gaming is "quixotic" and up there with rocket science. Too true.

adventureful2• 14 years ago

It's a hack, it's not meant to be a broad commercial product. It's not much different than the test engines he builds for experiment. You're indeed being unnecessarily cynical.

MisterBastahrd• 14 years ago

I'm not all that excited about John Carmack's antiquated view of the video game market. While there are companies releasing swaths of titles in different genres, he's got... Doom 3. Yay, whatever.

Most people will not spend $500 on a peripheral. You can get some hardcore gamers to do it, but unless the VR gear also includes a wireless headset, you're shit out of luck. So now you're looking at close to $600 bucks a unit. Good luck with that. I'd rather buy a 48 inch TV that I can use when I'm not gaming.

bluthru• 14 years ago

>So now you're looking at close to $600 bucks a unit. Good luck with that.

The 60gb PS3 launched for that amount. From what I've read in other articles, Carmack's goggles are 1/10th the cost of comparable units.

slurgfest2• 14 years ago

John Carmack has written 3D engines widely used in commercial games for decades now (most recently Rage - whatever its demerits as a game, the technology is cutting edge and the game is definitely not antique). Whether or not you liked the content in Doom 3 has very little to do with Carmack's very technical, back-end work.

When the 3dfx boards came out, they cost something like $500. But it still opened up a big market. I don't see why you are assuming that a wireless headset is necessary and will not be included. Buy a TV if you want, all you've shown is that you are not in the targeted market at this early stage. (Probably because there is no way to provide that kind of hardware at lower cost, particularly without more traction)

Carmack is certainly wealthy enough already, I would assume that his interest in VR headsets is that he is a geek who wants to move the state of the art forward (not too different from the reasons for doing Armadillo Aerospace)

ctdonath• 14 years ago

I don't see why you are assuming that a wireless headset is necessary and will not be included.

Wireless VR is very important. Getting tangled in cables while you're physically thrashing around sucks. Trust me (owner of original Virtual iGlasses).

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Well, the kit cost $500. Once it's in the hands of a company that can mass produce, the price could be substantially lower. And with console manufacturers, there's always the possibility they'll sell hardware at a loss to move software. The point being we don't know the final end price yet.

The real concern there is the Big Corp will compromise the design just enough to make it uninteresting.

Tooluka• 14 years ago

Video games market IS antiquated. Crappy gamepad controllers, requirement to use TVs, hardware upgrades lock for 5-6 years, dumbed down games (as a result of gamepad use). Sure, it has billion marketing budgets, easy to start using equipment, but technologically it is antiquated.

JVIDEL4• 14 years ago

Dude, Carmack was never a consoles guy, he didn't like the Genesis nor the SNES, he didn't like the Playstation, Saturn and N64, etc...

If he was excited by nextgen consoles, now THAT would be news...

SwellJoe• 14 years ago

Did you read the article, at all? The point is what he is excited about, which is developments in VR.

JVIDEL4• 14 years ago

Yeah, 5 days ago, with next-generation he means consoles, not VR HMDs

adventureful2• 14 years ago

And yet he did like the Xbox 360.

brooksbp• 14 years ago

as well as Microsoft's static analysis tool for Xbox 360 development!

starship2• 14 years ago

The 1990's were fifteen years ago. Since then Carmack has spent 60 hours per week writing code for every conceivable console, PC, and mobile platform. Most people in his position would have moved into management by this point, he chose not to. As a result he has more expertise on more topics than just about anyone else in the gaming industry. And more than most in computer science generally. If he has an opinion on something, its because he knows what he's talking about.

JVIDEL4• 14 years ago

I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's talking about, he just never liked consoles, he was always a PC guy and if he were truly "excited" about the nextgen that's like hearing Armstrong will quit riding bikes and be a F1 pilot.

frou_dh2• 14 years ago

I found John Siracusa's summary of the march-of-progress on Hypercritical insightful. Along the lines of:

> Processors can never be fast enough, memory can never be big enough. If you take your favourite device 20 years in to the future and try to convince people that it had been "good enough" to settle down, they'll rightfully laugh in your face.

---

Then again, it's a double-edged sword if increasingly advanced ways to bombard you with distraction, or make trash jingoistic war games, come along for the ride.

phoboslab• 14 years ago

I love how Carmack is constantly pushing the industry forward.

He made raycasting engines when everyone else was still doing 2D stuff. He made fully 3D games when everyone else was still using raycasting. He built a game engine with completely dynamic lighting, when everyone else was still relying on lightmaps and some cheap hacks.

Arguably Duke Nukem 3D looked better than Quake, but polygonal was the future. Half-Life 2 looked better than Doom 3, but dynamic lighting was the future.

While everyone else keeps iterating current technology (often to astonishing results), Carmack does something new - something that may have a lot of drawbacks initially, but will be the future. I see the same happening in other industries - take Tesla vs. any other automobile industry out there for an example.

I haven't been this excited about a new piece of gaming hardware since I got the N64 for my birthday back in 1996. I'll buy it!

(Of course it's not only Carmack who is doing research in that department. This post isn't so much about praising him, as to praise innovative thinking.)

pestaa• 14 years ago

Exactly. First I didn't understand why MegaTexture was implemented in a production-ready game (Rage) because it made lots of texture look like a decade old, but I guess Carmack sees the future in it.

Negitivefrags3• 14 years ago

Rage was a huge shame (tech wise). They needed to be able to ship more data to make the tech really shine. The game was 3 DVDs as it was but it needed to something more like 8 or 9 DVDs.

It just feels like such a shame for the graphics to look bad for want of the ability to ship data to the customer.

gouranga5• 14 years ago

Let us not forget Unreal which was arguably better than quake at the time from a technology standpoint...

However, I find that the gaming experience peaked with Unreal Tournament. Its been about appearance over substance since (apart from tribes 2).

Stop whinging about the tech and make something fun again!

neutronicus• 14 years ago

The orignal UT was so fun. The later ones tried to be Halo and suffered for it.

maggit2• 14 years ago

I misread your comment several times before I consulted Wikipedia to find some clarifications. It might be the case that others need the same clarifications as me, so I might as well post them here:

* Quake was released June 1996

* Quake II was released November 1997

* Unreal was released May 1998

So, the Quake "at that time" is Quake II. Just to clarify :)

"Make something fun" needs no clarification, though. That one needs agreement ;)

johnchristopher2• 14 years ago

> Arguably Duke Nukem 3D looked better than Quake, but polygonal was the future. Half-Life 2 looked better than Doom 3, but dynamic lighting was the future.

Maybe so but almost 10 years later and half-life 2 is still more enjoyable than doom3. Quake1 and quake3 are the only id games that are remembered not only for their tech advancements (and of course, commander keen).

Now if we had had source engine facial and body animations combined with doom3 engine from the beginning (and of course the much better story-writing of hl2): http://www.nofrag.com/2004/nov/24/15016/

MikeCapone2• 14 years ago

> Quake1 and quake3 are the only id games that are remembered not only for their tech advancements (and of course, commander keen).

I would say that Doom belongs at the top of that list.

bookwormAT• 14 years ago

I agree with every bit you wrote about John Carmack's contribution to gaming hardware and computer graphics.

But it should also be noted that both these topics are not that important in the gaming industry as they used to be when Carmack started. Graphics have become "good enough" for 3D in 2004 or so, and much earlier for 2D.

The bottlenecks in todays video games are in Artificial Intelligence (for simulations), game mechanics and story telling (which is on a all time low if you ask me).

The latest Game from Carmack I know of, Rage, was just more or less the same as every other "AAA" shooter released within the last 6 years.

tluyben2• 14 years ago

Yes; that's why I like Indie games more now; they are more creative with game mechanics + story telling. I think the current next-gen hardware is not enough of a leap to make enough difference; if you just take the Unreal engine it'll all look nice now. Complex AI or actual realistic human + animal movement of body/face (no, currently they are not) would require a lot more advances in hardware/software. For a big jump in AI I would say memristors would be something. But after HP shouting that they would be selling them last year, the hype died down :)

Aldor2• 14 years ago

Didn't Half-Life 2 have dynamic lighting?

BlackAura• 14 years ago

Not really. The lighting in Half Life 2 was based on static lightmaps. They were very fancy lightmaps, which enabled them to use techniques such as normal mapping or specular reflections, which are normally incompatible with lightmaps, but they were static lightmaps nonetheless.

It has some dynamic lighting effects, the same way Quake did them (modifying the lightmaps). It could also do projected shadows and self-shadowed objects using shadow maps, but not on world geometry.

I believe that the current source engine has some kind of dynamic lights. Either that, or Portal 2 did a fantastic job of faking them.

Still, that was 2011. Doom 3 came out in 2004, and exclusively used dynamic lighting, without a static lightmap in sight.

motters2• 14 years ago

It doesn't sound as if anything has been done about the VR sickness problem. Wearing bulky screens in front of your eyes probably doesn't have much of a future, but I think that augmented reality using something like the EyeTap device has a much bigger future which extends significantly beyond gaming.

Negitivefrags3• 14 years ago

My understanding is that the sickness was in large part due to the latency (Solved by Carmack). Beyond that it's just a matter of getting the perspective correct (Also solved by carmack).

motters2• 14 years ago

It occurs if there's a sustained mismatch between your vestibular sense and visual odometry. That's ok if the game only involves looking around in a fixed position, but if the avatar is walking/flying then you're likely to get VR sickness, no matter what the frame rate is.

Apparently, VR users do habituate to the effects after a few days, in the same manner as space sickness, but in the intervening period there can be some unpleasantness.

6ren• 14 years ago

I knew someone working in VR about 20 years ago, and the big problem then was latency - if there's too much delay between when your head moves and the scene is rendered at the new orientation, it just doesn't work. IIRC the eyes are sensitive, in this respect, to delays of less than a movie frame's 1/24 sec.

Carmack is both very concerned and very knowledgeable about latency in rendering, so it seems likely that he's solved this problem... but I haven't seen it explicitly addressed in anything I've read about his recent work. It might help his advocacy if he explained why this tremendously exciting thing failed last time, and that he's solved it, to overcome the "VR winter".

staunch• 14 years ago

He's talked about this exact issue and is addressing it.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-v...

kalleboo• 14 years ago

These videos were more interesting than the OP. Hearing him geek out about all the things he's tried to make it work well makes me really excited for the stuff that's in the pipeline.

warp• 14 years ago

Another video from E3:

http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6...

nohat• 14 years ago

He addressed that in a video here http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-v...

ivankirigin• 14 years ago

Is the related kickstarter active yet? Link?

nixarn• 14 years ago

Not yet, it was planned to go live 1.5 weeks ago, but some "good news" delayed it by 2 weeks, so it should probably go live this week. And the good news might be some great hardware partner(s).

John Carmack "not all that excited" by next-gen hardware

Related Stories