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I thought given the debate about what Carmack said, it would be nice to have a full transcript of John Carmack’s QuakeCon 2005 keynote for reference here, so I typed one up.

I have divided up the keynote into what I think were the general areas that he was trying to cover.

Apologies in advance for any typos or mistakes in the transcription, of which I’m sure there are plenty. This took forever to type up.

Transcribed from the video file available at http://www.filerush.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=11114#11114

Reflections

First, it's worth sitting back and reflecting about how amazing the industry has been and the type of progress that we've seen.

A long time ago, a graphics pioneer once quipped that reality is 80 million polygons a second. We're past that number, right now, on cheap console hardware. Later that number was fudged to 80 million polygons a frame, because clearly we don't have reality yet, even though we have 80 million polygons a second.

But still, the fact is that number was picked to just be absurd. It was a number that was so far beyond what people were thinking about in the early days that it might as well have been infinity. And here we are with cheap consoles, PC cards that cost a few hundred dollars that can deliver performance like that, which was basically beyond the imagination of the early pioneers of graphics.

And not only have we reached those kind of raw performance throughput numbers, but we have better features than the early systems that people would look at. You can look at a modern system and say it is better in essentially every single respect than multi-million dollar image synthesis systems of not too many years ago.

Unlike a lot of the marketing quips that people make about when this or that chip is faster than a supercomputer, which are usually fudged numbers when you start talking about only executing in cache, ignoring bandwidth, and this or that to make something sound good, that's not really the case with the graphics capabilities we’ve got, where not only do we have raw triangle throughput, we've got this programmability that early graphics systems just didn't have at all. We've got better image fidelity coming now, we've got higher multiple scan-out rates, and all of this stuff, and we're getting them in the next generation of consoles for just a few hundred dollars. And the PC space is still advancing at this incredibly rapid clip.

Well everybody's kind of saturated with the marketing hype from Microsoft and Sony about the next generation of consoles. They are wonderful but the truth is they're about as powerful as a really high end PC right now and a couple years from now on the PC platform you're going to be able to put together a system that's several times more powerful than these consoles that are touted as the most amazing thing anybody's ever seen.

But this trend of incredible graphics performance, what it's allowed us to do, and this is great just following up on the Quake 4 demo, because there's a whole lot of shock and awe in everything that they showed there. And that is a direct result of what we're able to do because of the technology. id is often sort of derided as being a technology focused company where a lot of people will get on this high horse about game design purity, but the truth is, the technology that we provide, that we're able to harness from the industry, is what lets us do such a memorable gaming experience.

While you can reduce a game to its symbolic elements in what you're doing and what your character accomplishes, you can't divorce that from the experience that you get with the presentation. So the presentation really is critically important.

To some degree id software has actually been singled out by developers as causing problems for the industry by raising the bar so much and I am sympathetic to this.

It's a serious topic to talk about in software development where as the budgets get larger and larger, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars. There are people that have said explicitly they wish that Doom 3 or now Quake 4 hadn't shipped because now every game is expected to look that good. Every game is expected to have that level of features because the bar has kind of been raised. Things like that happen in a lot of other areas also. It's going on with physics as well as graphics, where every game is expected to have a physics engine and I have some sympathy for them.

I sometimes find it unfortunate that we effectively have to make a B-movie to make a computer game nowadays, whereas sometimes it would be nice to be able to concentrate on a game being a game and not worrying about having to have hours of motion capture footage and cinematic effects but that’s just kind of what games are expected to have nowadays.

But the technology has provided real absolute benefits to the game playing public, to the people that are playing these games. Sometimes people will look through the tinted glasses of nostalgia and think back to some time where maybe gaming was perhaps less commercial, less promoted, less mainstream, less whatever, and think back to, you know, the golden age.

But the truth is the golden age is right now. Things are better in every respect for the games that you play now than they ever have been before. It’s driven home when you take something like watching the Quake 4 trailer here and then you go back.

Most people here will have fond memories of Quake 1. I know the great times you had playing that and the things would be stuck in your memory. But you then go and run them side by side, and you could have fun in that game, and there are the moments of wonder at the newness of it, but it won’t have the presence and the impact, and the ability to really get in and stir up your guts that we can do with the modern state of the art games.

So I’m not apologetic at all for the effort that we put in to pushing the technology, what we’ve been able to do to allow the artists and designers to present a world that’s more compelling then what we’ve been able to do before and to make stronger impacts on the people playing the games. That’s all been really good.

And the trends are still looking really strong. There’s nothing on the immediate horizon that would cause us to expect that over the next several years we’re not going to see another quadrupling and eventually another order of magnitude increase in what we’re going to be able to do on the graphics side of things.

Console Development

So the console platform is going to become more important for us in the future. It’s interesting now that when we look at the xbox 360 and the PS3 and the PC platforms, we can pretty much target essentially all of them with a more or less common code base, more or less common development strategies on there, and this is I guess going to be the first public announcement of it, this will be the first development cycle for id software where we’re actually going to be internally developing on console platforms for a simultaneous, hopefully, release on there.

In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an xbox 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be starting on that initially. It’s worth going into the reasons for that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the development process goes smoothly onto them.

While Doom 3 on the xbox was a great product -- we’re really happy with it, it’s been very successful -- it was pretty painful getting that out after the fact. We intend to make some changes to make things go a little bit smoother on this process.

We’ve been on-again off-again with consoles for a long time. I’ve done console development work back on the original Super Nintendo and several platforms up through today, and there’s always the tradeoff between flexibility on the PC and the rapid evolutionary pace that you get, and the ability to dial down and really take the best advantage of the hardware you’ve got available on consoles.

It’s worth taking a little sort of retrospective through the evolution of PCs and the console space.

In our products if you look back at the really early days, up through basically Doom, the original Doom, we were essentially writing register level access to most of the PC video cards, we would use special mode X graphics and things like that to get a few extra features out of that.

Once we got beyond that point, especially after we moved to Windows, with post-Quake development, it’s become a much more abstract development process, where we program to graphics APIs and use system software interfaces, and that certainly helped the ability to deploy widely and have a lot of varied hardware work reasonably well. You can certainly remember back in the original Doom days we had a half-dozen different audio drivers for Pro Audio Spectrums and Ad-Libs and all this other stuff that we’ve been pretty much able to leave behind.

Eventually with the 3D space there was the whole API wars issue about how you were going to talk to all of these different graphics cards because for a while there, there were 20 graphics chips that were at least reasonable players. It’s nice now that it’s essentially come down to ATI and NVidia, both of whom are doing very good jobs in the 3D graphics space.

Especially in this last development cycle, in the last year, that I’ve been working on some of the more advanced features, it has been troublesome dealing with the driver situation. Bringing in new features, new hardware, new technologies that I want to take advantage of, that have required significant work in the driver space where there have been some significant driver stability issues as they’ve had to go do some major revamps to bring in things like frame buffer objects and some of the pixel buffer renderings and stuff like that.

That has given us some headaches at id where we have one driver revision that fixes something that makes our tools work correctly but that happens to cause the game to run slow because there some heuristic thing going on with buffer allocations and we’ve had things kind of ping-pong back and forth between some of that and I’ve had some real difficulty trying to nail down exact graphics performance on the PC space because we are distanced from the hardware a fair amount.

The interfaces that we go through, they don’t map one-to-one to “calling this” results in “this being stuck into a hardware buffer which is going to cause this to draw”. There are a lot of things that are heuristically done by drivers now that will attempt to not necessarily do what we say, but do what they think we meant in terms of where buffers should go and how things should be allocated and how things should be freed. It’s been a little bit frustrating in the past year trying to nail down exactly how things are going to turn out where whether I can say something is my fault, the driver’s fault, or the hardware’s fault.

So it’s been pretty refreshing to actually come down and work on the xbox 360 platform, where you’ve got a very, very thin API layer that lets you talk pretty directly to the hardware. You can say “this is the memory layout”, “this call is going to result in these tokens going into the command buffer”, and so on. The intention is I’m probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on that as a primary development platform, where I’ll be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then we’ll go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform on there.

We do have PS3 dev kits also, and we’ve brought up some basic stuff on all the platforms.

A lot of people assume for various reasons that I’m anti-Microsoft because of the OpenGL versus D3D stance. I’d actually like to speak quite a bit in praise of Microsoft in what they’ve done on the console platform, where the xbox previously and now the 360 have the best development environment that I’ve ever seen on a console. I’ve gone a long ways back through a number of different consoles and the different things that we’ve worked with, and Microsoft does a really, really good job because they are a software company and they understand that software development is the critically important aspect of this, and that is somewhat of a contrast to Nintendo and Sony, and previously Sega, who are predominantly hardware companies, and decisions will get made based on what sounds like a good idea in hardware rather than what is necessarily the best thing for the developers that are actually going to be making the titles.

Over the history of the consoles there’s been sort of this ping-pong back and forth between giving good low-level access to the hardware, letting you kind of extract the most out of it, and having good interfaces and good tools to go with it.

In the real old days of side scrolling tile based consoles, you got register access, and that was pretty much it. You were expected to do everything yourself, and the hardware was usually pretty quirky and designed around a specific type of game that the vendors thought you would be making on there. It’s entertaining to program in it’s own way.

But the first really big change that people got was when the original Playstation 1 came out, and it had a hardware environment that didn’t originally let you get at the lowest level graphics code on there. But they designed fast hardware that was easy to program. One fast processor, one fast graphics accelerator, and you got to program it in a high level language on there.

The contrast with this was the Sega Saturn at the time, which had five different processing units and was generally just a huge mess. They did document all the low level hardware for you to work at, but it just wasn’t as good an environment to work on.

So it was interesting to see with the following generation, that Sony kind of flip flopped with the Playstation 2, where you now had low level hardware details documented and all this, but you were back to this multi-core, not particularly clean hardware architecture.

And then Microsoft came out with the xbox which had an extremely clean development environment, the best we’ve really seen on a console to date, but you didn’t get the absolute nitty-gritty low-level details of the 3D system on there. And I know Microsoft actually, there’s a lot of bickering back and forth about “was it NVidia’s fault or Microsoft’s fault” or whatever on there, but still it was a clear advantage for developers. If you ask developers that worked on xbox and PS2, the xbox is just a ton nicer to develop for.

So it’s been interesting to see that Microsoft has had a good deal of success, but they haven’t been able to overtake Sony’s market dominance with the earlier release of the PS2.

So it’s going to be real interesting to see this how this following generation plays out, with the xbox 360 coming out first, and being more developer friendly, at least in our opinion, and Sony coming out a little bit later with PS3.

Hardware-wise, there’s again a lot of marketing hype about the consoles, and a lot of it needs to be taken with grains of salt about exactly how powerful it is. I mean everyone can remember back to the PS2 announcements and all the hoopla about the Emotion Engine, and how it was going to radically change everything, and you know it didn’t, its processing power was actually kind of annoying to get at on that platform.

But if you look at the current platforms, in many ways, it’s not quite as powerful as it sounds if you add up all the numbers and flops and things like that. If you just take code designed for an x86 that’s running on a Pentium or Athlon or something, and you run it on either of the PowerPCs from these new consoles, it’ll run at about half the speed of a modern state of the art system, and that’s because they’re in-order processors, they’re not out-of-order execution or speculative, any of the things that go on in modern high-end PC processors. And while the gigahertz looks really good on there, you have to take it with this kind of “divide by two” effect going on there.

Now to compensate for that, what they’ve both chosen is a multi-processing approach. This is also clearly happening in the PC space where multi-core CPUs are the coming thing.

Everyone is essentially being forced to do this because they’re running out of things they can do to make single processor, single thread systems go much faster. And we do still have all these incredible market forces pushing us towards following Moore’s Law -- faster and faster, everyone needs to buy better systems all the time. But they’re sort of running out of things to do to just make single processors much faster.

We’re still getting more and more transistors, which is really what Moore’s Law was actually all about, it was about transistor density, and everyone sort of misinterpreted that over the years to think it was going to be faster and faster. But it’s really more and more. Historically that’s translated to faster and faster, but that’s gotten more difficult to make that direct correlation over there.

So what everybody’s having to do is exploit parallelism and so far, the huge standout poster-child for parallelism has been graphics accelerators. It’s the most successful form of parallelism that computer science has ever seen. We’re able to actually use the graphics accelerators, get all their transistors firing, and get good performance that actually generates a benefit to the people using the products at the end of it.

Multiprocessing with the CPUs is much more challenging for that. It’s one of those things where it’s been a hot research topic for decades, and you’ve had lots academic work going on about how you parallelize programs and there’s always the talk about how somebody’s going to somehow invent a parallelizing compiler that’s going to just allow you to take the multi-core processors, compile your code and make it faster, and it just doesn’t happen.

There are certain kinds of applications that wind up working really well for that. The technical term for that is actually “embarrassingly parallel” -- where you’ve got an application that really take no work to split up -- things like ray-tracing and some of the big mathematics libraries that are used for some vector processing things.

The analogy that I tell hardware designers is that game code is not like this; game code is like GCC -- a C compiler -- with floats. It’s nasty code with loops and branches and pointers all over the place and these things are not good for performance in any case, let alone parallel environments.

So the returns on multi-core are going to be initially disappointing, for developers or for what people get out of it. There are decisions that the hardware makers can choose on here that make it easier or harder. And this is a useful comparison between the xbox 360 and what we’ll have on the PC spaces and what we’ve got on the PS3.

The xbox 360 has an architecture where you’ve essentially got three processors and they’re all running from the same memory pool and they’re synchronized and cache coherent and you can just spawn off another thread right in your program and have it go do some work.

Now that’s kind of the best case and it’s still really difficult to actually get this to turn into faster performance or even getting more stuff done in a game title.

The obvious architecture that you wind up doing is you try to split off the renderer into another thread. Quake 3 supported dual processor acceleration like this off and on throughout the various versions.

It’s actually a pretty good case in point there, where when we released it, certainly on my test system, you could run and get maybe a 40% speed up in some cases, running in dual processor mode, but through no changing of the code on our part, just in differences as video card drivers revved and systems changed and people moved to different OS revs, that dual processor acceleration came and went, came and went multiple times.

At one point we went to go back and try to get it to work, and we could only make it work on one system. We had no idea what was even the difference between these two systems. It worked on one and not on the other. A lot of that is operating system and driver related issues which will be better on the console, but it does still highlight the point that parallel programming, when you do it like this, is more difficult.

Anything that makes the game development process more difficult is not a terribly good thing.

The decision that has to be made there is “is the performance benefit that you get out of this worth the extra development time?”

There’s sort of this inclination to believe that -- and there’s some truth to it and Sony takes this position -- “ok it’s going to be difficult, maybe it’s going to suck to do this, but the really good game developers, they’re just going to suck it up and make it work”.

And there is some truth to that, there will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time, and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches and CELL is worse than others in some respects here.

But I do somewhat question whether we might have been better off this generation having an out-of-order main processor, rather than splitting it all up into these multi-processor systems.

It’s probably a good thing for us to be getting with the program now, the first generation of titles coming out for both platforms will not be anywhere close to taking full advantage of all this extra capability, but maybe by the time the next generation of consoles roll around, the developers will be a little bit more comfortable with all of this and be able to get more benefit out of it.

But it’s not a problem that I actually think is going to have a solution. I think it’s going to stay hard, I don’t think there’s going to be a silver bullet for parallel programming. There have been a lot of very smart people, researchers and so on, that have been working this problem for 20 years, and it doesn’t really look any more promising than it was before.

Physics and AI

One thing that I was pretty surprised talking to some of the IBM developers on the CELL processor, I think that they made to some degree a misstep in their analysis of what the performance would actually be good for, where one of them explicitly said “now that graphics is essentially done, won’t we have to be using this for physics and AI?”.

Those are two poster children that are always brought up of how we’re going to use more CPU power -- physics and AI. But the contention that graphics is essentially done I really think is way off base.

First of all, you can just look at it from the standpoint of “Are we delivering everything that a graphics designer could possibly want to put into a game, with as high a quality as they could possibly want?”, and the answer is no. We’d like to be able to do Lord of the Rings quality rendering in real time. We’ve got orders of magnitude more performance that we can actually suck up in doing all of this.

What I’m finding personally in my development now is that the interfaces that we’ve got to the hardware with the level of programmability that we’ve got, you can do really pretty close to whatever you want as a graphics programmer on there.

But what you find more so now than before is that you get a clever idea for a graphics algorithm that’s going to make something look really awesome and is going to provide this cool new feature for a game. You can go ahead and code it up and make it work and make it run on the graphics hardware.

But all too often, I’m finding that, well, this works great, but it’s half the speed that it needs to be, or a quarter the speed, or that I start thinking about something “this would be really great but that’s going to be one tenth the speed of what we’d really like to have there”.

So I’m looking forward to another order of magnitude or two in graphics performance because I’m absolutely confident that we can use it. We can suck that performance up and actually do something that’s going to deliver a better experience for people there.

But if you say “ok here’s 8 cores”, or later 64 cores, “go do some physics with this that’s going to make a game better”, or even worse, “do some AI with this that’s going to make a game better” -- the problem with those, both of those, is that both fields, AI and physics, have been much more bleeding edge than graphics has been.

To some degree that’s exciting, where the people in the game industry are doing very much cutting edge work in many cases. It is “the” industrial application for a lot of that research that goes on.

But it’s been tough to actually sit down and take some of that and say “all right lets turn this into a real benefit for the game, lets go ahead and how do we use however many gigaflops of processing performance to try and do some clever AI that winds up using it fruitfully”, and especially in AI, it’s one of those cases where most of the stuff that happens in especially single player games, is much more sort of a directors view of things. It’s not a matter of getting your entities to think for themselves, it’s a matter of getting them to do what the director wants, to put the player in the situation that you’re envisioning in the game.

Multiplayer focused games do have much more case for you want to have better bot intelligence. It’s more of a classic AI problem on there, but the bulk of the games still being single player it’s not at all clear how you use incredible amounts of processing power to make a character do something that’s going to make the gameplay experience better.

I keep coming back to examples from the really early days of the original Doom, where we would have characters that are doing this incredibly crude logic that fits in like a page of C code or something, and characters are just kind of bobbing around doing stuff.

You get people that are playing the game that are believing that they have devious plans and they’re sneaking up on you and they’re lying in wait. This is all just people taking these minor, minor cues and kind of incorporating them inside their head into this vision of what they think is happening in the game. And the sad thing is you could write incredibly complex code that does have monsters sneaking up on you and hiding behind corners and it’s not at all clear that makes the game play any better than some of these sort of happenstance things that would happen as emergent behavior of very trivial simple things.

So until you get into cases where you can think in games, games like “The Sims”, or perhaps massively multiplayer games where you really do want these autonomous agents, AIs, running around doing things. But then that’s not really a client problem, that’s sort of a server problem, where you’ve got large worlds there which again isn’t where the multi-core consumer CPUs are really going to be a big help on that.

Now physics is the other sort of poster-child for what we’re going to do with all this CPU power. And there’s some truth to that, I mean certainly what we’ve been doing with the CPUs for the physics stuff -- it’s gotten a lot more intensive on the CPU -- where we find that things like rag-doll animations and all the different objects moving around, which is one of these sort of “raise the bar” things every game now has to do this. It takes a lot of power, and it makes balancing some of the game things more difficult when we’re trying to crunch things to get our performance up, because the problem with physics is it’s not scalable with levels of detail the way graphics are.

Fundamentally, when you’re rendering an image of a scene, you don’t have to render everything at the same level. It would be like forward texture mapping, which some old systems did manage to do. But essentially what we’ve got in graphics is a nice situation where there are a large number of techniques that we can do that we can fall off and degrade gracefully.

Physics doesn’t give you that situation in the general case. If you’re trying to do physical objects that affect gameplay, you need to simulate pretty much all of them all the time. You can’t have cases where you start knocking some things over and turn your back on it and you stop updating the physics. Or even drop to some lower fidelity on there, where then you get situations where if you hit this and turn around and run away, they’ll land in a certain way, and if you watch them they’ll land in a different way. And that’s a bad thing for game development.

And this problem is fairly fundamental. If you try to use physics for a simulation aspect that’s going to impact the gameplay, things that are going to block passage and things like that, it’s difficult to see how we’re going to be able to add a level of richness to the physical simulation that we have for graphics without adding a whole lot more processing power, and it tends to reduce the robustness of the game, and bring on some other problems.

So what winds up happening in the demos and things that you’ll see on the PS3 and the physics accelerator hardware, you’ll wind up seeing a lot of stuff that are effectively non-interactive physics. This is the safe robust thing to do.

But it’s a little bit disappointing when people think about wanting to have this physical simulation of the world. It makes good graphics when you can do things like instead of the smoke clouds doing the same clip into the floor that you’ve seen for ages on things, if you can get smoke that pours around all the obstructions, if you get liquid water that actually splashes and bounces out of pools and reflects on the ground.

This is neat stuff, but it remains kind of non-core to the game experience. And an argument can be made that we’ve essentially done that with graphics, where all of it is polish on top of a core game, and that’s probably what will have to happen with the physics. I don’t expect any really radical changes in the gameplay experience from this.

I’m not really a physics simulation guy so that’s one of those things where a lot of people are like “damn id software for making spend all this extra work on graphics”. So to some degree I’m like “damn all this physics stuff making us spend all this time on here”, but you know, I realize that things like the basic boxes falling down knocking things off, bouncing around the world, rag-dolls interacting with all that, that’s all good stuff for the games.

But I do think it’s a mistake for people to try and go overboard and try and do a real simulation of the world because it’s a really hard problem, and you’re not going to give that much real benefit to the actual gameplay. You’ll tend to make a game which may be fragile, may be slow, and you’d better have done some really, really neat things with your physics to make it worth all of that pain and suffering.

And I know there are going to be some people that are looking at the processing stuff with the CELLs and the multi-core stuff, and saying “well, this is what we’ve got to do, the power is there, and we should try and use it for this”. But I think that we’re probably going to be better served by trying to just make sure that all of the gameplay elements that we want to do, we can accomplish at a rapid rate, respectable low variance in a lot of ways.

Personally I would rather see our next generation run at 60 fps on a console, rather than add a bunch more physics stuff. I actually don’t think we’ll make it, I think we’ll be 30 fps on the consoles for more of what we’re doing. Anyways we’re going to be soaking up a lot of the CPU just for the normal housekeeping types of things that we’re doing.

So I’m probably coming off here as a pretty big booster of Microsoft on the 360 and their development choices, the potentially really interesting thing on the other side of the fence with Sony, is that they’re at least making some noises about having it being a more open platform. This is always been one of the issues that I disliked about the consoles.

I mean I don’t like closed development platforms. I don’t like the fact that you have to go be a registered developer and you have to, you know, have this pact where only things that go through a certification process can be published. As a developer I’ve always loathed that aspect of it. Nintendo was always the worst about that sort of thing and it’s one of the reasons why we’re not real close with them.

It’s the reality of the market when they sell these platforms essentially at a loss they have to subsidize those to make it back on the unit sales of the software. It’s why I’ve always preferred the PC market in the past. We can do whatever we feel like, we can release mission packs, or point releases, we can patch things, all of this good stuff that happens on the PC space that you’re not allowed to do on the consoles.

So Sony has been talking about more openness on the platform, and I’m not sure how it would work out there directly, but if you had something where if the PS3 became sort of like the Amiga used to be as a fixed platform that was graphics focused, that could be potentially very interesting. Microsoft certainly will have nothing to do with that [...audio dropout...]

As a quick poll here, how many people have HDTV? The console vendors are obviously pushing HDTV but I’ve been hearing this sense that... the Super Nintendo way back when had “HDTV output support” it’s been over and over and over that it hasn’t turned out to be a critically important aspect. For console as computing device, having a digital output, HDTV, may be one of the key things that makes that possible, because WebTVs and such have always sucked, nobody actually wants to do any kind of productivity work on an NTSC TV output, but digital HDTV is really pretty great for that.

Microsoft’s got this big push that I’m somewhat at odds with them about, about minimum frame-buffer rendering resolutions on the 360 and it’s not completely clear how that pans out, but they’re essentially requiring all games to render at HDTV resolution. And that may not be exactly the right decision, where if you’ve got the option of doing better rendering technology at less pixels with higher antialiasing rates, that seems like a perfectly sensible thing that someone might want to do, but having a blanket “thou must render at 720p” or something, probably not.

But some marketing person came up with that and decided it was an edict, which is one of those things that I hate about the console environment -- that you get some marketing person making that decision and then everybody has to sort of abide by it. Not clear yet exactly how that turns out. Obviously things like Quake 4 are running good at the higher resolutions but the next generation rendering technology there are some things like if it comes down to per pixel depth buffered atmospherics at a lower resolution, I’d rather take that than rendering the same thing at a higher resolution. But I’ll be finding out in kind of the next six months about what I actually can extract from the hardware.

Cell phones and fostering innovation and creativity

To change gear a little bit on the platform side, something that also ties into the whole development cost and expense issue. A lot of you have probably heard that several months ago I actually picked up some cell phone development, which has been really neat in a lot of ways.

Coming off Doom 3’s development, which was a 4 year development process, which cost tens of millions of dollars, with a hundred plus man-years of development effort into it, to go and do a little project that had about 1 man year of effort in it, a little bit more, and was essentially done in four months, there’s a lot of really neat aspects to that.

One of the comments I’ve made in regards to the aerospace industry, talking about rockets and space and all that, is that the reason things have progressed so slowly there is because there’s so much money riding on everything. If you’ve got a half-billion dollar launch vehicle satellite combination, engineers just aren’t allowed to come up and say “hey I got an idea, lets try this”. You know, you don’t just get to go just try something out that might lead you to much better spot in the solution space. You are required to go with what you know works and take a conservative approach that will have very low, as low a likelihood as you are able to guarantee against failure.

While in game development we’re a long ways from that particular point, but when you’re talking about tens of millions of dollars, sure it’s not hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s not chump change either. You look at game development process, and if someone is going to be putting up a couple tens of millions of dollars, there is a strong incentive to not do something completely nuts.

You know they want to make sure that, you know, and even the people working on it, if you’re going to work on something for four years, it’s all well and good to say “we’re going to be at the vanguard of creative frontiers here, and we’re going to go off and do something that might turn out to be really special.

But if you spend four years of your life developing something, and it turns out to be a complete flop, and you spent all of your money and publishers don’t want to give you another deal for your next one because you just had a flop, that’s a real issue. And that is what is fueling the trend towards sequels and follow-ons and so on in the industry.

And a lot of people will deride that and say well it’s horrible that there’s no innovation and creativity and all this here we’re getting Doom 3, Quake 4. You know, I’ll look at it and say yeah but they’re great games -- people love them, people are buying them and enjoying them and all that.

But there is some truth to the fact that we’re not going off and trying random new genres.

The cell phone development was really neat for that. Where we went and did a little kind of turn-based combat game, I think there’s going to be a few people with some of the phones around here you might be able to take a look at it, but the initial version was just tiny. We had to fit in a 300k zip file essentially on here. It was almost an exercise in pure design. It’s not so much about the art direction, about how we’re going to present this shock-and-awe impact that we’ve been doing on the high end PCs. It’s about what are going to be the fun elements here, you know, “how much feedback you want to give them”, “what loot does the player get”, “how do you get to bash monsters”, and it’s almost at the symbolic level because it’s so simple.

Now, after I started on some of that, it wasn’t long before I had a backlog of like a half dozen interesting little ideas that I’d like to try on a small platform. And these aren’t things that are anything like what we’re doing, I mean I’ve got some ideas for a rendering engine for a particular type of fighting game or sort of a combat lemmings multiplayer game on cell phones and so just cool things that we could never just go off and try on the PC space because id does triple A titles, you know, we’re not going to just be able to go and lets try doing a budget title or something like that, it’s just not going to happen. The dynamics of our company, we need to continue to use the people that we have at the company, we’re not about to say, “well we don’t need level designers for this project, all you guys, have a good life”. Our projects are defined by the people that we have at the company.

But the idea of having other platforms where you can start small, at this one man year of effort or so, to just try out new things, I think is really extremely exciting.

There are two predominant platforms on the cell phone for development, there’s the Java platform and the BREW platform. And what’s really neat is the Java platform is essentially completely open. Literally I was looking at my cell phone and said, “I’d like to try writing something on this”. I just poke around online, download the development tools, download the documentation, and go upload a little program. And you can just start just like that. That was sort of the feel that I had way back when I first sort of learned programming on like an Apple II or something. You just sit down and kind of start doing something.

Sometimes I worry about people trying to start developing today because if you start on the PC and you’re looking at Doom 3 or something and you open up MSDEV and say “where do I start”, it’s a really tough issue. I’ve always consciously tried to help people over that gap with the tools we make available for modding and source code that we make available, specifically for that to kind of help people get started.

I guess now is as good a time as any to segue on this. The Quake 3 source code is going out under the GPL as soon as we get it together now. So there are a few actual key points about this. We’re going to cover everything this time, I know in the past we’ve gotten dinged for not necessarily getting out all the utilities under the same license and all that, but we’re going to go through and make sure everything is out there and released.

All of the Punkbuster stuff is being removed, so the hope is anyone that’s playing competitively with released versions should be protected from potential cheating issues on there. We’ll see how that plays out.

One of the kind of interesting statistics that Todd and Marty told me just earlier today, is that the entire Quake franchise, all the titles that have been produced on it, our titles, our licensee titles, have generated over a billion dollars in revenue worldwide. And the source code that’s going out now is the culmination of what all of those were at least initially built on.

I have a number of motivations for why I do this, why I’ve been pursuing this since the time the Doom source code was released. One of them is sort of this personal remembrance where I very clearly recall being 14 years old and playing my favorite computer games of the time, like Wizardry and Ultima on the Apple II, and I remember thinking it’s like “wow it’d be so great to be able to look at the source code and poke around and change something in here”, and you know, I’d go in and sector edit things to mess with things there, but you really wanted the source code.

And that was something that later on when it turns out that I’d been writing the games that a new generation of people are looking at and probably thinking very similar things, that wouldn’t it be cool to be able to go in and do this, and the original mod-ability of the games was the step that we could take, but when we’ve been able to take it to the point of actually releasing the entire source code on there, it opens up a whole lot more possibilities for people to do things.

The whole issue about creativity in the development environment; that is one of my motivators for why I give this stuff out there, where I actually think that the mod community and the independent developer community, there are a lot of reasons why we can look for creativity from that level, where people can try random things, and there’s going to be fifty things and forty of them are stupid, you know, and some of them turn out to be good interesting ideas. Like it’s amazing to look at how Counterstrike has gone which was somebody making a mod to make something fun, and it’s become this dominant online phenomenon there.

So there are also the possibilities of people actually taking this and you know, perhaps doing commercial things with it. The GPL license does allow people to go make whatever game they want on this and sell it. You can go get a commercial publishing agreement and not have to pay id a dime if you abide by the GPL. And I’m still waiting for someone to have the nerve to do this, to actually like ship a commercial game with the source code on the CD. I mean, that would be really cool.

We always have the option of re-licensing the code without the GPL. You can’t do this if picked up random people on the net’s additions to it, you know, that’s stays GPL unless you go get a separate license from everybody there, you’re stuck with the GPL.

But if you work with the original pristine source from id, you can always come back to us and say “well we developed all of this with the GPL source code, we want to ship a commercial product, but we don’t want to release our source code, so we’d like to buy a license”, and we do that at reasonably modest fees, we’ve done that some with the previous generation, and that’s certainly an option for Quake 3.

I do hope that one of these days that somebody will go and do a budget title based on some of this code, and actually release the source code on the CD. That would be a novel first, and the way I look at it, people are twitchy about their source code, more so than I think is really justified. There’s a lot of sense that “oh this is our custom super value that we’ve done our magic technology in here”, and that’s really not the case.

A whole successful game, it’s not about magic source code in there, it’s about the thousands and thousands of little decisions that get made right through the process. It’s all execution, and while there’s value in the source code, it’s easy to get wrapped up and overvalue what’s actually there.

Especially in the case of the GPL’d stuff, I’m mean here we are, it’s like I’m releasing this code that has this billion dollars of revenue built on it, don’t you think it’s maybe a little bit self righteous that the code that you’ve added to it is now so much more special that you’re going to keep it proprietary and all that.

There have been some hassles in the past about people that developed on previous GPL’d code bases and don’t follow through and release the code, and occasionally we’ve had to send, get a lawyer letter or something sent out to them.

But for the most part I think a lot of neat stuff has been done with it. I think it’s been great that a lot of academic institutions have been able to do real research based off of the code bases, and I am still waiting for someone to do the commercial kind of breakthrough project based on the GPL stuff.

Previously I would have several people say “oh but you didn’t get the utilities licensed right” or any of this stuff as sort of an excuse about it, but we’re going to have all that taken care of correctly this time, and anyone can kind of go with it to whatever level they want there.

That’s one of my multi-pronged attacks on hopefully nurturing creativity for gaming on there, and I do think making the canvas available for lots of people to work on is an important step.

The low end platforms like the cell phone development, I actually have sort of a plan that I’m hopefully going to be following through to develop a small title on the cell phone and then possibly use that, if it’s well received, as a springboard towards a higher level title, which is sort of the opposite way to people doing it now, where usually on the platforms on the GBA and the cell phone stuff, you’ll see people that have a named title on some other high end console platform, and they release some game with the same title that has almost no relevance to the previous thing, but you’re just using some brand marketing on there.

I think that there’s the possibility of doing something actually the other way, where if we do something neat and clever or even just something stylistically interesting, that people can look at and say “this is a good game”, and you get a million people playing it or something. Using that as your kind of negotiation token to go to a publisher and say “all right, now we want to go ahead and spend the tens of millions of dollars to take this to all the high end platforms and really do an awesome job on that. We’ll see over the next, you know, year or so, if any of that pans out. I think there’s a better chance of doing that than your random cold call.

id software is in sort of a unique position of we can just say this is the game we’re going to do next, and publishers will publish it because we have a perfect track record on our mainstream titles, they’ve all been hits and successes.

But even in a lot of the companies that we work with, our partner companies -- companies that we help on development projects and try to help get projects going -- it’s tough to pitch a brand new concept. It’s pretty easy to go ahead and get titles developed that are expansions and add-ons and in-themes and sequels, and the stuff that known to be successful, but starting something brand new is pretty tough.

I think that things like starting from mods or small game platforms is an exciting idea for moving things a little bit forward there.

On the downside, the pace of technology is such that while our first cell phone target was for this 300k device, we later made an upscale version for one of the higher end BREW platforms and it’s 1.8 megs and I looked at this and said well, we up-scaled all of this, but if somebody targeted a game development specifically for the highest end of the cell phones now, you’re already looking at million dollar game budgets, and given a year or two we’re going to have PSP-level technology on the cell phones, and then a couple years later, we’ll have Xbox, and eventually you’ll be carrying around in your hand the technology that we currently have on the latest consoles, and then people will be going “is it worth 20 million dollars to develop a cell phone game”.

So this is treadmill that really shows no sign of slowing down here. And there are going to continue to be problems in the future. And I’m not sure how you scale down much further than that, so there might only be this window of a year or two where we’ve actually got the ability to go out and do relatively inexpensive creative development before the bar is raised, as the saying goes, over and over again, and you’re stuck to huge development budgets even on those kind of low-end platforms.

Where the hardware should go

In terms of where the things I think hardware should be evolving towards, honestly, things are going really well right now. The quibbles that I make about the exact divisions of CPUs and things like that on the consoles, they’re really essentially quibbles. The hardware’s great, I mean everybody’s making great hardware, the video card vendors are making great accelerators, the consoles are well put together, everything’s looking good.

The pet peeves or my wish list for graphics technology at least, I’ve only really got one thing left on it that hasn’t been delivered, and that’s full virtualization of texture mapping resources.

There’s a fallacy that’s been made over and over again, and that’s being made yet again on this console generation, and that’s that procedural synthesis is going to be worth a damn. People have been making this argument forever, that this is how we’re going to use all of this great CPU power, we’re going to synthesize our graphics and it just never works out that way. Over and over and over again, the strategy is bet on data rather than sophisticated calculations. It’s won over and over again.

You basically want to unleash your artists and designers, more and more. You don’t want to have your programmer trying to design something in an algorithm. It doesn’t work out very well.

This is not an absolute dogma sort of thing, but if you’ve got the spectrum from pure synthesis that like to make their mountains and fluffy clouds out of iterated fractal equations and all this, down to pure data which is nothing but rendering models that are already pre-generated, I’m well off towards this side, where I believe in simple combinations of extensive data.

The texturing is one of the areas I think we can still make radical improvements in the visual look of the graphics simply by completely abandoning the tiled texture metaphor. Even in the modern games that look great for the most part, you still look out over these areas and you’ve got a tiled wall going down that way or a repeating grass pattern, maybe it’s blended and faded into a couple different things.

The essential way to look at it is that texture tiling, the way it’s always been done, texture repeats, is a very, very limited form of data compression, where clearly what you want is the ability to have exactly the textures that you want on every surface, everywhere.

The visual results you get when you allow an artist to basically paint the scene exactly as they’d like, that’s one of those differences where a lot of people are sort of wondering what going to be the next big step, where obviously look at the Doom 3 technology versus the Quake 3 technology, we took a massive leap in visual fidelity.

Now there’s a ton of graphics algorithms that you can work on that will be of improved quality in similar models, that we can take forward, and a lot of them are going to be pretty important. High dynamic range is the type of thing that can make just about everything look better to some degree, and you can do all the motion blurs and the subsurface scattering, and grazing lighting models, and all of this.

And those are good, but they’re not they type of thing that for the most part when you glance over someone’s shoulder walking by that it makes what’s on the screen look radically better.

Unique texturing is one of those things where you look out over a scene, and can just look a whole lot better than anything you’ve seen before.

What we’re doing in Quake Enemy Territory is sort of our first cut at doing that over a simple case, where you’ve got a terrain model that has these enormous, like 32000 by 32000, textures going over them. Already they look really great. There’s a lot of things that you get there that are generated ahead of time, but as the tools are maturing for allowing us to let artists actually go in and improve things directly, those are going to be looking better and better.

We’re using similar technology, taking it kind of up a step, in our next generation game, and I’d really love to apply this uniquely across everything.

It’d be great to be able to have every wall, floor, and ceiling uniquely
textured where the artists are going around and slapping down all these decals all over the place, but it’s a more challenging technical problem where there’s a lot of technology that goes on behind the scenes to make this flat terrain thing, which is essentially a manifold plane, uniquely textured with multiple scrolling textures and all this stuff going on behind the scenes -- it doesn’t map directly to arbitrary surfaces where your locality can’t necessarily tell you everything. An obvious case would be if you’ve got a book. A book might have 500 pages, each page could have this huge amount of texture data on there, and there’s no immediately obvious way for you to know exactly what you need to update, how you need to manage your textures.

Lots of people have spent lots of time in software managing these problems -- you get some pretty sophisticated texture management schemes, especially on the consoles where you’ve got higher granularity control over everything.

But the frustrating thing for me is that there is a clearly correct way to do this in hardware and that’s to add virtual page tables to all of your texture mapping lookups and then you go ahead and give yourself a 64-bit address space, and if you want, take your book that has 500 pages, map it all out at 100 dpi on there, and give yourself 50 gigs of textures. But if you have the ability to have the hardware let you know “ok this page is dirty, fill it up”, whether it’s fill it up just by copying something from somewhere, or more likely, decompressing something, or in the case of a book, using some domain specific decompression -- I mean you could go ahead and rasterize a PDF to that, and actually have it render just like anything else.

This is one of these things that has seemed blindingly obvious and correct to me for a number of years and it’s been really frustrating that I haven’t been able to browbeat all of the hardware vendors into actually getting with the program on this because I think this is the most important thing for taking graphics to the next level, and I’m disappointed that we didn’t get that level of functionality in this generation.

What you want it to do is if it’s missing the page, not mapped in, it just goes down the mipmap chain and eventually it stops at a single pixel, whatever, it’s all completely workable, there are some API and OS issues that we have to deal with, exactly how we want to handle the updates, but it’s a solvable problem and we can deliver some really, really cool stuff from this.

The only other thing that I have to say about graphics now really is that getting people to concentrate more on the small batch problem is important.

Microsoft is focusing on that for Longhorn to try and make that a little bit better, but it’s a combination hardware software thing where ideally you want your API to be a direct exposure of what the hardware does, where you just call something which sets a parameter, and it becomes “store these four bytes to the hardware command buffer”, and right now there’s far too much stuff that goes on which winds up causing all of the hardware vendors to basically say “use large batches”, you know, use more instancing stuff, or go ahead and put in more polygons on your given characters.

But the truth is that’s not what makes for the best games. Given a choice, we can go ahead and have 100,000 polygon characters, and you can do some neat close-ups and stuff, but a game is far better with ten times or a hundred times as many elements in there.

For instance, we’re a long ways away from being able to render this hall filled with people with each character being detailed because there are too many batches. It just doesn’t work out well, and that’s something that the hardware people are aware of and it’s evolving to some correction, but it’s one of those issues that they don’t like being prodded on it because hardware people like peak numbers. You always want to talk about what’s the peak triangle, the peak fill rate, and all of this, even if that’s not necessarily the most useful rate. We suffer from this on the CPU side as well, with the multi-core stuff going on now.

But overall I’m really happy with how all of the graphics hardware stuff has gone, the CPUs, and it’s sort of fallen off my list of things -- about four or five years ago I basically stopped bothering talking with Intel and AMD because I thought they were doing a great job. I really don’t have much of anything to add. Just continue to make things faster, you know, you don’t have to add quirky little things that are game targeted.

And you know the last year or two, even the video card vendors -- I continue to get the updates and look at all of these things -- but basically it’s been “good job, carry on and get the damn virtual texturing in”, but that’s about it.

So life is really good from a hardware platforms standpoint and I think the real challenges are in the development management process and how we can continue to both evolve the titles that we’re doing and innovate in some way, have the freedom to do that, and that’s probably a good time to go ahead and start taking some questions.

Question: Tradeoffs when developing for multiple platforms?

Ok, so the tradeoffs when you are developing for multiple platforms. It’s interesting in that the platforms are closer together in the upcoming generation than the current generation.

There is a much bigger difference between Xbox and PS2 than there is between Xbox 360 and PS3.

There were clearly important design decisions that you would have to make if you were going to be an Xbox targeted game or a PS2 targeted game, and you can pick out the games that were PS2 targeted that were moved over to the Xbox pretty clearly.

That’s less of a problem in the coming generation because both a high-end PC spec and the 360 and the PS3, they’re all ballpark-ish performance-wise.

Now the tough decision that you have to make is how you deal with the CPU resources. Where you might say that if you want to do the best on all the platforms, you would unfortunately probably try to program towards the Sony CELL model, which is isolated worker threads that work on small little nuggets of data, rather than kind of peer threads, because you can take threads like that and run it on the 360. You won’t be able to get as many of them, but you can still run, you know you got three processors with two threads, or three cores with two threads in each one.

So you could go ahead and make a game which has a half dozen little worker threads that go on the CELL processor there, and run as just threads on the 360 and a lot of PC specs will at least have hyper threading enabled, the processor’s already twice as fast, if you just let the threads run it would probably work out ok on the PC, although the OS scheduler might be a little dodgy for that -- that might actually be something that Microsoft improves in Longhorn.

And that’s kind of an unfortunate thing that that would be the best development strategy to go there, because it’s a lot easier to do a better job if you sort of follow the peer thread model that you would have on the 360 but then you’re going to have pain and suffering porting to the CELL.

I’m not completely sure yet which direction we’re going to go, but the plan of record is that it’s going to be more the Microsoft model right now where we’ve got the game and the renderer running as two primary threads and then we’ve got targets of opportunity for render surface optimization and physics work going on the spare processor, or the spare threads, which will amenable to moving to the CELL, but it’s not clear yet how much the hand feeding of the graphics processor on the renderer, how well we’re going to be able to move that to a CELL processor, and that’s probably going to be a little bit more of an issue because the graphics interface on the PS3 is a little bit more heavyweight. You’re closer to the metal on the Microsoft platform and we do expect to have a little bit lower driver overhead.

People that program directly on the PC as the first target are going to have a significantly more painful time, although it’ll essentially be like porting a PC game, like we did on the Xbox with Doom, lots of pain and suffering there.

You take a game that’s designed for, you know, 2 GHz or something and try and run it on a 800 MHz processor, you have to make a lot of changes and improvement to get it cut down like that, and that is one of the real motivators for why we’re trying to move some of our development to the consoles is to sort of make those decisions earlier.

Question: Next game after Quake 4?

No I’m not going to really comment on the next game right now.

Question: PSP or portable platforms?

No, I haven’t done any development on those yet. I just recently looked over some of the PSP stuff with. We tossed around the idea of maybe taking a Doom 3 derivative to the PSP. I really like the PSP. I don’t play a ton of video games, but I like the PSP, one of the few things I’ve been playing recently.

I think it’s a cool platform and we’re looking at the possibility of maybe doing something that would be, it would have to be closer to Quake 3 level graphics technology because it doesn’t have as much horsepower as the modern platforms. But it’s got a nice clean architecture, again back to one reasonably competent processor, and one fast graphics accelerator.

The development tools again aren’t up to Microsoft standards on there, so it’s probably more painful from that side of things, but it looks like an elegant platform, that would be fun to develop something on.

Question: Stand-alone physics cards?

Ok, stand-alone physics cards. They’ve managed to quote me on the importance of, you know, physics and everything in upcoming games. But I’m not really a proponent of stand-alone physics accelerators. I think it’s going to be really difficult to actually integrate that with games. What you’ll end up getting out of those, the bottom line, is they’re going to pay a number of developers to add support for this hardware and it’s going to mean fancy smoke and water, and maybe waving grass on there. You’re not going to get a game which is radically changed on this. And that was one of the things again why graphics acceleration has been the most successful kind of parallel processing approach. It’s been a highly pipelined approach that had a fallback.

You know in Quake, GLQuake, and Quake 2 timeframe where we had our CPU side stuff, and the graphics accelerator made it look better and run faster.

Now the physics accelerators have a bit of an issue there where if you go ahead and design in these physics effects, the puffy smoke balls, and the grass and all that, you can have a fallback where have a hundred of these on the CPU and a thousand of them if you’re running on the physics accelerator.

Once of the problems though it’s likely to actually decrease your wall clock execution performance, and this is one of the real issues with all sorts of parallel programming is that it’s often easy to scale the problem to get higher throughput, but it often decreases your actual wall clock performance, because of inefficiencies with dealing with it. And that’s one of the classical supercomputer sales lines that you can quote these incredibly high numbers on some application, but you have to look really close to see that they scaled the problem.

Where usually people when you think of acceleration you want to think “it does what I do only better and faster” and a lot of cases in parallel applications you get something where “well, it does what I do, it’s better, but might actually be a little bit slower”, and this was one of the real problems we had with the first generation of graphics accelerators until 3DFX really got things going with Voodoo.

A lot of the early graphics accelerators you’d take the games, they would run on there, and they would have better filtering and higher resolution, so in many cases they’d look better, but they were actually slower -- in some cases significantly slower than the software engines at the time. It was only when you got to the Voodoo cards that actually it looks better in every respect and it’s actually also faster than the software rasterizer version that they became a clear win.

So I have concerns about the physics accelerator’s utility. It’s the type of thing where they may be fun to buy for their demos, it might be cool, and there will be some neat stuff I guarantee it. I know there’s some smart people at the company working on it that I’m sure will develop some great stuff, and there will probably be some focused key additions to some important games that do take advantage of it, but I don’t expect it to set the world on fire really.

Question: Creative gameplay design?

Creative gameplay designing -- that was sort of one of my themes about the issues of development and this was another kind of interesting thing with the cell phone project. Lots of people will go on about the lack of creativity in the game industry and, you know, how we’re lacking all of these things.

It was interesting when we interviewed at Fountainhead, we were looking for some additional people to bring onto the development team for cell phone projects and we have several cases of people going “eh, I don’t want to work on a little puny cell phone” essentially.

Everybody wants to work on the next great sequel, you know, people go into the game industry, they want to work on Doom 5 or whatever, you know the games that they’ve had a great time playing and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it was a little disappointing to see a lot of people give lip service to creativity and innovation and being able to go out and try different things, but there’s probably not nearly as much when it comes down to actually walking the walk on that, it’s probably not as widespread as a lot of people who just chat on message boards about how awful and non-creative everything is these days.

But I do think that, like I said, my key plan is, small platforms may be a cradle for innovation and then I leave a lot in the hands of what people can do with the source code platforms we have released as an ability to kind of strut your stuff.

And the other aspect of the source code is it is the best way to get into the industry. Do something with the resources that are available out there.

If you do something really creative and you get thousands of people playing your mod online, and everybody likes it, you can get a job in the industry, because those are credentials. That’s showing you’ve got what it takes to actually take an idea from a concept to something people actually enjoy, and that’s been a really positive side effect of the whole mod community in general, and the source code stuff is a follow on that.

Question: LGPL middleware solutions?

So, LGPL middleware solutions -- I’m not really up on all the middleware -- so are there actually any significant middleware solutions that are under the LGPL?
<Audience member unintelligible>
Yeah, we use OpenAL for some of our audio stuff.

The GPL has always been sort of a two edged sword, where a lot of people will just say “well why don’t you release it under the BSD license or something so we can do whatever we want with it” and there’s something to be said for the complete freedom, but I do like the aspect of the GPL about forcing people to actually give some back. I do get a little irritated about people getting too proprietary about their addition to the code when it’s built on top of what other people have put far more effort into.

But any of the work that goes on for developing GPL or LGPL stuff, it’s been to some degree, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the development of sort of amateur graphics engines that people are doing because it’s fun -- and it is -- and not so much because it’s something that’s really going to be helping anyone produce a title or do something interesting there.

I think that in general people trying to actually make a difference would be better served working in one of the established code bases, because in the development process, the last 10% turns out to be 90% of the work.

There have been dozens and dozens of projects that are done in a somewhat public form that look like they’re making great progress, and you take a quick glance at it and say “oh this is 90% or 80% of the way to something that can be a commercial game” when in reality it’s 10% or 15% of what it takes to actually get there.

So I certainly encourage people to work inside the context of full complete code bases that have a commercial kind of pedigree on it, but the great thing about any of that though is if you just want to program to have fun -- which is a perfectly valid thing to do -- writing graphics engines and middleware solutions sort of from scratch has it’s own appeal.

Question: The orders of magnitude we’ve seen in graphics?

The numbers of orders of magnitude we’ve seen in graphics is really stunning. It’s easy to be blasé about the state of everything, but if you step back and take a perspective look at this, I stand in awe of the industry and the progress that has been made here.

I mean I remember writing character graphics depth buffer on a line printer at a college VAX. All the Apple II graphics and line drawing so on like that. I could not say that I envisioned things at the point that we’ve got right now.

I mean it’s hard, even if you say right now, what would do with four orders of magnitude more performance. I mean I can tell you right now what I’d do with one or two orders of magnitude. There are specific things that I know look good and will improve things and do all of that. But just imagining out another couple orders of magnitude, is pretty tough.

Even at the worst of times, I’m a glass is half full sort of person, but this glass is overflowing. I don’t have anything that I look at as “darn it’s too bad we don’t have all of this”.

Question: Networking side of things?

On the networking side of things, it’s been extremely gratifying seeing the success of the massively multiplayer games. You know we certainly talked about doing that type of stuff early on in the Doom days. We actually started a corporation, id communications, with the expressed idea that we should pursue this type of multi-player persistent online experience.

id never got around to all of that, but when the early Ultima Online and Everquest were coming out, I was certainly looking on that eagerly anticipating how they would do and the huge success that we’ve seen with all of those has been really cool. It’s again one of those things that we’re not directly a part of, but I can very much appreciate the raw neatness of how that’s all gone.

There are technical directions that things would go if performance, if broadband performance continues to improve in terms of bandwidth and latency and variability, there are other styles of technology that one would do. You can make all the client side cheating sort of things impossible if you had enough bandwidth to essentially have everyone just be a game terminal where you’re essentially just sending compressed video back to them so there’s no opportunity for driver cheats or intercepting game positions of things. If someone wants to actually write optical analysis software to analyze compressed images to target people, go for it -- that’s a hell of a research project. Something like that would be a direction that things could change.

I think that the push that Microsoft’s done with Live in a lot of ways has been good, making voice kind of a standard part of a lot of the games, and the work that’s going on in terms of infrastructure and back-end in matchmaking, Microsoft’s been pretty smart in a lot of things they’re doing there.

So it was a lot of fun doing the early networking work, but it’s a reasonably well understood problem now.

I don’t expect to see really radical changes in the technologies that are going on in games. It’s just gotten easier with the broadband, where we don’t have to cripple the game or the single player aspect of the game as much now.

Quake 3 was all built around minimum transmit, all presentation client-side, and that actually made Quake 3 a little bit more difficult of an engine for developers that took it and made single player games out of it. A lot of times, like some of Raven’s titles, they would wind up making two separate executables, where you take one that’s more derived from the Quake 3 original source and one that they took a hatchet to, to make a great single player game out of.

As people start going through the source code in the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see what people make of those necessary tradeoffs.

Question: When is the Quake 3 GPL release?

Well we tried to start getting it put together but everybody’s really busy. Timothy is going to be taking care of making sure its got everything, its got the right GPL notices in it, that everything builds, the utilities and everything are done. I’m hoping it’ll be next week.

It would have been nice if we could have had it done and actually up on the FTP site now, but things like working on Quake 4 is still taking priority for a lot of resources there. I would certainly expect within a week.

Question: Tools and middleware versus APIs?

Ok, tools and middleware over APIs, you know there are interesting tradeoffs to be made there. For years the middleware companies were really in kind of a dodgy space in terms of what they could provide and the benefits that you get from that, and it was really only with the PS2 that middleware companies really became relevant for gaming.

Now id has always been sort of the champion of full engine licensing. We have no intention of changing from that model. I think that a company will get more out of taking a complete game engine and modifying that to suit their game, if they’re looking for something that’s reasonably close to what the game engine does, rather than taking a raw middleware technology and using that to build a game on top of.

Now the nastier the platform is the more valuable middleware is. Middleware was valuable on the PS2 because there’s a lot of nasty stuff in there the developers didn’t want to work with.

It may be less valuable on platforms like the 360 that are really pretty clean. There will be more solutions for things on taking advantage of the CELL processor where you’ll probably be able to get neat little modules that do various speech and audio processing and certain video effects, and things like that where you just know oh I can just go off and run this on a CELL processor, I don’t have to worry about figuring out how to do that and it’ll go do its job and add something to the game.

So there will be some good value there. There’s definitely a valid place for middleware solutions, but again there’s a ton of success that’s been built on top of the engine licensing model.

Question: Armadillo Aerospace update?

Ah, the Armadillo Aerospace stuff. Well I could talk for another two hours about all the aerospace side of things.

In October we’re going to be flying a little vehicle at the X-Prize Cup, to show rapid turn-around. The big change that we’ve made in the last six months is we’ve abandoned our peroxide based engine. We’re using liquid oxygen and alcohol engines, which we’re still getting them to melt sometimes, got a few issues left to work out on that.

The upside is that it’s essentially a combination which you can credibly build an actual orbital booster out of. The combination we were using before was optimized for ease of development and making it generally safer and lot less problematic for us to develop, but now we’re going ahead and taking that big step of making it work with cryogenic propellants, it will be the platform that will be able to take us into the future.

Question: Ferraris?

I actually just recently sold my last Ferrari. I’ve been sort of pawning them off for a while, and a lot of people commented that for a while in my old house I didn’t have much space in my garage, so I had my little machine tools and my mill and my lathe, small things, and I would be setting books and manuals and parts on my Testarossa, people were like “this is just appalling”, but it was table space for a while there. But I did just recently sell the F50.

The rocket work kind of drove a lot of vehicle choice where I drive a BMW X5 to carry boxes around here mostly, cause I have to lug things around, and it just doesn’t work having boxes of industrial parts sticking out of a Ferrari there.

My wife’s car is a BMW Z8 which is a neat little sports car. It’s not a Ferrari, but it’s actually in many ways sort of a more little fun car to drive.

Recently just before I sold the F50, I drove it around for a little while. It had been in the shop for a long time actually getting the turbos taken off, because the damn Ferrari purists, none of them want a turbo Ferrari. It’s like I don’t understand it. They would rather pay more for this pure car that you’re in danger of having someone with a Mustang with a big shot of nitrous running ahead of you. It’s like that’s no way to have an exotic car.

But it was interesting to just sort of go ahead and drive it again like that. Yeah when you run it flat out, it’s a fast car. And it’s faster than the Z8, but just for most day to day around town driving, the Z8’s actually a more fun little car.

You know the cars I have the fond memories of are things like my 1000 HP Testarossa, which is just a completely different quality of experience. It’s not just a little bit faster, you know, it’s “See God and hope you don’t die” type of fast. And you know that’s spoiled me for years. It’s like forever after probably I’ll test drive somebody’s new supercar and it’ll be like “oh this is... pleasant.”

Question: Facial expressions in games?

Ok that’s another kind of good example about how we really need more of stuff. If you look at the movies doing facial expressions, they will have hundreds of control points going on, tugging every little muscle that makes up the face.

We as an industry know how to do very realistic facial work there if we follow the movie example, but it’s time consuming and expensive, and I don’t expect radical improvements in that, where if you look at the Lord of the Rings work on there, in a lot of the making of stuff where they talk about how they animate Gollum’s face and it comes down to an insane amount of man work just going in tweaking every last little control point. Yeah they capture most of it, but everything gets touched up.

And that’s just what’s going to be leading us to hundred million dollar game budgets. And these are just all the things that, it’s not going to be long before we literally see a hundred million dollar budget game that’s going to employ all of this level of movie production values going in there and human faces are one of those really tough things.

id has classically intentionally steered away from having to do that because it’s a tough problem solvable only by large amounts of manpower and money going towards that. And unless you’re perfect, it can still come off looking really bad.

It’s one of the problems that scare me about doing the more and more people that you do have on there. I mean even at the movies, you look at the movies that have the incredibly huge budgets, you tend not to have synthetic computer actors doing close up face shots. You have the computer animated guys screwing around doing their action things down there, but you don’t do a zoom-in full face close up on a simulated character, because even given unlimited resources, you get a few things like Gollum, and that’s not a human -- you get away with it because it’s a creature.

When you take an actual person and simulate it, it’s possible to pull off, but it’s incredibly expensive and that’s one of the real challenges facing gaming today, as you get a lot more games that are kind of set in conventional modern world environments where you’ve got more and more things that people are used to looking at and used to interacting with, solving the people problem is a really big issue because it starts rearing it’s head as the thing that will dominate your experience of how realistic the people look, and in a lot of games people just have to kind of swallow that little bit of disbelief and say everything else look really lush and wonderful, but the close up facial expressions are not there yet. I’ll be surprised if we do get there in this coming generation.

I think that’s about my time slot, thanks.

 

[fugimax]

Good job.

How about a video of it NOT in NSV format, though?

 

[PhatSaqs]

Good lord thats alot.

 

[aaaaa0]

Good job.

How about a video of it NOT in NSV format, though?

I have no idea where to get a non-NSV version of the video. The audio quality on the NSV video was pretty bad, and I had to listen to some parts a dozen times to make out what he was saying.

 

[SantaC]

Good job.

How about a video of it NOT in NSV format, though?

try vlc

 

[fugimax]

try vlc

not working for me.

unless they just added/fixed support for it in the last 2 months...since that's when I downloaded it.

 

[Pseudo judo]

Good job.

How about a video of it NOT in NSV format, though?

.

 

[Borys]

Interesting points:

- Quake 3-level graphics on PSP (!!!), doable
- 2007-2008 PCs will be several times more powerful than 360/ PS3 (No shit, Sherlock.)
- next id's game comes out either PC-first console-later or on both at the same time. NO console-first exclusivity.
- this is the Golden Age of gaming

Oh, and the obligatory GAF Logic(TM):

LOL! Carmcka iz a n00b Kojima pwns him.

 

[Zaptruder]

LOL! Carmcka iz a n00b Kojima pwns him.

As far as games are concerned... yes, yes he does.

And... it's probably overlooked, but what JP developers lack in technical depth they makeup in artistic depth...

that is they cover technical shortfalls with carefully designed art that bridges the gap and then some.*

Kojima is one of these people. Carmack is not.

*Like the stuff that Polyphony Digital does for the GT series... 'baking' in lighting into the cars, or for MGS2, attaching rain textures to snake to compensate for the inability to technically create dynamic rain hitting and coming off snake... while still providing a strong impression of really fierce rains.

 

[teiresias]

Interesting points:
- Quake 3-level graphics on PSP (!!!), doable

umm, ok

- 2007-2008 PCs will be several times more powerful than 360/ PS3 (No shit, Sherlock.)

and several times more expensive - how the whole cost/performane ratio gets lost in the PC-crowd's need to feel superior is a mystery to me.

- next id's game comes out either PC-first console-later or on both at the same time. NO console-first exclusivity.

obviously so when the port looks mediocre compared to a dedicated console team's games they have the "oh, it was just a port" excuse, coupled with the "it was a port on this horrible multi-core system that was built by the DEVIL!!!"

- this is the Golden Age of gaming

he says as he pumps out yet another FPS

"the Super Nintendo way back when had “HDTV output support”

Ummm, exactly what is he trying to reference with this?

 

[Borys]

Zaptruder:
I was just making fun of GAF people. I respect Kojima and adore his games but I'm not downplaying Carmack at the same time like others do. They both excel in different areas.

and several times more expensive - how the whole cost/performane ratio gets lost in the PC-crowd's need to feel superior is a mystery to me.

Heh, he "forgot" to say that. However he looks at PC/ console performance not from consumers POV so that's understandable.

obviously so when the port looks mediocre compared to a dedicated console team's games they have the "oh, it was just a port" excuse, coupled with the "it was a port on this horrible multi-core system that was built by the DEVIL!!!"

Well he said his next game will be made rather simultanously (sp?) on console and PC. No PC-->360 port this time so you should have higher expectations.

he says as he pumps out yet another FPS

What's wrong with good FPSes? Carmack supplies the engine other devs supply the fun.
See: Jedi Knights, Soldier of Fortune, Call of Duty, probably Prey and Q4 MP etc.

 

[jman2050]

But it’s been tough to actually sit down and take some of that and say “all right lets turn this into a real benefit for the game, lets go ahead and how do we use however many gigaflops of processing performance to try and do some clever AI that winds up using it fruitfully”, and especially in AI, it’s one of those cases where most of the stuff that happens in especially single player games, is much more sort of a directors view of things. It’s not a matter of getting your entities to think for themselves, it’s a matter of getting them to do what the director wants, to put the player in the situation that you’re envisioning in the game.

...

You get people that are playing the game that are believing that they have devious plans and they’re sneaking up on you and they’re lying in wait. This is all just people taking these minor, minor cues and kind of incorporating them inside their head into this vision of what they think is happening in the game. And the sad thing is you could write incredibly complex code that does have monsters sneaking up on you and hiding behind corners and it’s not at all clear that makes the game play any better than some of these sort of happenstance things that would happen as emergent behavior of very trivial simple things.

...

But I do think it’s a mistake for people to try and go overboard and try and do a real simulation of the world because it’s a really hard problem, and you’re not going to give that much real benefit to the actual gameplay. You’ll tend to make a game which may be fragile, may be slow, and you’d better have done some really, really neat things with your physics to make it worth all of that pain and suffering.

More people need to realize this...

 

[teiresias]

More people need to realize this...

Just to realize that Carmack is hopelessly biased towards only targetting hardware advancements at graphic problems and could give a rip about attempting to improve computing issues in other areas of gaming that could actually . . . you know . . . aid gameplay.

 

[Cerebral Palsy]

Ok, so the tradeoffs when you are developing for multiple platforms. It’s interesting in that the platforms are closer together in the upcoming generation than the current generation.

There is a much bigger difference between Xbox and PS2 than there is between Xbox 360 and PS3.

...

That’s less of a problem in the coming generation because both a high-end PC spec and the 360 and the PS3, they’re all ballpark-ish performance-wise.

.

 

[gofreak]

.

Well since you won't comment, I will. For his purposes that may be true (he is mr. "i don't need better physics/AI" afterall ). His definition of "ballpark" might be wider than others too..I mean technically it's absolutely not true that a current high-end PC is as powerful as the next-gen systems.

Although I feel like we're threading over territory already well trodden-on in the last thread.

 

[Cerebral Palsy]

Well since you won't comment, I will. For his purposes that may be true (he is mr. "i don't need better physics/AI" afterall ). His definition of "ballpark" might be wider than others too..

You're really trying hard. Thanks for giving me a laugh.

I mean technically it's absolutely not true that a current high-end PC is as powerful as the next-gen systems.

Last I checked this next generation was going to last longer than today. What is true now obviously isn't going to be down the road a bit. I don't give it long at all beyond the release of the PS3/360 that they are surpassed by the pc.

Although I feel like we're threading over territory already well trodden-on in the last thread.

Yup.

 

[VictimOfGrief]

Hmm, well after reading that... I'll give some credit to Carmack for his vision of the industry.


< - - - But seriously, I love my tag. :lol

 

[dark10x]

Last I checked this next generation was going to last longer than today. What is true now obviously isn't going to be down the road a bit. I don't give it long at all beyond the release of the PS3/360 that they are surpassed by the pc.

Problem with the PC is, a lot of its potential will never be utilized.

So what if the lastest hardware ends up becoming more powerful? No PC game will put it to use. The ones that TRY to put it to better use always end up hitting some other bottleneck that ruins the experience. PCs have more problems than graphics cards to worry about. Even the fastest gaming PCs have annoying problems with games that really damages the experience. High-end console games usually push the systems pretty hard while maintaining a very polished feel until the end (in all areas, not just visuals and framerate). I mean, you load up the FEAR demo, and what do you see? You get two boring, static load screens that take a decent amount of time to disappear. PC gaming is becoming less interesting to me as nobody seems to be able to deliver something really solid. Half-Life 2 was like a final straw. I never expected all of those problems...but sure enough, my first experience was ruined. You just can't trust a brand new PC game out of the box to deliver the kind of experience you want.

 

[Nerevar]

Christ, the anti-Carmack feel of this board is pathetic.

He makes a lot of good points, especially regarding physics and AI. In fact, his comments were a lot more insightful than anything the armchair game designers here on GAF have stated. Yet they continue to make ad hominem attacks on his character rather than responding to his points :lol. Typical GAF logic at play.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that some people in this thread seem to be replying to the vastly inaccurate comments that Todd Hollenshead "reported" from the other thread rather than reading what Carmack himself actually said.

 

[Cerebral Palsy]

Problem with the PC is, a lot of its potential will never be utilized.

So what if the lastest hardware ends up becoming more powerful? No PC game will put it to use. The ones that TRY to put it to better use always end up hitting some other bottleneck that ruins the experience. PCs have more problems than graphics cards to worry about. Even the fastest gaming PCs have annoying problems with games that really damages the experience. High-end console games usually push the systems pretty hard while maintaining a very polished feel until the end (in all areas, not just visuals and framerate). I mean, you load up the FEAR demo, and what do you see? You get two boring, static load screens that take a decent amount of time to disappear. PC gaming is becoming less interesting to me as nobody seems to be able to deliver something really solid. Half-Life 2 was like a final straw. I never expected all of those problems...but sure enough, my first experience was ruined. You just can't trust a brand new PC game out of the box to deliver the kind of experience you want.

OH NOES A LOAD SCREEN!1 Never seen one of those on a console before.

So what you're really saying is... You just don't like pc gaming. Thanks for filling me in on that.

 

[IJoel]

Thanks a lot for posting the keynote. It was a very enjoyable read.

 

[dark10x]

OH NOES A LOAD SCREEN!1 Never seen one of those on a console before.

So what you're really saying is... You just don't like pc gaming. Thanks for filling me in on that.

What the hell? No, that's not it at all.

I've become addicted to polish, for better or for worse. OK, so for me, there was one REALLY BIG GAME on each major platform last fall. MGS3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and Metroid Prime 2.

The three console games each delivered near flawless experiences. Basically, I was able to enjoy each game as the developers intended. Half-Life 2, however, had so many problems out of the gate that my initial experience was totally ruined. Oh, it runs just fine now (though there are still a few complaints)...but the initial experience is what counts and that's why it never made a big impact on me. I don't think MGS3 would have had anywhere NEAR the same impact if they had to stop in the middle of every big scene and bring up a "now loading" screen and then proceed to skip and stutter. Would have pulled me right out of the game. When playing those games, technical issues did not cross my mind at all. I was focused on the game content until the end, and that is probably why I can look back so fondly on each one. When I think of my first day of Half-Life 2, though, I feel remorse for what could have been...

It just seems to me that, whenever a new PC game shows up and pushes the hardware to the max, it is likely that it will not be all it could have been on any hardware. There are plenty of unpolished console games, but I am talking about AAA cream of the crop games. I can almost always be certain that any big games on the consoles are going to be polished to near perfection. I mean every aspect as well. From small things like initial startup to menu transitions to larger issues like loading and performance. I want to be drawn into the experience.

I gotta hand it to Carmack and crew, though. Doom 3 was pretty much one of the only PC games in the last few years that I was able to load up and enjoy almost like a polished console game. That's probably one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much. A lot of the typical "PC problems" weren't there and the game was polished as hell (though there were still a few performance issues here and there, it was mostly just fine). I was able to play most of the game without really messing with video settings or anything else. Once I get fiddling, I can't stop, and that almost always results in my game experience going down the shitter. I'm using a decent gaming machine (3.6 P4 + 6800) and I usually keep up to date on it too.

If you want to just call that hating, then so be it. Don't even respond. I don't want to hear it. This isn't about hating PC gaming, this is about wanting it to change for the better.

 

[Dave Long]

Whether you agree with Carmack or not, he's a genius and his technology drives graphics and interaction in videogames. Your favorite developers (console or PC) are playing his games and they're wondering how he makes things look so good on current hardware.

 

[Dave Long]

Once I get fiddling, I can't stop, and that almost always results in my game experience going down the shitter.

This is your problem, not the game's problem. Stop fiddling and just play.

 

[Borys]

Problem with the PC is, a lot of its potential will never be utilized.

So what if the lastest hardware ends up becoming more powerful? No PC game will put it to use. The ones that TRY to put it to better use always end up hitting some other bottleneck that ruins the experience. PCs have more problems than graphics cards to worry about. Even the fastest gaming PCs have annoying problems with games that really damages the experience. High-end console games usually push the systems pretty hard while maintaining a very polished feel until the end (in all areas, not just visuals and framerate). I mean, you load up the FEAR demo, and what do you see? You get two boring, static load screens that take a decent amount of time to disappear. PC gaming is becoming less interesting to me as nobody seems to be able to deliver something really solid. Half-Life 2 was like a final straw. I never expected all of those problems...but sure enough, my first experience was ruined. You just can't trust a brand new PC game out of the box to deliver the kind of experience you want.

Come on dark, that's just bullshitting and you're beyond that.

Nobody delivers solid PC games? What defines a solid PC game in your opinion?

Loadscreenlessness (I made it up ;p)? 99% of console games have loadscreens.

Oh you mean HL2-like level of loading. Show me a console game with that amount of textures, polys and overall high-fidelity (what a stupid PR term) in graphics. You got to load it sometimes, you know. Since the beginning of PC gaming there was loading. It won't disappear if you get 2 nVidia cards for $1500 and latest CPU and shit. Remember Thief 2? It loaded levels for up to 5 minutes on latest PCs.
HL2 without loading is simpy undoable and you certainly know that.

Crappy coding?

Doom 3, HL2 aren't exactlly crappy coded. In fact I don't remember a crap coded game since NOLF1 and some EA stuff (MOHA).

And I don't really understand the bottleneck problem you mentioned. The recommended requirements are on the back of the box for a reason. Pairing high-end VGA stuff with low-end CPU stuff or vice-versa makes bottlenecks. Having not enough RAM (1GB) is a bottleneck problem. When you're equipped with the latest and the priciest games don't make any problems.

PC gaming is starting to not be worth the price simply because it's lacking exclusive titles. Why should I upgrade for Q4, CoD2, UT2K7 when it hits consoles? And those are (or were) hardcore PC gaming franchises. FPSes.

 

[Zaptruder]

Christ, the anti-Carmack feel of this board is pathetic.

He makes a lot of good points, especially regarding physics and AI. In fact, his comments were a lot more insightful than anything the armchair game designers here on GAF have stated. Yet they continue to make ad hominem attacks on his character rather than responding to his points :lol. Typical GAF logic at play.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that some people in this thread seem to be replying to the vastly inaccurate comments that Todd Hollenshead "reported" from the other thread rather than reading what Carmack himself actually said.

Discounting your own sweeping ad-hominen attack, the points he makes about AI and physics are good ones... but I think he draws the wrong conclusions... or at least from what I can intepret.

For AI; good design can compensate for low processing time spent on AI algorithms... but at the same time, it can only go so far; If you want to have things like Oblivion's radiant AI occuring, where the AI kinda bounces off all the information in the world and reacts intelligently within the world, you're going to need a decent amount of processing power.
For FPS, it's not such an essential thing, but they're definetly more games out there than just FPS.

For physics, he's right... that most of the physics will end up been cosmetic; but that kind of cosmetic physics will really be what boosts the graphical fidelity for next gen. Once the code is written, it doesn't necessarily need to be written again and again; with middleware, developers can exploit the capacity to simulate physics without huge amounts of additional work everytime.

On the otherhand, even simply linearly scaling up the number objects able to be kept track of while applying physics to them could help change gameplay a good deal; once you get past a certain point, you get a lot more freedom in what you're able to do; for example you're now able to keep track of hundreds of brakeable/collapsible sections in walls, allowing you to add gameplay with that kind of consideration, as opposed to before where the number was too small; the sections of wall too large to be convincing.

 

[jman2050]

Just to realize that Carmack is hopelessly biased towards only targetting hardware advancements at graphic problems and could give a rip about attempting to improve computing issues in other areas of gaming that could actually . . . you know . . . aid gameplay.

Improvements in Physics and AI are almost unneccesary except for a select few game designs. They've BEEN unneccesary for five years now. Granted, so are graphics, and I'm not saying I completely agree with Carmacks apparant fetish for even more graphical power, but I can't how many times I cringe at people thinking the capability for great physics and AI isn't there (notice the use of the term great, NOT realistic). If a game's AI or physics suck, it's the programmer's fault, not the hardware.

For AI; good design can compensate for low processing time spent on AI algorithms... but at the same time, it can only go so far; If you want to have things like Oblivion's radiant AI occuring, where the AI kinda bounces off all the information in the world and reacts intelligently within the world, you're going to need a decent amount of processing power.
For FPS, it's not such an essential thing, but they're definetly more games out there than just FPS.

Regarding this, I thought I understood Carmack clearly on what he meant. Sure, next-gen hardware will make stuff like radiant AI easier to implement and easier to execute, but only if it is really neccesary. I direct you to my two favorite quotes regarding this:

It’s not a matter of getting your entities to think for themselves, it’s a matter of getting them to do what the director wants, to put the player in the situation that you’re envisioning in the game.

...

And the sad thing is you could write incredibly complex code that does have monsters sneaking up on you and hiding behind corners and it’s not at all clear that makes the game play any better than some of these sort of happenstance things that would happen as emergent behavior of very trivial simple things.

Games aren't supposed to mimic real life; that's not the point. The point is for the game system to act in the fashion dictated to provide a fun experience for the end user. Super-complex AI may be neccesary for such experiences... but then again... *points to Sim City* you may not need to overcomplicate things to make something fun. All that code you write to make your enemies super smart, while being revolutionary and genius from an engineering standpoint, may not be noticed by the player at all. And it isn't just Carmack. i've read my fair share of developer impressions, interviews, and watnot, and almost all of them state pretty much the exact same thing. And as someone who actually designs and programs game systems (which, not to sound elitist or anything, if I do I apologize, is more than can be said for many so-called game design 'experts' on this board), I concur completely.

 

[dark10x]

This is your problem, not the game's problem. Stop fiddling and just play.

It is my problem, I admit, but it is related to the individual game. Like I said, I didn't run into this for Doom 3...

 

[Tain]

Man. The guy doesn't even play many videogames. They aren't his main interest. Give him a break.

 

[gofreak]

You're really trying hard. Thanks for giving me a laugh.

Trying hard?

He's obviously very graphics orientated, and I think from that POV the systems and even current PCs are quite close.

If you think the CPU side isn't different, well..You could certainly do things on some CPUs that would make others cry, but that isn't so much the case on the GPU side.

Last I checked this next generation was going to last longer than today. What is true now obviously isn't going to be down the road a bit. I don't give it long at all beyond the release of the PS3/360 that they are surpassed by the pc.

Of course, but I took it that he was referring to the current high end.

 

[Zaptruder]

Regarding this, I thought I understood Carmack clearly on what he meant. Sure, next-gen hardware will make stuff like radiant AI easier to implement and easier to execute, but only if it is really neccesary. I direct you to my two favorite quotes regarding this:



Games aren't supposed to mimic real life; that's not the point. The point is for the game system to act in the fashion dictated to provide a fun experience for the end user. Super-complex AI may be neccesary for such experiences... but then again... *points to Sim City* you may not need to overcomplicate things to make something fun. All that code you write to make your enemies super smart, while being revolutionary and genius from an engineering standpoint, may not be noticed by the player at all. And it isn't just Carmack. i've read my fair share of developer impressions, interviews, and watnot, and almost all of them state pretty much the exact same thing. And as someone who actually designs and programs game systems (which, not to sound elitist or anything, if I do I apologize, is more than can be said for many so-called game design 'experts' on this board), I concur completely.

I think you miss my point; for the most part AI can be compensated for with good design. Intelligently abstracting enemy behaviour into simple terms in order to create just enough detail for the player's imagination in the circumstances.

But at the same time, increased processing time on the AI will allow you to achieve a greater variety of things such as radiant AI, which is something you can't as readily or successfully pull off with scripting and fudging, allowing a better sense of immersion into the game world.
In that sense, AI too is part of the presentation of the game.

For the most part I think the gap between an AI realistic enough to convince a person of some actual intelligence is several orders of magnitude of processing power(and developmental time) away from been reached.
But even so, an increased range in the kind of AI been employed can still be appreciated, as much as an extra layer of graphical sheen, if not more so.

 

[[Reki]]

Oh you mean HL2-like level of loading. Show me a console game with that amount of textures, polys and overall high-fidelity (what a stupid PR term) in graphics. You got to load it sometimes, you know. Since the beginning of PC gaming there was loading. It won't disappear if you get 2 nVidia cards for $1500 and latest CPU and shit. Remember Thief 2? It loaded levels for up to 5 minutes on latest PCs.
HL2 without loading is simpy undoable and you certainly know that.

The thing is, HL2 method sucks, it's not a big load at the start of the level but rather, several "mini" loads each time you advance 50 mts ¬¬

 

[jman2050]

I think you miss my point; for the most part AI can be compensated for with good design. Intelligently abstracting enemy behaviour into simple terms in order to create just enough detail for the player's imagination in the circumstances.

But at the same time, increased processing time on the AI will allow you to achieve a greater variety of things such as radiant AI, which is something you can't as readily or successfully pull off with scripting and fudging, allowing a better sense of immersion into the game world.
In that sense, AI too is part of the presentation of the game.

For the most part I think the gap between an AI realistic enough to convince a person of some actual intelligence is several orders of magnitude of processing power(and developmental time) away from been reached.
But even so, an increased range in the kind of AI been employed can still be appreciated, as much as an extra layer of graphical sheen, if not more so.

I understand what you're saying, and I'm not neccesarily disagreeing with the idea soasmuch the priority it's given. Realistic AI that gives the impression of intelligence is nice from an engineering standpoint, but not neccesarily from a game design standpoint. I don't know, all this talk I hear about giving special emphasis to physics and AI in the nex generation is a bit disconcerting, if only because, as many of us know, we have a LONG way to go as far as improving the gameplay experience. I suppose Carmack made his statements because he wanted to focus in particular on the graphical aspect, which is another subject of Carmack bashing really, but the concept behind those words stand, and as I design a game, I'm not worrying about physics and AI much, relatively speaking. As far as how this relates to hardware, just look at the entertainment of the the idea of physics cards. I mean seriously, what is the point? -_-

 

[eso76]

What's really interesting is how different sources manipulated Carmack's speech.
Because that's not a matter of "different interpretations".

Having read half of the transcript, i can state JC is, like. the ultimate graphic whore.

Oh, and a moron, as far as game design goes.


All he does is measure games by their engines and graphics, he might be a good coder, he might be clever but seems to be clueless about what can be done in terms of gameplay with more complex physics and ia.
Eventually he makes it sound like these things are not what makes a game a better game. heck, graphics is !

(talking about having water behaving realistically, flooding a room for example)

This is neat stuff, but it remains kind of non-core to the game experience

HAH !
That's just because you, Carmack, Sir, are an idiot (i'm still speaking in game design terms) and can't figure out a way to turn such feature in a fresh gameplay element.
I can think of a thousand situations where "realisticly behaving water" would offer a fun gameplay diversive. And not just me (think of the however rudimental FLOOD or Waverace itself, and that's the tip of the iceberg).

It's interesting when he talks about hardware and the things we can do (in terms of graphics) with modern pc's and next gen consoles, but other than that, his ideas are already clear in his games, doom 3 especially. " Graphics above all, since i have no idea what else a good game makes anyway".

Oh, and riddick's engine mops the floor with Doom 3's, you nerd !

 

[Zaptruder]

As far as how this relates to hardware, just look at the entertainment of the the idea of physics cards. I mean seriously, what is the point? -_-

Increased graphical fidelity.

Seriously. We've reached the point where physics based consistency affects graphical fidelity as much as the number of polygons that can be churned out.

I mean... what looks better? I car with 300,000 polygons or a car with 50,000 polygons and 3000 'bones' that deform realistically upon collision?
Or what about 50,000 strands of hair on a character model... or 200 'strands' that bounces and distorts accurately.
Or clothing... hi res vs somewhat lower res that clips realistically and deforms accurately against a character...

In in motion and application the latter in all cases by far.

 

[nightez]

Middleware was valuable on the PS2 because there’s a lot of nasty stuff in there

This quote is a classic!!!

 

[Flo_Evans]

Thanks for the transcript.

Reading the whole thing his comments make alot more sense then the sensational pull outs like "ps3/x360 are 1/2 the speed of current PCs"

I think alot of his opinions have to be taken with a grain of salt, them seem to be formed around the kind of games he wants to make. i.e. The A.I. in doom is 'good enough' for a game like doom, where it is basicaly like walking through a haunted house they set up around halloween, monsters pop out and run at you. For a game like this the A.I. does not have to be that advanced to scare the player and it accomplishes the games design. But, you take something like MGS (and I hate to use this as an example, its not Kojima vs. Carmack, but hear me out) You have enemy soldiers that need to behave like individuals, they eat sleep, look at porn magazines on the ground, and search as teams and so fourth.

You could say the same thing for physics aswell. Games like HL2 used physics heavily in puzzles. If this was a good or bad is another topic of disscusion, I thought it was pretty cool that you had to build bridges and jam up spinning fans to get through parts of the game. Well better than flipping a switch somewhere on the level to unlock a door at least.

Anyway thanks again for taking the time to type that out

 

[Nerevar]

Seriously. We've reached the point where physics based consistency affects graphical fidelity as much as the number of polygons that can be churned out.

I mean... what looks better? I car with 300,000 polygons or a car with 50,000 polygons and 3000 'bones' that deform realistically upon collision?
Or what about 50,000 strands of hair on a character model... or 200 'strands' that bounces and distorts accurately.
Or clothing... hi res vs somewhat lower res that clips realistically and deforms accurately against a character...

In in motion and application the latter in all cases by far.

I think you missed his point there. His point is not that physics "don't matter" (which eso76 completely missed - either he doesn't know how to read or "he's an idiot" as he so dramatically proclaims for Carmack). Rather what he's saying is that he doesn't think we're at a level yet where realistic physics calculations can be feasibly done that fundamentally impact gameplay.

because the problem with physics is it’s not scalable with levels of detail the way graphics are.
...
But essentially what we’ve got in graphics is a nice situation where there are a large number of techniques that we can do that we can fall off and degrade gracefully.

Physics doesn’t give you that situation in the general case. If you’re trying to do physical objects that affect gameplay, you need to simulate pretty much all of them all the time. You can’t have cases where you start knocking some things over and turn your back on it and you stop updating the physics. Or even drop to some lower fidelity on there, where then you get situations where if you hit this and turn around and run away, they’ll land in a certain way, and if you watch them they’ll land in a different way. And that’s a bad thing for game development.

And this problem is fairly fundamental. If you try to use physics for a simulation aspect that’s going to impact the gameplay, things that are going to block passage and things like that, it’s difficult to see how we’re going to be able to add a level of richness to the physical simulation that we have for graphics without adding a whole lot more processing power, and it tends to reduce the robustness of the game, and bring on some other problems.

So what winds up happening in the demos and things that you’ll see on the PS3 and the physics accelerator hardware, you’ll wind up seeing a lot of stuff that are effectively non-interactive physics. This is the safe robust thing to do.

I don't see anything that contradicts those quotes. Instead, I see a bunch of people bitching that he's nothing more than a graphics whore, when instead he's pointing out that advanced physics drains resources much faster than advanced graphics and offers much less in return. However, 95% of the people are retarded and seem to read that as him saying that advanced physics is worthless, which isn't true at all. So we get idiots in here (not you) posting mildly retarding things like "Carmack is such a retarded grafix whore!!!1! OMG!" while missing the point of his presentation entirely.

Edit: While I agree with a lot of what you say (physics is a good part of graphical fidelity this gen), Carmack's point still stands. If you are rendering 500 cars crashing into one another, you have to run the physics simulation for every single one of those cars, whether you see it or not. However, for graphics, you don't even have to worry about rendering the cars not in your line of sight, and on top of that you have techniques to reduce the processor overhead for displaying distant cars too. So you get a sharper drop-off and much more processing overhead to calculate advanced physics. At what point is the trade-off worth it? Carmack seems to think that we need to increase processor ability by at least a full order of magnitude before it becomes feasible. You may disagree, but that hardly invalidates his main point.

 

[Apenheul]

*.*

You're so perfect

 

[Kleegamefan]

Problem with the PC is, a lot of its potential will never be utilized.

So what if the lastest hardware ends up becoming more powerful? No PC game will put it to use. The ones that TRY to put it to better use always end up hitting some other bottleneck that ruins the experience. PCs have more problems than graphics cards to worry about. Even the fastest gaming PCs have annoying problems with games that really damages the experience. High-end console games usually push the systems pretty hard while maintaining a very polished feel until the end (in all areas, not just visuals and framerate). I mean, you load up the FEAR demo, and what do you see? You get two boring, static load screens that take a decent amount of time to disappear. PC gaming is becoming less interesting to me as nobody seems to be able to deliver something really solid. Half-Life 2 was like a final straw. I never expected all of those problems...but sure enough, my first experience was ruined. You just can't trust a brand new PC game out of the box to deliver the kind of experience you want.

I couldn't agree more....

 

[Hitokage]

PCs might get better graphics cards down the road but the x86 platform is not meant for hardcore flop crunching. By the same token, the Cell isn't meant for desktop applications. You could probably throw in yet another chip on a PCI-E card to do such things(not to mention that AudioPU Creative wants to throw into the mix)... but it's all $$$$ added to the consumer's bottom line. To top it all off, all of these seperately made and purchased components have to work together. The PC that'll beat out a PS3 will be a frankenstein monster that eats wallets whole.

 

[Phoenix]

Carmack being wise in this space as always. He's saying alot of things I'm sure people don't want to hear, but certainly needs to be said. Always interesting to listen to his various rants and talks about things.

 

[eso76]

I think you missed his point there. His point is not that physics "don't matter" (which eso76 completely missed - either he doesn't know how to read or "he's an idiot" as he so dramatically proclaims for Carmack). Rather what he's saying is that he doesn't think we're at a level yet where realistic physics calculations can be feasibly done that fundamentally impact gameplay.

And about this he's wrong.
Anyway. Easy, i just like to be dramatic and the smiley at the end meant exactly that i was being intentionally dramatic and half-joking. I thought that was quite clear but you don't know me so i couldn't expect that. in fact.

"Half" as in he's certainly right about physics being far from being realistically simulated and he certainly makes good points and clarifies a lot of things common gamers don't take into consideration. At the same time, as a gamer, i -know- he's wrong in thinking physics simulation (that's just an example), although still very rudimental, doesn't affect gamplay enough to be worth devoting resources to.
Basically "improving graphics can improve gaming experience better than a limited physic simulation would", he does say that and i disagree.

A very basic example; one of the first times i started to realize halo's potential was when i found myself in the middle of a bridge, a bunch (4?) of covies in front of me, a banshee flying towards me and shooting at me, only one rocket left: some quick thinking and i decide to use the rocket on the banshee the moment it's flying over the covies, so that it hopefully falls on them, killing them, or maybe falling in front of them blocking their bullets. However basic, as far as physics are involved, that was immensely more rewarding than seeing self shadowed enemies for the first time.
Psi ops used havok to open a thousand gameplay possibilities and it was so refreshing being given the chance to solve situations setting up some chain reaction programmers have probably never even thought of.
We're talking about a very limited, basic physic simulation: still halo wouldn't have been nearly as fun as it turned out without it and psi ops' gameplay and concept successfully revolve entirely around it.

This transcript was very interesting, i intentionally exaggerated his words but be sure, i didn't miss or misinterpret anything he said; i certainly know how to read: the explanations he gives are well made and perfectly reasonable, but they can't hide the fact he only sees things from his perspective (a graphic engine coder) someone who is indeed more interested in graphics than "gameplay", someone who hasn't played much recently, or someone who's...i don't know how to say that...very 'visual' ?
Nothing wrong about that, or about being interested in code scalability and performance above all; i am just saying the industry should take his words for where they came from; a graphic coder, not a content designer.
Heck, i am a graphic whore myself, but i still can imagine in-game situations where resources of the hardware - however not powerful enough to achieve 100% accurate results - would be better spent in other ways.

EDIT
"advanced physics [drains resources much faster than advanced graphics and] offers much less in return "...in terms of gaming experience ? You talk about reading comprehension, however, isn't this being a 'graphic whore' to an extent ?

 

[CaptainABAB]

I like how the following...

If you just take code designed for an x86 that’s running on a Pentium or Athlon or something, and you run it on either of the PowerPCs from these new consoles, it’ll run at about half the speed of a modern state of the art system, and that’s because they’re in-order processors, they’re not out-of-order execution or speculative, any of the things that go on in modern high-end PC processors. And while the gigahertz looks really good on there, you have to take it with this kind of “divide by two” effect going on there.

became in summary....

"In comparison to high-speed AMD/Intel system, X360 runs about half as fast"

and not....

"if you don't modify code to utilize the new console architectures, your port will suck ass"

 

[Kleegamefan]

BTW, Quake 4 on X360 has FEWER polys than the PC version:

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=1&cId=3142747

Another nice surprise is at Quakecon was that we got a quick one-level walkthrough of Quake 4 for the Xbox 360. Now, before we get into it, we need to point out that this is still relatively early in development. Hollenshead has said that the Xbox 360 version is using all of the same assets as the PC version, but running at a slightly lower poly count.

Okey Dokey

 

[TheDuce22]

The only people who really take issue with what he said are the sony zealots (gofreak, klee, ect). I dont see alot of Carmack hate outside of that.

 

[Azih]

I think there might be a little bit of Epic fanboyishness popping up.

But yeah the Sony fanboy trolling of Carmack is beyond ridiculous

 

[Warm Machine]

This quote is a classic!!!

From experience, its all true too.

 

[Servizio]

John Carmack would be absolutely awful at making 2D RPGs.

 

[Apenheul]

I think there might be a little bit of Epic fanboyishness popping up.

But yeah the Sony trolling of Carmack is beyond ridiculous

Now where is he exactly trolling Sony?