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John Carmack demos Rage on iPhone
- jpeterson 16y agoWow, someone has a Stephen Wolfram-sized ego going on there.
- jonursenbach 16y agoCarmack's ego is well deserved.
- bprater 16y agoAgreed. Only someone who hasn't been in the tech industry since the early days of 3D games wouldn't recognize Carmack's name. He is a demi-god to me, a person who has passionately stuck with 3D programming for most of his career and even pressed outside his comfort zone into the emerging commercial space race. If anyone deserves to have ego, he does. Frankly, considering what he's accomplished, I think he's quite humble on stage.
- jpeterson 16y ago... because he makes video game engines. Okay.
- hc 16y agoi'm willing to let your remarks on carmack's "ego" slide, but only because you're such a paragon of humility yourself
- jameskilton 16y agoCarmack is the 3D engine GOD. There is no-one like him. Seeing that, on an iPhone, holy crap. I'd love to see what it's like on an iPad (as he nicely describes for us).
- snprbob86 16y agono one? There are quite a few developers like him. Sure, he's one of the first and most famous, but having worked in the game development space for a while, I can safely say that there are people quietly writing equally, if not more impressive graphics engines.
- phoboslab 16y agoI think one reason why Carmack still sticks out, is that he set up his company in a way where he can still "play" with new techniques every day. I suspect that not many other programmers have this kind of freedom. Also, not many other graphic engine programmers have their own company. They might be as good or better as Carmack, but they are hidden under layers of corporate obscurity. The guys at Crytek who invented SSAO come to mind - most of the time SSAO is credited to Crytek and not to individual people (which is a shame, imho). ( SSAO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion )
- elxrr 16y agoWhat about Epic's Tim Sweeney?
- CamperBob 16y agoSweeney's a strong, innovative player in his own right, but the fact is, he got his start by chasing Carmack's taillights from one E3 to the next. JC was doing this stuff back before you could Google how to do it, or buy a book at your local B&N telling you how to do it. That counts for a lot. So does his consistent willingness to bring the fire down the mountain and hand it to the masses.
- snprbob86 16y agoI think you're not giving Sweeney enough credit. He basically invented modding with ZZT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT Additionally, post Quake 3, the team at Epic routinely chose better design tradeoffs for real world games. This includes both performance tradeoffs and spending of engineering effort on production needs (like a solid level editor). Hence the popularity of the Unreal 3 engine.
- BigZaphod 16y agoI think you'll find that pretty much anyone will freely give him a pass on that. It's beyond well-earned. His skills are freaking legendary.
- MRL 16y agoHe's John Carmack, he's earnt it many times over.
- elxrr 16y agoHe usually comes across as a very nice and level-headed guy. Still though, he's a legend.
- amichail 16y agoRecommended reading: http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155/ http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu... Also check out John Romero's interview on Matt Chat (#51-55): http://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8 http://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8
- samlittlewood 16y ago"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it."
- phoboslab 16y agoFull audio of the Romero interview: http://armchairarcade.com/matt/podcasts/romero_full.mp3 http://armchairarcade.com/matt/podcasts/romero_full.mp3 Interesting stuff. I was surprised by how much technical knowledge Romero actually has. He talks about the challenges of programming for CGA vs. EGA in the (pre) Commander Keen days.
- cubicle67 16y agoHere's another worth reading http://slashdot.org/games/99/10/15/1012230.shtml http://slashdot.org/games/99/10/15/1012230.shtml
- kn0thing 16y agoThat was the book that convinced me to start a startup with Steve. He'd let me borrow his copy of it, which is on his shelf to this day (I'm crashing at his place this week and just saw it). Can't recommend it enough. It's not brilliantly written, but it's written well enough - and the story, well...
- loganfrederick 16y agoI have to second this. Reading Masters of Doom right after it came out during my freshman year of high school really shaped my interests and world views for the rest of my life. The two lead characters of Romero and Carmack were so realistic and yet larger-than-life that I just knew I had to be a part of something big and relevant.
- traskjd 16y agoTo get your daily fill, it seems John is now on twitter: http://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack http://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack
- elblanco 16y agoThat's great! His .plan files were great reading back in the day.
- angrycoder 16y agoSome awesome person has collected most of his writings on scribd. interviews - http://www.scribd.com/doc/479479/John-Carmack-Archive-Interviews http://www.scribd.com/doc/479479/John-Carmack-Archive-Interv... slashdot posts - http://www.scribd.com/doc/470798/John-Carmack-Archive-slashdot-posts http://www.scribd.com/doc/470798/John-Carmack-Archive-slashd... .plan 1998 - http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-Carmack-Archive-plan-1998 http://www.scribd.com/doc/14192/John-Carmack-Archive-plan-19... there is a plan file for each year, just search for John Carmack on scribd.
- revorad 16y agoThose scribd pages with ads are really annoying. This is much better - http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html
- cubicle67 16y agothis is the same guy that also builds rockets in his spare time http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
- mkramlich 16y agoYep and the other major figure, along with Elon Musk, who first made his fortune in software, and then later leveraged that to get into making innovative rocket ships. Imagine Carmack and Musk getting together on some project, maybe throw in Dean Kamen, and tremble.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoDean Kamen....? Really?
- jacquesm 16y agoDean Kamen is one very smart cookie and to have a serial inventor like that on board could definitely be an asset for any venture. The fact that not all his inventions take off is something I think we can excuse him for, and I'm sure that millions of dialysis equipment users world-wide would agree on that.
- muhfuhkuh 16y agoNo? How about James Dyson?
- swah 16y agoLook at you. Now look at him (http://infosecurity.us/images/Dean_Kamen_IBot.jpg http://infosecurity.us/images/Dean_Kamen_IBot.jpg). Now back to you. Now him again. Sadly, you aren't him.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoI just don't see Dean Kamen's fit with Elon Musk and Carmack.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- saint-loup 16y agoMan, thoses textures. The liveblog of the keynote, with interesting bits like "At their heart and core Apple is not really a game-friendly company" (a thing we already knew but, well..) : http://kotaku.com/5611429/quakecon-2010-keynote-liveblog-aka-man-i-hope-they-mention-doom-4 http://kotaku.com/5611429/quakecon-2010-keynote-liveblog-aka...
- Geee 16y agoThey also published the sources for Return to Castle Wolfenstein / Enemy Territory at ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/
- maukdaddy 16y agoHoly crap thanks for the link! I completely missed the release amongst all the other news. I can't even begin to calculate how many hours of college I wasted playing RtCW
- squidsoup 16y agoID games have always been technically astounding, but let down by art direction and inconsistent gameplay. From everything I have seen of Rage so far, it looks like they've been working on these shortcomings - I'm quite excited about playing it.
- jerf 16y agoThe current TV console generation has lasted longer than most, by the design and general consent of all the console makers, and the interesting question there has been what will convince them to do the next generation of hardware for the Wii, XBox 360, or the PS3? And now I have my guess: A portable gaming system that can hook up to a TV and push 720p that is effectively indistinguishable from the current generation of console. By "portable gaming system", I mean either a dedicated gaming console, or a cell phone. The interesting thing about the cell phone option is that while dedicated gaming systems come out rarely, cell phones are increasingly on the PC-style plan of coming out as rapidly as possible with as much hardware stuffed in them as possible. So while guessing when the dedicated portable gaming systems will pass the XBox 360 requires reading minds, guessing when cell phones will actually pass the XBox 360 is not so hard. Using this logic, I think we can expect the PS4 and XBox 720 by 2013 at the latest, not because the cell phones will be quite there by then, but because the cell phones on the horizon in late 2012 to 2013 will be able to exceed them. And especially for the PS and Xbox line, that's an embarrassment I don't think they can put up with and still maintain their image, no matter how unhelpful the next generation of graphics will be to their market or how expensive it makes the games. Unless they just throw in the towel, which, honestly, isn't necessarily a bad bet for the PS5 or Xbox 1080, but I think we're going to have one more conventional generation of consoles whether or not it's a good idea, after which we may discover they don't have a niche anymore.
- pmcginn 16y agoNo offense, but you're not making any sense. The current generation has not lasted longer than previous generations, and pretty much anyone in pre-algebra could plot you a graph that would show "we can expect the PS4 and XBox 720 by 2013 at the latest." PS1 - 1994 PS2 - 2000 PS3 - 2006 The average works out roughly the same for Nintendo, and since Microsoft only has two data points it's not really worth including them.
- sbierwagen 16y agoAlso note that the PS2 is still in production.