John Carmack @ Quakecon 2006

privateer · 6 Αυγούστου 2006

1. id software's next title will be a 3D action game, but perhaps quite different from its previous titles.

Both John Carmack and the rest of id Software were predictably tight-lipped about the studio's current project, which will be a brand-new IP (as opposed to another Quake or Doom or Wolfenstein title). During the keynote's Q&A segment, however, Carmack offered a few tidbits, albeit a bit vague, about the new game.

First, when asked if id Software would ever move away from the first-person shooter genre, Carmack stated that they'd be sticking with their strengths. "We've got millions of people who love what we do, and we're going to probably continue making them happy," said Carmack, who also mentioned the desire to use the current staff. "We're not about to say, 'id decided not to do a first-person shooter, so these six level designers, we don't need you any more.'"

Carmack did mention that the new game should "do things that people have never seen before -- certainly never seen from id before. We are branching out into different directions." However, he did make it clear that the title would still be "a 3D action game."

When asked about the movement towards photorealism in games, Carmack noted, "Honestly, it's a bit of a worry for me right now, because our next game has lots of people in it," as opposed to the zombies and demons that generally dominate id Software's games. Later, Carmack went as far as to offer conclusions people could take away from earlier comments on the latest revisions on the "megatexture" technology he'd originally developed for Quake Wars. "People can draw a few conclusions," said Carmack. "I said that I'd developed a third-generation megatexture technology at 128,000 x 128,000 textures, so it's a pretty safe bet it's not a corridor shooter."

What does all this mean? Obviously, there's plenty of room for speculation. Is id working on a wide-open, GTA-inspired game played in first-person? Could they be trying to build the nonlinear, mission-based action game that the oft-delayed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seemed poised to be? It's anyone's guess at the moment, but it's encouraging to hear id may be branching out with its next title.

2. Carmack has yet to touch a Nintendo Wii.

Forgive my not-so-clever bullet point, but that sums up what Carmack had to say when asked if he'd been able to play with Nintendo's new console and what, if anything, he thought of the new controller. He stated that he'd yet to try the Wii and that id Software, historically, had not really worked much with Nintendo in the past. Carmack mentioned that he'd considered the possibility of bringing some of his work on cell phone games to the Nintendo DS, but that anything of that nature would likely be brokered through another publisher rather than directly through Nintendo.

3. Carmack isn't yet sure what to make of the recent AMD/ATI merger.

Barely two weeks ago, AMD and ATI sent shockwaves through the PC hardware industry by announcing that they would combine forces as one company. So it was only a matter of time before someone asked Carmack, who has spent many previous keynotes expounding upon issues related to ATI and NVIDIA video cards, what he thought of the deal.

Carmack said he was caught a little off-guard by the deal, and perhaps surprisingly, hadn't really formed an opinion on the deal yet. "I heard a couple weeks of rumors and then the announcement that it was a done deal," said Carmack. "I'm interested in hearing what the plans are. My first reaction would be that I was very happy with the graphics industry having two strong independent players. I'd probably would have been a little happier with three -- when we had 20, it was clearly a bad thing, but when it shuffled down, we were left with a few strong players; I think that's really good for the industry. Two might be a tiny bit marginal, and if it comes down to one captive player, that's probably not the best thing for the market. But I can certainly understand AMD's motivation."

4. Programmers, John Carmack included, are notoriously horrible with deadlines, but it's a tradeoff worth making.

On a somewhat lighter note, Carmack addressed the topic of schedule slippages, mentioning "The Mythical Man-Month," a classic mid-1970s book on software engineering that's still fairly relevant to today's software development. Perhaps inevitably, the conversation turned to the problem of programmers constantly underestimating how long something would take, something Carmack had firsthand experience with.

"It used to be a joke at id when someone would say, 'How long would something take?' 'Two weeks.' Because a programmer can get anything done in two weeks," Carmack joked. "Fourteen days, if you stayed up, you could just get anything done in that time. Of course, it doesn't actually work out like that. In any of the projects I've worked on, I've never failed in any of them, but I've never been on time.

"Even with all the experience that I've got, there's just something that's fairly damning about the work that we do, and it's pretty common," said Carmack. "It's really rare to run into a programmer that can actually say 'it's going to take this long' and get something done in that timeframe ... unless it's something they've just done before. In our defense I would say that we are trying to do new and different things, and there's an aspect of research and not just engineering -- we're trying to do something that we haven't done before, and you can't predict the unknown with complete certainty."

5. Carmack was concerned over whether he and id might have had released the Quake III source code too soon.

For years, John Carmack and id Software have been big supporters of open-sourcing code from previous projects, but Carmack expressed some concern over whether the Quake III source code might have been made available too soon, citing two major exploits that came to light shortly after the source-code release last year. In taking a poll of the audience on hand, however, the crowd was overwhelmingly behind the release of the code, even though it led to some multiplayer cheats.

Carmack's reaction: "OK, I'm happy now."

6. Carmack is still enjoying programming for the mobile platform, and highly recommends it as a starting point for beginning programmers.

"The cell phone platform stuff has been really pretty fun," said Carmack on his side projects developing cell phone games. "I look at that and think, 'This would have been such a cool environment to learn programming and game development on.'"

"I tell people now, if you want a professional programmer, programming something on the cell phone might be a really good way to start, because you can just do it in Java, and you don't have to learn DX9 to get stuff on the screen. I look back at how I learned programming on an Apple II; there was a lot of benefit to being able to write a couple-of-pages program to see stuff happen on the screen that you really don't get with PC development nowadays."

7. Carmack still loves his rockets, and has a new sponsor.

Towards the end of the session, Carmack slipped in a little tidbit about his rocket-building hobby. "NVIDIA is actually sponsoring our rocket for the X-Prize cup this year," Carmack said, greeted with much applause. "We're going to have two vehicles ... we're probably going to call them Pixel and Texel," adding that the rockets will bear NVIDIA logos to boot.

As for the rest of Carmack's talk, there was a lot of conversation using words like pipelines and kernels and rasterization that's best left undissected for now. As soon as we figure it out, you'll know too. Stay tuned to GameSpy throughout the weekend as we continue our coverage of QuakeCon 2006.