QuakeCon 2012 - John Carmack Keynote

tl;dw:

John Carmack has a virus (biological) and so goes for a 3 hours and a half speech. He apologizes for the way Rage release went on PC. (non adapted drivers support) He talks about graphic card drivers issues. (And notifies the open Intel drivers for Linux as improved) He talks about supporting multi-platform (Mac, Linux, mobiles) with games. He would like Steam to take seriously on streaming games (having the games frames calculated on distant servers and streamed to the player's device). His current field of research is Virtual Reality and he talks about it for about 1 hour and depicts the current state of VR applied to games. He talks about optics, research hardware (head mounted device, head tracking, 3DTV, ...) and the technicality of rendering/making a VR game. He also thinks about neural stimulation as a next big step through Virtual Reality. He's not a big fan of webGL and browser technologies/JavaScript and doesn't believe webGL's access to graphic card to be secured/totally sand-boxed. It comes from the openGL drivers and the way they are implemented/all the possible access they provide to malicious (or simply badly written) code in his opinion. He talks a bit about CPU and GPU architectures and programming for those. He talks about windows8 adoption and expresses that it is a "problem" he'd rather not have to deal with, he's happy with windows 7 and not expecting much from w8. He talks about audio, considering it a solve problem for "standing position" gaming (desktop, computers, mobiles) but possibly an area to improve on for VR, immersing even more the user into the experience and "cheating" the brain into buying into the virtual world. He talks about I/O (input/outputs), and speculates on the future of those for VR and gaming (gloves, touch pads, monitor vs head mounted devices, ...). He talks about his work on rockets for his aerospace company. He took questions from the audience.

Doom 4 will possibly be made for 3D view (opposed to 2D view a monitor screen, a TV, etc...) and is mentioned as being the next project after the release of Doom 3 BFG.

John Carmack presents himself as a technical person/graphics programmer.
He's been developing game engines for his company ID Software for more than 20 years (he basically made the first scrolling engine on PC at a time when graphic cards weren't designed to support such a feature) and he's known for "inventing" the FPS genre with his company in the 90's with games such as "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom".

Each year at the QuakeCon, he gives a speech where he talks about the technology/games/whatever he is working on and give honest analysis and feedback on his work, his vision of the game industry and his company.
He's a highly clever person and despite long monologues his talks are always fascinating.

I tried to sum up the keynote as objective as I could, don't take it as golden words, nothing is better than hearing his thoughts directly from himself.

Edited by Kyatric - 07 Aug 2012 at 5:15am

Well technically, before there were "FPS" there were "Doom-likes".
Also, again from a technical point of view, the engines behind Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom II and the Quake saga consecutively revolutionised/reinvented the genre.
Maybe you're referring to Marathon on Mac ?
To be honest I've always been a PC guy, so I don't know for sure about the dates and I never played Marathon, not at the time nor since.

Notice how I had put "inventing" into quotes though. ^^


I like how this video mentions the genius that also was behind game and level design (and which are not due to John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack on twitter) but to his colleague from the time John Romero (@romero on twitter)).
If like me you've played the first episode (shareware version) of Doom (and or Doom II) over and over again, you'll know what's missing there and how it kind of denatures the original "experience" ^^

Also thank you @shinkan, I've corrected the grammar mistake that your quote was pointing.

Edited by Kyatric - 07 Aug 2012 at 5:29am

Extract from Wolfenstein3D's wikipedia page :

Before Wolfenstein 3D, the technology had already been used by id Software in 1991 to create Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D for Softdisk. Other games using the Wolfenstein 3D game engine or derivatives of it were also produced, including Blake Stone, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, Operation Body Count, Super 3D Noah's Ark, Rise of the Triad, and Hellraiser, an unreleased Color Dreams game planned for the PC and the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Does the name of the game you're thinking about is up there ? ^^
Maybe you mean Elite ?
There's a quite a difference between the render of Elite and the one of Wolfenstein3D imo.

Doom 3 I played and didn't finished.
When I was playing Doom and Doom II as a teenager, I would play until I got motion sickness, and then played even more until I felt on the very edge of throwing up/bad headache.
Doom 3, I got the motion sickness in about 5 minutes ^^
But I was older also, and less inclined to appreciate the FPS scrolling anymore (at least this kind, with light effects and stuff).