id's John Carmack answers questions at QuakeCon 2011
All ninety minutes of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2011 'question and answer' session is now available for your viewing pleasure.
All ninety minutes of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2011 'question and answer" session have appeared online, giving those not lucky enough to attend an opportunity to see the legendary designer discuss the finer elements of game creation.
A wide range of topics were discussed, but few points were as well received as Carmack's announcement regarding dedicated server support. "We actually have marching orders that future games will have dedicated servers," Carmack told the delighted QuakeCon crowd.
For Rage, the company's upcoming game, dedicated servers are not included, because the team's focus is on its single-player experience. Carmack did note, however, that based on community support, adding dedicated servers to the game's multiplayer modes is "not off the table."
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replyXav de Matos posted a new article, id's John Carmack answers questions at QuakeCon 2011.
All ninety minutes of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2011 'question and answer' session is now available for your viewing pleasure.-
i love his opening "As long as anyone has intelligent questions, i'll keep answering them"
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The man builds space-fairing rockets as a hobby. He also is the progenitor of the entire First Person Shooter genre. So yeah, he's waaaay smater than you.
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I am so SMART, ESS MMM ARE TEE!
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Doom wouldn't be the game he's referencing - more likely Wolfenstein or Catacomb-3D (as I've learned from wikipedia).
From the wiki, for what it's worth:
"John Carmack's technical achievements with the Catacomb 3-D engine were a strong starting point for the game concept."
Perhaps somebody else would have taken his place, but if it were not for John Carmack we would likely not have had the Wolfenstein 3D. Without that, Doom might never have come. His technical prowess allowed things to happen on hardware that other games weren't doing at the time. Quakeworld catapulted multiplayer first person shooters into the spotlight.
I'd love to hear your suggestions for another person or other people more influential/crucial to the explosion of the genre. Surely you have someone else from id in mind, or perhaps the whole team. It'd be pretty absurd to credit another team.-
romero is just as important and probably more because carmack doesn't really know about gamedesign or pr in the early days. it is apparent in many ways when you listen to him talking about other peoples success or ids own. its even more apparent if you look at the decline of id products over time.
Romero was really the driving force behind doom/quake level design and if you look at the quality of the maps he made in contrast to willits,petersen and mcgee. the best episodes/maps were his.
romero was the dude who balanced out carmacks bullshit and vice versa. in the doom postmortem there was an interesting bit where tom hall said that some interesting architecture didn't work in one map, and camack told them its due to the engines limitations. romero was the dude who told him plain "fuck this shit. fix your engine dude, it looks cool." thats pretty much how bsd became the standard in fps gaming.
when romero left carmack ran the show and he pretty much started to dictate the direction to the designers. people like american mcgee hated working for him because he made was such a pain in the ass in that regard. ( around the time quake came out and duke3d was out)
i remember a interview with carmack where he actually considered stuff like crouching, shooting marks on the walls etc as unnecessary in fps...
i don't think tim willits is the kind of guy that can stand up to carmack an tell him no for the sake of game design.
so yeah kens labyrinth was not the shit but doom was. an engine only brings you so far. in an interesting twist look how they made duke 3d out of silvermans engine which obviously was a step or two behind the quake engine but the game itself rivalled it based on gamedesign alone.-
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this discussion comes up often, basically this is a cut and paste of 3 different posts with the addition of a sentence or two ;)
if you are interested in the development history of id you should give "masters of doom" a read and watch the doom postmortem on the gdc site where tom hall is spazzing out like a mofo next to romero.
i usually post in these threads because people these days tend to forget romeros impact or his vision for id.
one of the bigger issues with carmack and him was that romero wanted to build a bigger studio with more people and more products as he knew it was the way the industry was developing. carmack did not. in the end id was bought and they are doing what romero wanted to do a decade ago.
as for carmack being unpleasant to work with it cost people like romero (who wanted to leave anyway),mcgee or paul steed the job (was fired in retaliation for doom3 because carmack was untouchable).
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You forget that Romero got his bigger studio, twice. He got it with IonStorm Dallas, which is no more, after releases of Daikatana and Anachronox. Then he got it again with Slipgate Ironworks, his MMO FPS house. He's since left that as it was downsized. I'm not saying blame Romero, but your arguments are incredibly one-sided. You're speaking about John Carmack out of ignorance. Don't pretend like you know him after reading a book.
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Agreed. I mean - sure Carmack might not have the 'pep' of Romero but at least he doesn't leave a trail of poorly designed titles (Daikatana) or poorly managed studios.
Plus - Tom Hall is where it's at. Everyone knows that. He's like the George Harrison of iD. -
That's a complete different argument. Romero is a great designer but a lousy businessman. Yet it also allowed ionstorm austin to release deus ex, the thief deadly shadows etc (which despite all the praise didn't do very well). I'm not entirely sure how big slipgate ironworks was but initial he had a handful of people.
also my argument is not one-sided, i'm saying that design is just as important if not more important than the engine. hence my silverman duke nukem example.
don't get butthurt calling people ignorant, i'm not pretending to know jackshit based on a book.
i've been along long enough to read interviews with guys like tom hall, sandy petersen, american mcgee and john romero all of which left id on bad terms.
carmack is a brilliant and fascinating dude but anyone who read interviews with him could tell that those impressions are not far off.
just recently he stirred some shit up when he made the rather dumb remark about indie developers being snotty in regard of popular titles like modern warfare and their constant reiteration of what its already popular and a proven concept.
this highlights perfectly why he was in conflict with people, how it lead to tom hall leaving when they scraped his doom bible stuff or how they made quake a 3d fps with doom guns instead of the originally ambiguous plans.-
I disagree about Romero being a great designer. He was a great level designer back in the day, but I think his track record after leaving id speaks for itself. Train wreck after train wreck. Pretty much everything he's been involved with after id has been a disaster. On the other hand, id has continued without him, Tom Hall has done fairly well, American McGee has done very well, and Peterson has went on to be a part of other successful ventures. What exactly has Romero done since leaving id that has been so great? Nothing but disappoint after disappointment, so I can't share your respect for Romero.
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Whenever I think about Romero it reminds me of Slash from Guns N' Roses. He's a great guitarist but just go listen to Slash's Snakepit. It's not a bad album but it can't hold a candle to his GNR stuff. And Axl of course took 15 years to make a single GNR album and while good it can't hold a candle to older GNR stuff. There's more factors than just chemistry of course but I think that some people just do good work together (even if they don't work well together). Just because Romero was a great designer at id doesn't mean he can carry a company.
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he did release very good phone games with his small company even before that segment blew up big due to the iphone. hyperspace deliveryboy and congocube were excellent games (he also did contract work/the port for some shitty ngame game). all of which he did with tom hall btw.
recently he did some work on ravenwood fair which is a 25 million user facebook game.
i don't know a game where he was lead designer that was bad he was brought in to gauntlet late game when the project was failing and he and sawyer bailed.
now american mcgee did only one good game in 2000, alice. after that it was, scrapland, bad day l.a and grimm. recently he has released a sequel to alice which is supposedly good (75 metacritic).
as for id lets see, they did quake 2 which was disappointing in many regards, quake 3 which was a reiteration of what made quake1 good with some minor elements of quake 2 (rail) and a adon which was a financial setback and pissed of fans in the mod-community which made quake 3 playable with actually good maps, osp and cpma. their only original game was doom3 which was a desaster in terms of design with its monster closets and linear too dark to see shit levels. then they were pretty much bought out which cold be interpreted by a cynic as failing.
my respect for romero stems form his body of work with wolf,doom, doom2 and quake along with some phone games but mostly for his interaction with the community (it was him who released the quake map files) and insightful interviews stuff like the gdc doom postmortem or stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq__3XNvvHI
i would not disagree if any one called him out on occasional attention whoring, dumb marketing or some other shit.
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it was romero/eidos giving people like spector or hall a free pass to do their ambitious, great but ultimately financially unsuccessful games like deus ex or anachronox.
if you remember they also were shit-canned a few years later after releasing ultra turds like invisible war.
spector did only two games after deus ex. deadly shadows and epic mikey. both to mixed reviews and lackluster sales.
nonetheless warren spector is still a fantastic and brilliant designer with an even more impressive body of work than romero.
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Would you believe that Spector is currently writing the Duck Tales comic book?
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of those people who left, how many of them still make hit games? Maybe American McGee, but his track record is spotty at best. Tom Hall? I like the guy but he hasn't created anything in over a decade, same with Romero. Now how many games has Carmack and his team made in that time?
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Steed was fired because he shot off his mouth to the press and embarrassed id on more than one occasion. Internally he was quite popular and I was on the impression that John Carmack was actually one of his supporters.
My memory of what happened was that id wasn't sure what to do after Quake 3 and that internally there was a lot of desire to do a new DOOM game, which included John Carmack. The other co-owners were against it but after a stalemate with the employees (there may have been some threat of a walkout), the owners caved. But then they fired Paul Steed - they basically gave in to the demands but decided in exchange to act on something they had wanted to do anyway. John Carmack didn't have a majority share so he couldn't save Steed if he wanted to.-
yeah from what i gathered it was that (as said in the plan update by carmack) he was fired as retaliation for supporting cramack and being one of the more vocal instigators of the the doom3 crowd.
the being a public dick/embarrassment thing was more of an excuse to shitcan him. i brought him up as an example of people in conflict with or around carmack when it comes to design or company decisions.
the doom3 crowd including carmack went and blackmailed them by saying allow us to make doom or fire us. carmack was off limits so steed caught the bullet.
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I think the whole Id Software team of the Wolfenstein-era deserves credit, not just Carmack. Sure, the graphics engine itself was very important to enable a 3D shooter, but how much did Carmack contribute to the art, design, sound effects, etc. of the games? Nobody would've cared much about his great 3D engine programming skills if it weren't for killing Nazis with double-barreled shotguns or monsters like the cyberdemon. (And I'm a software developer myself, btw. so I really do respect the techies).
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lol @ android fanboy.
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That guy was a dick, kept interrupting Carmack who was trying to answer his question, and then finished with a fail zing. Fuck that guy.
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Ah it was nothing wrong- that's not even so much at all. might say a little "stronger" - but you certainly don't look rounded-fat (which is the worst) so ... relax :)
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still large percentage of these daily activations are high-end devices
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Didn't Carmack say that they had a build of Rage working on Tegra 2? I think they're going to eventually port there iOs games to Android but there has to be a demonstrated market for games first.
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Yeah, this is the real thing. The money's just not there. It doesn't matter if there's 10x the Android installed base if you're still making more money on iOS. That's why guys like this point to the numbers that work in their favor (550K activations/day) instead of the numbers that don't (more money on iOS)
This is why shit like Angry Birds is free but ad supported on Android - they wouldn't be able to make enough money on it if they had to rely on Android people to purchase it. Plus thanks to ROM hacking, sideloading, etc. piracy becomes a bigger issue.
Same way companies like Loki (publisher of commercial Linux ports of games) back in the day went under - they tried to hoist a business model on the top of a market that has a demonstrated desire to not pay for things. Not to say that Linux users were cheap bastards but it's hard to go to a community that has "free" as part of its creed and ask them for money.-
That's a pretty ugly generalization and not accurate. Warez are more common by percent of users on windows than linux. (Yes, I'm also aware that's partly because so much is available free on linux that there's less need for it.)
I know plenty of linux users who pay for things. Particularly things from Id, who contribute to the community.
Loki had a slew of business problems. Overextended, underfinanced, didn't pay their workers, poor visibility (many linux users didn't know about or couldn't buy the games). And particularly damaging was late ports. Porting a game long after it was available on another platform, with usually no improvements and selling at full price? Hard sell, most of the fans of the game already have it and are looking for something new.
Proving the money's there is a harder thing. Humble Bundles are doing a fair job on that, note linux earnings exceed mac every time. And dollars per purchaser wildly slant towards linux. Yes, they still aren't paying full price, but for indie games mostly into the long tail, it's money they likely wouldn't have otherwise made.
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I got the impression - and this is supported by other statements he made in the presentation - that he made the iPhone games because he got an iPhone, thought it was neat, and since he did ObjC on NextStep back in the day it was pretty simple to get stuff running on it. And being the enterprising/smart guy he is, he was able to capitalize on it financially.
Now he's having to hear from whiners like this guy who are acting like he "owes" them an Android version and that id is "ignoring" the market when the truth of the matter is he has numbers in front of him that say Android development isn't quite worth it and besides, this was just a fun side project anyway.
I will say though that when Todd H. asked who owned Android versus iOS, the Android people were the clear majority. I actually didn't even raise my hand because I didn't want to put up with the glare of the Android people I came with. So, the popularity of Android is both a good and bad thing.-
It's hilarious that people get so emotional over something as stupid as a phone.
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It's like Android is exposing all of the worst aspects of the open source movement - fanatical users, severe fragmentation, etc.
Plus it's not like traditional gaming. If you own a PC but the game you really want is on the 360 then you just buy a 360. If you own a 360 but the game you really want is on the PS3 then you buy a PS3. But if you own an Android phone and the game you really want is on iPhone you can't just go buy an iPhone. I mean you can, there's no technical or legal reason you can't, but most people are not going to purchase or need multiple cell phones or contracts. You could go buy an iPod Touch but that really kills the point of a smartphone - that it's a single device to carry around that does everything. Now you have to carry around two devices. Or just leave the iPod Touch at home, which defeats the purpose of a portable device.-
The problem with Android is the company behind it. Google store is a mess, according to every android developer I've heard.
OSS isn't the problem there... But I don't doubt there are some OSS fans who are confused about why Android isn't being supported. Idiot community members are a problem in EVERY community of any size.
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And I just realised he looks almost exactly like Hawking!!! oO
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heh, it's short for giblets (pronounced jiblets) as in the slimy bits of an animal, usually a chicken, that no one eats.
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I always love when id guys say it publicly because I know how much of a wrench it throws in the machinery of people who've pronounced it wrong for so many years.
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80 minutes. Not 90.
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