What is Digg?152 Comments
- dukeeeey, on 10/12/2007, -7/+146Carmack has only written some of the most successful games/game engines of all time. He helps drive hardware technology ..
- theblooms, on 10/12/2007, -14/+142John Carmack is nearly single handedly responsible for the 3D environment in the home. A little DOS game he made a couple of years ago called "Quake." Maybe you have heard of it before?
Before Quake and the 3DFX Voodoo accelerating it, 3D in the home was unheard of. And if Carmack is so damn lazy about embracing new designs, why the hell did he bother programing GLQuake with MiniGL and Glide drivers? The Voodoo (as well as the vastly inferior Rendition and Virge based video cards) was in so few machines at the time, that could have been considered "a waste of time." But he saw the future and embraced it. Hell he even wrote VQuake just for those running the Rendition cards.
Segitz, you are either ignorant of id Software's, and by default John Carmack's history, or you're a moron. - OverloadUT, on 10/12/2007, -7/+78hadiz: No he doesn't. Those games were not 3d, but Quake was. There's a huge difference in technology between Doom and Quake.
- killinger777, on 10/12/2007, -3/+63You fool, Xbox 360 has a triple-core CPU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360#Central_processing_unit - grevvvvvv, on 10/12/2007, -4/+51It's not possible to digg you down as far as you deserve.
- addisonj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35sorry HappyScrappy, Marathon once again fits into the same type of "3d" category as Doom and wolfenstein, the quake engine was the first "true" 3d engine to be used in a game, marathon was similiar to doom in that it used 2d sprites and effects overlayed on a "3d" game world, Quake was the first engine used in a game that rendered 3d models and light and effects, though they didn't look that awesome, it was fundamentally different than the rest. I am not calling Carmack a god or anything, i think in the gameplay department there are much better developers, but carmack deserves to be recognized as an amazing programmer and knows what he is talking about, and its no surprise that the ps3 is harder to develop for, 8 small CPU's and 1 big CPU = difficult times, whereas 3 equal powered cores = more straightforward traditional programming
- hadiz, on 10/12/2007, -34/+66theblooms: You mean Wolfenstein 3D/Doom, both of which preceded the Quake series.
- Lazybones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28@HappyScrappy
However it still had 2D characters and if I recall 2D items.. Only the maps had 3D aspects.. This puts it in the 2.5D category with later games like DukeNukem 3D.
Quake was full 3d, polygon characters / monsters and all. - brendonauger306, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24dude are you blind, if you anything about the spu cores that are currently in the ps2, you would see the benefit from a development side of things, the xbox 360 was designed for the developers to take advantage of, maybe you should do a little research before making a statement as bold as that one... John Carmack is of course a leader in the field and i would tend to think that he would know what he's talking about when referring to the systems and their potential. I hate fanboys....
- Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20jesus ***** christ. Can the fanboys on all sides just shut the hell up and stop trolling every single story which has anything to do with the wii, xbox360 or the ps3
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24He's just seems to be saying it's more difficult to use the asymmetrical architecture. I agree with him. It was a choice Sony made. With asym, if a developer writes to your hardware well, the ultimate performance can be higher. But with the 360 shared-everything model (including bandwidth), the theoretical peak performance is lowered, but it's so much more easy to develop for that a much greater percentage will be able to get a lot nearer to this lower peak. And so you might end up up with better performance in the typical case for devlopers.
You can make arguments either way, and I don't have a problem with John's. But before fanboys want to rip all the content out of his argument and just turn it into a straight "better v. worse", Carmack doesn't even try to cook it down that simply, and perhaps others should resist the temptation also. - vagarach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18No, he is correct. It was largely Quake running on the Voodoo cards that drove their adoption. A 'killer app' if you will. I do know that going from the reasonable and completely playable speed that Quake 1 ran at on my Pentium 133Mhz with 16MB RAM in software to Quake accelerated with a Voodoo card, with smooth textures and crazy insane speed was quite the experience for me. You could drop (what was it, $300?) on a Voodoo and people would laugh at you. Then you show them Quake, and well, the laughter stopped.
- apescissors, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Carmack is the only name in the computer games industry that I know to trust. His input is always welcome and noted as far as I'm concerned.
- patm1987, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17HappyScrappy, look up raycaster
see, in a game like doom, wolfenstein, and marathon, you split the screen into one ray for each vertical line. These rays are essentially fired out until they collide with a wall and then represent that distance and height and all that with some creative problem solving. In the end, all the data is in 2d and all the math lives in 2d space. stuff like looking up, walking up stairs/elevators, and distance are all performed by special tricks while outputting from this 2d data.
in a game like quake, and pretty much all modern 3d games, you rasterize the level. Essentially, you represent all the objects as polygons (usually groups of triangles) and apply a bunch of crazy 3d transforms that move it to 2d space (insert linear algebra here). This process is a bit more complicated, but involves taking all the objects in a frustum in 3 space, transforming that frustum to a cube, some more neat transforms including 4space, and then it's mathematically flattened to 2space for output to your monitor. In the end, it's a different math than the raycaster above, and allows you to rotate in all directions.
in the future, you may see raytracers used in games (to an extend, the technique is used for some fancy texture effects in modern games to simulate shadow and detail on a surface that has neither). This would be similar to a raycaster, only a line is traced from every pixel on your screen (and, to keep up with modern demands, wouldn't just go till it stops but bounce around like a real light ray). unfortunately, this is slower than raycasting and rasterization.
note, I've only made a 2d triangle rasterizer so far, so I'm not the biggest expert on it, but others would like to verify/correct me, no? better I get it wrong here than on a test.
again, to make my point clear, marathon only really has 2d data representation and 2d mathematics (for rendering, the game may be all fun and good in 3d-ish gameplay), so it's not a fully 3d game. - iposthuman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I so agree with ya. I didn't realize it was possible but I'm so sick of it already. Totally ruining the gaming channel, nothing constructive.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14@jebadiah
I dug down your comment before even reading because it just looked so ***** annoying. - lava, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15that backfired for you didn't it?
- Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -5/+18I bet the PS3 would make a good server.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Carmack doesn't say that. And he writes games and is writing for PS3.
What are your qualifications?
He merely says that given that PS3 is unlikely to dominate the market, developers will not spend the kind of time required to investigate the complex PS3 architecture and optimize for it. He doens't say games can't be optimized for it (as you say).
It'd be really great if people didn't try to take a reasonable statement by Carmack, fail to understand it and thus try to turn to mean something other than what he said. - realyst, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Name one.
Thought so. - killinger777, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Sorry. Marathon is not a 3d game.
"Unlike modern first-person shooters, Marathon has a pseudo-3D engine that only creates the illusion of 3D by placing two-dimensional objects together."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(computer_game_series) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+17and you can have riiiiiiiddddddddggggggeeeeeeee racer! :-D
- Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Who are you? I've never heard of you. Besides, I only listen to people who actually have something to say anyway, so your opinion doesn't matter. Dugg down.
PS: John Carmack historicly has developed mostly PC games. - toasty168, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16Actually, the PS3 would make a great media center. Just not that great for games.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Actually, where he speaks of 360's success it is in relation to Sony making decisions about PS3 that are better decisions if you dominate the market than if you share it. Sony assumed one, and now it looks like it may be the other.
As to Carmack banking on 360, well, the Japanese don't play FPSes, and that's all John does (and rockets), so perhaps the fact that 360 seems to have already lost to the PS3 (and Wii) in Japan is of no concern to him. Other developers may need to take this into consideration though. - toasty168, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Yup, he always unbiased and tells it like it is and thoroughly explains his opinions.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10It is not as large as the US. The gaming market is larger disproportionate to the population, but it still isn't as large as the US.
But in the last gen, you had plenty of crossplatform games that ported to Xbox to pick up another 10-15% more sales over PS2 alone (and some even to Gamecube!), so shearing off the 25-30% of the gaming market that Japan represents is a decision not to be taken lightly. - tendonut, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12And Rockstar can put their dark alley driving hooker shooting games on the PS3....wait a minute...
- r3d0din, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12There's a ton of post arguing the value of John Carmack's remarks. If you like Sony more than Microsoft, or you'd prefer to spend your cash on the Playstation 3 versus an XBOX 360, that remains entirely up to you. But it's just plain ludicrous to pretend that Carmack is wrong or that there was ever a time when he hasn't been relevant to the gaming industry. The man is a genius when it comes to graphics programming. Nearly every major technological breakthrough in graphics has come from his mind. Ever heard of binary space trees? What about programming games in C++ instead of assembly? Fully polygonal 3D games? And don't get me started on mega textures. I tried not to make this a long post and I hope that it doesn't sound negative, but the man is an absolute visionary. And I don't even like games by id software.
I've said this before on digg, and I feel the need to reiterate it here. When it comes to programming, John Carmack is GOD and his words are law. - fantasticFlan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11lack of demand != junk
The PS3 is a powerful piece of hardware, regardless of how many people want one. - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10@knodi and it still doesnt change the fact that silly, childish trolls such as yourself are RUINING digg, particularly any page which has any relation to the three consoles.
It doesnt MATTER which you think is best nor does it matter what you think sucks - People will buy whatever they want to according to their own opinions and dont need a wankfest over one console to make their mind up. - MacHarborGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Marathon was not a true 3d engine with true 3d maps. Marathon's maps were built much like doom's, using an overhead editor to make the world via polygons that defined the floor, and height data for those polygons to create a ceiling. Here is an except from...
http://www.marathon.org/hyperarchive/Files/editors/marathon.engine.faq.0.6.txt
-- Polygons: Our 8-Sided Friends
Marathon's basic "building block" is the polygon. Every map is made up
of dozens and dozens (sometimes hundreds) of polygons connected
together to make hallways, rooms, etc.
Because of the way Marathon's engine operates, a Map is designed in 2D.
You cannot "model" a three-dimensional room by creating a 3D cube and
sticking other 3D cubes onto it, as you would in a 3D program like
InfiniD or Ray Dream Designer. Instead, you create polygons outlining a
room's boundaries, or walls. You then tell Marathon the height of the
floor, and the height of the ceiling. You link these polygons together,
creating pseudo-3D structures by changing the floor and ceiling
heights.
Ledges are simply polygons whose FLOOR heights are higher than the rest
of the room. Staircases are simply hallways whose floor heights go up
or down... Platforms and doors are "special cases" -- regular old
polygons whose ceiling heights and floor heights can change
dynamically. A door, for example, is just another 2D polygon in a map,
connecting two larger rooms. But when you're playing the game, walk up,
and hit the action key, its ceiling height changes and it appears to
slide upward, allowing you to pass.
-- Pseudo-3D: Smoke and Mirrors
"But wait," you cry! "That sounds like the way DOOM does things! I
thought Marathon's engine was superior to DOOM's, able to do 'real' 3D
maps!" You're right, partially. Marathon IS capable of creating maps
with rooms on top of one another. But it's all smoke and mirrors --
understanding that is the KEY to understanding map creation.
Picture a flat map, with no elevation changes. It's shaped like a big "U".
-- insert picture here --
If you twist one side of the "U" around, so that it overlaps the other
side, you will have two polygons that occupy the VERY same space in the
"world."
-- insert picture here --
However, when you open that map in Marathon, you won't SEE the second
hallway when you're in the first one. They are two separate "rooms,"
even though they occupy the same space in Marathon's "universe."
What happens when you change the ELEVATION of one of those rooms,
though? Suddenly, you have two rooms that are on TOP of each other as
far as you, the player are concerned. Although the actual map defines
them as 2D spaces that overlap, the Marathon engine turns them into 3D
rooms on different "floors" of a structure.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to me
Quake, on the otherhand, was the first (as far as Doom and Marathon are conserned) truly 3D world because creating maps for it was the same as using a 3D modeler, you would create cubes, spheres (or something that resembled a sphere), and other shapes to create the world. You could have bridges that you could both walk on top of and under, something that both Doom and Marathon were uncabable of doing, hence they were not true 3D engines. - Tiak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9An engine that uses sprites isn't a true 3D engine, so while you can qualify Marathon and others as 3D games because you can technically move in 3 dimensions, it didn't utilize a 3D engine, and as such Quake is a level of complexity above them. One's definition of 3D game hardly matters.
- Denver80203, on 10/12/2007, -10/+18It's a fine doorstop
- shmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8My buddy got one. It's pretty dang sweet actually, the graphics are truly impressive (R:FoM).
Sony has sure made it hard to like the PS3 in theory, with this Bluray crap and the lateness and the price and the arrogance. but after playing it I kind of want one... Will I be getting one for $500? Fuuuuck no. But in 2-3 years if there's still the PS3 and it's < 300 or so, I'll pick one up, right after my iPhone (or whatever it's called then).
Another thing we seem to be ignoring is gameses. When the 360 came out there wasn't much of a catalog. Halo, Madden, a few others. If or when PS3 has a few more really good titles, that will level the field a bit. Also remember there are millions of PS2-only people with tons of PS2 games, that in and of itself will sell a lot of consoles. I mean, RE4, San Andreas, Metal Gear, people -- that's a pretty big selling point.
Thanks for listening. this is the first and last time I comment on the console wars. - rbanffy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11Do all Microsoft astroturfers really expect to win 360s, notebooks or other expensive gifts?
- Charlotte_Web, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8MORE IMPORTANTLY in the article, Carmack said in the article that id is returning to developing for Nintendo systems, beginning with the DS.
That's great news! - toasty168, on 10/12/2007, -9/+15A well respected expert, developer who has himself inspired many other game developers has spoken. A pioneer in the field of game programming. Considered a genius by many of his fellow collegues in the gaming field. Hardware manufacturers regularly consult with him as to the direction 3D graphics should be going (nvidia). The 360 is just the overall better machine. The PS3 is not focused. It's a jack of all trades and a master of none. Sony went after a media center hoping to take over your living room. Microsoft gave you many options to create a media system but clearly focused the 360 on gaming. The vast majority of people want affordable gaming compatible with their current entertainment systems. Sony felt it's brand was strong enough that people would change their current entertainment systems to be compatible with/take advantage of the PS3. Sure, the hardcore would but the hardcore aren't the people who make or break your console. It's the plebe who still has an SD tv and probably won't be getting hd for a few years and doesn't want to spend 600 dollars on the do everything entertainment machine. They just want a game console. A ***** console that plays cool games. Not a stupid "super computer" that's really good at math.
Sony is in a world of hurt. Anything to the contrary is more Sony ***** propoganda or unbelievable brand loyalty. - Derelict267, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Too bad there won't be a doom 4 :( at least not for a long while according to him.
- Stonedonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6He's more of an engine designer than a game designer -- where he has been historically amazing. This kind of expertise requires intimate knowledge of the hardware. And given how often his company apparently gets secret prototypes, I would say he is often consulted and can give feedback on a very technical level. He could probably design a video card if he wanted to. I don't doubt that the specs have floated through his head more than once.
- trubbleshute, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7It's not like the person posted their own blog entry stating the one hundred and one reasons you shouldn't buy a PS3. It's Carmack saying he's banking on Xbox 360.
Google some interviews of this guy, he is amazing-- and the stuff he has done for the gaming community is amazing as well. - Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@theblooms Carmack himself didn't write VQuake--Michael Abrash did.
It was well known at the time that Michael Abrash wrote VQuake. He talked quite a bit about it in one of his "Ramblings in Real Time" articles.
"Since then, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working on the port of Quake to Rendition’s Verite 3-D accelerator chip"
http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/chap69.shtml
Ramblings in Real Time is interesting stuff for anyone still interested in software game rendering.
http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/ - yournamehere, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Doom3 while good wasn't great and it wasn't Doom. They used the name to gain recognition but the game and the name were different.
That said, JC knows his ***** and at very least deserves proper respect for bringing gaming to true 3d and showing both the card manufactures and game programmers that there is a viable market for it. - Lazybones, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Developers have said it over and over again, that most game code can not be parallelized the same way server code can. You can only sub device so many tasks to be done at once, because so many tasks are dependent on each other. There are points of diminishing returns.
Hence why 3 standard full featured cores are better than 6-8 mini cores for most developers... They are looking to off load some physics, and AI but the rest of the code base is rather linear. - rbanffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@Lazybones,
It all depends on what kind of game you are talking about. I know many types of games that can be heavily parallelized.
Granted, the deeply asymmetric architecture of the PS3 is very hard to master and keeping the SPUs working full steam is sure a challenge, but the PS3 has much more processing power than the 360 and the rewards will be taken by whoever does it first.
I am not familiar with the development tools for Cell, but I imagine it to be a nightmare when compared to the 3-way SMP of the 360. We have been doing SMP in desktops and servers for years. Cell is much more like a no-compromise supercomputer than a desktop or videogame and it is certainly harder to program. - sachmanb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Yay it's Carmack. In high school he was my programming hero, I'd read his .plan file and see if I could get insights on how to be a better programmer =). An early role model.....I enjoyed making those Quake mods..... Good to see his name again since I don't play many games anymore! Yay
- Kwipper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5IMHO! Quake was the first FULLY 3D First Person Shooter of it's time. Before, the level design was 3D but the enemies and weapons consisted of just 2D sprites. I think that is the point that (theblooms) was trying to make.
- Chandon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Floating point performance is rarely useful on a server. The X-Box 360 would be better at serving web pages or running database software. As a supercomputing node to predict the weather or do protein folding, the PS3 would be way better - although I'm not sure how good the floating point accuracy is.
On the other hand, a decent Opteron or Xeon processor would probably own either of them in price/performance for non-video game stuff. - shmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4dude.
1. Learn how to address a response
2. learn how to quote a comment
3. learn how to reply to said comment
4. stop with the obnoxious flaming. - Ignignokt01, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Carmack at E3 2005 commenting about the same thing. (i think its from 2005)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PFUw29U4J8
He's pretty consistent, although now its unsure if the PS3 will have that 'dominant market share' he was talking about. -
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