John Carmack talks next gen consoles at Quakecon 2013 keynote

Anyone that thinks he's a failure is crazy. The guy is a legend in the videogame world, and rightfully so. On top of that he's just an incredibly smart person that has an admirable thirst for knowledge in a variety of technology fields.
 
And id is about half the size of Naughty Dog, with no major support behind them from a console platform holder.

Rage sold well enough, period.

Well enough by what metric? They had to cancel Rage 2 and focus on Doom 4 which had to be started from scratch after years of work. Todd Hollenshead left, a sign the powers to be are unhappy. I don't see any public signs that Rage did well enough, sounds like it almost broke the studio.
 
Rage did well enough, maybe not as good as to justify a sequel with id deep into the production of the sequel of their best selling title to date.

But Doom 4's problems are completely unrelated to the sales of Rage. Why would anyone have to start from scratch because a previous project didn't sell well? If anything, bad sales and being short of money would actually keep them from doing so!

Also, Todd has probably left - if he wasn't actually fired - because of the Doom 4 issues, as Rage has been released years ago. You don't get to keep your job for years if you mess up something, right?
 
It's actually been going on for some time now. As I've said, almost every AA game looks really good nowadays, and also a lot of people have their sensibilities tuned to superficial elements or feature lists (you can see it here on B3D too), instead of the pure richness of the visuals in Rage or the smooth framerate. Carmack's brilliance is not as evident as it was in the days of Doom or Wolfenstein, when the only other 3D FPS worth mentioning was Ultima Underworld, with 1/8th the screen size (but with more 'real' 3D).

It's like, you wouldn't ask the average movie goer to vote for the Academy Award for best cinematography, either. But a 100 years ago, everyone would have voted for the Lumiére brothers, who practically invented this stuff.
 
On top of that Rage sold 3+ million units and had a development team of less than a hundred people. Compare that to more than a thousand people working on Assassin's Creed games - yeah they sell more copies but cost way way more money too...

You somehow skip over the time/work factor here.
7 years for Rage, 1 year for another AC iteration these days I think:)
 
It's probably best to skip game comparisons because it's only going to get ugly.

Carmack is highly respected, incredibly knowledgeable and still cutting edge. He's always pushing something that's ahead of its time. I'm not sure how that's even up for debate.
 
You somehow skip over the time/work factor here.
7 years for Rage, 1 year for another AC iteration these days I think:)

two years. because different teams do each edition.

in the case of ac the teams are huge, and spread on multiple locations, perhaps 600 developers.

better example might be cod, also on a annual cycle with two dev teams, but iw (at least) is modest sized...

but games on annual installments tend to build heavily on the prior games. still, point stands.
 
Anyone that thinks he's a failure is crazy. The guy is a legend in the videogame world, and rightfully so. On top of that he's just an incredibly smart person that has an admirable thirst for knowledge in a variety of technology fields.


simply because he never said ps3 was more powerful than 360 and similarly (and correctly most likely) is saying the two new machines this gen are also much closer than some people care to admit
 
low latency headset with high density high frequency screen then ?
That should be interesting...
 
1 + 1 = 2
1 + 2 = 3
--- That's evolutionary ---

0 (Zero)
--- That's brilliance ---

John Carmack is a brilliant man. There's doubt about it...But can he play a violin? I assume not. So is he a failure? According to some of you, yes!

But think about it. He's might not be an awesome game designer or a violinist. But what he has contributed and influenced in his area of expertise, nothing short of revolutionary. And more importantly, as Laa-Yosh pointed out, he remains relevant. That's freaking amazing. Because that reveal his true nature. It wasn't because he was happened to be there when 3D gaming getting traction. It's because of him, that made people saw the posibilities. Rage with megatexture did that. The game might not sell as much as CoD, but it didn't have the same marketing budget as CoD. BTW Rage is an awesome game, the smooth framerate, amazing graphic and the gameplay was pretty good to boot.

I'm excited that he's getting his hands wet in VR. His brilliance will drive this market/industry forward...A lot of his talk and technology might sound boring and doesn't excite a lot people, but those in the know, knows his words are golden standard.
 
I have this recurring nightmare where, by middle age, I drive the development of multiple leading-edge software techniques and engines, become noteworthy in the eyes of a whole genre of fans, and make a lot of money.
The next step in my nightmare, I start feeling like I'm not doing anything new anymore with game engines, so I proceed to make something boring like freaking space rockets.
It doesn't work out, leaving me destitute with just way more money than most people.
I then get hired as an executive in an up and coming startup focused on something leading-edge that excites me--yet another horrible twist where I find myself doing something I find personally fulfilling.
I then wake up screaming.

Thank goodness I'm not failing like that.

:LOL:

This goes to my imaginary list of my favourite postings on this board ;) . Sometimes certain phrases are too lightly thrown around.
 
What I've always appreciated most about Carmack is his "no BS, tell-it-like-it-is" approach. I get so sick of the PR blather that some game devs spout.
 
Exactly. The way I think about Carmack is, he is a true Engineer. Or at least that is the impression he gives when talking in interviews and keynotes like theese. He sees things and talks about them objectively. He evaluates their prons and cons unemotionally, even when talking about his own past or future aproaches. He never pretends his technical aproaches have no downsides, and is frank about recognizing his big mistakes whenever there is one. When asked about something he cannot talk about because he was advised to do so by marketing and pr people, he says just that. Gabe Newel is not too different, despite not being as technical, and people also generaly like the guy and enjoy hearing him speak.
Even when asked about silly mundane things, Carmak's answers reveal a surprisingly similar line of thought. "What is you favorite juice? Well, though I like oranje juice, the time to prepare vs. reward ratio of it is lower than just eating an orange, so I tend to prefer doing so, or if I really wanna drink something I go with watter. On a restaurant environment I might choose the orange juice, but ocasionally I also like a lemonade" <- this never happened, its just a fictional example I came up with to illustrate what I was talking about, but I've seen he do that to explain his choices of cars, literature, hobbies, familiy and other regular stuff like that. It's a very enviable way to live life in my opinion.
 
Gabe Newel is not too different, despite not being as technical, and people also generaly like the guy and enjoy hearing him speak.
Gaben is an incredible speaker. Just listening to him talk and from the things he says you can tell he's smart as hell. He has that ability to see things, connections and so on that truly intelligent people have (meaning, not just those who score high on an IQ test.) It's no mere accident that valve became as successful as they are, they're not a flash in the pan company built on hype and stolen ideas (zynga, I'm looking at you), they're gonna stick around for a while.
 
You can also say both guys are remarkable for their muli-diciplinarity (renaissance men as some say) While Carmak is usually closer to technical programing, physics, and computer technology stuff, and Newel is not so worried about those stuff as he is about game production, studio managment, game design, distribution, marketing, and generally all sorts of really weird game-related mad scientist stuff (VR included, were both guys overlap). Yet I might be wrongly atributing some of Valve's research to Newel himself, but I know he is personaly involved with at least a good buch of the things I mentioned and then some.
 
Gaben is an incredible speaker. Just listening to him talk and from the things he says you can tell he's smart as hell. He has that ability to see things, connections and so on that truly intelligent people have (meaning, not just those who score high on an IQ test.)

Gabe is very different to Carmack, as milk said, Carmack distills almost everything to a hardware or software engineering view. The lack of business, economics and industry politics skews is one of the reason why I like listening to Carmack.

But Gabe is very business/profit orientated. Remember when he infamously said:
Gabe Newell said:
"Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created"
Actually Gabe, as much as a fucker Cell was to work with, in no small part due to the terrible state of Sony's early devtools, Cell was setting the direction of the future of games development. You may dislike (or hate) the architecture but the philosophy of re-thinking game engines down to smaller parallisable tasks to run on lower-clocked or stream processing cores, was obviously the [then] future. To be fair, Carmack also didn't like this development either and was long a proponent for higher-clocked, fewer-core processor architectures.

Gabe's also been outspoken on Windows 8 app space. Now I was with him on this at first. As a Mac OSX user since 2003, I thought this was a terrible idea until Apple introduced the OSX App Store (similar model to the iOS model) and realised, as a consumer, it was in my interest to buy software from the app store. There was none of this single-machine licence, the OS would keep it updated, the app was sandboxed to limit rogue app's destructive abilities. Now I'll rarley buy an OSX app unless it's in the app store. There are good reasons not to be in that space, like Parallels and VMWare's products where they can't operative within the sandboxed requirement space, but mostly I simply won't buy applications, utilities or games outside the app store.

Carmack is polarised from an engineering perspective, Gabe is not. That's not to say either is wrong or bad, but from where I sit 99% of the time, which is from a consumer perspective, Carmack's perspective is more relevant. And even then, he's not always right about where technology is heading.
 
Why can we only get a secure sandbox for applications if we pay through the nose for it? I've paid for windows, I'd like it to have a secure environment for third party applications without Microsoft playing a gatekeeper.

Google does everything with Android how Microsoft should be doing it ... minus the open source thing the Android App model is how Microsoft would have done it in the old days. If Microsoft doesn't provide an alternative which preserves the strong points of Windows all they will become is a second string Apple ... and the world doesn't need or want that.
 
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