Carmack's Hands On Impressions of Xbox 360 & PS3

[DemoCoder]

Can't we all just agree that iD sucks at skin shaders, and everything still looks too plasticy and polybumped? Every game from iD or done on a Doom engine since Doom3 seems to have this problem. Dunno, something about the shaders in all existing D3 engines.

I'm certainly not blown away by Rage like I was when the D3 rotating head footage first leaked. ID seems behind other devs now.

 

[Xenon]

Last I checked the 360 was multi-core.

Last time I checked, Carmack wasn't developing 360 engines.

 

[Gabrobot]

We all know John hates developing for multi-core processors and adapting to architectures that are radically different from the one's he's been used to for the majority of his life.

Uh, so why was he playing around with it back in Quake 3?

 

[Gabrobot]

Please reponse in a polite and respectful manner:smile: . Learn how to control your anger. Anger is a powerful force, I know, but with strength and spirit you can control it. Patient, calmness and humility is the way:smile:

Remember, angry people do foolish thing.

Angry or not, he's right. id Tech 5 is a 360 engine, and Carmack developed it.

 

[Xenon]

and this is your brain on crack...

If I had to guess, the 360 id Tech 5 engine was optimized by a 360 developer, just as the PS3 version was optimized by a seasoned PS3 developer. But, if you have proof that John, himself, handled the conversion from the core PC version then by all means present it. You see, John's a busy guy. In between all day meetings, the supervision/guidance of multiple id projects by external development companies, continued development on the base PC version of the id Tech 5 engine...well, you get the idea.

 

[Xenon]

Angry or not, he's right. id Tech 5 is a 360 engine, and Carmack developed it.

id Tech 5 is a PC based engine that was ported to the 360 and PS3.

 

[Xenon]

Uh, so why was he playing around with it back in Quake 3?

Quake 3 is multicore?

 

[hughJ]

Quake 3 is multicore?

It benefits from SMP, yes.

 

[nAo]

IF it runs at steady 60 FPS than I think it's very good/impressive, though I must admit I now prefer 30 fps + amazingly good motion blur + extra details/AA

 

[nAo]

It benefits from SMP, yes.

It 'just' renders different frames on different cores

 

[Gabrobot]

id Tech 5 is a PC based engine that was ported to the 360 and PS3.

No, Carmack developed it primarily on the 360 and it was then ported to the PC and PS3. The engine is fundamentally designed for multi-core.

Keynote from two years ago

 

[AlphaWolf]

If I had to guess, the 360 id Tech 5 engine was optimized by a 360 developer, just as the PS3 version was optimized by a seasoned PS3 developer. But, if you have proof that John, himself, handled the conversion from the core PC version then by all means present it. You see, John's a busy guy. In between all day meetings, the supervision/guidance of multiple id projects by external development companies, continued development on the base PC version of the id Tech 5 engine...well, you get the idea.

You don't have to guess you could actually google up the correct information or even just check this site to find out that the xbox 360 was the primary platform.

Gabrobot posted a link above which you could search and find:

So it’s been pretty refreshing to actually come down and work on the xbox 360 platform, where you’ve got a very, very thin API layer that lets you talk pretty directly to the hardware. You can say “this is the memory layout”, “this call is going to result in these tokens going into the command buffer”, and so on. The intention is I’m probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on that as a primary development platform...

 

[AlexV]

But must he reply in such a harsh and rude manner?:smile: .

Until humanity learn how to control anger, society will continue to decline

Is this the latest trendy thing to do?I've seen a number of "master Yodas" showing up on forums...had to happen at some point I think, but it's still mehh. Way of The Leaf FTW!

Back to Carmack...what he says is interesting, certainly. What I don't see is Carmack being an innovator...he never really was one, what he does is look at the stuff that's already here, and tweak/improve it to perfection, IMHO, so I wasn't really expecting him to be all to hot about significant departures from the established paradigm, like the PS3 is and, to a lesser extent, X360 are. His ragging on multicore was also expected, as this is a murky area...juicing multiple cores is quite hard, and even though considerable sums of money have gone into parallelization research, no really good, general case approach has come out of it.

 

[Titanio]

Saw the tools video on gametrailers. Looks very cool, and easy-to-use. I'm curious though, when he mentions stuff like "stacks of newspapers on the ground" - if you stamp newspapers, or bones or whatever onto the surface, are they just baked into the surface textures and not actually objects in-and-of themselves? In other words, if you want any actual geometric object, do you defer to your art package? I guess once you've made that object in an art package, though, you can texture it up using their texturing tool..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Seems to me they were textures only. The bundle of papers looked pretty flat. Then again the stones looked fairly geometric.

A lot of the scope of megatexturing seems a bit redundant to me. A texture file of 20 GB doesn't have 20GB of work in it. The artist focusses on key areas. That's simple economics for you, but it means that huge expanse of data isn't actually being used. As per the example, the mountain tops won't be detailed in. At which point, why have one huge texture that covers them? Wouldn't the system be better with multiple small, scene-wide textures? Or is one massive, mostly procedurally created texture required for the engine to be effective?

I did like the notion of painting in shadows under trees though. That's still an issue in some games, like RnC. The plant matter and rocks just seem to float. Adding shadowing underneath would do a world of good.

 

[tabs]

Presumably the areas of little detail will benefit the most from compression.

 

[Xenon]

No, Carmack developed it primarily on the 360 and it was then ported to the PC and PS3. The engine is fundamentally designed for multi-core.

Keynote from two years ago

Can someone confirm these claims? I just find it hard to believe that the id Tech 5 engine wasn't designed primarily on the PC, like all of his other engines.

"In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an xbox 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be starting on that initially. It’s worth going into the reasons for that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the development process goes smoothly onto them."

 

[sionyboy]

Well it is a transcript of what Carmack actually said...I'm not sure what more confirmation you need really. This is from the same keynote outlining why he was proceeding with development on the 360 over the PC.

So it’s been pretty refreshing to actually come down and work on the xbox 360 platform, where you’ve got a very, very thin API layer that lets you talk pretty directly to the hardware. You can say “this is the memory layoutâ€, “this call is going to result in these tokens going into the command bufferâ€, and so on. The intention is I’m probably going to be spending the next six months or so focusing on that as a primary development platform, where I’ll be able to get the graphics technology doing exactly what I want, to the performance that I want, on this platform where I have minimal interface between me and the hardware, and then we’ll go back and make sure that all the PC vendors have their drivers working at least as well as the console platform on there.

It was also reported by the press at the time,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20050816034824.html

http://techreport.com/etc/2005q3/carmack-quakecon/index.x?pg=1

 

[Sound_Card]

Meh..

Take what John Carmack said about the PS3 with a grain of salt. Just IMO

And why is that PSman.


In all honesty, why take it with salt? Their are certain handicaps in the PS3(or should I say advantages in the 360 ) that plain jane make the 360 the better console to devlop on from a "ease of use" standpoint. Everyone will argue which cosole is better to get the most out of it from a "best graphics standpoint" untill their blue in the face but that is not my point.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

I think his MS bias blinds people to what he is saying.

Everything he does say positive about the PS3, does come with negatives shortly after though so it's understandable.

why are you here?

Why are you posting in the Console Technology forum, when its obvious you have 0 to contribute, and you don't want to talk about technology at all.

GameFAQ's crowd would suit you a lot better. (Your rumour about GTA4 delays would actually be believed there)

You didn't like what one of the most respected coders in the world said about something, and you run around calling him biased? Why? Are you in some kind of a position to refute whatever he said about the PS3 or any other console, showing hes on perpus holding back information about the consoles problems, or not telling the truth?

It was so much easier with the rep system...