Carmack puts down EMBM

[Ali]

Just read this: http://www.voodooextreme.com/article...rviewday2.html

Quote:
Dot3 texture blending. This is critical for bump mapping. Embossing and bump env mapping don't cut it at all. GeForce and Radeon have this now, and everyone will follow.

Thats a bit of a bugger. He also says:
Quote:
3DFX Voodoo4/5, S3 Savage4/2000, Matrox G400/450, ATI Rage128, Nvidia TNT[2]: Much of the visual lushness will be missing due to the lack of bump mapping, but the game won't have any gaping holes. Most of these except the V5 probably won't have enough fill-rate to be very enjoyable.

Hes talking about DOT3 bump mapping there I think.

He does say somewhere that there a coulpe of good cards just over the horizon though. G800 maybee?

Ali

[Sicna]

It's not because John Carmack said that Env Bump-Mapping is not good that it isn't.

In my opinion, he might be a good coder but he's biased. His Q3 engine is very good but come on the only reason why it's better than UT is because of curves??

It's fast sure. It's good and can have some good results? Agreed. But isn't he the guy that wants 64 bits textures when we still have problems playing at 32 bits.

The guy exagerates a bit IMO. When you do it right, it look really good. And from what programmers say, it's really easy too. And if Env Bump-Mapping is so awful why put it on the new Radeon?

Just my 2 cents...

Sicna

PS I'll at least admit I've always like the Unreal engine better than the Quake Engine (even the Q3) better moving textures (like the water) unfortunatly it's still a bit too slow.



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What kind of party is this. No booze and only one hooker. -Bender

[Ali]

I wasnt trying to say it was a bad thing, just that John Carmack though it wasnt the best.

Ive seen the demos of water with EMBM, and cant believe how good it looks. I see real water now, and think "wow, that water is EMBMed"

Also, isnt EMBM DirectX only? Not sure about that, but I remembered hearing that somewhere. (I remembered that after posting here though).

Ali

[Greebe]

EMBM is DX only. He's whining because it'll take only the absolute fastest of fast Gcards out to run his game smooth. What a whiner.

Q3 may look nice, but gameplay sucks.

[Joel]

And he also suffers from a condition called God-syndrome.

Joel

[Sicna]

Sorry didn't mean to put you down

I know it's not you. Like Joel said I hate John Carmack's godlike attitude!

He may be good at building engines but games is another matter entirely...Q3 sucks just like Q2. Q1 was good when it got out.

Sicna

[Minstrel]

From elsewhere in that interview he said that EMBM is a degenerate case of a more general technology (I don't recall the exact details of what he wrote) but that he also blames Microsoft for supportning only that.

I'll go look it up in a while.

[red2]

No consumer card today supports the real bump mapping algorythm. It requires WAY too much power. EMBM is an extremely nice hack, so is DOT3. John is an elitist and likes the best, so that is why he said EMBM isn't great. DOT3 is a "truer" form of bump mapping and is supported in Opengl so that also affected his decision.

[Storm]

Way too much power... are we talking about displacement mapping? EMBM's problem is low resolution. I suppose having a fractal "detail" texture, And a bump map would make an object seem more realistic, but it would probably be a bit too slow on the G400

[Raptor^]

Carmack can only do 1 thing - FPS engines in OpenGL. If anything doesn't fit that mould, it must in his opinion, suck.

He even seems to be getting worse at that, the Q1 engine was beautiful for its time, fast and elegant. The Q2 engine was average.
The Q3 engine may look pretty, but its looks in no way justify its incredible lack of speed, especially when dealing with transparency and fogging.

His ridiculously inflated sense of self importance amuses me, 1 man does not make a good game (Romero and Daikatana anyone?).

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P3-700E@933, Abit BF6, G400 MAX, 8.6 gig Seagate, 8.6 gig WD, SBLive 1024, 256Mb PC133... Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse, Keyb, Stuff

[DosFreak]

Obviously you guy's don't know Carmack. Don't you read his .plans? He doesn't have a GOD syndrome and he he is all about team effort. Every time I see an interview he mentions his team. Just because someone is good at his work and excells at what he does doesn't mean you people have to diss them because they are better at something than you. Carmack makes GAME ENGINES. That's it's strength. Probably always will be.

[Pace]

Yea - I think other people exagerate what JC says - they treat him as a god. He might be elitist in some of his views. Indeed, today's quote on Blue's might suggest that:

PVS was The Right Thing when level geometry counts were much lower. With tens of thousands of polygons in a scene, creating a cluster tree directly from that becomes completely unrealistic from a space and time perspective.

The options are to either do PVS with a simplified version of the world, or ignore the geometry and just work with portal topology.

Unreal used a scan-line visibility algorithm, which crippled it's ability to have high poly counts or high framerates with hardware accelerators.

Tim Sweeny knows full well that the architecture is very wrong for modern systems, but many of the original decisions were based on earlier software technologies. Unreal was supposed to be a "killer app" for the Pentium-200 MMX processor.

I have a lot of respect for Tim and Unreal, but the visibility algorithm in Unreal turned out to be a bad call. He is changing it for future work.

He does tend to work for the gaming industry as a whole but sometimes he is interpreted as a visionary! His 64-bit colour statement was valid - go find his .plan somewhere.

I did like Quake 3 and it's engine does look great. And I think it does play great (though I don't want to turn this into Q3 vs UT!). His support for Linux was admirable (even though not being a success). Ok, maybe not admirable but certainly unusual in this day and age (not being 100% profit driven). I did have another point against him but I can't remember it - hopefully it'll come up again in the thread - something elitist I think, can't for the life of me remember!

I'll get back to you if I mind it!

Paul.

[Buback]

why are you all bashing carmack?

i kinda think he's right about embm. if microsoft was going to put in a whole new rendering pipeline into dx8 then why bother puting embm into dx7? i can't really explain my position, but it seems to me that embm was just to fill the gap befor the release of dx8.

not that it isn't a nice feature. I love it.

also carmack can have an opinion just like any of us. he has a powerful voice within the gaming community, and so he is almost godlike. however i don't think he abuses his power at all.

buback

[Greebe]

Carmack slams EMBM because it reduces FPS proformance. If that wasn't so he'd still most likely slam it because it's a DX only thing.

Dosfreak, to claim that we'd have to be jealous of his skills. I for one am not.
FYI, he's always slammmed whatever wasn't the absolute fastest in consumer level OGL graphics cards.

Before anyone here decides to turn this into another soapbox special, please remember that some of us here know what they are talking about and these comments aren't coming from a kiddy.

[This message has been edited by Greebe (edited 22 September 2000).]

[ph0rk]

God complex? huh? People just ask his opinion a lot. Haven't you guys seen the typical "The Carmack (TM) on [insert gaming/tech related topic here]" posts on the Shugashack, VE, Blue's, etc.? People seem fascinated with the guy. And hey, I like to hear what he has to say, too: id's a leader in the gaming community, why wouldn't I?

JC's commentary is generally technical in nature, anyway's, rather than game-oriented. No surprise there: id is a technology house, not a content house. They don't make games, they make engines - take Q3 as an example - not much of a game. It sure looks nice, though

I think EMBM looks good. Much better than no EMBM anytime I've seen it. So then from an end-user perspective it does what it's supposed to. *shrugs*

Also JC himself has said not to expect the new Doom for about 2 years. Are any of you going to be using a G400 in 2 years? I'm not. So why does it matter what Doom will run like on one? I know ppl keep asking JC in interviews what the new Doom will run like on current hardware, so of course he answers. But it's a silly question to ask, really.

Pace - if you won't start it, I will: UT r0x j00! Q3 sux0rz!

=P

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Cory Grimster
cory@houseofstuff.net
http://www.houseofstuff.net