Carmack on Parhelia

[thop]

first: think of carmack's ego or attitude want you want but he does not what he is talking about and is surely not a novice programmer or whatever you were implying.

second: id sells engines not games. thats were most of their money comes from. doom3 is mainly a tech demonstration of their engine, although it will also be a great game i guess.

[Fenrir(AVA)]

I kind of said this from q3 engine, it is a great enginge but its going to be a while before someone makes a great game out of it.

[Pace]

You don't think Q3 was good?

JC ain't bad, just don't take his word as gospel.

[Wombat]

JC is an idiot. The task of a programmer is to write code NOW , to optimize it NOW and to work with the hardware wich we have NOW.

That might be your job, but it isn't for a large percentage of the industry. It's called R&D, and half of the work is trying to predict where you will be, where your necessary partners will be, and where your competitors will be months/years down the road. It's a good thing people like JC aren't as short-sighted as you, or we'd be playing yesterday's games tomorrow.

[YngwieM]

Originally posted by Drizzt
JC is an idiot. The task of a programmer is to write code NOW , to optimize it NOW and to work with the hardware wich we have NOW.

Very powerful statements, Drizzt...

And that's why I think that the greatest game programers of the world are the ones who program for the Consoles!

In the PC Gamming, there are just few exceptions when the programmers REALLY takes the maximum the HW can offer...

[Sinistral]

- Posted in another thread...

Just cause the Doom3 Game is coming out (estimated) at Q3 2003. John Carmack said himself, to not expect games using the engine to come out for 2-3 years afterwards. A lot can happen in 1-4 years in the computer industry. -

[YngwieM]

Originally posted by Wombat
That might be your job, but it isn't for a large percentage of the industry. It's called R&D, and half of the work is trying to predict where you will be, where your necessary partners will be, and where your competitors will be months/years down the road. It's a good thing people like JC aren't as short-sighted as you, or we'd be playing yesterday's games tomorrow.

Wombat, I agree with some of your thoughts, because it's very nice to we always see news technologies poping-up, new games impressing us, taking us to the "future"..

I don't think JC is an idiot, just because even Q3 could be played on a G200 thru a GF2, and even now we bennefit from the technology his company created in games such as RTCW and JN II.

But I think Drizzt statements are quite valid, mostly becausethere is a "hole" in the PC Programming. Most of the programmers got used to maintain the code technics and in spite of doing SW optimizations, they just wait for a more powerfull HW to keep doing the same code...

The proof of this is the Sony Playstation 2. We just have to analyse the early games and what we've got now. The improvement of grafics, sound, movement innovations, are impressive!

Well... maybe that's just some cheap thoughts, ad I'm sorry about my restricted english...

[moreau]

I for one am not willing to dismiss John Carmack as an idiot. He does after all carry a lot of sway in his industry.

I was, therefore, disappointed by his comments. In fact, it was the most disappointing thing I heard in all of this.

I was hoping, independent of speed, that he would endorse the Parhelia technologies. Alas, no.

If, however, DoomIII is actually a hear or more off, then that certainly tempers his statement. Game card cycles are not that long.

UT2k3 will be the more appropriate question.

CEM

[YngwieM]

Now talking 'bout JC statements... I'm not surprised...

In spite all of the "bad" things, all I hope is that we can play Doom 3 in 1024x768 w/ 16xFAA and aniso.

I think that I ain't asking too much, am I?

[thop]

the original playstation is surely a prime example of squeezing out performance from hardware.
i think the main problem is as always time and money: do i dig into the code, even optimize it in ASM by feet or do i simply throw some CPU/GPU cycles on the problem? in the real world it might be 50/50.

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Drizzt


Not too much detail in the other post 'cause my english level doesn't allow me to write too complex thougths, however:

I seem to remember me that I am a programmer.
Could it be, I'm not sure, but probably having a nice software running on about the 40% of italian medium and big companies and another specialized software sold worldwide make me qualify somehow as a programmer.

So each morning I get up, go to work and start coding.
One day, I find a piece of code that is half a second too slow.

Now, I have two way to solve the problem.
1) Optimize the code.
2) Say to da bozz: "It's not really a problem. I'm targeting the software for 2004-2005 processor and Database engines. There will be no problems on a Athlons 8000Mhz".

The results are
Case 1: nobody says me "Good Job!", simply because I've done what I'm payed for
Case 2: I'm fired.


JC is an idiot. The task of a programmer is to write code NOW , to optimize it NOW and to work with the hardware wich we have NOW.



And what really upset me is that THEY NOT WORK EVEN WITH FUTURE HARDWARE!!!!

All the use they do of a card features is Frame per seconds!!!
Morrowind is probably the first game in the last year to use a feature of a card (pixel shader) apart from the rendering engine itself!!!

Where JC has made innovation?
Where JC has made innovative effects?

SHIT!!!
A FPS is simply becoming a task for level designer and game designer.

When there was only texturing on the video cards, all the programmers wanted more texturing power. After the implementation of T&L, all that programmers want is more powerful T&L units so they can add polys.
For what are they paid, so?
"A.A.A: searching for a programmer.
Requirements: Ability to buy the most powerful cards avalaible in shops. Without coding capacities should be better."


Well, too much anger and too many thoughts flowing freely in Italian to be translated here in english.

Again, a man who say
"Why have much better colors and innovative feature like Trueform and DM on a card instead of adding more texture unit?"
is an idiot.

(a man who say that says only 2 bit color more is more than an idiot. He's a poor mathematician. THEY ARE 2 BIT MORE BUT THEY ARE THE RIGHMOST BIT!!!! IDIOT!!!)

I'm really [incazzato].

Very good points!

Optimising has somehow been forgotten in these days of computing.

[Wombat]

Optimizing forgotten? Hardly, and especially not by JC. JC actually seems to kill a machine's performance by demanding things of it, not poor optimization. After all, this is a guy who tweaks GLX drivers to improve his coding skills (and fixed a bug in Matrox's Linux drivers).

[Damien Green]

I think that some of you are somewhat missing the point. Computer games need to appeal to a large market, the larger the better, since this will provide more profits for the game's developers (which is presumably what they want??). I would imagine that if a survey of computer users was taken, we would find that not many people have particularly high end systems. Many of my friends are still using systems with 500Mhz processors, some are luckier and have 800's or above, but there aren't many with the latest kit.


To address JC's comments:

Firstly, JC is talking about a game that won't be appearing for at least another year, the 3D engine he is currently developing is likely to be miles beyond present times (a necessity if the game is to appear fresh in 2003) so how can we expect it to run well on current hardware?

Secondly, it sounds to me like JC may well be developing something that is just too demanding. There is no way that the majority of PC Gamers are going to spend $400 or so just to play one game!!! It may look beautiful, but I doubt that many people have vast sums of money hanging around in their pockets!
So in essance, he may well be cutting down on the market potential of Doom 3, since when it finally arrives it may only be appealing to the richest of PC users with the latest (most expensive) hardware, and I can't imagine there are too many of those.

I have already pre-ordered a Parhelia card, and I'm very excited about it. I've currently got an ATI Radeon (the original 64MB vivo) and it pretty much runs everything I want it to (when the lousy drivers aren't crashing my system - never a problem with my G400max!) and at a decent enough speed. The Parhelia is likely to be double the speed of my Radeon (if not more) so I'm perfectly happy. What interests me more is the image quality, since I work with digital video, this is going to be very very useful.

I reckon that by the time Doom 3 arrives, the Parhelia will be able to run the game, and it will be playable. It is likely that both the Matrox drivers, and indeed the Doom 3 3D engine will have been fully optimised. In order for it to sell well, Doom 3 will have to be playable on new generation and older generation video cards in order to have a viable market.

It will be interesting to see what happens.......

[xortam]

Christmas 2003 I was reading that as the end of this year. I'm not going to hold off 18 months to buy a replacement for my Max. I'm surprised its still that far away considering the demos that were recently shown. I can't be too concerned about what Doom III will require if it won't appear until 12/03. The graphics industry moves too fast for me to plan that far off. I don't game much and what I do play is the Myst/Riven and Quake/Doom games. I bought my Max with Q3A in mind. I was hoping to find a snazzy immersive single player game like Doom III to enjoy next but I guess I'll need to enter the world of UT or something. This concern over Doom III is meaningless to me now.

P.S. And I don't fault JC for aiming that high for a platform target. Doom III will probably run quite adequately on the latest HW available at that time. I'm sure he's trying to push the technology and match what he expects will be supported at that time. He works closely with the graphics vendors to help gauge those targets.

[thop]

from what i know the only thing that carmack said about the release date was: 2003.

and about D3 being too performance hungry for maybe 80% of the hardware out there: from JCs point of view that makes perfect sense to me. like i said he sells engines. everyone will go woooo and buy the engine. and games based on that engine will probably come out a year or two later, when the hardware of the masses is ready.