Carmack had his QuakeCon keynote a couple of days ago. Not much new but I found it interesting. The technical part starts about an hour in.
As for Java, he mentioned that they may stop making games for the Java and Brew platforms and instead focus on the iPhone.
I swear that guy used to be ahead of the game
Kev
Mountains of cash seem to have that effect on people.
Isn’t he putting most of his effort into rocket science these days rather than graphics tech?
Either way, the detail in the landscapes is jaw dropping. Must be really nice from an artist’s point of view to just paint with none of those annoying texture budget restrictions.
He may have a secret technology or business deal that hasn’t been publicly exposed yet, which would give him leverage.
Always interesting to hear him speak.
As an aside, he gives the impression to be genuinely enjoying his work and his life, the way he talks about his Teslas and Testarossas during his keynote and all ;D
I agree the landscapes in Rage look amazing!
Not sure why people take him so seriously. He is a graphics programmer and nothing more. He is not a programming language designer, he is not an operating system designer, etc. There’s plenty he doesn’t know.
The only things you might be interested to hear from him is either graphics or business related things. That’s it.
Good to hear him slating Firemint :persecutioncomplex:
…and criticizing the mobile carriers as the biggest limitation in mobile development!
Why ppl take him seriously?
Because he’s one of the visionaries of the games industy. And one that’s quite vocal in his (usually well founded) opinions.
He’s overrated. He made a good software 3D rendering engine and it looked impressive - so different from what people were used to seeing that they elevated him to some sort of programming god status… Then eventually the Quake code was released and if you took a look you could see how crappy it was 
Since when does it matter what the code looks like? ;D
The point is that he did so many innovations in 3D rendering engines (using hw accellerated OpenGL in a game, curved surfaces, using bump mapping to suggest more polygons in models, ‘carmacks reverse’ etc) and made so many interesting business decisions (share ware, staying independent, open sourcing his game engines for example), that he became one of the most prominent people in the games industry, and IMHO very rightfully so.
I don’t know why some people are so eager to downplay his contributions to the games industry.
Really? Really?
Visionary?
What visionary stuff has he done?
He used to write seriously awesome game engines, though. The Doom and Quake 1 engines, mostly.
So just read my previous post for examples.
By him being a visionary I just mean that he had the vision to innovate things, simple as that. What’s your definition of ‘visionary’?
I’m not arguing he’s not talented. I’m just saying that
He’s a very talented game engine programmer. He had a team of very talented artists and visionaries helping him to create some of the best games ever made.
However, he wasn’t the first to invent or implement any of the things you listed. He did popularize a lot of them, though, but that’s probably because the games were massive commercial successes (and very awesome).
If people went by pure technical innovation, people would listen a lot more to the old Blue Sky Productions team. Ultima Underworld was released several months prior to Wolfenstein 3D, and featured full texturemapped 3D gameplay, and was a great game to boot.
[quote]Ultima Underworld was released several months prior to Wolfenstein 3D,
[/quote]
However, Catacomb 3-D and Hovertank 3-D were both released before that.
Yes, and Maze War was released in 1974. If that’s too step-based for you, Midi Maze was released in 1987, four years before Catacomb 3d.
Hovertank 3D didn’t have textured walls, Catacomb 3D was less technically impressive than Ultima Underworld, and the texturemapping was inspired by the UW development.
I have to admit, you got me there
I have fond memories of Midi Maze on my old Atari Mega 2, but from a game engine pov it was nothing special (apart from the nifty MIDI based networking).
So which FPS game engine before Quake3 had curved surfaces? 
Anyway, at the very worst ‘visionary’ might be stretching things a bit, but I’m still not sure how one can deny his influence in gaming history.
I’m absolutely not in the “Carmack is teh awesome 3d codez god” camp, but there’s no denying he’s one of the best at what he does, and he is also vocal in his opinions and he’s often right. So my point is: No wonder the media takes note and take him seriously; they’d be stupid not to.
[quote=“erikd,post:17,topic:34086”]
It’s not a shooter, but curved surfaces have been around for a while:
http://www.consolemad.co.uk/gallery/albums/CD32/Frontier-Elite_II/frontier2.jpg
Ah, Frontier, I remember that game too from my Atari
I can’t remember though if those curved surfaces were still curves up close, like in Q3?
I’m talking about the mountains in the back, the 2D curves like in the foreground don’t count 
Yeah, the mountains and clouds were bezier patches, iirc.