HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ curiousmindz

Can you share the timestamp for that? (The whole video is an hour and a half long)

I wonder the context of the prediction, since smartphones, tablets and consoles have always followed this trend. And even Intel with their integrated graphics.

Also, on the highest-end, I don't think that will ever be the case because merging CPU and GPU creates huge thermal constraints...

⬐ glacials

27:13; sorry, it looks like HN clipped away the timestamp in the URL.

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless.

His QuakeCon talks are particularly good.

QuakeCon 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

QuakeCon 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code.

Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

You might find John Carmack's 2011 quakecon keynote video interesting, he addresses a fair amount of your questions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

John Carmack mentioned OCaml and Haskell at the last QuakeCon (on the topics of game scripting and static analysis), citing performance and hiring issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 (1:10ish)

I'm not sure about the performance issue. If it stays within a reasonable (low single-digit) factor I think the hit is worth the quality guarantees you can get out of it. The hiring/education issue is probably the #1 reason so few attempts are made in this direction.

Here is an accompanying segment from QuakeCon 2011 in August where static code analysis is discussed. This topic must really be on his mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28&feature=playe...

Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most important bit is probably after the ellipses):

"If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my face.

"We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people thought that was all that we were doing.

"And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good job on it.

[...]

"It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games.

"The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have moments of abject terror and intensity, and it's nicely balanced by the areas where you're going through, you're exploring, you're talking in town and doing these things. And we learned a lot through this process. By no means are we ready to be stood up next to Skyrim or something as an adventure game -- that's not what we're doing -- but it is clear at this point that there are beneficial things we can add to the gameplay experience, where we take everything that was fun and good about classic id games, and you can do these other things that add additional layers to it, that don't take anything away."

(Watch the keynote at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 )

Carmack's take on his own game seems to be a very very far cry from the parent article's "blame the artists!" whinging. It sounds from what he says about his own take on the game, and probably more importantly from how genuinely excited he seems up on stage, that Rage's mixing up the tried and true id gameplay formula was, personally for him, an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

yes, id software is notorious for open sourcing all their games a while after release.

John Carmack took a few months break from Rage development to work on these (at least on Wolfenstein, not sure about Doom) [1], so there will definitely be substantial differences to adapt to iOS, like - I'm guessing - OpenGL-ES code and touch controls.

here's a write-up from Carmack about his Wolfenstein iPhone development adventures: http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopme...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

⬐ palish

Doom 3 is going to be open-source before the end of the year. I can't wait!

⬐ smackfu

Great little detail:"Wolfenstein was originally written in Borland C and TASM for DOS, but I had open sourced the code long ago, and there were several projects that had updated the original code to work on OpenGL and modern operating systems. "

Everyone benefits from Open Source, even the original creators.

I'm sure Carmack says alot more about the patent issues and open sourcing the engine in the keynote. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

⬐ spdy

It is amazing how technical his talk is it`s really intressting if you have a progamming background.

And it just so different to any other keynote for a game i have ever seen.

edit: 5 mins to the end he talks about the doom3 opensource

Carmack expresses admiration for these in his recent keynote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28#t=4820s

⬐ there

just make sure you don't do stupid things to quiet static code analyzers or compiler warnings.

http://digitaloffense.net/tools/debian-openssl/

⬐ s1rech

man, I love hearing what Carmack has to say about anything SW related.

⬐ tomica

i stand in awe whenever i see a Carmack keynote. it almost feels like he breathes in once at the start, and delivers a coherent and easy to follow (and i am no game programmer) stream-of-conscience speech for 90-180 minutes without a single pause or the aid of a slide deck.

if ever there was a genius (not throwing it out lightly) who knew what he was talking about...

⬐ melling

Software quality, code analysis, etc @ around 55m.

⬐ kayoone

This guy is just awesome, i can only imagine how broad his knowledge as a graphics programmer must be going through all this from the very beginning, always delivering next generation gaming engines. Also love the fact that hes still a die hard coder after 20 years of doing this and doesnt want to stop anytime soon. Not to forget that he is a part-time rocket scientist :) Love this man!

⬐ swah

He mentions that he would like to use Haskell or OCaml at 1h10m25s (http://youtu.be/4zgYG-_ha28?t=1h10m25s).

⬐ swah

This was pretty different from most keynotes you usually see - he is very sincere about what could be better, that the game could have looked better if they ran it at 30fps instead of 60fps, what Intel could do better on their graphic chips, differences of developing for the PC vs consoles, how they could use being able to distribute more data than they can, ... Perhaps because he can do that because he's the boss?

⬐ swah

He talks about static code analysis tools around 55 minutes.

⬐ swah

tl;dw: he looked at Coverity, found it expensive. They are now using Microsoft Analyze tools (appears to be something that comes with higher end versions of Visual Studio, Pvs Studio and PC Lint.

⬐ swah

More excerpts:

- "We're trying to write better code from the beginning in some ways."

- "One of the lessons we took from Doom3 is that script interpreters are bad from a performance, development, debugging standpoint."

- "Rage still haves a little bit of script, from Doom3" (he means that in a bad way).

- "In Doom4 we have something call Superscript, its scripting in a subset of C++..." (???)

- "I'm all about trying to be nuch more restrictive about what we can do."

- "I'm very tempted to wanna move to a functional language, Haskell or OCaml or something. But that is not a credible thing to do in the game industry. Because again, 49 people on our list.. I could probably convince a handful of them that we should move to a new language... but then, we're back to having performance issues, having a huge educational and hiring problem... so we got to stay with something that is C/C++ish based on there. But I think that it would be worthwhile to have restrictions to 95% of our code limit us to essentially the Java subset of C++, no unchecked arrays..."

- "I write all my new code in pseudo-functional, but unless something is made impossible it will still creep into your codebase."

⬐ spitfire

The guy basically wrote an operating system (That's what megatexture really is, a complete OS VM and scheduling system) he's remarkably calm about it. Lesser men would be brag left and right about 1/10th of that sort of accomplishment.