HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

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

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers went from games to aerospace?

http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/elon-musk-and-john-carmack-t...

https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/16/elon-musk-tries-to-woo-joh...

Elon Musk practically offered Carmack a job at SpaceX, tweeting "Well, if you love rockets, come work on them with me at SpaceX!"

Carmack is a very enthusiastic person, who is hard working, and genuinely passionate about everything he pursues. I have "followed" him for a good while. It's not difficult to tell he's a lot smarter than your average Joe, but he also seems quite a bit sharper than your average smart programmer. I recommend watching all his talks and interviews.

Some amusing and revealing stuff on his childhood: http://www.giantbomb.com/john-carmack/3040-4576/

"In the gaming industry, there are a lot of people that are specifically in it because they love games and they want to create things. My love for programming is a more abstract thing. I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems. There are some things that are inherently more rewarding than others. Graphics and games are probably the most generally rewarding area of programming."

On software engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

Another smart and nice guy in the business is Tim Sweeney. About the same age as Carmack, and also founded Epic the same year id Software was founded, at 21. Sweeney got his first taste of programming at 11.

"It was astonishing seeing the IBM PC. It was such a crisp machine. I'd seen a Commodore PET computer before, and it was a crappy device that never really did what you wanted, I couldn't figure it out and nobody was there to show me how to use it. I sat down at this IBM and every key you pressed made this bright, quick sound. [It had] this nice clear screen, this very powerful basic programming language. It just took me a couple of days to figure out how to use that. It was totally love at first sight. From that point on, I tried to dedicate all of the time I had free to learning to do more with computers."

He seems to share a similar passion to that of Carmack's.

"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker.

Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

It's interesting to me that about 5 years ago John Carmack was talking up game streaming quite a bit in his annual QuakeCon talk. From what I remember he was pretty confident it would be the future of gaming at the time. However I'd love to know what went wrong and why game streaming as a whole has pretty much completely fizzled. Was it just too much hype and optimism that the technology would improve and latency wasn't an issue, or perhaps bad business models that doomed it from the start?

IMHO game streaming is pretty much doomed if the future of gaming is ultra low latency and high framerates for virtual reality. There's just no way a streamed game could work with Occulus Rift, etc. and have low enough input and display latency to be believable.

edit: I think it was his 2012 QuakeCon talk: https://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=3522

⬐ IkmoIkmo

It's probably things like resolution. I mean, we now have 5K screens in homes. Gaming on a high res (not 5k, but at least full hd) has become the norm, and internet speeds did not grow as quickly.

I think at some point the timing will be better because the growth speeds will reverse. i.e., the human eye cannot see the difference between refresh rates and pixel per inch density once it becomes too large. I doubt after 5k we really need more pixels.

Of course by then we'll come up with new stuff to use bandwidth capacity for instead so it's hard to tell. But with everything moving to the cloud & wireless, the notion that we'll wirelessly be outputting video to a monitor, or running graphics software in the cloud, it's not far fetched.

⬐ m_mueller

I'm thinking that in a few years there will still be games with intense graphics that aren't VR - these will just be a new type of casual game. In the last months the barrier to use high-end engines has been significantly lowered, which should make these tools available even to such lower budget titles (but sometimes with a huge following). VR helmets will probably stay a 'nerdy thing' for a while, taking over the gaming world from the top end and (hopefully) through arcades.

⬐ wsc981

I don't think streaming is dead. I think it's mostly suited to casual gamers though. And the casual gamer market should be much bigger compared to the hardcore gamer market anyway.

I did like OnLive on my MacBook Air quite a lot, but their game selection was quite limited.

⬐ forthefuture

The problem with streaming will always be that computers get better faster than Comcast (or w/e internet service you have) does. Just going off a quick search for GPUs, pretty much every metric has doubled in the last 5 years. My internet speed over the same period has literally not changed. Not to say that the GPU is directly responsible, but that if memory usage in games is growing at even a linear rate (which is conservative), it's still impossible for internet speeds to match that improvement.

I suggest parrying their ActiveX thrust with a counter-attack argument for NaCl.

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client

If you have to do something inside a browser, Native Client is much more interesting as something that started out as a really pretty darn clever x86 hack in the way that they could sandbox all of this in user mode interestingly. It's now dynamic recompilation, but something that you program in C or C++ and it compiles down to something that's going to be not your -O4 optimization level for completely native code but pretty damn close to native code. You could do all of your evil pointer chasings, and whatever you want to do as a to-the-metal game developer.

-John Carmack, OculusVR [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk&t=2h36m18s

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyUgHPs86XM

⬐ Sammi

I've watched the one on lighting twice, just cause it blew my mind so much. I finally (think I) understand light.

⬐ DonHopkins

When I first read that, I thought "lighting" was some kind of mind altering drug. It is, if you do it right! ;)

⬐ iamshs

I finished watching first one, and my admiration for him grows even more. Immense knowledge with a gift of presenting mere facts. What a likable personality. Thanks for the links.

I think the reason is two-part:

1. (From the original link):

"Over the past few years, browser support for plugins such as QUAKE LIVE have dropped off significantly, causing problems for plugins to operate in a consistent and working manner. With the recent announcement of Google Chrome's roadmap [1] to turning off plugin support and the upcoming changes in Firefox [2], it seems that now is the time to make the transition."

2. (From John Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2012 [3]):

"Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality."

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-f...

[2] http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/09/24/plugin-act...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

--

Based on John's comments regarding Linux, they just are not seeing the return to make it a priority. He mentions that Mac does better than Linux, but perhaps not enough, again, to be a priority.

⬐ zanny

I went looking for a record of the statistics, but I know that the Humble Indie Bundle 9 had a larger gross revenue share from Linux than Mac, plus significantly higher per-user average payments from those who claimed Linux.

But yeah, Steamboxes will make Linux a viable sales platform for games. Without it, you are basically looking at an OS that users have to manually install unless you buy from one of the three Linux pc boutiques online or the specific Dell / HP laptops with Ubuntu, and then you still only have Ubuntu as a distro option.

If Linux ends up in stores, especially on the cheaper end playing all the Indie games, running SteamOS at least, the market will explode.

I want to say I'm disappointed id is becoming effectively dropping the platform, especially when it has higher adoption numbers now than it ever did when they released any other game for it. Their games probably represent 90% of pre-Humble Bundle / Steam hours played on Linux, considering all the mods and such.

⬐ ewzimm

I think the takeaway is there are less people interested in playing a traditional deathmatch first person shooter on Linux than other platforms. Personally, I find them to be boring and overdone. There are much more exciting types of games being made by the indie community than a modified version of a game from 1996.

⬐ zanny

Quake Live is based off Quake 3 which was released at the end of '99, but I get the point.

Ironically though most of their Linux based competition (Xonotic, Open Arena, etc) all use the quake 1 - 3 engines.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4423031

Here is the link to the transcribed portion of the talk (starting at 00h:30m:02s):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk&t=1802

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew).

I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

John Carmack at Quakecon 2012: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

The thing about Carmack and Linux is, that everything he says is based mostly on the QuakeLive port id did a while back (edit: he says this here http://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=45m26s). The port was released as an afterthought and quite a while after the Windows version), it wasn't publicized anywhere so naturally, people ignored it. From this experience he concluded that Linux isn't financially viable and/or there are no people interested in gaming on the platform. Now I'm not saying that Linux is financially viable, I don't know that. I just think that

- a lot of people do pay for games on Linux (look at Humble Indie Bundles, look at the indie titles or the recent titles on Steam)

- I know people who pay for games but are stuck on Windows because they play games. My guess is that these people would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if their games were playable under Linux.

⬐ Pent

Well to be fair, some data is better than no data, regarding how financially viable linux is for gaming.

⬐ adamors

Oh but there is data. Linux users on Humble Indie Bundles constantly pay more per head than OS X or Windows users. http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/281...

My point is that Linux users are willing to pay for games, if they know about them.

⬐ rednukleus

To play devil's advocate - Linux users may pay more for the Indie Bundles, but there are only a few tens of thousand Linux users paying anything at all. The proportion of Linux users who buy the Humble Bundle is probably much much higher than the proportion who would buy a AAA game (for a number of obvious reasons). Games like CoD need to sell at least hundreds of thousands of copies for it to be worth the support costs.

⬐ pekk

I don't think it would hurt the game industry to do more projects which cost less than $50 million to produce, and sell for less than $60. Deer Hunter and Barbie type games (accounting for a huge proportion of US sales) sell for more like $20. And iOS games sell for more like $1-$5. But for some reason the latter causes people to ask where they can find the opportunities more than to sit around complaining about how iOS users are cheap and their data doesn't count because they aren't paying $60.

⬐ mtgx

Are you referring to this quakelive.com? He said it's a failure as a free 2 play game online. What does that have to do with Linux? I don't think it even works on Linux, actually.

⬐ jiggy2011

I can't remember the exact quote but he said something a long the lines of "we tried porting quake live to linux and nobody played it". Which I'm sure is true, but the way he said it seemed to imply that this was adequate evidence that supporting Linux was probably a waste of time.

⬐ danielweber

Quakelive worked under both Windows and Linux last time I checked.

⬐ adamors

There is an offical, native Linux client that no one knows about. It was released in 2009. And because no one actually bothered with it, he concluded that the WHOLE platform is disinterested. http://youtu.be/wt-iVFxgFWk?t=45m26s

⬐ cma

That isn't all he based it on. id games used to be available on Linux, with ports produced by Loki or with unofficial binaries by staff. They never brought in enough money.

⬐ pekk

And if Loki hadn't died around 2002, there would be many excellent Linux games to sell on Steam today, which is a much better platform for promoting, updating and DRMing the games. Bad timing.

⬐ adamors

He says "We have made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with the QuakeLive client and that platform just hasn't carried it's weight." Watch the video I linked to.

⬐ cma

That the latest foray didn't carry its weight doesn't imply the earlier foray carried its weight.

⬐ jiggy2011

The dualboot issue is important here. Since most people who go out of their way to install linux on a computer are probably savvy enough to setup a dualboot it removes a lot of the economic incentive to port games to Linux.

This is because they know that most serious Linux using gamers will probably dual boot anyway so a Linux port of a game is a "nice to have" but won't stop somebody buying a game.

Carmack talks a bit about one optimization he used in the doom 3 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=1h51m45s

For those that follow game development, John Carmack had this to say at QuakeCon 2012:

"But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there." [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=45m4s

John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

"It's about time a major player got behind Linux [...]"

What about id Software?

They have a long-standing history of support for the platform, including John Carmack's philosophy and advocation of OSS that has driven his contribution of id Software game engine source code to the community, up to and including id Tech 4.

He even cares so deeply about the topic that he worked to keep id Tech 5 free from the shackles of proprietary code, because he wants to eventually release it as open source. He said (italic emphasis is mine):

"'Do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this?' And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that." [1]

I think the reality is that id Software has attempted to build the market-space, but the base just hasn't been there. For example, John had this to say recently at QuakeCon 2012:

"Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms.

[...]

Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality. Valve will probably pull a bunch more people there. I know absolutely nothing about any Valve plans for console, Steam-box stuff on there; I can speculate without violating anything.

[...]

So, it's enticing, the thought there that you might have a well-supported, completely open platform that you could deliver content through the Steam ecosystem there. It's a tough sell on there, but Valve gets huge kudos for having the vision for what they did with Steam, sticking through all of it. It's funny talking about Doom 3, where we can remember back in the days when they're like, 'Well, should you ship Doom 3 on Steam, go out there, make a splash?' ... I'm like, 'You're kidding, right?' That made no sense at all at that time, but you know Valve stuck with it and they're in a really enviable position from all of that now.

It still seems, probably crazy to me that they would be doing anything like that, you know, but, it's something that's not technically impossible, but would be really difficult from a market, sort of ecosystems standpoint." [2]

[1] http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/9374

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=44m28s

Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it.

Start Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

You might also enjoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4423031

⬐ watt

This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8&feature=relmf... is more on topic (QuakeCon panel with Michael Abrash of Valve).

Interesting comments on Mac and Linux platforms [1]:

"Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms.

I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early.

But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there.

Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality. Valve will probably pull a bunch more people there. I know absolutely nothing about any Valve plans for console, Steam-box stuff on there; I can speculate without violating anything.

One thing that also speaks to the favor of Linux and potential open source things is that the integrated graphics cards are getting better and better, and they really are good enough now. Intel's latest integrated graphics cards are good. The drivers still have issues. They're still certainly not going to blow away somebody's top of the line SLI system, but they are completely competent parts that are delivering pretty good performance.

And one of the wonderful things is that Intel has been completely supportive of open source driver efforts, that they have chipset docs out there, and they work openly with community to develop that, and that's pretty wonderful. I mean, anybody that's a graphics guy, if you program to a graphics API, use D3D or OpenGL, you owe it to yourself at some point to go download the Intel chipset docs. There's hundreds of pages of them, but you really should read through and see what happens at the hardware level. It's not the same architecture that Invida and AMD have on there, but there's a lot of commonalities there. You'll grow as a graphics developer to know what happens down at the bit level.

Another one of those things, if I had more time, if I could go ahead and clone myself a few times, I would love to be involved in working on optimizing the Intel open source drivers there.

So, it's enticing, the thought there that you might have a well-supported, completely open platform that you could deliver content through the Steam ecosystem there. It's a tough sell on there, but Valve gets huge kudos for having the vision for what they did with Steam, sticking through all of it. It's funny talking about Doom 3, where we can remember back in the days when they're like, 'Well, should you ship Doom 3 on Steam, go out there, make a splash?' ... I'm like, 'You're kidding, right?' That made no sense at all at that time, but you know Valve stuck with it and they're in a really enviable position from all of that now.

It still seems, probably crazy to me that they would be doing anything like that, you know, but, it's something that's not technically impossible, but would be really difficult from a market, sort of ecosystems standpoint."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk#t=44m28s

⬐ Lockyy

The statement that people are less willing to pay for things on the platform is kind of refuted by how the linux demographic always pays almost double what people on osx, and triple what people on windows pay for the humble bundles.

⬐ suhastech

Don't forget the number of people.

⬐ simonh

And yet he's stating facts based on actual experience doing it.

⬐ kmm

So do we, based on the public data provided by The Humble Bundle. He captured and might have analyzed his segment of the market, (the last time 8 years ago!), we can do something with another segment.

There's really no need to be so snappy.

⬐ Lockyy

Okay, fair game I concede that he's probably right.

⬐ ondrasej

These two facts are not necessarily in contradiction. At this moment in the current Humble bundle, the average price paid by Linux and Mac users is significantly higher than the average price paid by Windows users, but the total income from Windows is still way higher than the income from Linux and Mac combined, just because of the raw numbers of users.

It looks to me like there are some Linux users who don't mind buying games (and do not mind paying premium for that), but the majority is not interested in buying games at all, regardless of the price.

Moreover, my own experience with buying games is that (digital distribution aside) it was practically impossible to get Linux versions of games (well, at least in Czech rep., where I used to live). And if there was a Linux version at all, using it meant buying a box with the Windows version and the patching it. So, even though I use Linux for work, I used to play games almost exclusively in Windows (and then on XBox, which made things even easier).

I would suggest watching his entire talk on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

⬐ Keyframe

Three and a half hours?? I better grab some popcorns then.

⬐ tkahn6

Definitely worth watching. It's more like a tech talk than a keynote. Extremely good insight in there.

⬐ wwwtyro

I was glued to the screen for the entirety of that talk. That guy is completely engrossing to listen to.

⬐ kefs

Just a comment to add.. John Carmack's keynotes aren't the usual fluff you get from most CEOs... he gets technical and doesn't hold your hand.

⬐ queensnake

He mentions around 0:36 how he picks things to review in the check-ins - it sure would be nice to see a "John Carmack's Style Guide".