Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It says something about John Carmack’s status in the gaming industry that he can hold a talk that lasts for three and a half hours and the majority of watchers are simply delighted. So, if you’ve got nothing else on for the next 210 minutes, here is said relaxed, cheerful, full-throttle, ad-libbed and fascinating QuakeCon speech in full. id’s brain o’brains chats about the problems with Rage and its messy PC launch, his love-hate relationship with the PC as a platform, those Oculus Rift VR goggles that are getting Kickstarted hearts all aflutter, Doom 3 BFG, 3D displays, just the tiniest smidgen on Doom 4 and, of course, a sustained stream of characteristically uncensored techspeak about the past, present and future of computing. Such as viewing images by firing laser beams directly into people’s retinas. Er…

Impressively, as well as talking for so damned long, he doesn’t sit down until the 90-minute point.
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PCG has the news on Carmack’s latest side-project, which is making a VR kit. Carmack showed it off behind closed doors at E3, allowing people to play Doom 3, with full-on surround-o-vision. Carmack says: “This is literally held together with duct tape, but the guts of this is going to be made available as a kit for around $500.” (Update: Apparently this guy is also responsible for a lot of what they’re up to.)

So not a commercial thing, but a do-it-yourself VR system with Carmack’s brain behind the gadgetry. I’m getting one. For research and development purposes, you understand. Anyone else?

Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I’m pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he’d be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn’t know if it would be more difficult, but he was “almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships.”

So, with Rage safely released, it’s finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.

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id’s legendary robo-brain John Carmack has broken the developer’s rather inadvisable silence about the mucky state of Rage at launch on PC last week. Apology? Nah? Accepting blame? Nah. It’s all ATI’s fault that id released a game designed for future rather than existent drivers, he says. Oh, and the reason the game, once working, is still not as super-shiny as we might have hoped is because “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.” Here we go again.

In happier news, the first Rage patch is out, and thank the god of textures, it introduces a much-needed graphics settings menu to the game.
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Aha! I am not sure this video had surfaced while I was posting yesterday, but here it is anyway, below, via Bethblog. It covers Rage and the tech behind it, what Carmack thinks of the PC as a platform now, Doom 3 code being released, and lots of tech jabber about various platforms and games (even some mentions of Doom 4 tech) that you may or may not understand or care about. Nevertheless, one of our finest traditions.
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Mr Carmack was up on stage at QuakeCon last night, and he was talking Rage and PC. Getting the PC version up to speed has, apparently, been one of the sticking points for Rage’s development, which has taken a few years now. Interestingly, release might not be the end of the that particular line of development, either, because Carmack has revealed that he’s already started a new project, and the “research engines” that this new project produces could be added to the PC version of Rage down the line. Quite what this means isn’t clear, but apparently he has a “firm” plan to release this update to PC, as well as a high-quality texture patch. It’s fascinating to see Carmack getting excited about the PC again, a platform whose power he called “crazy”. Increasingly, I suspect, the words out of the mouths of Carmack and other tech gurus are going to be about the untapped potential of the PC, particularly as the archaic specs of 360 and PS3 begin to frustrate those developers who are still interesting in pushing their technology. There’s a bit more detail on Mr C’s talk here.

I’ve also posted a big old Rage trailer below.
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Over the weekend, Eurogamer posted a story about how PCs are better than everything else, including new babies and planets with rings. Well, those weren’t quite their words, and nor were they of Mark Rein, VP of Epic, but he said something close. He in fact said that, “We’re at the stage in the life of the consoles where the PC has shot by them in terms of capabilities.”

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Code guru, hobbyist rocket scientist and co-founder of iD Software John D. Carmack has been tracked down at E3 by PC Gamer, and they were rewarded by a rather excellent twenty minute interview. With him, obviously. Want to know what he had to say about consoles holding back iD’s work on the PC? Of course you do. It’s after the jump.
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A Lifetime Achievement award, that is! Just my little joke there. Sorry. You hate me now, don’t you? It’s late and the punning part of my brain has been asleep for hours.

Yes, the idmeister general is be honored with said accolade at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards (I swear that should have an apostrophe somewhere), for his “his contributions to the art and science of games”. Which is a rather lovely way of putting it, to my mind. He follows in the gong-grabbing footprints of Will Wright, Sid Meier and that Mario bloke, and can bask in the warm glow of knowing a panel of his esteemed peers – from the likes of Bioware, DICE and Popcap – nominated him for it. Well done, big John. Now go and make sure Rage is brilliant, please.

Details of the award and a spot of Carmackian backstory below…
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Polish games mag CD-Action (who, according to these videos, seem to have their own drink?) have posted an enormous John Carmack interview to the web, and we’ve reposted it below. In it Carmack chats about Rage, stepping away from graphics to work on player experience, the problems of contemporary developments, the challenges of modding in the “post-Doom 3 era”, and so forth. Thanks to Pat at VG247 for the heads up on this.
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