Quakecon starts today and the Carmack keynote speech is at 5.30 eastern time which I make to be 10.30pm GMT. Gonna watch that. Barely ever understand what he blabbers on about but always fascinating to listen to.
There better be some Doom 4 news
QuakeCon to livestream Carmack's keynote, Elder Scrolls Online and more
This is interesting. Apparently the id software art director was responsible for the artwork in Pacific Rim!
On Saturday, Aug. 3 at 4 p.m. ET, id Software art director Hugo Martin will present "From Sketchbook to the Big Screen," a talk detailing how he designed concept art for the gigantic Jaegers mechs featured in Guillermo del Toro's recently released film, Pacific Rim.
No Cypher or Cooller this year then by the look of it.
Quakecon Duel Invitational Master
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Is there a summary of the keynote somewhere? Besides the inevitable conclusion that Id Software is properly fucked if Doom 4 keeps failing and how Zenimax is going to shut them down...
themuffinman wrote:Is there a summary of the keynote somewhere? Besides the inevitable conclusion that Id Software is properly fucked if Doom 4 keeps failing and how Zenimax is going to shut them down...
I don't think so. He just talks about his views and ideas on all sorts of tech related things that interest him and doesn't spend a single word on the business side or game design side of things.
themuffinman wrote:Is there a summary of the keynote somewhere? Besides the inevitable conclusion that Id Software is properly fucked if Doom 4 keeps failing and how Zenimax is going to shut them down...
The short version is: pick a recent technology and here is why it sucks.
He is slamming everything and it's great. Kinect, Android, shared memory, 4K, 30 fps gaming, stereoscopic 3D, and more and I'm only on part 3 so far.
I'm planing on going again next year...any other Euros fancy it?
Donny, I tell ya what, if you come next year I'll be sure and make it down there. I'm not sure if that's incentive for you to stay or go, but there ya have it.
He's not downplaying the importance of 4K and retina displays. It actually makes it painfully clear how little bitWise is understanding of the keynote. What Carmack said is that he'd much rather have the gaming/hardware industry focus on refresh rates than on resolution. He'd take 60 or 120Hz (or even better: asynchronous display refresh) over 4K displays right now. It all fits his view where he thinks a lot can be won with perfecting what we have now. To illustrate, he gave the example of someone demo-ing some advanced lighting algorithm which was, when looking at fine detail, impressive enough, but the whole thing was ruined by huge tearlines caused by a lack of vsync. It's those types of issues that can ruin some really fancy graphics technology.
Also, Carmack was actually positive about unified memory and was just somewhat weary anout the PC having a disadvantage due to not having unified memory, but he figured memory availability and raw power would compensate that.
As for Android, he said that in the past 3 years it evolved into a viable platform for game development, which it definitely wasn't 3 years ago. However, of course he had some negatives to state about the OS, but the underlying message was that it improved at an impressive rate.
I could go on and on like this, but I guess you'll just have to watch the videos.
Ok...then I'll downplay the importance of 4K: 4K is only worthwhile on screens bigger than 50 inches. Dunno why it's a topic issue for games unless you only play on massive screens and sit right in front of the damned thing.
Seriously...does every person who owns a console own a massive tv and sit within touching range? No? Then who gives a fuck about 4K?
Indeed. Carmack is just being honest about what he sees as some rather gimmicky technologies that may not have the best "bang for buck" when it comes to progressing the gaming experience. He certainly wasn't slamming any one of those technologies so much as just picking out some of the technical issues when working with them as a developer and how the tradeoff on some of them might not be wholly beneficial.
For example, 4K is nice but it'll come with some pretty big tradeoffs when trying to determine how best to use GPU resources to maximize the gaming experience. Do you really want to sacrifice FPS for pixel density? Carmack's opinion is no, we're better off trying to get smoother motion and dealing with anti-aliasing than smooth lines but laggy frames, and I'm inclined to agree. If we can magically have 4K and smoother frames at the same time, I don't think Carmack would have brought any points against it, but since there are some tradeoffs he's simply pointing out that there will be additional costs to consider.
uhh, doesn't higher resolutions and pixel density come with the benefit of not needing as much anti-aliasing?
Also, he was downplaying it. He clearly stated that he could barely tell the difference between his hotel key-card and his phone screen, as well as some framed lcds on the wall.
That whole bit of him speculating increased resolution might further increase display latency was several minutes after he originally talked about retina and 4k. Its a legitimate concern but it wasn't in his original argument when he basically said 1080p is good enough.
His point with the keycard was that rendering and the displaying of that has reached levels of realism that in some cases makes it hard to differentiate between what's real and what not. I don't quite remember the actual topic when he mentioned the keycard, but if anything, it was praise for the iPhone's screen.
My apologies for finding the near constant calling people out on issues comical and relaying that in my absurdly short, exaggerated recap. Also I meant he had issues with separate memory busses but typed it out wrong.
But yes, I understand the point of his argument and it is the same point he has been trying to make for years. I agree with him. The focus of progress is in a lot of the wrong areas these days.
