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Programming Portables (Games) XBox (Games) IT Technology

John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS 244

Posted by Zonk from the rainbow-of-fruit-flavours dept.
Via a Gamasutra post, John Carmack's comments on upcoming id choices. Game|Life has a few quick comments on Carmack's hope to bring Orcs and Elves to the DS. This would be id's first game on a Nintendo platform in some time. Likewise, he makes it clear that he considers the 360 the dev platform of choice due to the ease of development on the console. From the article: "the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we're not going to do much until we're at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We'll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It's not something we're going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one."
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John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS More

John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS

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  • I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.

    Oooh,*burn*!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Saint_Waldo ( 541712 )
      GI: When you were talking about adding more resources into the parallel development, do you feel that goes against Microsoft's XNA platform? Microsoft's spiel was that you used to spend 80% on problems and 20% on creativity.

      Carmack: Yeah, that's all bull****.

      Oooh,*burn*!

  • Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by computertheque ( 823940 ) on Thursday January 11, 2007 @12:41AM (#17552020)
    At least no one can say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. It's kind of hard to disprove that man's intellect when it comes to software development.

  • ... PS3 fanboys dismiss Carmack as "moron". (Score:4, Interesting)

    by seebs ( 15766 ) on Thursday January 11, 2007 @01:40AM (#17552518) Homepage
    http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=52467 [ps3forums.com]

    This thread has been one of the funniest things I've ever seen. All the PS3 fanboys are bashing Carmack for his comments about Cell, despite the fact that it's quite clear none of them program at all, let alone program on asymmetric CPUs.

    Hilarity ensues as people who would have been lauding Carmack to the skies if they'd seen only his gripes about the 360 CPU attempt to prove that he's totally irrelevant and afraid of learning about technology.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Stormie ( 708 )
      All the PS3 fanboys are bashing Carmack for his comments about Cell, despite the fact that it's quite clear none of them program at all, let alone program on asymmetric CPUs.
      Don't worry, all the PS2 and PS3 programmers I've worked with have had nothing but contempt for Carmack for many years. Just another PC programmer who thinks he's hot stuff.
    • They don't seem to understand which games it is that Carmack has worked on -- I see the HL episodes, UT2007, and a few other games attributed to him in that thread alone. Console gamers are truly a bizarre parallel realm.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Das Modell ( 969371 )
        Yeah, that forum is way out there. Posted by the same person:

        Which is why he's a sack of crap and all of his games sucked thus far (except for Gears anyways) Doom 3 was uninspiried, Quake 4 was uninspired AND felt the same as Doom 3, Unreal 2k7 looks like it'll have a lot on it's hands going up against the 40-player Resistance

        I pay attention to the game industry and read up on everything I can.

        All the posters who seem like they know what they're talking about are simply ignored.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by blitzcat ( 69699 )
      Sony fanboys : the new mac zealots. The ps3 is better because it _is_.
  • And this would have nothing to do with a little visit by MS a couple of years ago, right?

    How exactly is the XBox 2 ("360") going to run OpenGL code, Carmacks API of choice?

    • How exactly is the XBox 2 ("360") going to run OpenGL code, Carmacks API of choice?

      But is OGL still his first choice?

      He isn't convinced that it is time to make the jump to DX10, but DX9 seems be delivering pretty much everything he wants.

      • Re:Right (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11, 2007 @06:11AM (#17554114)
        No, Carmak is NOT using DX9. He's using an Xbox 360 - that's something completely different. Granted, the API looks a lot like Direct3D 9, but it's not actually compatible, and it exposes 100% of the hardware features directly with minimal (virtually zero) driver overhead, no stupid driver bugs, no emulation, no possibility of missing features...

        On a PC, OpenGL and Direct3D 9 are almost exactly equivalent. On a modern engine, 70% of the code is (or could be, if you put a little effort into the design) API-independent. Things like scene traversal, resource management, batching, loading and generating geometry and so on. In the API-specific part, you have a small piece of code that does useful work, and in an ideal world this is all you'd need. It simply manages resources for you, so you can (for example) tell it to load a mesh onto the video card and it does it, or give it a triangle mesh and tell it to draw it.

        The larger part is dealing will all kinds of stupid garbage. For example, in Direct3D 9 you can lose any data you have stored in VRAM at any time, so you have to detect this condition, re-load (or regenerate) all the data, and fix it before you can do any more rendering. It's not difficult, but it's more work. In OpenGL (and on games consoles) you do not need to do this. With OpenGL, you need to detect and load appropriate extensions, which you don't have to do as much in Direct3D 9 (you do have caps bits, which serve much the same function). So in the OpenGL code, you might need a couple of extra paths to deal with hardware / drivers that don't support specific extensions. You could have four separate paths for things like render-to-texture, or several different texture formats for floating point textures, you might have to deal with drivers that don't support S3TC compression, and so on. You've got to deal with the operating system, other software components you're using, and the whole thing's a huge mess.

        That entire part is unnecessary on a console. You have one piece of hardware, which maps directly to the available API, with 100% of all features exposed, including things that PC APIs deliberately prevent you from doing. It makes writing code so much simpler - you write some basic, low-level rendering code which interacts directly with the hardware, then get on with the useful task of writing the game engine. You never have to worry about whether or not you've hit a slow path (happens in OpenGL a lot) or a bug (happens in Direct3D a lot, and OpenGL if you're using Intel's rather crappy drivers) in the driver, because the drivers don't actually do anything more than queueing command packets for sumbission to the video hardware.

        The same applies to the Xbox, but also to the GameCube, the Wii, the Dreamcast, and to a lesser extent the PS2 (because you have to write all rendering code in VU assembly to do anything useful).
    • Maybe his choice has changed, like mine has. Years ago, OpenGL was the superior 3D API -- it was faster and easier to program for. OpenGL has been evolving very slowly, while Direct3D evolved quickly to take advantage of advances in video card technology. As well, the APIs have improved rapidly. Direct3D also has better docs. I'd say since DirectX 8, D3D has been the superior API. If only D3D were cross platform...
      • Not to mention that the Graphics card inside the 360 is an ATI card, and I think their support of DirectX is much better than their support for OpenGL. Although their drivers are always just horrible.

  • Doom on the Wii (Score:5, Funny)

    by Heir Of The Mess ( 939658 ) on Thursday January 11, 2007 @02:26AM (#17552854)
    I wonder if they would do Doom for Wii so that I can really jump around and smash my wiimote into things it's never smashed into before.

  • Vista & DX10 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 11, 2007 @06:35AM (#17554242)
    Carmack:
    There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren't any for Vista. They're artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It's a hardware-interface spec. It's an artificial thing that they're doing there. They're really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      Yep. Vista doesn't really benefit users.

      If people actually kept insisting that Dell etc preload XP instead of Vista, then the WINE etc people would have a chance to take over the desktop from Windows.

      That's because Carmack et all will keep writing stuff for XP+DX9.

      Then all those Linux ppl will have time to make XP+DX9 compatible stuff. Once that happens, Microsof could end up like Intel trying to go Itanic, but everyone ignoring Intel and sticking to x86 because AMD provides a compatible path.

      As is most peo

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