Carmack has a great way of explaining basic technical jargon and gradually going deeper and deeper into more advanced topics, but bringing it back right before it becomes incomprehensible to 99.9% of the audience. And he's never bragging or trying to impress; he's a humble, honest person who takes pride in his work.
How could anyone have clicked "dislike" to this video? It just boggles the mind... There is no one programmer in the games industry who has continually innovated and grown the industry through his works as Mr Carmack has. He is straight forward and honest about the realities of what his company is doing ,as well as their goals, and above all else takes the time through his works to show appreciation for the not only the product his company is making, but all gamers & programmers w/ open source
This was a great way to spend an hour and a half. I didn't understand many of the things he said, but it was clear that he was knowledgeable and important to the game industry.
I have never heard someone be this honest about his own code/project. When I listen to this dude, i realise how little I know, but at the same time I still understand enough to realize how brilliant he is.
This video really drives home the sobering fact that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how videogames are built. I'm really glad there are people like John Carmack out there to do all that complicated stuff for me and i'm more than happy that we fill his pockets with enough money to buy twin turbo Ferrari F50's and rocket ships.
John Cormach has become one of my all time favourite personalities somehow! I just love the way he looks simultaneously very awkward and very comfortable.
for better or for worse, John Carmack made me the man I am today, mainly because of how many hours I spent playing Quake 2 and Quake 3, which can i just say were A LOT! good, good times!
I'm not a programmer, but the way he talks is incredible. It gives you a glimpse into the way he thinks, which is categorical and organized. I'm a 3D artist (and amateur writer) and very interested in how I think and how I can make my self think better, and how that affects my art. It's very inspirational to listen to someone that is so self-criticizing and makes abstract concepts seem like simple mental hurdles. He reminds me of other great thinkers such as the Dalai Lama and Steven King.
In regards to the comment about keyboards, he's talking about not having direct access to a debug environment on the console hardware itself. It's one thing to have a compiler on a workstation tell you things that might go wrong at compile time, but often entirely more useful to be able to watch what is happenning on the real hardware step by step to fix bugs. This has nothing to do with using a keyboard to control a game.
He makes a good point with static analysis. This has saved me hours or work tracking down obscure issues gcc didn't throw a single warning about with all warnings turned on.
terrific video, I love how he doesn't shy away from any of the details. Also how he doesn't fail to bring up the "short-comings" he encountered. I'd like to see Todd Howard do the same..
Genius... thank you, for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. We can only hope other developers are inspired by your determination to improve in every way. Thank you.
I'm not really gamer but I am a programmer (not in games though), and I absolutely loved hearing him ranting away here. Was nice to get a little insight into their development practices and the stuff about the static analysis was interesting. Also, that build server with 192GB of RAM - WOW! I can't believe he was able to talk about all that without the aid of any notes or anything too - guy is a true genius. Much respect!
@Daracus I meant that you will only be able to run it through Steam. It's like buying the game in a brick and mortar store but you still need to register the game to your steam account, and you can only play with steam.
Re-watching this in 2020, it strikes me that the direction that upcoming consoles are taking with their hardware design is pretty much exactly what John yearned for when making Rage. File size limits from the manufacturers have been pretty much lifted with 100GB+ games becoming the norm, and both consoles will come with fast SSDs and hardware decompression that allow to fetch data with minimal latency, decompress it on the fly and plonk it directly in VRAM. Hell, Mark Cerny even described in his PS5 hardware keynote a use case that is basically what Carmack was doing with virtual texturing in Rage. Fascinating stuff.
@hansonkewl06 Carmack is a pioneer and a programmer. His ideas about where gaming will be is always on point. He lobbied for the source code of this game to be released. He wrote Quake, Doom, Wolfenstien and all the original FPS'. His ability to stay one step ahead of all other game programmers is legendary. He is a true scientist and an inspiration to all programmers. Steve Jobs was NOT a programmer he was a thief. "I'm not glad he's dead but I sure am glad he's gone" - Richard Stallman
@TheLackofattack I know, im sure SSDs will become standard long before we see a "unified processor". As for the BUS, i forget to mention its yields are faster than the processing itself (and the read/write cycle of the RAM obviously). I know what im saying is outrageously impossible but the 8/16bit consoles are examples of a single processor that did everything, just the same with their cartridges is with SSDs.
@SuperHappyCow I see, i really can't wait to try out rage, i wonder what they've accomplished after spending all these years working on it, should be interesting. I'm now really excited to see how beautiful rage looks.
@Prometheus4096 Oh right, misunderstood. There are some mailing lists you can subscribe to that are basically journals for new algorithms/data structures/ whatever in research or development in game engines. Worth checking out!
@42:44 when we build our virtual textures for the dynamic stuff, it is this process that @42: 49 at one point it just took hours. I rewrote it to be such a way that it used huge amounts of memory mapped files and it got down much much faster @42:59 but it really started swapping on any system that we had. @43:02 So we said "Well let's find out what the actual limitations here are." @43:07 So we took one of our servers and we put 192 gigabytes of ram in it
I worshiped this guy as a kid. An orphan kid off the rails turned founder of an entire industry. I still remember people criticizing him when he claimed he was going to do true 3D texture mapping on a Pentium. 6 months later quake was born.
Carmack is a god amongst programmers. There are some things i disagree with him on, but he does know what he is doing, and i can't wait to see more from him and his team!
@beavermatic I agree that ati/amd users had far more issues, but the manual cfg fixes and other methods to try to resolve the texture quality of the game had no effect at all. Just gotta wait for those driver updates.. :/
@sabers2th Partly true, if you listen to what he was saying, the code was written back in 05/06, then development on the three distinct versions began simultaneously. The console versions aren't PC ports, neither the PC version is a console port, they are unique from one another in the way the allocate and source resources. Yes there was an emphasis on the console versions, mainly because a SKU on the consoles is worth more, but that doesn't mean they slouched on the PC version.
@tylerkills0012 That he definitely did not say. I'd like a citation. blu ray has nearly 3 times the storage of a dvd and is far faster to read, the problem is the ps3 only has 2x read speed (about 9mb/s on blu ray) compared to the xbox(12x or about 18mb/s dvd). The reason for that is the PS3 is designed to have a portion of the game installed to hard drive which is something carmack is a fan of and wishes microsoft would allow. It speeds up game time considerably.
@spotpilgrim That's not how it works, you can't lock frame rates so they don't fall, you can only lock them so they don't go above a certain threshold, like with v-sync. They can aim for 60fps but there will be frame rate drops.
The longest video on youtube I have ever watched, but I surprisingly wasn't bored. Carmack spoke about some really interesting problems that industry having right now: like a 10x horse power of the GPUs on PC and how its going for a waste, lack of unification. And of course the release of the Doom 3 source code. What I liked the most that he spoked about the things that developers don't usually speaking of: the drivers, the directx problem.
@LeadPumpkinLP Excuse me, let me rephrase. I meant that it will most probably be a steamworks title, seeing how Bethesda's games are aswell, and that Steam is regarded as one of the more acceptable DRM software. Even though you can buy the game through other vendors (of course), you will need to register with Steam in order to run the game.
@elsaeraser He is also one of the most important persons who pushed 3d acceleration technology and the reason OpenGL is still around on PCs (which is awesome) as back in the day OEMs didn't want to support it, but he convinced them otherwise. Also keep in mind that a programmer only does the coding... there are many other tasks in game development which likely are the real reason it took 6years, the engine was demonstrated years ago. I think one has to be a programmer to appreciate Carmack.
Great speech! The part at 50.00+ is brillant. And 6 years to make a game and he was almost spot on with the tech it seems. He needs to be on the dev board for the next xbox. Triangles. Triangles everywhere.
@TheLackofattack PCI and RAM slots shouldnt be replaced even tho Carmack fancys the idea of unified architecture. Because PC is and should always remain the platform that is timeless (or future proof). But to answer your question, you're going to have to think outside the box, reduce processing speed with efficiency, make watercooling standard, make silicon obsolete by utilizing quantum processing... who knows, nothings impossible.
at 25:40 he says they might hold on to the PC version to optimize it, and that it might not come out with the console versions. He should have followed his instinct. PC version was not released "When it's done".
@warwize I agree. I can tell, but only looked at it once you pointed it out. Do you often look at clothes? I would've seen it eventually... watching this thing for over an hour.
Being a programmer, this is very interesting. Some people may find technical issues boring and difficult to comprehend, but for me, these issues are probably one the most interesting things when it comes to computer games.
Carmack has a great way of explaining basic technical jargon and gradually going deeper and deeper into more advanced topics, but bringing it back right before it becomes incomprehensible to 99.9% of the audience. And he's never bragging or trying to impress; he's a humble, honest person who takes pride in his work.
This guy did so much for this industry, I can't even imagine the worth of his work.
This guy has an infectious positivity, I love listening to his thoughts even though not everything he says means that much to me
Carmack is god TBH alot of gamer should be thankful how doom and quake gave birth to other games and other engines like h-l1/source etc.
A man fuelled by passion. Constantly raising the bar. Insightful video, especially the latter half.
Fantastic talk. It's so nice hearing someone just laying it all out on the table for those that care to learn or want to know!
How could anyone have clicked "dislike" to this video? It just boggles the mind...
There is no one programmer in the games industry who has continually innovated and grown the industry through his works as Mr Carmack has. He is straight forward and honest about the realities of what his company is doing ,as well as their goals, and above all else takes the time through his works to show appreciation for the not only the product his company is making, but all gamers & programmers w/ open source
Thank you id and who ever helped making and posting this video, especially since last year didn't work out :) (and only ~24h delay!)
This was a great way to spend an hour and a half. I didn't understand many of the things he said, but it was clear that he was knowledgeable and important to the game industry.
I have never heard someone be this honest about his own code/project. When I listen to this dude, i realise how little I know, but at the same time I still understand enough to realize how brilliant he is.
Is it me or does this guy get it? he seems to articulate so well what gaming is all about.
This man... may he live another 200 years at least.
This video really drives home the sobering fact that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how videogames are built. I'm really glad there are people like John Carmack out there to do all that complicated stuff for me and i'm more than happy that we fill his pockets with enough money to buy twin turbo Ferrari F50's and rocket ships.
I could listen to him for houres. He's such an awesome legend!
It's always fantastic to hear John talk. I really enjoy this, and it seemed like he enjoyed talking, too.
Awesome keynote. I loved watching the whole thing. People working with Carmack are very fortunate.
John Cormach has become one of my all time favourite personalities somehow! I just love the way he looks simultaneously very awkward and very comfortable.
@mrbitbot Absolutely. Just let Carmack ramble, it's all golden.
I could listen to John all day.
Steve Jobs is the salesman, it's Steve Wozniak who did all the early Apple designs (and never got as much credits as he deserved).
I could listen to this guy talk for years :)
for better or for worse, John Carmack made me the man I am today, mainly because of how many hours I spent playing Quake 2 and Quake 3, which can i just say were A LOT! good, good times!
This guy is a god to be able to speak for so long and stay so consistently interesting
I gain some kind of strange pleasure from listening to John Carmack talk about things I don't understand.
I'm not a programmer, but the way he talks is incredible. It gives you a glimpse into the way he thinks, which is categorical and organized. I'm a 3D artist (and amateur writer) and very interested in how I think and how I can make my self think better, and how that affects my art. It's very inspirational to listen to someone that is so self-criticizing and makes abstract concepts seem like simple mental hurdles. He reminds me of other great thinkers such as the Dalai Lama and Steven King.
I love how Carmack's muscles form into the Quake symbol. Now THATS dedication.
In regards to the comment about keyboards, he's talking about not having direct access to a debug environment on the console hardware itself.
It's one thing to have a compiler on a workstation tell you things that might go wrong at compile time, but often entirely more useful to be able to watch what is happenning on the real hardware step by step to fix bugs.
This has nothing to do with using a keyboard to control a game.
john carmack is awesome he is seriously always ahead of his time
This man never stops talking, and I can't stop listening
He's a very brilliant guy and what a legacy he will leave behind for us..
He makes a good point with static analysis. This has saved me hours or work tracking down obscure issues gcc didn't throw a single warning about with all warnings turned on.
he is the best speaker I have ever seen he never stop talking amazing
terrific video, I love how he doesn't shy away from any of the details. Also how he doesn't fail to bring up the "short-comings" he encountered. I'd like to see Todd Howard do the same..
Genius... thank you, for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. We can only hope other developers are inspired by your determination to improve in every way. Thank you.
27:46 - he wasn't wrong. I played RAGE on a middling laptop some 5 years later than the release with integrated graphics... and it ran just fine...
it's just because ur grate Mr Carmack, thank u so much.
I'm not really gamer but I am a programmer (not in games though), and I absolutely loved hearing him ranting away here. Was nice to get a little insight into their development practices and the stuff about the static analysis was interesting. Also, that build server with 192GB of RAM - WOW! I can't believe he was able to talk about all that without the aid of any notes or anything too - guy is a true genius. Much respect!
Gaben and Carmack both belong in the pantheon of gaming gods, obviously. Gaben as the god of storytelling (?) and Carmack as the god of game-tech.
listening to carmack is like listening the inventor of the computer graphics.... he knows his work pretty damn well!!!!
One of the superstars of the gaming industry, impressive!
Listened to all of it. Understood 1/4 of it.
I love how he explains to us how the consoles work in depth. And how they are so limited.
@Daracus I meant that you will only be able to run it through Steam. It's like buying the game in a brick and mortar store but you still need to register the game to your steam account, and you can only play with steam.
hey, hes just a guy who loves what he does and it shows when he talks about the games. i envy that with a passion!
10:28 "We have a report of a bug in the microphone system"
John "Legend" Carmack
Re-watching this in 2020, it strikes me that the direction that upcoming consoles are taking with their hardware design is pretty much exactly what John yearned for when making Rage. File size limits from the manufacturers have been pretty much lifted with 100GB+ games becoming the norm, and both consoles will come with fast SSDs and hardware decompression that allow to fetch data with minimal latency, decompress it on the fly and plonk it directly in VRAM. Hell, Mark Cerny even described in his PS5 hardware keynote a use case that is basically what Carmack was doing with virtual texturing in Rage. Fascinating stuff.
This is the very first time i have that transcribe audio works perfect with John Carmack's voice.
@hansonkewl06 Carmack is a pioneer and a programmer. His ideas about where gaming will be is always on point. He lobbied for the source code of this game to be released. He wrote Quake, Doom, Wolfenstien and all the original FPS'. His ability to stay one step ahead of all other game programmers is legendary. He is a true scientist and an inspiration to all programmers.
Steve Jobs was NOT a programmer he was a thief. "I'm not glad he's dead but I sure am glad he's gone" - Richard Stallman
How it all flows..wish I had a clear mind like that.
@TheLackofattack I know, im sure SSDs will become standard long before we see a "unified processor". As for the BUS, i forget to mention its yields are faster than the processing itself (and the read/write cycle of the RAM obviously). I know what im saying is outrageously impossible but the 8/16bit consoles are examples of a single processor that did everything, just the same with their cartridges is with SSDs.
Carmack is a genius. I'm pretty sure he is the most talented programmer in the whole world. Respect to this man.
@SuperHappyCow I see, i really can't wait to try out rage, i wonder what they've accomplished after spending all these years working on it, should be interesting. I'm now really excited to see how beautiful rage looks.
I just watched all of it... damn...
I don't think there could have been a better video to convince me to get Rage. Carmack is a legend!
yes and we love him for it.one of the smartest guys alive
Im nerding ouuuutttt!!!! Love him
@Prometheus4096 Oh right, misunderstood. There are some mailing lists you can subscribe to that are basically journals for new algorithms/data structures/ whatever in research or development in game engines. Worth checking out!
Man I remember making a Quake 3 map. Such memories
Keynote 2012 please! Need to watch it again :)
I am a hardcore experienced developer,...but this guy is the shit!
Carmack doesn't have a filter. He never dumbs anything down, because he doesn't realize it needs to be... that's what makes him so awesome.
Fun fact: John Carmack talks while sleeping too.
@42:44 when we build our virtual textures for the dynamic stuff, it is this process that
@42: 49 at one point it just took hours. I rewrote it to be such a way that it used huge amounts of memory mapped files and it got down much much faster
@42:59 but it really started swapping on any system that we had.
@43:02 So we said "Well let's find out what the actual limitations here are."
@43:07 So we took one of our servers and we put 192 gigabytes of ram in it
A living legend.
I worshiped this guy as a kid. An orphan kid off the rails turned founder of an entire industry. I still remember people criticizing him when he claimed he was going to do true 3D texture mapping on a Pentium. 6 months later quake was born.
@Vnix actually there'd still be drivers involved
he's thinking of the whole idea of taking advantage of their unification (i.e. less memory transfers)
I don't understand how this video can be disliked.
Carmack is a god amongst programmers. There are some things i disagree with him on, but he does know what he is doing, and i can't wait to see more from him and his team!
@beavermatic I agree that ati/amd users had far more issues, but the manual cfg fixes and other methods to try to resolve the texture quality of the game had no effect at all. Just gotta wait for those driver updates.. :/
@sabers2th Partly true, if you listen to what he was saying, the code was written back in 05/06, then development on the three distinct versions began simultaneously. The console versions aren't PC ports, neither the PC version is a console port, they are unique from one another in the way the allocate and source resources. Yes there was an emphasis on the console versions, mainly because a SKU on the consoles is worth more, but that doesn't mean they slouched on the PC version.
@tylerkills0012 That he definitely did not say. I'd like a citation. blu ray has nearly 3 times the storage of a dvd and is far faster to read, the problem is the ps3 only has 2x read speed (about 9mb/s on blu ray) compared to the xbox(12x or about 18mb/s dvd). The reason for that is the PS3 is designed to have a portion of the game installed to hard drive which is something carmack is a fan of and wishes microsoft would allow. It speeds up game time considerably.
@spotpilgrim That's not how it works, you can't lock frame rates so they don't fall, you can only lock them so they don't go above a certain threshold, like with v-sync. They can aim for 60fps but there will be frame rate drops.
The longest video on youtube I have ever watched, but I surprisingly wasn't bored.
Carmack spoke about some really interesting problems that industry having right now: like a 10x horse power of the GPUs on PC and how its going for a waste, lack of unification.
And of course the release of the Doom 3 source code.
What I liked the most that he spoked about the things that developers don't usually speaking of: the drivers, the directx problem.
listening to john carmack talk is like listening to a computer talk about its day.
Thanks for uploading!
Woo I've been waiting for this since yesterday :)
I love this dude.
@LeadPumpkinLP Excuse me, let me rephrase. I meant that it will most probably be a steamworks title, seeing how Bethesda's games are aswell, and that Steam is regarded as one of the more acceptable DRM software. Even though you can buy the game through other vendors (of course), you will need to register with Steam in order to run the game.
AWWW YEAH, QUAKECON.
@Luvenn if you cant understand the words he is saying dont embarrass yourself. he answered your question
1:23:56
Been waiting sooo long to hear these sacred words :DDD
I feel so god damn fucking stupid, but I just can't stop watching........
@elsaeraser He is also one of the most important persons who pushed 3d acceleration technology and the reason OpenGL is still around on PCs (which is awesome) as back in the day OEMs didn't want to support it, but he convinced them otherwise. Also keep in mind that a programmer only does the coding... there are many other tasks in game development which likely are the real reason it took 6years, the engine was demonstrated years ago.
I think one has to be a programmer to appreciate Carmack.
Great. But, and the Q&A session? It's always interesting.
First of all, John Carmack invented graphics ;3
Second of all, goddamn I want that RED cap at 0:59:09
this guy is my hero...
thx for uploading this its usually alittle annoying to find ;p
Great speech! The part at 50.00+ is brillant. And 6 years to make a game and he was almost spot on with the tech it seems. He needs to be on the dev board for the next xbox.
Triangles. Triangles everywhere.
John Carmack is my hero, just awesome.
Great Keynote!
Amazing.
@TheLackofattack PCI and RAM slots shouldnt be replaced even tho Carmack fancys the idea of unified architecture. Because PC is and should always remain the platform that is timeless (or future proof). But to answer your question, you're going to have to think outside the box, reduce processing speed with efficiency, make watercooling standard, make silicon obsolete by utilizing quantum processing... who knows, nothings impossible.
John Carmack = The reason I enjoy being alive.
He's a legend.
thank you, for fucks sake this took forever to upload...god damn...
at 25:40 he says they might hold on to the PC version to optimize it, and that it might not come out with the console versions.
He should have followed his instinct. PC version was not released "When it's done".
@warwize I agree.
I can tell, but only looked at it once you pointed it out.
Do you often look at clothes?
I would've seen it eventually... watching this thing for over an hour.
Being a programmer, this is very interesting. Some people may find technical issues boring and difficult to comprehend, but for me, these issues are probably one the most interesting things when it comes to computer games.
yes youre very special
I really can listen to him talk for hours even though I dont understand half of what he says.
@singlejoe84 He meant the actual software, not the programs for the bios and dashboard.