John Carmack Archive - Interviews http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack August 2, 2008 Contents 1 John Carmack Interview5 2 John Carmack - The Boot Interview 12 2.1 Page 1............................... 13 2.2 Page 2............................... 14 2.3 Page 3............................... 16 2.4 Page 4............................... 18 2.5 Page 5............................... 21 2.6 Page 6............................... 22 2.7 Page 7............................... 24 2.8 Page 8............................... 25 3 John Carmack - The Boot Interview (Outtakes) 28 4 John Carmack (of id Software) interview 48 5 Interview with John Carmack 59 6 Carmack Q&A on Q3A changes 67 1 John Carmack Archive 2 Interviews 7 Carmack responds to FS Suggestions 70 8 Slashdot asks, John Carmack Answers 74 9 John Carmack Interview 86 9.1 The Man Behind the Phenomenon.............. 87 9.2 Carmack on Money....................... 89 9.3 Focus and Inspiration...................... 90 9.4 Epiphanies............................ 92 9.5 On Open Source......................... 94 9.6 More on Linux.......................... 95 9.7 Carmack the Student...................... 97 9.8 Quake and Simplicity...................... 98 9.9 The Next id Game........................ 100 9.10 On the Gaming Industry.................... 101 9.11 id is not a publisher....................... 103 9.12 The Trinity Thing........................ 105 9.13 Voxels and Curves........................ 106 9.14 Looking at the Competition.................. 108 9.15 Carmack’s Research....................... 109 9.16 Miscellaneous Bits........................ 111 10 John Carmack Interview 113 11 Knee Deep in John Carmack 116 CONTENTS John Carmack Archive 3 Interviews 12 GameSpy @ E3 - Q & A with John Carmack 131 13 John Carmack on DOOM3 rendering 136 14 GameSpy @ QuakeCon 2003 - A Conversation With John Car- mack 141 15 DooM III Preview 147 16 Doom 3, basketball and the future of everything 153 17 Interview with id Software’s John Carmack on Doom3 158 18 ”Meet the Graphics Guy” - PC Gamer interviews John Carmack on the future of iD. 162 19 MegaTexture Q&A 171 20 CES 2007: John Carmack And Todd Hollenshead Speak 182 20.1 Part One............................. 183 20.2 Part Two............................. 191 21 QuakeCon 2007: John Carmack Talks Rage, id Tech 5 And More 201 22 John Carmack on the Nintendo DS 209 23 The id Mobile Interview 215 24 Carmack on id Mobile, Crap Games, and Why iPod Sucks 223 25 1UP Interviews John Carmack on id Mobile 230 CONTENTS John Carmack Archive 4 Interviews 26 Gamasutra interviews John Carmack and Katherine Anna Kang240 27 John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more 246 27.1 Ray tracing for more than rendering............. 247 27.2 Hybrid rendering, graphics APIs and mobile ray tracing.. 252 27.3 Multi-GPU graphics and Conclusions............. 255 28 Carmack frees Quake 261 29 Quake Live: Frantic and Free 265 30 id Software’s John Carmack and Marty Stratton Talk Quake Live, PC Gaming, and More 275 31 E3 ’08: Carmack IDs Quake Live 284 32 E3 2008: The John Carmack Interview 294 33 Quelling The Rage 300 CONTENTS Chapter 1 John Carmack Interview This interview was conducted by Bone for Blues News on Jan 08, 1997. http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?show=11 Interview Prologue I originally sent my questions to American McGee with the firm intention of wrapping an article around them. American, it seems, was too busy to do interviews at this moment, so I risked bothering John Carmack with the same questions. I did not do this lightly, taking about 5 days to con- sider whether he should be bothered or not. However, I thought my ques- tions were sufficiently well thought out enough that John might actually WANT to answer them. Boy was I surprised when I looked in my email this morning. I originally thought I’d get a sentence or two in response to my questions and base my article on those answers. It looks like John Carmack decided to write the article for me. I want to thank him for the time it took to answer my questions so thoroughly. He is an incredibly busy man who 5 John Carmack Archive 6 Interviews has a very active fanbase that sends him 50 emails a day. Please take note of his PS note at the bottom. Respecting this, I will ask for no more interviews from him until at least 1998 :). I think he would appreciate it if everyone else took his caution to heart and not start sending him a lot of email with questions. This interview and further editorial articles will be posted on Dark Re- quiem’s homepage as soon as DR j2j has enough free time to devote to the new ”Dark Tribune” section of the page. This has been in the works for a while, and already has several articles ready to go. DR j2j is also a busy man, and his professional concerns take precedence over the ”Dark Tribune”. It’ll be up ”when it is finished” :) Questions Bone: Just a recent development. Shawn Green has left id for Ion Storm. It seems that there have been a LOT of defections from id over the past few months. How does this affect id in terms of workload? Id has always been a small development community, but aren’t you guys reaching crit- ical mass where the workload becomes too much? John Carmack: Lots of people will read what they like into the the de- partures from Id, but our development team is at least as strong now as it has ever been. Romero was pushed out of id because he wasn’t working hard enough. We have hired Paul Steed, a new artist. That is the balance of changes to our development team. I believe that three programmers, three artists, and three level designers can still create the best games in the world. The other departures have been from our biz/support side, which doesn’t have anything to do with product creation. We are scaling back our pub- lishing biz so that we are mostly just a developer. This was always a major point of conflict with Romero – he wants an empire, I just want to create good programs. Everyone is happy now. CHAPTER 1. JOHN CARMACK INTERVIEW John Carmack Archive 7 Interviews Bone: As always, id leads the industry in technical terms, and others fol- low behind. However, isn’t there a boundary to how much more you can do given current input/output technologies? Doesn’t it then fall to the point of ”artistry”? What prompts this question is many of the screen- shots I’ve seen of Unreal. Some of the texture-mapping and monsters are just stunning in their artistry. How can id compete with companies that employ dozens of artists in their 3d efforts? It just seems that the ”push the technology farther” answer is simply not much of an option anymore until the next input/output technological breakthrough comes along. John Carmack: The official codename for the next generation game en- gine is ”trinity”. There is no information to be gleaned from that, we just need something to call it when it is discussed. The architecture for trinity is well underway, and it will be dramatically better in many ways. In fact, this next generation has more distinction than any before it, because it is the first of the transition from the pixel to the texture mapped triangle. Assumptions change and new capabilities arise beyond what a simple processor speed increase would have given. Pushing the technology is a long way from over, trust me. As far as unreal goes, we can’t compete with an unreleased product, be- cause a non existent product does everything you dream of and has no faults. Think back to what everyone thought quake was before anything was released. I wish Epic well, in any case. Unlike some other compa- nies, the principle developers at Epic have not involved themselves in any mudslinging. It is also a mistake to think that Id’s games ride on technology alone. DOOM and Quake aren’t just the minimum work required to make a 3d and networking engine a game – they are the right game elements as well. A user always wants more of everything – more features, more artwork, more levels. The assumption that hiring more people gives a better prod- uct is often incorrect. It might (but not always) get you MORE product, but not necessarily BETTER product. Bone: In the heyday when Quake was about to be released id had a strong presence on the net with informative .plan files, and romero would actu- ally appear on the undernet sometimes to brave the IRC nightmare to CHAPTER 1. JOHN CARMACK INTERVIEW John Carmack Archive 8 Interviews answer questions and just be involved. It seems that id has closed up since then and not been as involved with communicating with their end- users. Some of the people complain that id has stopped being interested in getting the community *involved* with the process of software devel- opment. They feel left out. I have not felt this personally, since I was part of the beta program for QW, but I was in the extreme minority. Is this lack of info simply because you are too busy with Quake II or is it a reaction to the fact that the main ego at id (Romero) had left and there simply wasn’t a spokesperson left? John Carmack: Romero was going on IRC when he should have been working, from my point of view. I listen a lot to the user community, but I make no apologies for prior- itizing heavily. A suggestion or opinion from Blue, Scary, Disruptor, or one of the many people that publicly devote much time and effort to the quake community gets orders of magnitude more weight than Joe Ran- dom User’s one-liner on IRC.