Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

John Carmack on JRE

Wyatt_Derp

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2019
Messages
3,062
Location
Okie Land
Carmack sold out to Facebook. He shrugs off their data harvesting because they pay him bank. Sad. So much wasted potential, maybe he should have stuck with Armadillo Aerospace.

Oculus's concept of VR has become dumbed down lower than mobile gaming, everyone with an ounce of self respect fled the company already, which is basically all the original founders except for Carmack.

VR is not in a great place right now.

Never meet your heroes - goes for just about anyone I've heard on Rogan's podcast, as well as for Carmack. I guess the modern equivalent would be 'never read the tweets of your heroes.'
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,938
but he's well aware his expertise lies only in martial arts and comedy

Rogan murders otherwise potentially funny jokes in the delivery. I'm not sure if he's autistic or what, but "funny" and "comedian" are not words I'd use to describe the man. I couldn't make it through the first 15 minutes of his Netflix Stand Up show. He is a pretty good interviewer, when he's not fucking talking about himself.

He worked well on Newsradio even if he wasn't funny~
 

cretin

Magister
Douchebag!
Joined
Apr 20, 2019
Messages
1,347
but he's well aware his expertise lies only in martial arts and comedy

Rogan murders otherwise potentially funny jokes in the delivery. I'm not sure if he's autistic or what, but "funny" and "comedian" are not words I'd use to describe the man. I couldn't make it through the first 15 minutes of his Netflix Stand Up show. He is a pretty good interviewer, when he's not fucking talking about himself.

Hes not autistic hes just not at all naturally funny. But hes a PROFESSIONAL comic someone will point out, how could he not be funny? Welcome to the LA comic scene, it's full of insufferable pretentious cunts who aren't funny and treat comedy as their vehicle to Hollywood because too ugly for acting/ dont Inspire rape by moguls.

Toe Rogaine's idol is Kinison, and hes every bit the hack Kinison was, so bully for him. Watching rogan with any talented comic in the room is just brutal, they're constantly dropping setups and lines for him to bounce off of or even just laugh but he just doesn't get it and sticks to his IM TRYING TO HAVE AN INTROSPECTIVE MOMENT WITH YOU schtick, extremely awkward.

Doubly awkward is watching any of that incestuous LA bunch wax poetic about the ART and THE PROCESS and then you go watch their sets and they stink.
 

Ringhausen

Augur
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
252
Yeah, it's a shame that JC had that gift as one of greatest, most brilliant game coders that ever existed, and he just seemed to walk away from that and concentrate on a VR pipe-dream that never seemed to go anywhere. Alas, the assburger brain can go in strange, pointless directions and paths and never return.
What, you want more megatextures? RAGE was a bigger disaster than Daikatana. Carmack deserved to leave in disgrace after bending the knee to consoles.
 

dbx

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 14, 2009
Messages
3,877
Carmack sold out to Facebook. He shrugs off their data harvesting because they pay him bank. Sad. So much wasted potential, maybe he should have stuck with Armadillo Aerospace.

I never found that a big problem w.r.t. Carmack, he was never overtly political or stuff like that, I don't even know if he ever said anything against data harvesting or pro privacy and such.
It a lot worse whan you have extremely lieberals and progressive scientist (like Yann LeCun) doing that, considering a mere decade ago where shitting of FB and protesting for more privacy protections against big corp. Especially considering they are AI masters :lol:.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
What's with all the passive aggressive digs at Rogan and Carmack in here? It's almost like I'm reading a VICE article:
YAhEcf0.jpg
 

shihonage

Subscribe to my OnlyFans
Patron
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
7,157
Location
location, location
Bubbles In Memoria
99% of the time they talk about rockets, cars, VR and other boring bullshit. He barely touches on his iconic games. This interview was better:

 
Self-Ejected

unfairlight

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 20, 2017
Messages
4,092
"His games"
What is he supposed to talk about? Going on Joe Rogan to talk about programming is fucking dumb, he is an engineer and programmer, not a designer.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,274
Location
Massachusettes
Yeah, it's a shame that JC had that gift as one of greatest, most brilliant game coders that ever existed, and he just seemed to walk away from that and concentrate on a VR pipe-dream that never seemed to go anywhere. Alas, the assburger brain can go in strange, pointless directions and paths and never return.
What, you want more megatextures? RAGE was a bigger disaster than Daikatana. Carmack deserved to leave in disgrace after bending the knee to consoles.

You do have a point. I actually hated Rage. Was expecting something groundbreaking and epic from big JC and instead got an undistinguished console title, or felt like one. Yeah, maybe John should stick to VR and perhaps someday his coding with help from good hardware development Oculus will be no more cumbersome to use than a pair of comfortable wraparound Oakleys.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,164
John Carmack wasn't responsible for Rage. He is an engineer, not a designer. You've been told that but you still act like the guy actually made the game.

And the tech behind Rage was actually interesting. I liked the idea of mega textures and what Carmack was trying to achieve with that. The reason this technology "failed" is because consoles couldn't handle it and nobody wants to fucking admit it.
 

TheImplodingVoice

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Oct 29, 2018
Messages
1,955
Location
Embelyon
John Carmack wasn't responsible for Rage. He is an engineer, not a designer. You've been told that but you still act like the guy actually made the game.

And the tech behind Rage was actually interesting. I liked the idea of mega textures and what Carmack was trying to achieve with that. The reason this technology "failed" is because consoles couldn't handle it and nobody wants to fucking admit it.
Well said
 
Self-Ejected

aweigh

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
17,978
Location
Florida
Obviously Carmack isn't a designer, but there is truth in the statement that the enginner who designs the tools informs the overall design.

"Consoles couldn't handle it", and this definitely affected the game design; and what the consoles couldn't handle is what the engineer(s) iterated.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,892
John Carmack wasn't responsible for Rage. He is an engineer, not a designer. You've been told that but you still act like the guy actually made the game.

And the tech behind Rage was actually interesting. I liked the idea of mega textures and what Carmack was trying to achieve with that. The reason this technology "failed" is because consoles couldn't handle it and nobody wants to fucking admit it.

Bullshit, the main issue with Carmack was he forced his will upon the company. He had the power and the company built shit he liked or he got excited about.
Actually a great example, the idea of mega textures is a nice concept tech wise. But it's beyond retarded from a workflow point of view. You want to reuse as many assets in generating the world not to custom paint every corner of it.

They had the golden goose in hand with Quake and multiplayer but Carmack decided community is too demanding and switched to play and be done games. He also got excited about lightning tech in games and Doom 3 became a survival/horror whatever the fuck wanna be shooter.

Wouldn't be surprised if he is the reason (or big part) in them not hiring more 'artist types' in the company and the talented ones they had left.

He is obviously an extraordinary engineer, but he had no place doing more than tech. Obviously, that's from a gamer pov. Can't really blame the guy for doing whatever the fuck he felt like doing, it was his company to fuck up afterall.
 
Self-Ejected

Davaris

Self-Ejected
Developer
Joined
Mar 7, 2005
Messages
6,547
Location
Idiocracy
Yeah, it's a shame that JC had that gift as one of greatest, most brilliant game coders that ever existed, and he just seemed to walk away from that and concentrate on a VR pipe-dream that never seemed to go anywhere. Alas, the assburger brain can go in strange, pointless directions and paths and never return.

He's got tons of money so has no motivation to work hard any more. I thought Carmac was more interested in AI, at least from some the tweets I've seen.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
Yeah, it's a shame that JC had that gift as one of greatest, most brilliant game coders that ever existed, and he just seemed to walk away from that and concentrate on a VR pipe-dream that never seemed to go anywhere. Alas, the assburger brain can go in strange, pointless directions and paths and never return.

VR will get big with the next console generation.
 

shihonage

Subscribe to my OnlyFans
Patron
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
7,157
Location
location, location
Bubbles In Memoria
John Carmack wasn't responsible for Rage. He is an engineer, not a designer. You've been told that but you still act like the guy actually made the game

His engine tech was always the driving force in the company. Especially after Romero left, Carmack became a dictator, hence we have Shadow Technology Demo known as "Doom 3", and "megatexture demo" known as "Rage".

And the tech behind Rage was actually interesting. I liked the idea of mega textures and what Carmack was trying to achieve with that. The reason this technology "failed" is because consoles couldn't handle it and nobody wants to fucking admit it.

The tech behind Rage was garbage. It was the typical autistic move of Carmack to make an entire engine based on a unified technology with horrible flaws because it was "beautiful in his head", all the while contemporary engines like Crysis absolutely ran circles around that game in terms of visual fidelity.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,810
95% of people in this thread didn't watch interview.

He talks extensively about early ID. Joe is Quake nut. He talked how they wanted to open source Doom add modding to Quake so on and so forth. His time with rocketry, VR and why he wants to be programmer rather than businessman etc. VR is only the start of talk but they go beyond that pretty quickly.

Never knew he was gearhead and he can kick some ass. Dude was tuning ferraris to 1000hp when most of people didn't know what tuning was, started first with wrestling then learned really high bar judo.

Watching him is like watching Elon Musk. Dude operates on completely different level.

Also, him dropping actual cars for a Tesla is disappointing.

Carmac had 1000HP Ferrari Testarossa in his quake days when tuning Ferraris was verboten by many. He never gave any shit about type of cars but performance they can give. Which means Tesla is natural progression and soon he will get his roadster which should completely kill gas operated competition. Electric motors are just way more efficient than gas engines.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Actually a great example, the idea of mega textures is a nice concept tech wise. But it's beyond retarded from a workflow point of view. You want to reuse as many assets in generating the world not to custom paint every corner of it.

I think Megatextures are one of the most misunderstood pieces of technology - probably the name has to do something with it - as your misunderstanding is very common.

You do not paint or create the megatexture by hand, it is automatically created via the map compilation tools. The map itself is still generated using repeated textures, reusable meshes and even brushes and such like all id's previous engines going back to Quake 1's editing tools (the Rage editor itself is based on Radiant, though instead of being a standalone tool it is part of the "id tech sdk" or whatever it was called). The megatexture is then generated by baking *everything* into a single gigantic texture, it is essentially like lightmapping on steroids, except while lightmaps only store lighting information, the megatexture stores a composition of whatever texture(s) used at each point in the surface together with any decals/splats, small geometric details (small objects are baked into the texture itself) and after full lighting with shadows has been calculated (they used a computer cluster dedicated to calculating the megatexture). IIRC in addition to the visual side, the megatexture also bakes other surface information, like what sounds would play when a surface is hit, etc (but probably these are stored on lower resolutions).

As far as workflow is concerned, in fact optimizing the artist workflow was the main motivation behind megatextures - Carmack didn't want artists to waste time worrying about how to optimize their assets (especially for consoles - megatextures were actually made with consoles in mind, at least in their Rage implementation) and instead wanted them to focus on doing what artists are supposed to do: make the art for the game, but without worrying about any sort of asset optimization. The "optimization" would be handled by the engine itself (the megatexture generator) and indeed that is how it worked (at least according to some second hand i have - an old coworker of mine knew an artist who worked on an id tech 5 game and told him that one of the things he liked about the engine was that they could throw whatever unoptimized mess at the engine and it'll just work without slowing things down).

The reason this technology "failed" is because consoles couldn't handle it and nobody wants to fucking admit it.

Actually megatextures didn't fail, quite the opposite. Carmack was trying for years to convince the GPU manufacturers to introduce some form of virtual texturing (in a similar sense to how CPUs can do virtual memory) without success so with Rage he decided to do it in the CPU. His implementation was mainly designed with XBox 360 in mind (where actually it performed best) which has unified memory accessible by both the CPU and GPU at the same time which allowed him to read data from the GPU and feed it with megatexture pages (as in "virtual memory pages") without performing any sort of copying (this need for copying was why on PC you'd often see popping - since the GPU has its own dedicated memory it, the engine needs to copy data back and forth and to avoid synchronizing the CPU with the GPU - which would mean that one would do nothing while the other worked - this copying was done over several frames and depending on how much memory had and how fast communicating with the GPU was, the number of frames could vary a lot - and this was also a reason why AMD GPUs had issues at the beginning since they misreported the available memory size to the engine).

After Rage was released and proved the usefulness of virtual texturing (despite issues on the PC, the game was still one of the best looking games on consoles - and runned at 60fps!), GPU manufacturers were convinced and added hardware support for them. These are known as sparse textures on OpenGL and Vulkan and as tiled resources on Direct3D. After Rage several other engines used them, though AFAIK none used them for full precalculation like Rage did (e.g. the Far Cry games use virtual texturing for its terrain by generating the pages on the fly instead of storing them on disk - this is in a way reminiscent of the surface cache used in the original Quake 1 software renderer on which the idea of megatextures can most likely be traced back).

Doom 2016/id Tech 6 nowdays still use megatextures and virtual texturing, though they have tweaked the paging algorithm a bit (i do not think they use any of the hardware accelerated methods). Also while they still bake a lot of information to the megatexture, the lighting itself has mostly switched to some hybrid of forward+ rendering with precalculated indirect lighting. This is really just a natural evolution of the ideas introduced on Rage/id Tech 5 with the capabilities of modern hardware.

Interestingly Carmack wanted for id Tech 6 to pursue the idea of "megageometry" by extending the megatexture idea to the geometry itself and instead of rendering polygons (at least for the static geometry) to render voxels generated by a similar process (the voxel set would be generated from the polygonal meshes, again with lighting information baked in - though not necessarily fully baked). They had shown some results of their work but i'm not sure if anything went public, at least not outside some QuakeCon talk by Carmack who mentioned that they managed to compress their voxel data to essentially "1.5 bits" per voxel. But this didn't pan out as GPUs at the time weren't that good at rendering anything outside of triangles (perhaps it could work nowadays with RTX though, although that again is all about triangles).

Personally i always found the voxel idea interesting but the storage requirements would be insane (even Rage that only baked texture data was huge, voxel data would most likely be several times bigger). Perhaps a better idea would be to only precalculate a very low resolution voxel set and generate the higher resolution voxel pages on the fly, similarly to how Far Cry generates its terrain. This may become a more viable approach as PCs (and consoles...) get more cores since voxelization is an inherently parallelizable task and you could dedicate a bunch of cores just doing that. If only i wasn't too lazy and wasted all my free time playing games from the late 90s and early 2000s... :-P.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Megatexture implementations are sort of relevant because
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/texture-space-shading/

Yes, AFAICT id Tech 6 seems to already do something like that with caching dynamic shadows into megatexture pages. But hardware support with an on-GPU cache sounds like an interesting idea. It looks like Turing introduces a lot of new tech.

huge drawback is "unique parametrization" of geometry - an out of ordinary workflow to most studios around (all?) , hence push for 4k rendering to get acceptable(?) result with shading to pixel grid.

What you mean with that? Any example?
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
RAGE was also a good game, especially compared to most of the shooters released nowadays.

One of the main problems why RAGE ended up having low-res textures all over when close-up was the space limitations for a Xbox 360 game, since they couldn't fit high-res textures on the space they had available and it was already considered large for the time with 3 DVDs (and the PC version was an afterthought, they didn't even release the Hi-Res Texture pack they were talking about): http://www.gamesradar.com/rage-360-3-disc-behemoth/

From afar it had some of the best looking "Mad Max" landscapes available in any game:
E44C8C1127AA15F690BD8E7FCE261AD9CC4EE4C2
93DF63F6461B7DDD1660D7B8248F1A2F9780E55B
98544FA4149F11418F93D355D4155A0AF13244A9


And it also had freaky looking NPCs and and enemies and other... qualities that games in the CURRENT YEAR do not have:
screenshot-21.jpg

126EA14552AEE8BA24C143B7F864AEC187C03B44

2013-11-27_00012.jpg

664FDA1CA0E02AA906DC1AE8839C6F583AAAF9C2

RAGE's Megatexture data afaik came in at somewhere between 1-1.5TB uncompressed: https://www.pcgamer.com/remembering-rage-a-flawed-but-technical-marvel/
Rage apparently uses 1TB of uncompressed textures, which is a massive figure when you think about it. That's like a single 524288x524288 texture, and I could use up my entire monthly bandwidth allotment just downloading that much data. Rage didn't use a single overarching megatexture—there were multiple 128Kx128K megatextures, each containing the artwork for specific areas like Wellspring, Subway Town, the outdoor desert environment, etc. The problem is that an uncompressed 128Kx128K texture is still 64GiB in size, so HD Photo/JPEG XR is used to heavily compress the megatexture, and then pieces are transcoded on the fly into a usable texture.

Ultimately, Rage ended up being a 20GB install (with 17GB of textures), at a time when 5-10 GB games were the norm. It's use of (mostly) unique textures for every surface made for a more visually interesting environment at times, and even now, eight years later, Rage looks decent. But while the scenery can look good from afar, getting up close to the textures shows some limitations.

The compression lends everything a somewhat grainy look, which is perhaps part of the Rage aesthetic. Look at a wall from across the room and it's not too bad, but get up close to most objects and there's a ton of blur and fuzziness. Character faces and some other objects get higher quality textures, but there's no way to store high resolution textures for every surface (without modern 50GB and larger HD texture packs, at least), and in Rage a lot of objects probably ended up with a 64x64 or even 32x32 slice of the megatexture.

There are games clocking at over 100GB nowadays (some of the Call of Duties like Infinite Warfare, BLOPS3/4), Elder Scrolls Online came in as a 102GB download including all Patches during the recent Free Weekend. Others like Final Fantasy XV are 89GB (and comes with an Optional 63GB High-Res Pack), GTA V is 86GB, Fallout 4 is 84GB, Quantum Break is 70GB, even DOOM is 69GB nowadays, but due to the time of release RAGE came out it was limited to 21GB for the entire game.

There were "some" workarounds to make the game run a bit better, but you never really got around that limitation: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rage-on.62620/page-26#post-2981215
 
Last edited:

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
AFAIK that "1TB of uncompressed textures" was actually referring to was the entire pre-baked source dataset that included the maps themselves, the meshes they used, the (repeating) textures, the tiny meshes that would be baked in, etc and the megatexture is generated in an already compressed form ready to be used by the engine.
 

tritosine2k

Erudite
Joined
Dec 29, 2010
Messages
1,465
http://archive.fo/LGxQw
In order to use precomputed lighting we need a way of mapping these lighting computations to the surfaces. One possibility is to store them per vertex, but in many cases that does not provide enough resolution and the interpolation of the lighting makes the triangulation of the mesh fairly obvious. Many games get away with that by compensating the lack of detail in the lighting with high texture and normal map detail, but (...)
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,892
Actually a great example, the idea of mega textures is a nice concept tech wise. But it's beyond retarded from a workflow point of view. You want to reuse as many assets in generating the world not to custom paint every corner of it.

I think Megatextures are one of the most misunderstood pieces of technology - probably the name has to do something with it - as your misunderstanding is very common.

There's no misunderstanding. But properly optimized workflows have teams specialized in just creating assets, that are heavily reused. It's a restriction that actually helps a lot. In theory his idea is great, in reality level designers with a lot more freedom will just spend tons more time for minute gains. That's the road to 3-4 hour long "michael bay" games.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom