QuakeCon 2012 - John Carmack Keynote

"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at [link] I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker. Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): [this video]

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers went from games to aerospace? [link] [link] Elon Musk practically offered Carmack a job at SpaceX, tweeting "Well, if you love rockets, come work on them with me at SpaceX!" Carmack is a very enthusiastic person, who is hard working, and genuinely passionate about everything he pursues. I have "followed" him for a good while. It's not difficult to tell he's a lot smarter than your average Joe, but he also seems quite a bit sharper than your average smart programmer. I recommend watching all his talks and interviews. Some amusing and revealing stuff on his childhood: [link] "In the gaming industry, there are a lot of people that are specifically in it because they love games and they want to create things. My love for programming is a more abstract thing. I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment w

Interesting comments on Mac and Linux platforms [1]: "Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms. I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early. But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there. Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just se

"It's about time a major player got behind Linux [...]" What about id Software? They have a long-standing history of support for the platform, including John Carmack's philosophy and advocation of OSS that has driven his contribution of id Software game engine source code to the community, up to and including id Tech 4. He even cares so deeply about the topic that he worked to keep id Tech 5 free from the shackles of proprietary code, because he wants to eventually release it as open source. He said (italic emphasis is mine): "'Do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this?' And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that. " [1] I think the reality is that id Software has attempted to build the market-space, but the base just hasn't been there. For example, John had this to say recently at QuakeCon 2012: "Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id,

I think the reason is two-part: 1. (From the original link): "Over the past few years, browser support for plugins such as QUAKE LIVE have dropped off significantly, causing problems for plugins to operate in a consistent and working manner. With the recent announcement of Google Chrome's roadmap [1] to turning off plugin support and the upcoming changes in Firefox [2], it seems that now is the time to make the transition." 2. (From John Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2012 [3]): "Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality." [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [this video] -- Based on John's comments regarding Linux, they just are not seeing the return to make it a priority. He mentions that Mac does better than Linux, but perhaps not enough, again, to be a priority.

It's interesting to me that about 5 years ago John Carmack was talking up game streaming quite a bit in his annual QuakeCon talk. From what I remember he was pretty confident it would be the future of gaming at the time. However I'd love to know what went wrong and why game streaming as a whole has pretty much completely fizzled. Was it just too much hype and optimism that the technology would improve and latency wasn't an issue, or perhaps bad business models that doomed it from the start? IMHO game streaming is pretty much doomed if the future of gaming is ultra low latency and high framerates for virtual reality. There's just no way a streamed game could work with Occulus Rift, etc. and have low enough input and display latency to be believable. edit: I think it was his 2012 QuakeCon talk: [this video]

The thing about Carmack and Linux is, that everything he says is based mostly on the QuakeLive port id did a while back (edit: he says this here [this video] ). The port was released as an afterthought and quite a while after the Windows version), it wasn't publicized anywhere so naturally, people ignored it. From this experience he concluded that Linux isn't financially viable and/or there are no people interested in gaming on the platform. Now I'm not saying that Linux is financially viable, I don't know that. I just think that - a lot of people do pay for games on Linux (look at Humble Indie Bundles, look at the indie titles or the recent titles on Steam) - I know people who pay for games but are stuck on Windows because they play games. My guess is that these people would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if their games were playable under Linux.