Items tagged with carmack
We learned earlier this week that John Romero's long-rumored first-person shooter is BLACKROOM, and without delay, money started pouring en masse into his new company's Kickstarter campaign. That should cause nothing other than rejoicing, right? Well, not so much in this case, and while any pulling of a Kickstarter campaign can give off a vibe that the project probably wouldn't have been successful anyway, that doesn't at all seem to be the case here. So what's the deal? In talking to Develop, Romero noted that there was an obvious disconnect between the amount of hype surrounding his holographic shooter and those who were actually backing it. He says, "There’s not tens of thousands of backers...
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Back in the fall of 2014, we reported that the legendary John Romero was working on a new first-person shooter. While FPS titles are a dime a dozen, it's hard to ignore someone like Romero, especially when the promise is that the main focus of the game will be its design, not graphics or other superfluous features. Today, we learn that that FPS is called BLACKROOM, and it's now ready for backing on Kickstarter. When Romero first teased this FPS, he raised some important questions: "There are unbelievable amounts of new stuff to do in that [FPS] genre. The idea of a shooter is running around with weapons, in first-person, blowing things away. But what are you really doing? What is the world like?...
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Yeesh. One has to wonder: "Can't we all just get along?" Evidently not, as John Carmack (yes, that John Carmack) is now staring down a lawsuit from his previous employer, which suggests that he stole precious information on his way out. Carmack has of course landed at Oculus, which has since been acquired by Facebook prior to the Rift virtual reality headset ever truly launching to the public. Clearly, Oculus has blown up big, while Zenimax (Carmack's previous employer) has seen much less of the limelight. Reports suggest that Carmack is facing a suit which alleges that he stole intellectual property and then used it to power Oculus Rift. In essence, Zenimax suggests that property belonging to...
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For decades, John Carmack has been an institution at id Software. The games id has built over the years may not have been huge innovators in terms of gameplay, but the engines behind those games have often pushed the envelope dramatically in terms of game detail levels and amazing environments. Now, he's moving on to take over the big shoes at Oculus, working on the VR headset, the Oculus Rift. id Studio director Tim Willits confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that Carmack has left the building. "John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio," Willits said. "John's work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development...
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John Carmack's annual Quakecon keynote is one of the most interesting events of the entire year. The man is incredibly intelligent and understands programming and development to a degree that very few people can match. id may have struggled to replicate the gameplay successes of its early years, but Carmack's understanding and perspective on the technical issues surrounding gaming is second to none. This year, he kicked off by discussing the upcoming consoles, their hardware capabilities (very similar) and the long-term impact on AMD. Carmack believes that having everyone standardized on the same architecture with very few differences will make it much easier for developers to build better products...
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If you've got 3.5 hours to kill, John Carmack's Quakecon keynotes are always fascinating. id games may not be the greatest titles around, but Carmack's knowledge and skills continue to shape the future of gaming across multiple platforms. There's been a great deal of rumor and speculation about Valve's plans for Linux support, including the Steambox (which trusted sources have told us is an actual project). Gabe Newell's distaste for Windows 8 is well-known, and while I happen to disagree with him regarding Windows 8's likely impact on the game industry, there's no denying that Valve's actions will have an impact. Carmack thinks Valve's move could shake things up and spark fresh interest in Linux...
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Bethesda Softworks, designers and distributors of normally excellent titles, are bringing out a "new" version of Doom 3, Doom 3: BFG. The new package includes "remastered" graphics (more on that gem in a moment), the Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil add-on, seven new levels thrillingly titled "The Lost Mission" and support for 3D, 5.1 surround, a checkpoint save system, some improved lighting, and the first official implementation of the Duct Tape mod, which allowed you to simultaneously see the game and shoot things. You also get Doom and Doom 2. Be still my heart. If you're one of the six people who game in 3D, wanted to play Doom 3 on a PS3 but never got the chance, or need a 5.1 speaker surround...
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One of the frustrating things about Rage is the tremendous difference between the game's visuals. Some areas and scenes are simply gorgeous, particularly if you use a customized configuration file to further improve graphic fidelity. Others are pig-ugly, with textures that apparently crawled into the art resources straight from Half-Life. What's most distracting is that the two types of art assets often put in an appearance right next to each other. Compare the box at right with the other surface textures. Carmack has tweeted that an upcoming patch will help alleviate the issue, saying "We have a bicubic-upsample+detail texture option for the next PC patch that will help alleviate the blurry...
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id Software's Rage has launched for PC and the various consoles, but the game comes loaded with a laundry list of issues. Most of the graphical problems appear to affect ATI users, but not all--texture pop-in is reportedly a huge issue for both Nvidia and ATI. Texture pop-in, for those of you who've somehow missed the phenomenon, is that split-second delay between pig-ugly visuals and actual graphics that's invaded PCs since console ports became the norm. We've borrowed a pair of screenshots from Duke Nukem Forever, where the effect was particularly egregious, to illustrate. ATI released a Rage performance driver, then yanked it and released a new Rage performance driver, claiming that the first...
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id Software's long-awaited FPS Rage is set to ship in October. When it launches, it'll be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. With expectations running high in the wake of the latest game trailer shown at QuakeCon last week, we've put together an article to examine the merits of both the game and the technology behind it... Rage: The Tech Behind Id Tech 5...
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id Software's long-awaited FPS Rage is set to ship in October. When it launches, it'll be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. With expectations running high in the wake of the latest game trailer shown at QuakeCon last week, we've put together an article to examine the merits of both the game and the technology behind it. Note: Some of the big images in this article are quite large. This was done to make certain texture detail and rendering quality weren't adversely affected by JPEG compression. The Game Vehicular combat is a major part of Rage. The engine doesn't support tessellation, but character detail is good...
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The big daddy of all 3D FPS game studios, id Software, has been acquired by ZeniMax Media - the media company run by Jerry Bruckheimer (himself), Robert Altman (not that one) and Harry Sloan (CEO of MGM). As a result of being brought into the Zenimax fold, the id Software franchises will be published under the Bethesda Softworks label, and games development will be done under one roof, as John Carmack has put it. This means Fallout 3, Quake, Doom and Elder Scrolls IV as one big happy family. Activision will retain the Wolfenstein distribution, though. The sale isn't a fortuitous alignment of stars in the night sky or a bet lost at poker, id Software is using this to get ahead of the game when...
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Id Software has had minimal success developing games for cell phones. It ported its popular Doom title over to the cell phone platform with Doom RPG, as well as developing two original Orcs and Elves games for phones. Ultimately, the three titles sold only a combined two million copies. The problem, at least up to now, is that cell phones have been less than ideal gaming platforms. They typically have small screens, limited processing power and memory, and awkward controls. But according to an article on Forbes.com, Id's co-founder, John Carmack is eyeing the iPhone as the mobile platform that can successfully address at least some of these issues:"One of the biggest appeals of the iPhone, says...
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AMDZone has a summary of Carmack's two hour heart-to-heart at Quakecon. In that time he gave his thoughts on a broad range of industry topics, from Physics Cards, Multi-Core CPUs and the ATI/AMD merger to name a few. "Multicore/multithreading he does believe that there is more benefit to it than widening SIMD. He sees the end to the great CPU clock up, and that threading is the way to go. They have had success to using threading with graphics renderer, but can improve it. Sound is another good possibility. The process of multithreading is difficult, but there are benefits. But when you can only thread 20% of a game you do not get a huge increase in peformance. Multicore...
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