Gamasutra has a must-read interview with id Software’s John Carmack. The brilliant programmer covers a wide variety of topics in this four-page interview, including Rage, frame rate, the decision to stop licensing id Tech, the benefits of being acquired by ZeniMax, the true power of mobile devices, and more. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. You’ll be a smarter gamer for it. Here are some highlights:
Why the company stopped licensing its id Tech engine:
It’s interesting when you look back at our technology licensing — it was never really a business that I wanted to be in. In the very early days, people would pester us, and we would just throw out some ridiculous terms, and we were surprised that people were taking us up on it.
I didn’t want to be in the process of supporting a lot of outside teams — because we feel beholden to not make radical changes, and pull the rug out from underneath lots of other people. If it’s your own team, you can make the sensible decision of “It’s going to be worth it. It’s going to suck for a while, but we can make our way through it.” But you don’t want to do that to other people.
Why Microsoft gives its Xbox 360 developers expensive tools for free:
Microsoft has got some pretty good static analysis tools, and normally they make you buy, like an $8,000 professional edition of Visual Studio, but they give it for free to all Xbox developers — which I think says an interesting thing about this stuff. Where Microsoft figures that, well, nobody blames them for crappy software on Windows, but they do blame Microsoft a bit for crappy software on 360, so it’s in their best interest to put more static analysis tools available there.
One of the biggest problems with PC game development:
It’s pretty sad, the fact that we have these PCs that are sometimes 10 times as powerful, and we have more trouble holding 60 frames per second on the PCs because of drive and OS unoptimalities. And there are reasons for all of them. I’ve done enough driver work on OpenGL to understand why things wind up the way they are.
And sure, on the PC, you can go ahead and you’re running two megapixels. You can turn on anti-aliasing, and you can have much bigger page tables for the virtual textures, and all this stuff. But still, if you want it to get done in like 16 milliseconds, the graphics drivers are a huge hindrance right there.
As I said before, it’s a fantastic interview. Carmack is awesome. I guarantee you’ll learn at least four things from this story. Now go read it!
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