John Carmack
John Carmack
John D. Carmackis an American game programmer, aerospace and virtual reality engineer. He co-founded id Software. Carmack was the lead programmer of the id video games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Rage and their sequels. Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, such as his famous Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes, and is also a rocketry enthusiast and the founder and lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace. In August 2013, Carmack took the position of CTO...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth20 August 1970
CountryUnited States of America
One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!
I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.
Focused, hard work is the real key to success.
I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.
Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do, it costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world.
We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.
At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.
Everybody's saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.
Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don't have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds.
The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.
I'd rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.
If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.