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
Hardware wise, there's a lot of marketing hype about the consoles. A lot of it really needs to be taken with grains of salt about exactly how powerful it is, ... The Xbox 360 has an architecture where you essentially have got three processors and they're all running the same memory pool and they're all synchronized, and cache coherent, and you can spawn off another thread in your program and make it go do some work. That's kind of the best case and it's still really difficult to turn into faster performance or getting it to get more stuff done in a game title.
Visually, ... it's going to be a pretty good step above what we've shown in 'Doom'.
We really, really want to get it done in the next two years,
This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety. It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident. It would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna's legs,
I've said before that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person.
Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game.
I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.
We are working internally on a completely new project, but we haven't made any firm plans yet for the future of the Wolf, Doom and Quake franchises. I would enjoy doing a DS or PSP game, but at this point I can't imagine having the time to be seriously involved in it.
Its gotten a little slower this last year since I got a little baby. I lost my Sundays.
It wasn't too many years ago when we were lucky to have three triangles for a nose on our characters. Now we've got pores and moles.
anywhere close to taking full advantage of all of this extra capability. But, maybe by the time the next generation of consoles roll around the developers will be a little more comfortable with all this and be able to get more benefit out of it. It's not a problem I actually think will have a solution. I think it's going to stay hard.
Think of what we, and others, are doing as building the largest roller coaster in the world. Rocket science is mythologized out of whack with its difficulty. Nine out of 10 people will fail, but one of us will eventually get through.
I'd thank you all for the award, and I'm still at it.
You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.