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
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.
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!
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.
Some cynical people think that every activity must revolve around the mighty dollar, and that anyone saying otherwise is just attempting to delude the public. I will probably never be able to convice them that that isn't always the case, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that I live in a less dingy world than they do.
I'm usually so focused on the here and now and the soon to be that thinking about what I've done in the past just doesn't occupy much time. But when I do look back over everything, I am quietly proud of all that I've been able to accomplish and all the enjoyment I've been able to let people have with the games that we've created.
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,
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.
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.