John Carmack on The Issues and Rewards of Bleeding Edge Engine Development

ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage GDC advisory board member Chris Hecker I'm gonna make this mercifully short yes I've been I've known John for I don't even know 10 or 11 years and I've been on the ahjussi advisory board for eight or seven or eight years and we've been trying to get him on the advisory board to speak at the conference for almost as long as I've known him and certainly as long as I've been on the advisory board and finally this is the year so ladies and gentlemen we're gonna show a short video and then john carmack thanks my job has always been finding the right balance between evolving hardware requirements user experience and the development process the sweet spot in the solution space our earliest titles were notable for the use of hardware level graphics techniques that were rarely seen on the PC but they were also developed almost exclusively in C at a time when game developers still held assembly language development as a point of pride a horde of technologies and methods have emerged and been explored since then VGA graphics floating-point calculations Doss extenders cross-platform development and portability offline processing networking and now a half-dozen generations of 3d accelerators the drive has always been to produce something exciting for both the developers to work with and the users to experience identifying the things that matter and focusing on them [Applause] [Applause] okay this year they hit on the winning strategy of convincing my wife that this was something I needed to do and letting her work out the details so I am going to talk about some topical development issues but first I'd like everyone to just step back a little bit from the kind of daily Labor's that we go through and just be amazed at the progress that we've seen here if you go back and look my first computer was a vic-20 you know 4k air ram one megahertz processor the first commercial program that I sold was developed on an apple to see 128 K R Ram aka video memory and if we look at that to what we've got today there's a factor of a million difference in power between that I mean we had you know the Apple twos could do maybe half a killer flop with the best code possible on there and now we're looking at you know hundreds of gigaflops of processing power on our systems and it's easy to kind of lose to just not be aware of just how tremendous that really is I mean a factor of a million that's almost like a euphemism for impossible somebody says it needs to be a million times faster and we'll go what we've gotten from there you know the early computer games were very much things that people had to be into that specific thing you had to have a huge suspension of disbelief to be able to sit down and enjoy the early games while now we have things that can just reach right out and grip people that are just normal people that are used to a film or television type experience and we can give them quality like that with the game so it's an interesting question to sit back and say well if we continue to have progress like this what are we going to do with another factor of a million and while it's likely we're not going to see necessarily all the same program you know progression levels there we probably won't see eye terahertz processors ten or twelve years from now but we're certainly to see massive strides in most of the other levels and certainly increased parallelism to make up for you know limits and scalar clock rates so if we look at what we've got now there's a lot of things that are actually pretty close to being done the resolution that we look at on monitors today which a lot of games are actually starting to render natively to is equivalent to film resolution when we're looking at 2 megapixels they're so high we've just recently made the step to a floating-point pixel formats which gives us the entire dynamic range that the human eye can perceive the frame rates that we see on some some games when you're looking at 120 Hertz rendering that's as fast as you can basically use for for presenting anything to anyone so a lot of these things are tantalisingly close to being able to be just written off as this is completed now there's a bunch of things obviously that still separate what we render from reality if there was an old saying many years ago in computer graphics that reality is 80 million polygons a second that's clearly not the case because here we are today we can render 80 million polygons a second in many cases and we're still a long ways from what anyone would really term photorealistic but the things that we can actually look at improving here we're probably a factor of a hundred off from the real world in terms of real-world clutter object complexity I typically ninh a game might have a couple dozen people where you look at an auditorium where there might be thousands of people and you get down to all the little tiny things that were used to sort of abstract again games where a cluttered desk in a game might have a couple sheets of paper a coffee cup keyboard and a monitor where if you look at you know most people's offices there's gonna be a couple thousand discreet little items there so there's a clear path that will take them on increasing the complexity of the worlds I am there will be probably you know another factor of 10 that we just cranked up in terms of the normal things that we do today in games that we want to go ahead and bring up to those done levels where we're doing everything at very high resolutions very high frame rates very high color depths mmm but I'm you know the another factor of 100 or so will probably come in I'm in terms of what we'll do with extremely high quality surface rendering going ahead and doing a good job at all of the analytically intractable problems like soft shadowing and motion blur at doing really good reflections throughout the world without I've you know necessaries necessarily simplifying assumptions but it's still on the graphics side of things you look at it and a factor of a million is basically doing it sixty Hertz what takes four and a half hours to do now and of course four and a half hours is has always been sort of what a rendered frame takes no matter what computing power that you've got it'll be interesting to see if people are able to suck that up in the offline side of things there but still it means that we can quite credibly with no huge leaps of imagination or breakthrough technologies expect to eventually be rendering I Lord of the Rings rendered quality I'm CG graphics and games you know a decade or more from now but there are a lot of kind of subtle issues that are seen there when you look at the offline rendering world which gaming will have to put a little bit more cleverness into that's like in say Lord of the Rings every frame is basically gone through and tweaked dynamically with an artist's eye and that's something that we aren't able to do in a real time situation because we've got more flexibility than that but the the problems that a lot of gaming has related to the offline stuff is very much one of being able to give the player the freedom to move around there and losing the ability to completely control the experience they're certainly different types of games will be know done quicker than others when you've got a third-person constrained view you're gonna be able to put most of that level of kind of detail and sophistication and the games will look like a movie you know third-person rendered games where you have a director's perspective moving in there I I have very little doubt that that will be solved to the quality level of looking like a movie I am first-person games where you've got complete freedom are a little bit harder or a lot harder in some ways the the actual fidelity that you'd like to render on there for an immersive experience is something that requires a little bit more in the way of advances in IO devices where you know interestingly the resolutions that we're at right now if we had the proper display technologies there at perfectly acceptable to render reality if we had retinal scanning and direct retinal imaging if we have to use something as crude as like a cave imager for the entire thing we might need under factor of 50 in terms of pixel rates to go ahead and give the complete level of look around at anything immersion but some of the things that make it even more difficult are when we start looking at the ability of people to look at whatever they want rather than whatever the camera view wants which brings you up the whole the whole issues of things that are tweaked and massaged in the offline rendering world that need to somehow come across automatically in convincingly and that leads up to a couple of the problems which really aren't so much nearly done in AI you know and what we'll do in computer games another one that's basically could be done right now is audio if anybody wanted to spend all the resources that we have today I terms of using the GPUs for it and all the floating-point processing power audio could be done I mean we could go ahead and have all the head modeling all the written you know the radiosity style sound transfer through very complex environments and we certainly have the you know the sample rate and then you know the bit depth for all of that but it just doesn't really pay off in the current generation of things to devote that much effort to it but give it a couple more you know a couple more turns of the processor generations the audio will just be done now the things that that aren't done physics simulation which ties in with that and tweaking of all the rendered views where we're much much closer to being able to render exactly what we want then we are to be able to simulate exactly what we want and in many cases physics is still one of those things where everybody's got a physics engine now and they all sort of kind of work in many cases but everybody knows pretty much what you do to go ahead and break your you know break most physics engines and we're still doing basically trivial things you know it's cool to have a couple boxes or you know bounce around and knock off of each other and land in different or you know different orientations and the ragdoll a character but when we start looking at things that people will be experimenting with in current and future game generations there we'll be I know simulations of weather simulations of liquids I you know simulations of you know dust motes going through the air and transferring through the environments and all of these are you know they're interesting challenging problems I am that we can get some mileage out of I it ties in kind of interestingly with something that's happened in the game you know the game industry over the last decade and that a lot of things that were academic pursuits are actually really relevant to what we're doing now you know ten years ago gaming had nothing whatsoever to do with what people would do academically with simulation or graphics I what you were doing was basically all implementation level things I've you know the trickery was in figuring out how to do something clever and make some implementation thing you know a small integral factor faster than what would be the straightforward algorithm for it but now with the power that we've got and the fact that not everything is it is nailed down so hard in terms of exactly what fractions of the CPU need to go to these things and what are left over for other things we've seen it certainly in the last five years I have you know a huge amount of beneficial crossover from the academic graphics research world into computer graphics because now what people do for you know for a college thesis or something has direct applicability to what you can use in a computer game so physics rendering is something that's still going through a lot of that and I that's not my specialty but it's one of those areas that you can clearly look at and say this is going to be you know a very exciting area of research that will be important as we start more or less polishing off many of the graphics side of things and I have that also brings up the largest issue which is what you do with AI level things and of course that's a field that that goes much beyond gaming or entertainment even into you know really large kind of world scale important item issues on there but when we come down to it as we start rendering all of these completely perfect worlds that are just looking absolutely fabulous the process of making everything else look as good as the rendering in bulbs many things that are difficult physics simulations and then many things that are just AI complete problems and it's going to be really interesting to see how those things are addressed i one of the major one of my major strategy is that it has always been if you're not going to try and solve something really well try and dodge the issue as completely as possible I've you know which is why we don't have a lot of character interaction because character interaction is hard and if you start making characters look really really good but they still act you know like cardboard cutouts I am you know it's an open question whether that's actually a good direction to pursue so AI is one of those things that in games industry is still addressed completely as a you know a set of techniques and tricks and you're working at it specifically for a you know a limited set of outputs but we're gonna be demanding more and more out of that and when we start you know looking at what we really expect to see in a game if people just sit back and kind of blue-sky they want to have you know some you know like I say a fantasy environment where you go in and you've got all of the people there and they're acting like people that's a really tough problem now it's interesting in that I believe personally that as the direction of research goes game environments are a really wonderful place to actually conduct AI research because it gives you a simulated environment where you don't have to worry about sensors and actuators and you can still work on kind of the core computational problem there so there's some hopeful I you know bits that there may be interesting research elements going on there but it always has to be kind of tied in with the fact that in the end we are making a product that's supposed to entertain people and the choices that you make in technical directions if you want to be successful you have to kind of keep your eyes on the value rather than necessarily in some ways what you consider the quality of what you're doing and I say I in many cases there's some interesting aspects to the gaming world on there where a lot of what people look at as a like Bach programming and things like that and I am you know our our issues where you're addressing a very domain-specific element of the game and that's been good mileage I you know we've gotten good value out of the effort that goes into that but when we start looking at harder and harder problems on there it does become closer to a pure research topic and I am you know I'm probably not going to be one of the people at the forefront of that technology but it's going to be an incredibly important area that we look at over you know the next decade of game development on there and there is always the possibility that you know some real fundamentally important wide-reaching results may be obtained by you know the efforts of people you know to make a game in there to make something come out time you know the way they want to have characters interacting there because that is one of the you know one of the big problems still yet to be done in computer science and I certainly believe it's a solvable one but tying that into the you know the actual process of sitting down and making the games there is I'm you know it's always been interesting to have a goal with a project that you're working on trying to do something new at each time you know to try and kind of meter out the time that you've got for developing something new and interesting to actually tie in with producing the product that's going to pay for your company to continue to be able to do games in the future and that's one of the other major topics that it I want to go over is they the extensive stretching of the game development cycle and some of the problems that I think I see with I'm you know with our development cycles and to some degree with the industry as a whole we've been obviously doom 3 hasn't shipped yet where I am you know we're going into our fourth year of development on that it's it's really close but there's some interesting things that I can look at on here where I can remember clearly in previous projects thinking ok we're you know we're down to the wire we're pushing everything through I've done a good job on all of this but wouldn't it be nice if I could sit back and really clean up the code perfect the interfaces and you know just do a wonderful nice craftsman job on that and interestingly this project I've had the time to basically do that and come to the conclusion that it sort of sucks to be in that position where there's a small level of you know there's a level of craftsman satisfaction that you get from trying to do what you do at an extreme level of quality and one thing that I found is that's not really my primary motivation I do take some enjoyment in it when you go ahead and you know and work and polish and improve something but in the end that's not what's really providing the value to your end users and that has really become clear to me and it's been you know it's been something that's driven all of my developments over the years in that you want to pick out the things that are really important and you need to be able to categorize and say this is perhaps has value but isn't the best use of the time on there and that's gone back through you know every project we've ever done has had those kind of decision points on there where is this going to be the thing that we focus on is this going to be key and when you get little bits of time and you could sit back and I am do a really nice polishing job it's kind of nice but it's not it's not the point of maximum leverage and I found that I get the most satisfaction out of the development work when I can tell that the work that I'm doing has no major leverage on the final product and there's a lot of things that have changed you know with the industry that to some degrees have kind of lessons the ability of bekhten to happen I've you know in the early days you would have a company that would have a couple programmers working on a project and there would be a good chance that a single programmer would basically know everything about what's going on in a project and up until recently every aspect of a game that came out of it was something that I had originally written and then we would have one or two other programmers that would pick up the foundation and head in and work from there the last game with quake 3 was the first game that had a major chunk that was something that I didn't write which was the bought a I logic and the in Doom it's the first game that we started off intending to have multiple developers developing completely independent areas and it's necessary at some point to do that if we follow the current design trends that we're doing with games because at some point you just reach a level where one person can't possibly do all the things that you decided are critically important for your product you have to split things up but there's there's a big cliff right there when you go from one person being able to deal with and manage and go over and change and fix anything in the product to a point where you have three or four or more developers that may not actually know what's going on and everybody else's code it's been unnerving for me sometimes to realize that there are source files in doom that I've never even opened and and on the one hand I can kind of berate myself a little bit and say I should be doing more comprehensive code reviews over everything but it does just mean there's a finite level where there's just only so much that one person can deal with it one time and there's again it's necessary if we continue to have the kind of feature lists that we have if we have to do everything we've always done before and then do much you know many more things everything that all the competitors are doing but to some degree I feel that we might be falling into a kind of trap kind of a mainframe trap where if you looked at the old computer vendors that would look at things and say well this is the serious work this is you know our group of competitors we have large products that have decades long you know histories or legacies with them and we need to keep maintaining this level of support and while I don't have specific no visions for how this can go it does still strike me that there's the possibility for things that are not yet another first-person shooter third-person action game you know RPG whatever that there that there are game possibilities that are not just working directly off of the exist paradigms you know the genres that we've got now and certainly its major claim to fame probably is that we you know we invented a genre with the first-person shooter and to some degree we're still trapped by that success I am you know they don't expect anyone to you know to cry over our woes on this that we're you know we're very happy to be successful with this but there are subtle you know issues there that prevent us from doing radically different things I have just the concept of having dozens of employees that I'm you know that have certain skill sets kind of determines where we go in the development process on there we can't just say oh I've decided we're gonna do a strategy game with some interesting and clever objective and we really don't need all these level designers and so there's you know there's an aspect of the established game companies having I'm sort of a mainframe bias on there and I have high hopes that there's still many of the creative small development teams that you know can be working on more of an innovative new approach in there because you've got there are factors of efficiency there when I can still look back kind of wistfully at the time when there were six of us you know sitting in a room working all night to get the project done rather than having a project manager and multiple kind of departments working on the different things there and on the one hand there's no question that what we're doing now really is superior in every way I mean I'm not gonna go you know longing for the good old days of the extremely simple games I mean what we're doing now is just better but it's better at a much larger cost and the development process there I do think still is open for you know that six-person team doing something really innovative but it's not going to be a first-person shooter or any of the established genres because it's just taking incredibly massive amounts of development time and effort to do this and the time ties in in a really depressing level with the technical I am requirements and strategy on there where the new doom game was based on strategic decisions that I made over four years ago they've turned out good that the hardware is pretty much evolved I am the way I expected although you know to be sure I have sort of a Heisenberg uncertainty principle effect on the hardware industry where the strategic decisions that I make do influence you know upcoming generations of hardware so you know it may not be completely strategic brilliance on my part but but the decisions looked good but I looked at this and we were rendering the same pictures that we do now effectively I am over three years ago you know on a g-force one class hardware and here we haven't shipped the title yet and we've had three you know three generations of hardware that could have used this technology that we haven't been able to get out and actually really take maximum advantage of and right now we're looking at starting new research for I am you know the current generation of hardware with floating-point pixel formats doing all the interesting rendering things that we're looking forward to on there but you know I'm looking at this and saying well we ship doom really soon now I generally we'd like to go ahead and have the next title it's going to be much shorter development time which usually means that we have to not get really aggressive at developing new things if we basically took doom and just kind of spiffed up the technology a little bit if you know for the couple things that that we can now count for in the changing market share that means that a brand new level of technology if I do the kind of level of cleanly rewrite that I did with doom might not even be started being worked with for two years from now and then it could take two or three years to develop a new title I mean if we're lucky you know it could be another four year title after that and that's looking at six years from concept I am you know to actual deployment on there and then of course there's the the kind of legacy tailing on there where we'll have licensees that are using that through two generations of product after that that's requiring to some degree looking ahead almost a decade on the hardware technology and certainly you can't be appropriate at that point you might be scalable on some level there but it's sort of like running I am you know you can run quake on a modern processor but it doesn't take advantage of what you can really do like it would with a current game on doom 3 so that's one of my big trouble spots on there about I want to bring new technology out kind of as rapidly as possible I mean the new stuff is great the things that we can do with the cards that are just coming out I mean I just got an Envy 40 into my you know my dev system and it's you know it's spectacular there's just you know the power that we can get with that to really go ahead and utilize all the you know the floating-point calculations that we want to use the new generations of things that I want to do in the rendering and it's it's really disappointing to think that at the absolute best possible case if we decided to kind of you know go for it and do a you know a real high-end product for the next one it would be two and a half years best case before we could have something like this that actually gets into people's hands and I don't really know what to do about that you know an idea that I floated early on in dooms development that I wish we had followed up on was to go ahead and do a product that's specifically a rendering showcase and a lot of people you know accused in products of being that anyways but it's you know that's not the case we do look at all the aspects of the game that we want to improve there and certainly rendering has not been the thing holding up Doom 3s development it's all the other aspects of the game that we're improving on there so you know I I have some hope for tiny little specialty products and things like that what I had pitched the idea early on was basically doing kind of a quake to remix and taking a game and not changing the game you know not going in and trying to redo everything but build new media sets for it and use the new technology and get it out there knowing that you're targeting a small section of the market just so people can go ahead and get some value out of the newest generation of graphics technologies get people experienced with it and kind of start the cycle a little bit faster you know where everybody always wants to see the second generation title with a new technology once everyone's kind of learned the ropes for it and is ready to kind of you know apply all the lessons that they learned there you know it would be great if we could shorten the development cycles on the rather than having three or four year development cycles so you wait six or seven years to see the second generation technology you know we could bootstrap that somewhat earlier but even the idea of just kind of rescanning an old game I'm you know brings with it the problems that as we're doing this newer newer graphics technology the media creation demands I have just gotten worse and worse on there certainly we've got more levels of maps that are higher resolution that we're applying to everything but what we also see is that things that were acceptable in the earlier games I mean you go back Wolfenstein was blocks you know you had a texture run that was tied to the same thing on each side it took 30 minutes to make a map there were shipping Maps in there that were done in less than an hour you know somebody scrubs something out play tested for a while said this is fun and it's in you know spear of destiny I am and they they were they worked they were fun but when we look at things now where it's taking man months to deliver I am you know a level to even kind of the beginning of the play test stage on there it's you know it becomes a real problem and I worry about the the interactions between the media creation and the actual game content side because we go back again to the Wolfenstein Maps and if somebody goes into a room and this is not much fun here you just scrub out a couple more tiles to connect it in and make a cycle to some of the other areas and if you go in and you spend your couple months and you build an area in a current game generation and you say well this play isn't working out all that well that same knocking the hallway into another room I can take a week you know it can take a week to go ahead and rebuild a room that then looks good that connects in a different way and has slightly different flow and relights the different area so that's you know a concern and it's certainly something that's taking it makes the kind of final end of the game development process take a lot longer and I'm afraid that it has the possibility of actually making the games less fun on a pure kind of game development symbolic level I which you hopefully more than counteract by the kind of increased richness there or you just kind of bite the bullet and take the time and get late and slip and actually deliver something where you have had the time to go do those two-week fixes if you know every time you find a game development problem on there and you know each time we've kind of done a technology there have been things that I thought would help in this process like the level of interactivity that we have in dooms content creation is you know is one of the really amazing things then you know that we have over there like when we have other developers kind of in looking at the technology I've you know looking at the game is one thing I'm you know you can always kind of set piece of scene especially if you don't let them touch it that looks great but what usually leaves kind of the biggest impression is when I when our level designers kind of go ahead and bring up the editor which is now integrated with the game stretch out a rendering window and everything's looking right with shadows and the bump mapping and then they just grab a light and drag it around and like all the shadows and lighting and everything changes in real time and contrasting this with the previous generation where we had usually a 30 minute cycle I have to go ahead and send something through the visibility in the lighting process before you could actually look at it in the game so at the start of this development I'm thinking okay we've got a little more work to do here but this level of interactivity is so much better that it's going to you know shrink our development time on there somewhat and it hasn't worked out that way and it's sort of like I believe the offline rendering world where you get more capabilities or the ability to do something faster and people will spend more time going ahead and trying to make it absolutely perfect and it's you know the the demand for the interactivity there has been kind of amusing where at first when I brought it up we had our normal kind of level editor and you would hit Enter to go ahead and render a scene I am you know what it would bring up the scene exactly you know as the game renders it with the bump mapping and the shadows and all that so that was pretty cool then we got a little bit faster computers in there and everybody's like well we'd like to be able to go ahead and you know stretch geometry and move around in this so okay we put in continuous you know render mode on there then people want to see the particle systems dynamically acting in there and you add that in and it finally got to the point where I am they they were complaining about the fact that to change a lights color you would you would have to bring up a color picker dialog click on that and then close it and now we've got like continuous color dragging in it you know in a live color window on there and you know all of this is great and our seat you know we have a lot of really wonderful scenes in there but it hasn't shortened the content creation time so we are looking at it a little bit more from a higher level strategy strategic view now where there is going to be some attempt to start you know building libraries of media and sharing to some degree there are some media assets that we've shared with Raven I you know working on quake 4 and we've got some things we've shared with other licensees and we are we are hoping that our next title I will be able to reuse at least some of Doom's assets so that was one of those things where that sort of gives us a constriction on our possible I our possible game designs there it's gonna be some near future I am you know either present day or a near future thing where we can reuse the fire extinguishers and waste baskets and some of those things like that in the game which is another one of those kind of to some degree hamstrung by our own directions on there now you know we I still keep looking at things where there may be some possibilities of technical solutions to this but I'm beginning to to fear that I no matter what kinds of new technology I can bring in to help bring some of these things a little bit easier that it's not actually going to help that I even if we get same you know some forms of real-world data capture to go ahead and you know grab materials from you know real radiometric light values and doing some interesting links things like that that the next project is gonna take yet more man-hours for per media element and the decision that we wind up coming to is that the games are gonna have to get less diverse to maintain an increase in quality on there and that's that's always been something that I even before it kind of reached critical levels like it is now it always seemed too clear to me that a lot of game design where you have four completely different environments you know you want to have world one world - world three world four I always seemed to me like four times the work for you know one time's the profit on there that if you want to make a game you know pick a single environment and try and make that as lush as possible I am but we sort of got especially like first person shooters sort of have an ANSI standard 30 levels to them or there abouts and that's a lot of you know it's a lot of a courage to just kind of fill out there and I think that we're trying to learn some lessons from I am you know from genres that people have been forced to you know for outside development reasons like cartridge console games like on ultra 64 is where you're limited by the total amount of item of cartridge ROM that you can have on there you're forced for various reasons there even if you've got a hundred person development team you can't create too much effort so you change your game design styles based around that and even in the kind of high-end game development space where you may have large budgets large teams I just to get things done in reasonable amounts of time we're gonna have to start making some of those decisions as well because it's easy to have kind of vast expansive worlds if you're basically painting with a very broad brush but now that we've given people the the capability of going down and painting with extremely fine brushes on lots of different levels its I it can take an arbitrary amount of time and as we approach the level of fidelity that you can get with movies the problem becomes you know almost insurmountable where movie development right now will employ hundreds and hundreds of people building some of these issues and these are sets you know they have no backs you know you can't just turn around at some scene in a movie and then go and like jump up onto a ledge and explore down the hallway because that stuff hasn't even been created by those hundreds and hundreds of people and when we can draw pictures that look just as good as what we're doing currently in movies today I people are going to expect sets built to that level of detail but then they want their thirty levels of adventure there or you know even worse when you go into like large-scale online games where you want to have you know a considerable size of the world there and these are real problems I'm it's possible that you know there may be opportunities for I you know for kind of stock books of you know of different data and certainly this has been tried there's a few companies that you know that sells stock models for different things but with gaming as long as we keep revving these technologies like this the actual requirements for the media keep evolving and that has kind of double edged problems there where on the one hand you have to keep retraining your own artists and if you want to get something done fast maybe you have to throw a whole lot of artists on it you have a whole lot of people early on at the learning curve there I'm but if you want to get it done fast you kind of throw you lose the benefits of you know of people you want your learning curve to occupy a relatively small fraction of your development time and I if the learning curves relatively short you know you can go ahead and you spend several months learning and then two years developing or something but as things get more and more complex that takes longer for people to not necessarily like understand how it operates but kind of find their you know find the artistic groove on how they're going to use the technology effectively and that could still wind up taking a good you know a good chunk of the entire project there and the the fact that it continues to change that the skill sets necessary for a quake generation game versus a doom three generation game I means that you can't necessarily just have what the movie industry has is a huge pool of people where you can just go out and say we need 100 carpenters you know we can't just go out and say we need I you know 100 do three modelers or texture creators because the skill set isn't specifically there it takes months to go ahead and build any level of that and I have some hope that the next generation of rendering technology will be a more general purpose tool where it won't be the kind of naughty changes and features that we've seen up until now I'm you know and that's something that you know that I do think is fairly important where previously all the generations of things that we've done including doom 3 are based on Nachi sets of hardware features where okay we added cube Maps or we edit dot three blending or something like that and the relationship between a game engine and an offline rendering tool I you know for people that actually work with them they're completely different things I am there's some overlap in terms of what you wind up producing on the output but they're just not approached the same way in a content creation or a capabilities fashion but the next generation does look good for being something that will be a more general-purpose I you know it will be something where you can kind of program it as much as you want because we have our floating point pixel formats and we have our dependent texture reads and we've got longer programs and effectively we can decompose anything we need into this and the next level of technology will probably be taking advantage of this this may mean that as we look five years from now that the skill sets required for content creation do become more uniform across the industry and across the industry boundaries into the offline rendering world and this will probably be a good thing in terms of you know allowing people to move to different projects more readily and allowing companies if they choose to to bring on kind of waves of developers if necessary where you know nowadays especially you know it's growing developers at a project that's behind schedule just very rarely is a is a good thing you can bring on twice you can double your art staff and not actually get that much more done if you have to train them and doing brand new different things I you know in ways that they haven't seen before so being able to you know to leverage broader basis of you know if people to work on their is good and we will probably be seeing actual data sharing between like television motion picture rendering and what actually goes on in games you know there's a little bit of that that can go on right now certainly you know things are stolen for cutscenes and all but occasionally you'll still find like some model that was used scrunched up really small on I you know on a motion picture screen is actually something that can be rendered as part of the game right now I on the material side of things that's gonna be coming you know fairly you know fairly soon in terms of game development a next-generation technology should be able to go ahead and do most of the surface models that are used in rendering right now I you know that the resolutions will come down just to fit reasonably on there but it will still be a pretty direct path on there you know it's it's a little less clear when the geometry is going to start using exactly the same eye you know the same kind of tools and techniques that they use there I you know I've historically not been the biggest supporter of Hardware curved surfaces for various reasons you know it hasn't fit and what I consider the the best you know the best value for the effort on there but that may also be coming in but you know in the relatively near future and then you start using the same models to go ahead and first do your television show I have your weekly animation or whatever and make your game out of it but in some way these types of strategic directions are you know it's not it's certainly not what gaming development used to be about I mean it now we're talking like a Hollywood studio about being able to manage you know huge numbers of people to be able to cross-promote over different product lines and there's definitely you know an aspect where I can look back with fully at them you know the early game development where you just got some people together that wanted to make a really fun game built something that was cool and people played it and had fun I am you know it's I do still hope that and you know that there are people out here that are going to be following that path that can still bring the kind of new elements in I don't think that it's a closed off completely industry I do think that you know innovative and really exciting new things and do have a place and can still be successful that's something that you know I I know that my position isn't something that you know it's really shared by too many people here but the you know when I hear developers moaning and complaining about different things about you know whether they can't get a publisher or you know getting contracts for different things I you know I very rarely comment on those situations because you know my positions somewhat unique I am with regard to all of that but you know I I do think that they're still exciting things that can be done on the small level and there will be things that that won't be coming from mid software because in those ways we are kind of a prisoner of our own success there you know we have our way of doing things and it will continue to to grow the company larger to do larger and larger projects you know to go ahead and cross license and cross promote and and all that and that's soon I you know that's sort of our lot in life there they're going to be you know exciting things you have to come on the large scale but I do still hope that you know that there will be a ruin you know there will be a place for that program or artist combination to go off and do something really kind of interesting because the capabilities that we're getting on the one hand it sucks up more and more resources but on the other hand it does give you know raw capabilities to smaller and smaller numbers of people when we look at the graphics rendering capabilities and you know that we've got right now that are coming out soon I'm you can put what would have been as soon as the technology matures a little bit with the current generation of cards for doing sophisticated offline rendering with a at the current hardware accelerated floating board pixel format stuff you will have a render farm in a person's desktop computer and the capability is that that will give people is pretty exciting when you start thinking about well one artistic vision could now go ahead and do something that previously would only have been possible to render if you had a Pixar sized and render farm you know if you wanted to take I you know if you wanted to do a 60 second short or something if it took you four and a half hours per frame you just don't get too many cycles through I've you know through the creative process on there but you know it's not long at all until we have if not real-time rendering like we expect in a game engine very very fast I am the hardware accelerated rendering of things like that and I think that's going to be an interesting kind of artistic outlet and that's always been one of my major kind of motivations and rewards on there is kind of seeing what I do as a canvas that the artists and the creative people actually work on and each generation of game rendering technology and the game interactions and just all the things that make up the game engine I yeah the best moments for me have been when I kind of like look in someone's office and just see something really wonderfully cool that they couldn't possibly have done before that's now possible and that is not slowing down at all this generation will seem kind of cinematic director's visions of things that you couldn't do before where in previous games you would have some things that had sort of a you know a director style to it that would have some interesting things with camera angles and so on I you know and the way you could crop scenes and set them up but you really couldn't apply the tools and craft of it you know of a director or I'm you know a real set layout person but with the current generation of technology if you look through like a book on film lighting just every tool that they've got there everything that they do with you know barn doors and cookies and shutters and how you go ahead and do key lights and fill lights all that stuff comes out directly now and you know over the course of a few years as people get to experience you know experiment with that and kind of find their I'm you know their personal style with it that's gonna be very exciting to see and the next generation will take that to the level of the surface quality rendering that is movie quality on there especially people are willing to sacrifice a little bit of I you know a frame rate or do things in a not quite real time frame time rate but if they want to generate really fabulous images I'd you know it's a it's a canvas and paint brush set really the likes of which no one's ever seen before and that's going to be you know really something to watch so the the next I've got a pretty clear idea of where things are going for the next five years and things are you know kind of there's a path out there and there's a lot of inertia kind of covering what I what evolve in the electronics industry but I I would not hazard to guess too much about what things are gonna look like five years past that and I you know if you go back again to the very very early days you know working on you know working on my Apple to see or something and somebody said okay a million times more power I I wouldn't have had the visions of whom you know bump mapping and stencil shadows and all that I would have been happy to be rendering Tron in a video game I am so we look at it today and we can say well we want to have characters that look like Lord of the Rings this is I am you know we want to have that moving around in a game and will will get that I have no doubt whatsoever that we'll be seeing that I am but there may be other things that are just more I'm you know that maybe even more you know more important like what we see in terms of online communications and everything the fact that while bandwidth and latency haven't improved all that much the number of players that you have access to has improved by you know that factor of a million you know you've gone from playing with your brother or something to having the whole world of online gamers open to you and there may be you know aspects like that that turned out to be far more important to where games Goethe and the actual raw audio visual technologies so I think we're just about out of time here so I do have 10 minutes left to take questions if you have questions and I will come over to you you'll ask the question yes John what are your expectations from the next generation of the consoles versus you know the PC capabilities so what are you expecting from the PlayStation 3 and from the Xbox - okay I'm console games you know I'm not you know I'm not intimately involved in most of the console development it's not a it's not a business model that I that I like all that much you know I get you know I don't make a point to go out and get disclosed really early on it I would say that I am a little bit bothered by the next generation pushed towards again multiple processors which I thought most people would have learned the lessons from the previous generation where if you take a console that has one fast processor one fast graphics accelerator everybody loves to work on it it's nice to program if you take a product you know a console that has multiple processors that add up to some wonderful figure of power I it rarely gets utilized in you know as much and it hinders development time and I'm a little bit surprised that you know that that's kind of come back as you know as other development strategy strategy for that it's you see team sizes and and costs in video game development rising do you ever think they'll reach a critical mass where the industry can no longer support teams of that sizes and production costs that high I don't really see a specific end in sight right now I am I do expect that the major top-flight titles will be increasing in budget and there will probably be more attempt to go ahead and directly tie with movies get more I am you know more kind of return for the investment there but if we looked again five years into the future you know I would not be shocked to see hundred million dollar game development budgets I you know looking that high there and I do think that's a problem that we should be concerned about but I'm sort of at a loss as to you know what to do about it because if we're given this capability and you have the choice of either exploit the capability as much as you possibly can because your competitors are doing it that's going to require more and more media resources and I it's it's a serious issue so it's actually relates to the couple thing I mean I think everyone agree with you that like it's way easier to program for a fast cpu in a graphics card but hey they didn't pay attention so given that the next consoles are all multi processing how would you architect in broad strokes obviously an engine to work on that since it's such a pain well the the most straightforward thing is to go ahead and try to find the it's hardest when you've got a small granular number of processors I mean talking two to four processors is something that makes it really difficult to split things up because you could go ahead and say alright let's amp up the audio and use fully one processor to just make audio done that's not a bad thing to go ahead and do there when you want to try and really accelerates a rendering there you're going to pick there's no really optimal way to split rendering over two or three processors you know we've we split into a front-end back-end where you do kind of like CPU based things I have you know all the animation and deformation separated from the actual rendering and that can get you you know kind of sort of to a 50% split but when you start looking at numbers like if you want to split four processors across graphics it turns out that just about the best way to do that is to section the screen and you get some benefit from that but it's not a 4x you know a 4x improvement over there you can also like try to if you're running at very high frame rates you can go ahead and pipeline full frames which is a pretty good thing so that's an interesting possibility where if you want to go ahead and use I am kind of subsampled aspects in there with I if you want to do your soft shadowing your motion blur your order independent translucent sees all the analytically intractable things by actually rendering many more frames than your actual frame rate and doing the final compositing pass on there that would be a reasonably good way to try and use four processors for something but it becomes much worse than when you've got four CPUs and a single graphics resource where you just wind up queueing up all of those things and I'm you know I'm not thrilled with and you know with those directions and I think that we've we've got several generations showing that this was just not a great thing here which is why I'm against kind of surprised that I but it's in vogue again more questions given what you said about the future of game development and and the interest that universities seem to be having and game development as the new discipline how would you like to see the education of future game developers proceed I've always been a little bit skeptical about I am you know game development courses at universities largely because the field has been so dynamic where it's difficult to make a curriculum for something that's changing this rapidly I'm you know I can't say I've done any detailed surveys of the teams doing this but it is difficult to you know if somebody went through a four-year university program and they had a syllabus for game development on there that was made you know it could have been made at the time we were doing Wolfenstein I am you know somebody makes the syllabus runs one generation of students through it comes back and it's just the point of being almost not relevant on there I'm probably you get more from there's valid stuff to be done in the current computer science curriculums Graphics research now is directly relevant to um you know to the game design side of things or to the game engine side of things there are probably kind of meta courses that are useful in terms of of game design and development but those are the kind of you know soft academic things that I'm always a little bit leery of and I'm hesitant to you know to place a lot of value on somebody that's gone and you know gotten a degree in game design versus someone that you know personally as you know as a person hiring people at a company what you've actually done is far more important to me than what you've been taught I am but as we go on again maybe in this following generation where things do stabilize a little bit more in terms of general tool they're maybe a little bit more opportunity for it to be kind of codified into a syllabus there but at this point I am well I guess it's kind of like breaking in a new you know a new graphics technology where the first generation isn't necessarily so like to actually be used it's sort of kind of bootstrap the process where you eventually move into something that really is valuable later on but its side it's gonna be a little bit of a tough situation there but it'll eventually kind of work itself out I was intrigued by your statement that there are still exciting things that can be done on a small scale can you elaborate on that a little bit well that's kind of one of the you know the things where if I could say exactly what they were I probably just go have some people go do that but you know I I just don't want to fall into the trap of kind of the hubris of thinking that what we're doing is the be-all end-all of you know of the development and I certainly hope that there is the equivalent of you know a microcomputer revolution that has all of us that are going to be you know we're the establishment you know we're the the big corporate developers effectively which is weird for you know for it a company starting you know like many game companies effectively started in a back room but I am you know I think that there's a there's a degree of blindness to the possibilities when you're immersed in something that you do kind of for a living all the time there and yes I suppose there's a remote possibility that there's really not anything clever and innovative to be done on the small scale but I you know I'm not I'm not willing to take that as gospel right now and I definitely encourage people to you know to continue looking at the small things and the small game development things and actually some of the new markets that people have found it's great to see some people doing reasonably well I am on things like downloadable games it's interesting that the numbers that some people are doing there are better than the numbers that in software was doing as a shareware developer in our early time that bootstrapped the rest of our development so that's a hopeful sign you know there are people there that are in exactly analogous situations to what its software was 12 years ago in terms of the scope of the projects the funding and the rewards for the development there so I think there's probably a pretty damn good chance that there may be some of those that can follow a similar eye kind of curve of grow and I an expansion into what they can do gently the curious is to your opinions and or predictions for the future of games as art as opposed to just simply entertainment how could you say that again I'm curious as to your opinions and or predictions for the future of gaming as art as opposed to just entertainment okay I I do have a pretty direct opinion on this and that I don't look at what I do as art you know I am making a product for people and my job is to give them something entertaining you know it may be a self-selected group that thinks more similarly to what I do but I don't think that looking at it as art is a particularly positive direction to go at I am and again it comes back to what I was saying about how you can do quality and you can do value and if you want to be a successful company you want to focus on value because you can do something that may be extremely artistic that may be the work you know of a master craftsman and is extremely high quality but if it's not providing value to the people that are actually gonna buy the game I am it's not the best thing to actually be working on and there's certainly a place for art just as there is in any media but I don't think it's correct to look for expect or even try to make something that's expected to be a mainstream triple-a title a work of art I am you know I think it's kind of following the wrong path there time for one more question yes you mentioned after you ship do them through you're going to do a quicker Rev just polish up the graphics a little bit and then push another title out where do you see armadillos xprize relative to that second ret which one's going to come first alright say again didn't catch that in your second game right after right after doing through the little quick Rev and armadillos X PRIZE which ones going to hit first okay yeah well I could talk for another hour about all the the rocketry and aerospace stuff I died we're hot firing the vehicle all four engines on Saturday and if that goes well we're lifting off dive you know on a test flight the week after I week after that if things continue to go well you know over the next year or so I will be flying you know big vehicles very high with people on them and eventually I've you know eventually heading off horizontally for orbit all right thank you very much is this the real life

Channel: GDC

Views: 84,021

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, john carmack, id

Id: YUF-07ab9wU

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Godnaz]

It's interesting the listen to his predictions from 2004, 13 years later. He got many of them correct. Graphics technology coming into it's own with LOTR movie quality, true environment quality sound topping out and AI being the slowest and most challenging a technology for gaming. When you listen to him talk about detailed work ethic and development style, you can grasp how big of an influence he's had on the gaming industry.

People tend to forget that he's the pioneer and grandfather of first person shooters (Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom) and was key to advancing 3D graphics in games.