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
thank
I'd thank you all for the award, and I'm still at it.
lucky nose three
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.
building coaster eventually largest nine people rocket roller science
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.
advantage anywhere benefit close consoles developers extra full generation maybe next problem roll stay taking time
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.
architecture best case difficult exactly faster game hardware hype marketing memory needs performance pool powerful program running salt stuff taken thread three turn xbox
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.
attention break crafty leg pay rather sure
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,
inspirational focus matter
Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.
dedication self rivers
In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.
inspirational success real
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
rockets proportion difficulty
Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.
class sometimes function
Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.
games design suffering
The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various "modern" C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.
zero teaching games
Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.
self desert mojave
Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.