QuakeCon 2011; Carmack Keynote

As QuakeCon 2011 is underway, John Carmack has performed his annual keynote speech at the event. The good people at QuakeCon have uploaded a video of the speech in its entirety at their YouTube account.

Couldn't make it all the way through, but it was kinda interesting

For a programmer he's a pretty good orator (better than Gates in his early days at least :P) but I found his speech to be really long-winded. He would say paragraphs and the point would be like "there are these things called textures"

Shame really, he only spoke of Doom 4 for about 20 seconds

It's obvious he's set his brain to 10-20% normal operating speed so the crowd can actually understand what he's saying. Carmack is a cyborg.

magicsofa said:

For a programmer he's a pretty good orator (better than Gates in his early days at least :P)

But it's not really Carmack's early days. He's been a code rockstar since Wolfenstein 3-D after all. QuakeCons have been around since 1996.

Carmack probably has it easy... he's basically on stage just going subject to subject as he thinks of them. I know plenty of people like that, though almost nobody gets to hold an entire room's attention doing it :P

Also to be fair, he didn't speak about Rage as a game an awful lot either, the meat of the topics were the engine and programming work.

At about 24 minutes in, he explains that they got from Microsoft a license to use HD Photo stuff for compressing the image data on the discs. This may complicate significantly the possible open sourcing of this tech in the long term future.

chungy said:

Also to be fair, he didn't speak about Rage as a game an awful lot either, the meat of the topics were the engine and programming work.

That's what he do at these things.

Hell's Vendetta said:

Shame really, he only spoke of Doom 4 for about 20 seconds

It was already established Doom4 wouldn't be discussed much at QuakeCon.

Gez said:

At about 24 minutes in, he explains that they got from Microsoft a license to use HD Photo stuff for compressing the image data on the discs. This may complicate significantly the possible open sourcing of this tech in the long term future.

I don't think it will prevent the open sourcing of the engine (in 2020 or whenever), but the "promise" of Microsoft not to enforce their patents could well see Linux distributions like Debian not wanting to risk including engine binaries into their repositories, and some FOSS developers would also shy away from working on the code.

These patent promises (by Microsoft, IBM, etc) are ridiculous, like someone strapping a bomb onto you and then promising not to press the detonator. If they were truly serious then they would simply annul the patent (or put it into the public domain).

andrewj said:

These patent promises (by Microsoft, IBM, etc) are ridiculous, like someone strapping a bomb onto you and then promising not to press the detonator. If they were truly serious then they would simply annul the patent (or put it into the public domain).

IANAL, but my understanding is that such patent grants usually include reciprocal licensing clauses that require others not to enforce their own patents against the standard. So, if someone like IBM tried to enforce patents covering some aspect of HD Photo, they would automatically lose their rights to the Microsoft patents. In that sense these are kind of like the GPL, in that they grant certain rights, but also place certain conditions upon them.

Frankly, I think you're being a little over-dramatic. These promises are after all, legally binding and irrevocable (except in such circumstances as described above). I'm no fan of software patents, or the way companies like Microsoft sometimes choose to deploy them, but until the system is reformed, these sorts of agreements do actually offer a degree of protection that is greater than if the patents were never filed, or were placed in the public domain.

So about his mega textures. After hearing him talk about them for 30 minutes the only thing that I can grasp what it is is 1 giant texture that is just slid to X and Y coordinates to show up for different objects. He talked about it for 30 minutes. Something that other games already did... but they didn't give it a big fancy name.

geo said:

So about his mega textures. After hearing him talk about them for 30 minutes the only thing that I can grasp what it is is 1 giant texture that is just slid to X and Y coordinates to show up for different objects. He talked about it for 30 minutes. Something that other games already did... but they didn't give it a big fancy name.

It is different. And awesome

But it is what I said right? He talked about it for 30 minutes and I'm sure there was an answer in there somewhere. I'm just afraid I missed it.

I wonder if you asked him for the time he'd tell you how to build a watch.

I'm pretty sure it's different to how things have been done before. But it's not terribly exciting from a user point of view. I guess you could ask him to build a computer, and he would build the world's first quantum computer. Or build a nuclear reactor and in 30 minutes you will have fusion power.

With hype like that perhaps his genius is wasted on entertainment. :-)

geo said:

With hype like that perhaps his genius is wasted on entertainment. :-)

He certainly seems to think so.

Yep all great people have side projects.

@Gez: I suppose it's only a matter of time before they change their name to Union Aerospace... ;)

Oh shit, Carmack's end goal is to literally open a gate to hell on mars. Someone hurry up and don a green suit to stop him.

at 1:07:55
"You don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it."
This is so true. *looks at ST and shudders*