[The E]

And here's his recent Quakecon keynote: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/06/id-tech-carmacks-keynote-in-full/

If you are interested in computer graphics, you should listen to it.

Oh, and idTech 4 gets open source this year. Awesomeness.

[Zacam]

Yes, yes he is.

Enough said.

[Spoon]

Even though I only truely understood half of it

[Nuke]

ive known this guy was a genius since the mid 90s. hes been writing game engines for over 2 decades. idtech engines always seemed a notch above the competition in quality and performance.

[Kosh]

ive known this guy was a genius since the mid 90s. hes been writing game engines for over 2 decades. idtech engines always seemed a notch above the competition in quality and performance.

With idTech 4 that wasn't really the case.

[Unknown Target]

How do you figure? Wasn't it basically the very first well-done implementation of normal maps, self-casting shadows, bump maps, etc? Granted it hasn't aged well, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary.

[Nuke]

idtech4 was pretty awesome. if you dont think so your either playing doom3 or etqw, and in those games it doesnt look too advanced. but if you play prey or quake 4, you get a ****ing bad-ass usage of the engine. also carmack seems to favor 60 fps as his performance window. where other games like crysis seem to aim closer to 30 to achieve what it does. im actually looking forward to prey 2, which should be the last commercial game to use the engine before it goes open source.

[Kosh]

How do you figure? Wasn't it basically the very first well-done implementation of normal maps, self-casting shadows, bump maps, etc? Granted it hasn't aged well, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary.

Source was able to do most of that and offer more overall flexibility. It didn't do as well with licensing because of development delays, so many major releases of the era were already locked into the contemporary unreal engine which had already been out two years beforehand. 

idtech4 was pretty awesome. if you dont think so your either playing doom3 or etqw, and in those games it doesnt look too advanced. but if you play prey or quake 4, you get a ****ing bad-ass usage of the engine. also carmack seems to favor 60 fps as his performance window. where other games like crysis seem to aim closer to 30 to achieve what it does. im actually looking forward to prey 2, which should be the last commercial game to use the engine before it goes open source.

I played Quake 4, which was good. But I have to agree with your assessment of Crysis, it looked stunning for its time but the single biggest knock against it is still relatively absurd system requirements. I'll give credit to Unreal Engine 3, despite being released 3 years later I could run Mass Effect 2 at a better framerate for the same settings as Crysis 1.

[Luis Dias]

We will be able to see what id did to get its shadowing so smoothly. Or perhaps it's not a special thing... anyways I think we could learn a lot of stuff with it.

[Davros]

that would be Shadow volumes

[Luis Dias]

Sure, the carmack reverse and all that. I'm speaking of all the hacks that they used to get it so smoothly.

[The E]

I played Quake 4, which was good. But I have to agree with your assessment of Crysis, it looked stunning for its time but the single biggest knock against it is still relatively absurd system requirements. I'll give credit to Unreal Engine 3, despite being released 3 years later I could run Mass Effect 2 at a better framerate for the same settings as Crysis 1.

Mainly because the only difference between ME2 on PC and ME2 on consoles is that ME2 on PCs uses mouse and keyboard. Meaning that the actual hardware requirements are pretty modest. UE3 is an engine designed to run anywhere, whereas the Crysis engine was designed for future hardware at the time it came out, by using the stupid old PC programming paradigm of relying on hardware manufacturers being able to create hardware that is powerful enough to run it at some point in the future.

As for Source vs IdTech 4, both engines debuted the same year, and were developed in parallel. And one should never forget that idTech 4 was one of the first big engines to do per-pixel lighting (which Source didn't do; even the current HL2 with the Orange Box engine still uses per-vertex lighting, which is painfully obvious if you know what to look for).

[Luis Dias]

Yes, the "run anywhere" characteristic of UE3 is what made it one of the most used rendering engines lately. Crytek had to tone down everything in its engine for it to cope with the limitations of consoles, making the differences between what it can do vs what UE3 can do not sufficiently compelling. Personally I prefer UE3, but that's subjective and due to the fact that I can download it for free and use it as I want to (I tried to use it for architectural presentations but its still too difficult to make the transition as smothly and fast as possible for it to have any practical advantage, although there are some solutions out there already).

[Unknown Target]

Crytek didn't even look that good to be honest; their system requirements IIRC basically came from doing everything real-time, which was cool but ended up looking roughly the same as developers who used cheats or pre-rendered components. It just doesn't make sense to do a lot of what Crytek did.

As for Source vs idTech 4; Source was a system hog when it came out, and it really didn't look as good IMO. It just wasn't as pretty, to me, as idTech4, though the latter only really worked in close, confined, dark areas - perfect for Doom 3 but unlike Source it did really lack flexibility.

UE3 is just a powerhouse of an engine that is extremely flexible.

[Hades]

Yes, the "run anywhere" characteristic of UE3 is what made it one of the most used rendering engines lately. Crytek had to tone down everything in its engine for it to cope with the limitations of consoles, making the differences between what it can do vs what UE3 can do not sufficiently compelling. Personally I prefer UE3, but that's subjective and due to the fact that I can download it for free and use it as I want to (I tried to use it for architectural presentations but its still too difficult to make the transition as smothly and fast as possible for it to have any practical advantage, although there are some solutions out there already).

Considering Crysis 2 looked better than Crysis 1 I doubt all that much was 'toned down'.

[Luis Dias]

Would you really expect it to be worse?

What I mean is, compare the end product with the engine's demonstrations.

[MR_T3D]

I dunno, seeing that Tim over there is a *fan* of always-connected, seeing diablo 3 "forcing" it as great, I don't think I want to support him and id.
We'll see if he backtracks/Carmack weighs in an opposing view.

[The E]

That is so not going to happen. Diablo 3 will do for always connected DRM what Half-Life 2 did for Steam.

[qazwsx]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Q9-ftiPVQ
Q&A session, filmed just after the first video.