John Carmack Interview

A rare and informative interview with id Software lead programmer John Carmack.
January 7, 1997
by DR_Bone, Clan Dark Requiem

Bone: I know that the Next Generation Technology is tightly under wraps, and probably you have only the vaguest feel for what you to do next, and I will not ask about specifics. However, there are certain limitations that seemed to have been introduced into Quake while trying to make it work on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM. Due to the fact that the Pentium has taken off and that RAM prices have gotten so low that 16 megs is standard and 32 megs is VERY common, those limitations seem to be not needed anymore. There is one overriding example of this that I can come up with off the cuff. You can't see into water or out of water, yet the Unreal pictures show that realistic looking pools of water CAN be made. Other, more nebulous limitations, include size of the levels, specifically I have seen levels with HUGE open spaces that "gray out" due to limitations in VIS-ing those large areas. Also dynamic shadows seems to have been included in Unreal but are static in Quake. Is there any plans at all to get rid of these limitations by increasing processor speed requirements and RAM requirements?

John Carmack: Note that it is easy for an enthusiast to have a rather self centered view of the market. 32 meg systems are NOT common in the general population right now. Basically, everyone wants the games to be designed for their own systems. :-) The system spec for trinity would probably sound excessive to you right now. Your current system almost certainly isn't up to par, but you will probably buy a new system be the time a game ships.

Quake will have some new features added to the engine during Quake 2, but it will not change drastically. Drastic changes are in new technology generations.

I start fresh with a blank edit window for each generation, and architecturally the next generation will bear about as much resemblance to quake as quake did to doom. This is the right way (as I see it, in any case) to add features: a cohesive whole that is deigned to offer a well balanced experience, not one feature at a time just to play catchup or leapfrog.

Glquake has shadows and mirrors, but those are novelty features and not rigorously implemented. The game wasn't designed around them, and we won't exploit them.

I could add transparent water to glquake pretty easy, but the vis information in the current maps breaks at water boundaries (it saves a LOT of polys in many scenes), so you would never be able to see it in existing maps without re-vising them with a different utility.

< ok, I just went and added optional transparent water to glquake and the utilities (American had been bugging me about that for a while as well...). You can set r_blendwater 1 and run either a novised map or a map processed with qbsp2 -watervis.
Yes, it looks sort of neat. No, it's not earthshaking. I'll release a test map when glquake goes public. >

The greyouts in huge scenes don't happen in glquake, and can be avoided in software by increasing the surfaces and edge arrays. That was a tough balancing act to run on 8 meg systems. Actually, building those large intermediate tables was probably not The Right Thing in the quake engine. I feel that could have been done a little better with a different approach. We might try some other things out in quake 2.

Bone: While there is no doubting that Quake excels at DeathMatch play, and indeed might be the best DeathMatch game ever created, people were really expecting some more "world dynamics" to coin a phrase. The lack of interactive elements in the game had somewhat marred single-player Quake games (but oddly enough provided just the right balance between simplicity/complexity for DeathMatch). Are there any plans in the future for making future levels more dynamic in single player mode? I hesitate to give any examples here since it is a question of game design and purely your province. Perhaps more ambient sounds? (gurgling pools, dripping water, metal tapping against rocks) Not my strong suit, so I'll just leave it at that.

John Carmack: I will always take an aggressively simple approach to things, but yes, I agree that we should add more interactive elements in the future.

Another major way to improve the single player experience is with more skill and timing based actions, but the wide range of computer performance in our audience makes that a lot dicier than on a fixed game console platform. I intend to multi-thread the control in trinity, which should allow proper timing based maneuvers on any speed system.

Bone: Aside from the base desire for dominance and violence, do you have any higher goals for the technology that is being developed for Quake? I once read an article where it was stated the Mike Abrash was lured away from Microsoft by the promise of using the Quake technology to advance his goal of creating a "Snow Crash" type of environment with a virtual world that people can "live" in and create avatars to walk around in. I myself find this scenario somewhat compelling. Sort of a graphical, 3D realtime IRC. With Quake this seems to be tantalizingly within our grasp. What are your thoughts about using Quake for communication purposes other than just a game?

John Carmack: There will probably be some work in this area by other people with quake technology. Trinity will be even more flexible in this regard.

Bone: Clans seem to be a totally unexpected phenomenon in the history of computer gaming. It's predecessors in MUDs seem to totally pale in comparison in terms of popularity. Although id played somewhat of a bystander role in the development of clans, are there any plans to become more involved with the clan phenomenon?

John Carmack: It was so odd the way it happened -- internally, we had talked of clans of warriors before the game was released, but I don't think we ever publicly talked about it, and to have the same terminology apparently spontaneously evolve in the user community was pretty weird. I love it.

I don't want id to "involve" itself in much of anything on an official basis. I want to make the tools and capabilities available to the user community and let them self organize. We would need more people at id to stay involved with all the cool stuff going on, and I really don't want to grow the company.

John Carmack

ps: this really did take quite some time and effort to answer, so please don't take my response as an invitation to regularly interview me -- I don't like refusing people, but it just becomes necessary.

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