Tom’s Guide has a pretty in-depth interview with the based God of coding – the creator of Doom, Quake and the upcoming RAGE – John Carmack. He had some pretty interesting things about the next generation of consoles, Steam, and the trend towards motion control.
On his wish list for next gen…
So one of the most important things I would say is a unified virtual 64-bit address space, across both the GPU and the CPU. Not a partition space, like the PS3. Also, a full 64-bit space with virtualization on the hardware units – that would be a large improvement. There aren’t any twitchy graphics features that I really want; we want lots of bandwidth, and lots of cores. There’s going to be a heterogeneous environment here, and it’s pretty obvious at this point that we will have some form of CPU cores and GPU cores. We were thinking that it might be like a pure play Intel Larabee or something along that line, which would be interesting, but it seems clear at this point that we will have a combination of general purpose cores and GPU-oriented cores, which are getting flexible enough that you can do most of the things that you would do on a CPU. But there are still plenty of things that are much better done with a traditional CPU core, debugger and development environment. I will be a little surprised if there’s any radical departure from that. I hope neither of them mess that up in some fundamental way. I’m very interested to see what the next gen consoles look like, if they’re even going to have optical media or if they try to strike out without it. Those are the types of big decisions that I wouldn’t want to be in the position of making because they’re billion dollar effects. But this generation, I know most executives were surprised at what the attach rate was on this current generation of consoles.
On Kinect and Move…
The Kinect is a scalable technology, which I’m pretty excited about. And that technology can get ten times better in the coming years, so I think it’s an important thing to be playing around with. However, it’s not something that you can tack onto an existing game; we got asked a lot about what can we do with Kinect or the PlayStation Move with Rage, and it’s like well…nothing, really. It’s not that they’re not good, but you just don’t bolt that kind of technology on. Games are all about designing around your controls.
On Steam and digital distribution…
There’s definitely a sense that publishers don’t want to be tied to Valve. It seems like an easy thing, setting up your own digital distribution, but I caution everyone that there is a lot more expertise built up at Valve than you might think. It’s a harder task than just setting up some automated FTP sites with a web front end, and they have a network effect going by having the games download in the background. Everybody thinks, “Well, I don’t want to split my money with Valve. How hard can it be to set this up?” And my advice is: usually it’s harder than you think it is. I think from the consumer side, digital distribution like Steam is doing a really good thing. It’s better than dealing with getting the box and losing the CD and all of those related issues. Everybody knows that this is the way the wind is blowing.
It’s a great interview that goes from mobile discussion, to tablets, to coding, to practically all things tech. Well worth reading in full.
Interview: id Software’s John Carmack [Tom’s Guide]
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