John Carmack talks to game informer about id Tech 5

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http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803.1731.12214.htm?Page=1

Long interview so just a snippet here for you.

Game Informer: When we interviewed you at CES this year, and QuakeCon two years ago you weren’t too thrilled with developing for multicore systems. Obviously now, that’s the case across all platforms. Were you kind of at the point with id Tech 5 where, you said, “We give in?”

John Carmack: You have to take advantage of what’s on the table. Although it’s interesting that almost all of the PS3 launch titles hardly used any Cells at all. We hired one of the best PS3 guys around who did the Edge Acceleration technology for Sony – he’s on our team now so we’ve got some of the best PS3 experience here. In fact when we were doing all of the tech demos, we’d bring in the developers and they’d walk over and say, “it’s running on the PS3!” (laughs) They’d sit there and stare at it for a while.

There’s no doubt that with all of the platforms that we have running here PS3 is the most challenging to develop on. That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not that it was a boneheaded decision because they’re a lot closer the fact that they can run like this [points to the 4 different gaming stations running Rage] – they’re a lot closer than they’ve ever been before. It’s a hell of a lot better than PS2 versus Xbox. But given the choice, we’d rather develop on the Xbox 360. The PS3 still does have in theory more power that could be extracted but it’s not smart. We don’t feel it’s smart to head down that rat hole. In fact, the biggest thing we worry about right now is memory. Microsoft extracts 32 megs for their system stuff and Sony takes 96. That’s a big deal because the PS3 is already partitioned memory where the 360 is 512 megs of unified and on the PS3 is 256 of video, 256 of memory minus 96 for their system…stuff. Stuff is not the first thing that came to my mind there. (laughs)

The PS3 is not the favorite platform but it’s going to run the game just as good. To some degree there’s going to be some lowest common denominator effect because we’re going to be testing these every day on all of the platforms, and it’s going to be “Dammit it’s out of memory on the PS3 again, go crunch some things down” That’s probably going to be the sore spot for all of this but because we’re continuous builds on all of these we’re going to be fighting these battles as we go rather than build these things out and go, “Oh my God we’re so far away from running on there.” Which is the situation where Enemy Territory is suffering with at a degree right now, and a lot of other people have that.

Pretty good interview, good to see that they are trying to get the engine running equally across all platforms. Better than the shoddy ports we keep seeing atm.
 
RuMp3l4$k1n said:
Pretty good interview, good to see that they are trying to get the engine running equally across all platforms. Better than the shoddy ports we keep seeing atm.
Does this mean that they are making one engine that works on all systems or one engine per system? I do hope it is not the former. Indeed I assume it can only be the latter. My concern is that compromises made to resolves PS3 memory issues will filter into compromising the 360 too.
 
VIRII said:
Does this mean that they are making one engine that works on all systems or one engine per system? I do hope it is not the former. Indeed I assume it can only be the latter. My concern is that compromises made to resolves PS3 memory issues will filter into compromising the 360 too.

I guess if they have this new guy onboard it shouldn't cause to much of a problem.
 
I think it is the same core engine but tweaked to run on each system during development instead of just doing a straight engine chop/port once the lead platform is finished.
 
Good read, Sony have already decreased the OS footprint by quite a bit, in the latest updates it was a 20% drop from what it was in December. Think it now sits at about 52Mb, it does increase a bit depending on options like USB keyboards, remote play etc.
 
Just being lazy by not bothering to fully utilise the PS3 potential in my eyes ;)

Just kidding, it does seem like he cares about using more than 1 cell though, so even if the game takes a hit it might only be slight.
 
From what I can gather, they've found some way to develop the codebase so that it applies to all systems. Then there are different teams tweaking it for each platform. I also get the impression that the PS3 is the lowest common denominator and if they have to remove something because it won't fit in the PS3 memory, it's removed from all the other platforms, too.
 
ic1male said:
From what I can gather, they've found some way to develop the codebase so that it applies to all systems. Then there are different teams tweaking it for each platform. I also get the impression that the PS3 is the lowest common denominator and if they have to remove something because it won't fit in the PS3 memory, it's removed from all the other platforms, too.
That is the thing I really did not want to hear :(
 
If they didn't do it like this we would end up with another quake 4 (360) incident.
ID always pump out cracking engines so we can rest assured this will look ace regardless of certain systems limitations.
 
Jihad said:
I wasn't too impressed with the new engine, it still feels like the Doom 3 one.

Really hoping that doesn't happen.

When I played the release build of Doom3, I couldn't shake the feeling I was playing a really enhanced Quake3. Felt so similar. I'm not saying it didn't impress me at the time, it was pretty cool. But I definitely hope to see some innovative stuff from JC in the future.
 
n3crius said:
Really hoping that doesn't happen.

When I played the release build of Doom3, I couldn't shake the feeling I was playing a really enhanced Quake3. Felt so similar. I'm not saying it didn't impress me at the time, it was pretty cool. But I definitely hope to see some innovative stuff from JC in the future.

Fear ye not have a look at this here video of the new game Rage:
http://uk.gamespot.com/video/0/6176209%20/videoplayerpop?


Speaking to a small collection of game journalists, Hollenshead explained that Rage was a deliberate departure from the corridor shooters that made id famous. Its gameplay will be "60 percent shooting and 40 percent driving" between villages in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Its setting will be a far future which has seen civilization decimated after a comet smashes into the Earth. Players will aid the villages' inhabitants in fighting both an oppressive regime and various mutants and monsters roaming the wasteland.
 
Nice to hear it's running the same on PS3. Definitely a good thing to have!

As for the 4 systems, what are they? Xbox360, PlayStation 3, PC and Mac?
 
NokkonWud said:
As for the 4 systems, what are they? Xbox360, PlayStation 3, PC and Mac?

Yes. All systems have two DVD discs with the content except the lucky PS3 which has one Blu-Ray.
 
I will probably get cut apart for this next post but here is my attempt at being technical :)

Yeah Nokon I presume mac since it was announced at macworld originally lol
As for the PS3 limiting it, IIRC the macworld demo has 20GB of textures, not going to work on DVD9.
Also by the time you split the PS3 memory up and the xbox 360 memory up, the 2 of them equate to the amount of memory.
A big difference is though the PS3 Main Memory is XDR memory running at 3.2GHz, and the 256MB for GPU running at 700MHz.
The 360 just has 512MB of DDR3 running at 700MHz split between the CPU and GPU. So the memory issue will boil down to none at all. People just thing the 360 has 512MB RAM and the PS3 has 256, but if that is the case then the PS3 has 256MB RAM for graphics and the 360 has 0MB ;)
Also the Tech 5 demo has no DX 10 in it at all add to that, the engine was originally revealed at a Mac event, it gives major hints towards OpenGL being the preferred standard for the technology, also iirc all the other Doom/Quake engines have been built on OpenGL, and iirc OpenGL is what the PS3 uses. So tbh i wouldn't worry about the PS3 dragging things down ;)
 
It's just a case of using the memory more intelligently instead of jamming it full with as much crap as possible a la xbox/pc.

The later PS2 games eventually got the hang of it, constantly flushing/refreshing what was in memory and streaming data over the bus, it just takes time.
 
JUMPURS said:
Also by the time you split the PS3 memory up and the xbox 360 memory up, the 2 of them equate to the amount of memory.

Carmack's point is they don't. The 360 reserves 32MB for the OS and the PS3 96MB so the 360 has 64MB extra to play with.
 
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