QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - ▶ this video QuakeCon 2012 - link I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. link

You might find John Carmack's 2011 quakecon keynote video interesting, he addresses a fair amount of your questions. ▶ this video

Here is an accompanying segment from QuakeCon 2011 in August where static code analysis is discussed. This topic must really be on his mind. ▶ this video

John Carmack mentioned OCaml and Haskell at the last QuakeCon (on the topics of game scripting and static analysis), citing performance and hiring issues: ▶ this video (1:10ish) I'm not sure about the performance issue. If it stays within a reasonable (low single-digit) factor I think the hit is worth the quality guarantees you can get out of it. The hiring/education issue is probably the #1 reason so few attempts are made in this direction.

Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most important bit is probably after the ellipses): "If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my face. "We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people thought that was all that we were doing. "And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good job on it. [...] "It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games. "The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have moments of abject

yes, id software is notorious for open sourcing all their games a while after release. John Carmack took a few months break from Rage development to work on these (at least on Wolfenstein, not sure about Doom) [1], so there will definitely be substantial differences to adapt to iOS, like - I'm guessing - OpenGL-ES code and touch controls. here's a write-up from Carmack about his Wolfenstein iPhone development adventures: link [1] ▶ this video

I'm sure Carmack says alot more about the patent issues and open sourcing the engine in the keynote. ▶ this video