QuakeCon 2012 - 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 - link QuakeCon 2012 - ▶ this video 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

"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at link I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker. Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): ▶ this video

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers went from games to aerospace? link link Elon Musk practically offered Carmack a job at SpaceX, tweeting "Well, if you love rockets, come work on them with me at SpaceX!" Carmack is a very enthusiastic person, who is hard working, and genuinely passionate about everything he pursues. I have "followed" him for a good while. It's not difficult to tell he's a lot smarter than your average Joe, but he also seems quite a bit sharper than your average smart programmer. I recommend watching all his talks and interviews. Some amusing and revealing stuff on his childhood: link "In the gaming industry, there are a lot of people that are specifically in it because they love games and they want to create things. My love for programming is a more abstract thing. I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment w

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. ▶ this video link link

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: ▶ this video But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew). I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year ▶ this video

Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it. Start Here: ▶ this video You might also enjoy: link

It's interesting to me that about 5 years ago John Carmack was talking up game streaming quite a bit in his annual QuakeCon talk. From what I remember he was pretty confident it would be the future of gaming at the time. However I'd love to know what went wrong and why game streaming as a whole has pretty much completely fizzled. Was it just too much hype and optimism that the technology would improve and latency wasn't an issue, or perhaps bad business models that doomed it from the start? IMHO game streaming is pretty much doomed if the future of gaming is ultra low latency and high framerates for virtual reality. There's just no way a streamed game could work with Occulus Rift, etc. and have low enough input and display latency to be believable. edit: I think it was his 2012 QuakeCon talk: ▶ this video

I suggest parrying their ActiveX thrust with a counter-attack argument for NaCl. link If you have to do something inside a browser, Native Client is much more interesting as something that started out as a really pretty darn clever x86 hack in the way that they could sandbox all of this in user mode interestingly. It's now dynamic recompilation, but something that you program in C or C++ and it compiles down to something that's going to be not your -O4 optimization level for completely native code but pretty damn close to native code. You could do all of your evil pointer chasings, and whatever you want to do as a to-the-metal game developer. -John Carmack, OculusVR [1] [1] ▶ this video

I think the reason is two-part: 1. (From the original link): "Over the past few years, browser support for plugins such as QUAKE LIVE have dropped off significantly, causing problems for plugins to operate in a consistent and working manner. With the recent announcement of Google Chrome's roadmap [1] to turning off plugin support and the upcoming changes in Firefox [2], it seems that now is the time to make the transition." 2. (From John Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2012 [3]): "Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality." [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video -- Based on John's comments regarding Linux, they just are not seeing the return to make it a priority. He mentions that Mac does better than Linux, but perhaps not enough, again, to be a priority.

Previous discussion: link Here is the link to the transcribed portion of the talk (starting at 00h:30m:02s): ▶ this video

The thing about Carmack and Linux is, that everything he says is based mostly on the QuakeLive port id did a while back (edit: he says this here ▶ this video ). The port was released as an afterthought and quite a while after the Windows version), it wasn't publicized anywhere so naturally, people ignored it. From this experience he concluded that Linux isn't financially viable and/or there are no people interested in gaming on the platform. Now I'm not saying that Linux is financially viable, I don't know that. I just think that - a lot of people do pay for games on Linux (look at Humble Indie Bundles, look at the indie titles or the recent titles on Steam) - I know people who pay for games but are stuck on Windows because they play games. My guess is that these people would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if their games were playable under Linux.