GI: At QuakeCon two years ago, you were very adamant during your keynote about not being too thrilled about developing for multi-core systems. Not just specifically with PCs, but also the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now that you’ve been working with both of them since then, have your thoughts changed at all?

Carmack: Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that it’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, it’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. It’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this. We’re going to be incentivized, obviously, to take advantage of the system, because everybody’s going to be doing that. It’s not like anyone’s going to say that it’s impossible to do. People tend to look at it from the up side. It gives you this many more flops and it gives you this much more power to do that. But you have to recognize that there is another edge to that sword, and you will suffer in some ways for dealing with this. I don’t have any expectation that anytime soon, a massive breakthrough will occur that will make parallel programming much easier. It’s been an active research project for many years. Better tools will help and somewhat better programming methodologies will help. One of the big problems with modern game development with CC++ languages is that your junior programmer who’s supposed to be over there working on how the pistol works can’t have one tiny little erase condition that interacts with the background thread doing something. I do sweat about the fragility of what we do with the large-scale software stuff with multiple programmers developing on things, and adding multi-core development makes it much scarier and much worse in that regard.

So we’re dealing with it, but it’s an aspect of the landscape that obviously would have been better if we would have been able to get more gigahertz in a processor core. But life didn’t turn out like that, and we have to just take the best advantage with it.


GI: You talked a lot about the Xbox 360. What are your thoughts on the PlayStation 3 now that you’ve had more time on it?


Carmack: We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we’re not going to do much until we’re at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We’ll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It’s not something we’re going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, let’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3’s strengths. I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking it’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and it’s now looking like it might not be. I’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly--they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint.

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Oh no, Carmack HATES PS3!!!

Seriously though, Carmack is a genius and if he' s saying it' s bad for him it must be doubly bad for other developers.

As a ps3 fanboy i get offended by this statement however i must admit that it' s probably true and 360 owns my fav ps3.

I think it might be easier for junior coders to get trained in creating software for the hardware, instead of having the hardware-manufacturers build hardware wich will fit the scripts the junior-coders can use to alter pistol scenarios on.
Atleast that' s how it used to be, when people were creating their own code-libraries.

ID Software can hire Raven to do their game for them as they did for the PS2. Or maybe they should hire the ones in Sega wich were saying that programming on PS3, compared to programming on PS2 made them jump with joy. :-/

If Cell is wrong in PS3, it would be much more interesting if he had suggested a better alternative instead of only complaining as he allways have done.

I think it might be easier for junior coders to get trained in creating software for the hardware, instead of having the hardware-manufacturers build hardware wich will fit the scripts the junior-coders can use to alter pistol scenarios on.
Atleast that' s how it used to be, when people were creating their own code-libraries.

No, the coders are trained, its just the environment is getting more complex and intertwined to the point of erasing 1 line of code (for something as small as a pistol) wreaks havoc on the rest of the program. This is true not for only the PS3 but the 360 as well.

Truthfully Im glad. Now developers cant be lazy and leave hundereds of holes in the code that " probably wont" cause a problem, because by my standards when I pay $60 for a game " probably" isnt good enough.

it would be much more interesting if he had suggested a better alternative instead of only complaining as he allways have done.

You do know who he is right? I mean, how can you question the God that created Quake(except4), DOOM, and Wolfenstein?!?! Quake 3 is one of the top 5 FPS' s of all time.

On a not so related note but involving Quake, has anything been said about the rumoured 512mb memory card for 360? I would love to see the Quakes as arcade games.

ORIGINAL: QuezcatoL

As a ps3 fanboy i get offended by this statement however i must admit that it' s probably true and 360 owns my fav ps3.

QFT

Well hes used to develop for the PC where they rely much more on the GPU than the CPU and obviously the PS3 its a machine based around the CPU, they can even skin geometry on the SPE´s rather than the vertex programs. Carmack is a GPU guy so i unserstan why he doesnt like the way the PS3 its made and he likes the 360, he even said once that he could make an awesome game with a very very poor CPU so long he has an awesome GPU.

I think it might be easier for junior coders to get trained in creating software for the hardware, instead of having the hardware-manufacturers build hardware wich will fit the scripts the junior-coders can use to alter pistol scenarios on.
Atleast that' s how it used to be, when people were creating their own code-libraries.

ID Software can hire Raven to do their game for them as they did for the PS2. Or maybe they should hire the ones in Sega wich were saying that programming on PS3, compared to programming on PS2 made them jump with joy. :-/

If Cell is wrong in PS3, it would be much more interesting if he had suggested a better alternative instead of only complaining as he allways have done.

The programers didn' t have a say in CELL, Sony wanted to do the CELL project and they wanted to put them in the PS3. Carmack is saying that a symmetric cpu as opposed to an asymmetric cpu would have been better. I don' t really think he' s complaining for the sake of complaining, rather i think he wants attention by saying what everyone already knows.

As a ps3 fanboy i get offended by this statement however i must admit that it' s probably true and 360 owns my fav ps3.

Oh no, all the 360 hating has gone to his head!

Carmack cleans toilets in Heaven, so his word is Golden.

.....i guess Carmack' s long tradition of making the best games available for the Playstation platform is now at an end...

ORIGINAL: fernandino

Well hes used to develop for the PC where they rely much more on the GPU than the CPU and obviously the PS3 its a machine based around the CPU, they can even skin geometry on the SPE´s rather than the vertex programs. Carmack is a GPU guy so i unserstan why he doesnt like the way the PS3 its made and he likes the 360, he even said once that he could make an awesome game with a very very poor CPU so long he has an awesome GPU.

lawl, you don' t know what you' re talking about. nt though

On a not so related note but involving Quake, has anything been said about the rumoured 512mb memory card for 360? I would love to see the Quakes as arcade games.

Nope, nothing since the original rumour as far as I know.

I personally don' t care if I get Carmack' s games on the PS3, but then again I' m not a big fan of frag-fest games. It is true that the cell is more complicated to use, but it definitely has a lot of promise if programmers sink their teeth into it.

I loved wolfenstein, I played that game when it first came out, same goes for doom, and quake. After that, I believe people made better FPS games than he did. With the exception of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I' m not saying the others were bad games, but I' ve always prefered UT as a deathmatch game to the Quakes. I personally see more merit in the engines he produces rather than the games. I' ve played FPS all my life, and his latest creations, particularly Quake 4 havent really introduced anything I havent played before.

That wasnt the point,the point is that Carmack is prob the most skilled programmer in our industry and the biggest geeks,he doesnt talk shit.

But yeah,i could live without his games also.

Even though he created FPS and quake+doom gaved the 3d engine period a rocket start.

.....i guess Carmack' s long tradition of making the best games available for the Playstation platform is now at an end...

I think your sarcasm sums up the relevance to the market

That wasnt the point,the point is that Carmack is prob the most skilled programmer in our industry and the biggest geeks,he doesnt talk shit.

But yeah,i could live without his games also.

Even though he created FPS and quake+doom gaved the 3d engine period a rocket start.

Carmack is skilled with C, no doubt about it, and credited for coming up with the first comercial use of megatexturing-routine.
But I think there are alot of people who is more skilled than him as a programmer, perhaps not on a PC with all C++ libraries available, buit in the console industry, i think there are alot of people who might be better.

Carmack might also not be as neutral as he seems, afterall he were on the board wich decided how XBox were going to be designed. :-/
Not saying that he' s putting Sony in a bad light for that reason, just mentioning it. :-/

Will be interesting to see what they manage to do on Cell, but it' s exclusives wich will really shine this generation I believe. :)