Carmack's QuakeCon keynote 2013

[Orangy Tang]

brb watching 3h of a guy talking on stage...

[ThetaReactor]

I've always liked him. Not just because he's a genius, but because he tends to ignore the politics and trends of the industry. He doesn't shoot his mouth off like Cliffy or Fish or make absurd promises like Molyneux. He's a hardcore nerd, and I'm glad he gets to play with Bethesda's money, even if the games aren't always as good as the tech underneath.

That said, I haven't watched the vid yet, so forgive me if he's making an ass of himself...

[Firefox]

A good, absorbing talk as always. Perhaps not anything really surprising this year, but it's good to see him getting some Haskell and Scheme programming in as well as his usual cutting-edge graphics stuff and hear his thoughts on that.

Was it me or did one of the people with questions near the end sound like Jeri Ellsworth? (Asking about gaming input devices.)

[Istar]

Agreed with most of what he said, aside from the inevitability of always-on Kinect watching the living-room; I just think an optical sensor is never going to sit well with people. Voice, yes - systems which listen for commands and perform functions in response ("Hudson - lights on 50 percent, heating 17 degrees, tv on, channel 7, volume 15") but a camera into your living space observing activity, counting people, possibly relaying or using that data against you in some way - nope, not gonna happen.

[sdetoni]

Agreed with most of what he said, aside from the inevitability of always-on Kinect watching the living-room; I just think an optical sensor is never going to sit well with people. Voice, yes - systems which listen for commands and perform functions in response ("Hudson - lights on 50 percent, heating 17 degrees, tv on, channel 7, volume 15") but a camera into your living space observing activity, counting people, possibly relaying or using that data against you in some way - nope, not gonna happen.

"Open the pod bay door HAL"

*ISS OFF DAVE!

[Orangy Tang]

Having watched the whole lot the line that really stuck with me was "If it's syntactically valid, it *will* appear in your codebase at some point".

Also it may just be me but he seems to be shifting more towards a focus on robustness and iteration time over fancy tricks and hacks. I wonder how much of that is driven by the overly long Rage development time, or if he just thinks that the next gen is powerful enough that he's more comfortable 'wasting' some computing resources in making things smoother elsewhere.

[Deckard]

Super zombie thread resurrect -

Carmack has left FB- he didnt seem like a happy bunny a few months ago -

"We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover."

Hopefully onto bigger and better....