"The man on the edge of a knife" - John Carmack, milestones of achievements and contribution to the gaming industry

The figure of John Carmack in the computer games industry (hereinafter referred to as CI) is ambiguous. There are many rumors and scandals associated with his name. Many consider him an unpleasant person, and many also consider him a genius. These two properties, by the way, are not mutually exclusive. You can not be the most pleasant person to communicate, but at the same time do amazing things. In this publication, we do not consider all the merits of John before KI, do not discuss his debate with team members, and do not try to unearth the greatest number of scandals. Even the history of Id Software is not fully affected, only in passing touching the milestones passed by John.



Any developer with experience and anyone who devoted his entire life to the industry can be the subject of in-depth research, numerous publications, and even books. However, everyone understands, I hope, how much time is needed to gather all this information together, check and compare the facts, contact the defendants, and work out a clear presentation strategy. The more time passes, the more densely the shroud of history covers the years receding from us, from which knowledge could be extracted. It's one thing if you witnessed it, if the reader (or writer) represents the old stratum of players and the stratum of people interested. It is quite another thing if people who are not familiar with the games Wolf3D, Doom, Quake, and to whom the IDDQD and IDKFA letters do not speak, are familiar with the material. How to tell everything and not tire the reader? How to focus on the main thing? How not to spend weeks and months on the publication of a seemingly unnecessary article?

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The answer is simple. Choose the main thing that you need to convey to the reader. Choose a rod. The root cause. What prompted to write these lines. And I know exactly what I want at the moment. Tell about why I think John is a man on the edge of a knife. The man of the avant-garde. Risk experimenter and pioneer.

Optional prologue

In my youth, the era of the 286s, the players were very greedy for games. Each of them was something special, each of them was the subject of study. It was the era of "before the Internet", the period of black markets, the time of BBS, dial-up and five-inch floppy disks. The time when there could not be many games, and when there was enough time for their thorough study. And the point was not the scarcity of the range, but how this range penetrated into Russia. I could say “to the markets of Russia”, but that would be untrue. There were no markets. There were black markets, there were flea markets, there were “a friend brought a floppy disk”. To buy the game "in fair" there could be no question.



These difficulties made PC games something special for those who had PCs at home. They were often compared to Amiga or Sega games, trying to push out “their platform”, forgetting (and most often not knowing) that the “parent” of the games discussed was the same. That the developer immediately laid for his game several platforms. The same unforgettable Flashback was released on a monstrous number of platforms: Amiga, Mega Drive / Genesis, MS-DOS (floppy disk & CD-ROM), SNES, Mega-CD, Atari Jaguar (the list is not complete). But due to ignorance it turned out that in the dialogues there were phrases “cool game with PC”. I think Amizhniki only laugh while listening to this. And for good reason. An incredible number of games went on the PC with the Amiga, which was the main playing field.



Usually, acquaintances and friends had either a PC or a prefix, most often Spectrum. And I don’t remember people who would have had both. Perhaps somewhere alongside the division into PC-shnik and console gamers occurred. Gamepad and keyboard. Then the word “port with something” was not used, and there was no term “crooked porting”. The games Prince of Persia, Flashback were equally pleasing to the eye, both on the Amiga from Atari, and on the Sega from the PC.



Once a teenager, during the next of his many aimless walks, came across the Book House, not far from the Polytechnicheskaya metro station, and saw a girl behind the counter, who played an incredibly realistic game with an incredibly intelligent face. Blue walls, brown soldiers and golden cups. I remember well how she did it. With one finger. Incredibly long turning to the door, also gathering his thoughts for a long time, before pressing the "space" to open it. Slowness led to death. And the level began anew.



I wanted to exclaim “it’s necessary with three fingers, who can be the same!”, But I couldn’t overpower myself. Only continued to stand, fascinated looking at the pictures on the wooden walls. All that I remember about that moment can be described in two words - the thirst for possession. Play For me, then it was quite obvious to prefer computer games to girls. Looking back over the path and hand on hand, I see that nothing has changed. Girls are still beautiful and attractive, but the games are attractive too. As in 1992, in order to drag the game to yourself, neither flowers, nor long courtship are needed. Moreover, the incredibly convenient online service Steam is ready to set the best of them for a reasonable price.



In a voice quivering with desire, I asked if this game would be rewritten to me on a diskette, and ran home, since walking around the world with diskettes, I then had not yet become a habit. By an unfortunate coincidence, the floppy disk brought by me turned out to be a bat, and I ran home again, and again went to the Book House, in order to finally find out where our first milestone would begin, and my acquaintance with the works of John Carmack.

Milestone first

Many of us are well aware that Wolfenstein-3D was not the first "three-dimensional" game, and was not the first shooter in the history of games. Before him were Hovertank-3D and Catacomb 3-D . The interval between them was not large, but they differed strikingly. However, among the most noticeable and defining sources of the genre, in my opinion, it is worth pointing it out. Wolfenstein-3D. Those others were warm-ups. Those others were not so famous. This one has become like a good movie. Good graphics. Style. High-quality sound. Clear and expressive game play.







The well-known fact that John Carmack wrote his engine under the impression of the demo of the game engine - Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss . True, John’s version was much simpler. She had no floor and ceiling, did not have a height in space (stairs, rooms located at different levels and other elevation changes). Thus, the Wolfenstein-3D engine was not an innovation from the point of view of the engine, but became it from the point of view of a fast-running engine, and creating the first shooter in history that began to popularize a genre whose mechanics was focused on constant running around, shooting, collecting treasures and searching secrets.





How well you can see in Ultima there is already everything that will appear after a while in Wolfenstein-3D, and even in Doom, namely, elevation difference, change of gaze direction, texture-covered floor, shading of surfaces as the observer moves, etc. . It cannot be said that what was developed by Carmack was a revolution, but revolutionary was the advancement of the shooter as a genre forward. With a game that does not require super-power. Multiple enlarged image can be seen here (resolution 1586x880, size 1.003 kilobytes)



In terms of technology, the Wolfenstein-3D engine was pretty simple. He used sprites as objects and texture-covered walls that were the same sprites, but with a fixed position. The walls were strictly vertical in terms of height, and could be either parallel to each other or perpendicular (they could only form right angles of 90 degrees). There were no differences in lighting. But even such a meager set was enough to create an impressive picture. Rendering of visible and invisible space was carried out by reykasting.





Reykasting in action. The material is taken from Wikipedia, from a page dedicated to the Wolfenstein-3D engine.





Already in this game the possibility of custom modifications was laid. Having built in a text file a set of values ​​from special characters like “x” or “0”, you could get your own level, where the symbol “x”, for example, turned into a wall, and the symbol “0” into a barrel. I can not say that it is from here that the legs of the future Id Software approach grow in terms of the convenience of user modifications. But the fact remains that making the level for Wolfenstein-3D was possible, but for Prince of Persia or Dune 2 it was not possible. By the way, the year 1992 was very rich in games that laid the foundation for the future of the computer games industry.



Real "three-dimensional" walls, animated characters, objects, and hundreds of secret caches everywhere. Permanent firing, deep exploration (exploration), where it was unbearable to leave the level without finding that “last secret”. Memorable bosses. In this game there was everything you need in order to pass it and not to throw it to the last. At that time, the player had enough enemies protecting the treasures and the treasures themselves to keep moving forward.



During the game, of course, flashed thoughts that it would be great to have the same floor as the walls, the same ceiling as the walls, which had their own pattern. But alas. This was one of the limitations of this engine. The technology has just begun. As objects of saturation used sprites are always oriented to the player (later, a similar principle of sprite orientation became what is now called billboard's). Even these two tools, walls and sprites of saturation allowed to achieve a very impressive picture. And they did not bother. This did not cause rejection because we did not yet know any other 3D. We had nothing to compare.







As my friend, the developer, said:

- If we then saw what we see now ... probably our heads would have exploded.



In that dialogue, I allowed myself to disagree. And in the next milestone, I will tell you why. Let me tell you what I imagined the next game of John Carmack, and what it actually turned out to be. And also tell your thoughts about the flight of fantasy from a person, and the flight of fantasy in the industry of KI. The latter had a serious impact on my attitude to the industry and to games.

Milestone Two

It was quite obvious to me that the First - and will remain the first, becoming the flagship of the new genre, and that as a player await amazing discoveries and unforgettable impressions. However, for some time id Software fell out of my sight. Games until 1993 were more than enough to forget about their existence. Alone in the Dark, Flashback, Dune, Dune II, Star Control II, Wing Commander II. All this made these and subsequent years what can rightly be called the “era of the Golden Renaissance” in the world of CI. Each game was something new and unforgettable. And most importantly - it was an era of experimentation. The games of today and near do not lie with that abyss of mad experimentation by developers. The games of today are cautious and verified schemes from the point of view of game mechanics, exploiting long-forgotten truths, but not much advancing the industry forward. I will mention this separately at the end of the publication.







The theme must be said rather unsteady and risky to bring down the entire narrative. Therefore, we hasten to return in 1993, to John Carmack and the game that will go down in history as Doom. And if Wolfenstein-3D can be considered the grandfather of all shooters, then Doom is definitely a folder. And chronologically, and from the slang point of view. Even the term “folder” was first heard by me in the clubs where the Doom competitions were held.

“The ideas embodied in Wolfenstein-3D were further developed in it, reaching indecent proportions and generating a mirror effect. When a stone thrown into the water raises a wave, and circles from it diverge in different directions, affecting the most different corners of CI.







Differences from grandfather were quite significant. The floor and ceiling could now be of different heights, the sky could have been applied to the "polygons" of the ceiling, which had a parallax effect, it did not move with the level, creating an additional depth effect (the predecessor of future skyboxes with the same effect), the walls were no longer perpendicular and parallel to each other. Now they could be oriented to the player from any angle, and the rooms ceased to be rooms. You want a river under your feet - please. Want an oval room - no problem. Level elements have become mobile. Those. ceilings and floors could fall, it became possible to remotely open the door. The player’s swaying while driving was added, and the player stopped “driving in a tank” as it was in games before.



It was a real leap forward, especially within a year. True, there were limitations due to pseudo-three-dimensionality. The impossibility of having two volumes (rooms or passages) above each other. The levels of the structure still remained two-dimensional. Ideologically, they remained a system of rooms, rather than a building consisting of them. The walls had to be vertical, without the possibility of their inclination relative to the horizontal. The player and the characters, ideologically, as in Wolfenstein-3D, moved in the same plane, which made it impossible to jump over another character, or slip under it (in the case of flying opponents). The scale of the sprites and textures throughout the game should have been identical. Those. it was impossible to enhance the detail on a single quadrant, or use a long texture, or use a higher resolution texture.



With this, by the way, Ken Silverman's engine, called The Build or just Build , did an excellent job. A separate engine branch, using a similar ideology, but having significant differences from it. Which, by the way, gave us such hits as Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage. This is a topic for a separate and extremely lengthy conversation (meaning another publication, because this person deserves much more than an article).



Build, in my opinion, reached such heights that at the stage of the formation of three-dimensional graphics in games (fully three-dimensional games), beat three-dimensional games with a baseball bat, making them strong competition. However, as we well know, the industry adheres to fashion in product development. Therefore, if in the next year it will be fashionable to play in clown caps and stitch each other with leather whips, and for this they suddenly start paying a good price - you will all run around in games like clowns with whips. And strategists, and roleviki, and lovers of shooting - all without exception.



Note: My acquaintance with Doom took place much later. In the previous milestone, I mentioned the 286th car I had. By 93, the situation had not changed much. And in Doom, I played with friends. And before that there was a long story of one of them about how great the game is. I will omit the description of all epithets, wide-open eyes, and epileptically flapping arms that accompanied this story. In order not to bore you long gone, I will only note a couple of phrases:

- "You fall to the ground face, you lie and the monsters who killed you go around,"

- "You climb the stairs, go upstairs and see the edge of the floor, and there ... there is a monster and you see his legs."

Living fantasy, well fed by what I have seen in other games, drew me the following picture. The ladder in front of the nose, covered with yellow peeling paint, wonderful sprite hands, fingering up the crossbars, and many other details. Having drew myself in my head the devil knows what, and then seeing how it was implemented in Doom, I was disappointed. I waited for those “hands on the crossbars” and waited only after many years. Exactly, like other things that I then planned.

So I became acquainted with the term "unfulfilled expectations." Subsequently, this phenomenon will accompany more than one game, and not only for me. Large-scale projects that will stretch for several years will always be accompanied by public relations and advertising campaigns, which, coupled with proud marketing slogans, will often turn into a coffin cover for games with good and large nails in these covers. One of John’s latest projects (and I’m talking about Rage), for most people, will be the same unfulfilled expectation and Id Software fiasco. I have a different opinion, but we will not get ahead.



Not a lot of games were released on Doom Engine, which later became known as id Tech 1. To the surprise. Without the second parts, they can be listed on the fingers of one hand. Doom, Hexen, Heretic and Strife. Initially, the engines were referred to as the Doom Engine and Quake engine, but afterwards, they were “re-named”.



I must say that the list of games made on The Build engine was much more. And due to modifications including. 3D Realms in relation to players and other developers has always been more open, and to create their own date files (in the case of Doom engine WAD files) looked without frowning eyebrows. Subsequently, id Software revised its policy on open resources and open codes, which added to its even greater popularity, both among players and developers.



John never stopped at the achieved result. Thirst for new always pushed him forward. Experiments with new technologies and new technical solutions, this is what has accompanied him all his life, and that goes hand in hand with him today. The next milestone in his life journey was a fully three-dimensional engine, which replaced id Tech 1, and which opened the door to a new era.

It entailed global changes in the production of games, which in many cases were perceived by the audience with hostility. Remember, a little earlier I talked about a stone thrown into the water and the waves from it? The avant-garde genre of 3D-Action games like a horn announced to others the news that the industry has moved into the halls of three-dimensionality.

Third milestone

Any scribbler like me, and any player has his own preferences, and no doubt it leaves an imprint on the tone of the publication, on the commitment to one or another game. In this publication I will try to avoid my judgments and will try to rely on facts. Nevertheless, I reserve the right to be noted with personal notes in the epilogue to the article, and in the backdated notes that have already become commonplace.



I do not want to sparkle the already used and no less hackneyed stamps “the value is difficult to underestimate”, but in this case a breakthrough into real three-dimensionality really marked the beginning of a long migration of all types of developers to new, not yet developed lands and the beginning of a new era. The fact is that the 3D-Action genre from time immemorial has been the tip of a sword or sickle, with which developers are pushing ahead in time. This genre is the trendsetter for technological innovations, which then spread along the river beds of development into a wide variety of genres. And, of course, this is a genre that canonically loads the systems of your PC to the maximum.







Good or bad, but John Carmack with a sword with his head broke into the system of two-dimensional competitors, starting to strike them with a three-dimensional blade. The last of the opponents, the already mentioned The Build engine resisted to the last, but fell. Heroically. Struck by an angular low-poly piece of iron. Sprites with all their charm could not continue to compete with honest 3D. That it is now determined the demand and fashion.

The three-dimensional period of its formation and amazed and terrified. At the present three-dimensional levels, the ability to fence dozens of rooms on top of each other, protruding structures and uneven surfaces - all this was new. Sprites were no more. They were replaced by polygons with textures stretched over them. With the advent of polygonal models, other methods of lighting came, although the "fakes" (the illusions of what the engine didn’t really have) as was customary, and as is happening so far, since the times of games on the id Tech 1 engine, have always been present in games and will be present for a very long time. Because the concept and principle of illusion is much older. People will always deceive people.







What was the difference between the Quake engine and its pseudo-3D predecessor? Everybody. He was ideologically different. However, several features still migrated from id Tech 1 to the Quake engine. Namely, the binary partitioning of the space, or BSP-tree . This technique is still alive today. In the The Source engine, which presented the world with Half-life, and then Half-life 2. “Yes, so much water has flowed under the bridge!”, You will say. And you will be right. All that you now see around the legacy of the very same breakthrough.

All that changes in the current industry is the number of polygons (or triangles) in the frame, shaders, texture resolution, etc. That is, the quantity changes, but the quality does not change. Argued that such a leap in the industry will no longer be. And here I will express my doubt. It is unlikely that those who built Rome could have imagined that it would then be demolished by hordes of barbarians and the pharaohs could hardly have foreseen that their civilization would remain only in the form of pyramids and a lion with a broken nose, mummies and legends with books. Everything flows. Everything is changing. And immutability only in the constant variability of the world.



Let's go back to the Quake engine and what it brought to the industry. Polygonal geometry of levels and polygonal geometry of characters. Lightmap technology (light maps, or lite maps - I met both names and I don’t know which one is true), which was superimposed on textures with the second pass. The volumes of shadows and light were calculated automatically based on the sources of light placed in the editor. This technique is still widely used for baking static lighting. With the only exception that the size of this statics is increasing, the overlay algorithms are changing (afterwards, color lightmaps which changed black-and-white by the Radiocity method became popular).

In order to calculate the light on non-static objects (character, moving objects of saturation), dynamic sources of illumination and guro-shading ( shading by the Guro algorithm ) were used. Dynamic objects up to a certain point had no shadows, costing self-shadowing, and (or), previously drawn light and shade on textures.



Character models at the time left much to be desired in terms of their detail. A really good shading could only be obtained by increasing the tessellation of models, that is, with an increase in the number of polygons. At that time, three-dimensional graphics could not afford such luxury. Two-dimensional graphics were still a serious competitor to it, but fashion and progress did not leave the developers a choice. Do you want to sell well - do 3D. The quality of the visual image, by the way, is well illustrated by the following two screenshots. Fashionable three-dimensional graphics and old two-dimensional. The same year.









For me, the 1997 Redneck Rampage looks much richer than Quake 2, even with an eye to the fact that it is not three-dimensional. Hand on heart, without tears, I could not look at such a three-dimensionality even then. Probably from 1997, I fell ill with my retrograde. It seemed to me that two-dimensional graphics are better than such three-dimensional ones. Now, after almost 20 years, I am quite pleased with the three-dimensional splendor around me. But it's like wine. There is no need to impose your favorite variety on anyone, getting involved in drunken fights - it is better to drink it with those who like it, especially if you love, moreover, rural moonshine.



(The original of the first screenshot , and the original of the second (resolution 1280x512 ~ 230 kilobytes each)).



Another tradition introduced by id Software (apparently realizing that closure does not play into the hands of popularity) was the open architecture of the engine, which allowed users and developers to modify the engine. And then the developed id Software policy regarding its own engines, whose codes were opened as new technologies and new versions of engines were developed. I think that John Carmack played a significant role in the adoption of such a course. He himself liked to remake, modify and modify.



This openness has allowed many developers to make a number of modifications based on the Quake engine, including completely independent products. There is no secret for anyone that the Source engine, which is widely known in our time, is created based on the Quake engine. That is, in the basics of its Source has a code developed in id Software. According to unconfirmed information, John Carmack spoke very enthusiastically about Half-life and how the engine was modified. That is, was impressed.



Subsequently, some of those developers that began with modifications turned into serious developers. One such example would be Ritual Entertainment. Starting with the Quake add-on, she got to such a famous game as SiN.

The fourth and fifth milestone

The fourth and fifth milestones developed an already existing engine and were called id Tech 2 and id Tech 3, respectively. I combined these milestones together because the second version of the engine (Quake II engine) and the third version (Quake III engine) developed the ideas already embedded in them, increased only the tempo and detail, the bones remained the same. However, the ideology of the engine components remained the same. Fundamental technological leaps were not planned. More advanced shaders, special effects or the import of heavier models in terms of polygonage in the engine - did not pull on a dash or a breakthrough.



It was still a geometry based on a BSP tree. Advanced lightmaps based on the Radiocity method have appeared. They not only baked static light on the level geometry, but also took care of the illumination of the models, telling the dynamic model how and where it should be illuminated. In id Tech 2 color lighting first appeared, which then became the gold standard for most games.



To store characters and objects id Tech 3 uses three-dimensional models of MD3 format. The format is the successor to the earlier format used in the id Tech 2 engine. The format uses vertex (vertex) animation. The animation capabilities in MD3 exceeded the earlier MD2, since the animator could use any number of frames per second he needed to animate his models, while MD2 had a significant limitation of 10 frames per second. This made it possible to create smoother animations, including more global ones.

Another improvement in MD3 was the partitioning of models into separate objects. That is, the character’s head, arms, and body could move independently of each other, as well as have their own unique textures. The models were still covered by the Guro method, the levels were still covered with static lighting maps.



It is quite obvious that the engine only increased its volumes, reaching its critical mass and peak of its popularity. In global terms, he did not offer anything new, being, nevertheless, a convenient and powerful tool. At that time, id Tech 3 had only two serious competitors. Unreal Engine and Lithtech .

Milestone Six

At a certain point, the games reached a tipping point. Defined this moment again, John Carmack. He could not sit still. And he decided to take a new step. Use transition technology to increase the visible detail of objects while maintaining or even minimizing (if necessary) polygonal meshes. The time has come for a new model of unified lighting and shadowing based on normal maps (unified lighting and shadowing model & normal maps). One can talk about unbearably black shadows, about the plastic luster of those years, but it’s pointless to deny that this technology was used for the first time and to its fullest extent in Doom 3. Again and for the umpteenth time, John Carmack and his brainchild were ahead of the rest.









, , . , . , Doom 3. , , , .



Jokes jokes, grunts grumbling, but is it possible now to imagine a shooter without normal maps? The technology, which has been a long time carrier in a number of games, still remains transitional and auxiliary. Polygonal mesh detailing still needs additional granularity due to normal maps. In the yard in 2014. Doom 3 was released in 2004. Technology for ten years! And she is very much alive. Shaders change, shaders imitate physical materials appear. But we still sit on what was developed a long time ago.



By the standards of our industry, a period of ten years is not small. 10 years passed from the 1982 godlessly old four-color Paratrooper on a PC to the first pseudo-three-dimensional PC game (Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992), and the first real 3D game was 14 years old (Quake was released in 1996). See for yourself how significant a segment of 10 years is. And keep in mind that the development of Doom 3 has been going on for four (years). This means that as early as 2000, John Carmack knew what to do, and knew which technologies would be used. If not exactly, in general, at least.



In my understanding, even with disagreement with any decisions or choice of technology, John Carmack was always at the forefront. Always been in the forefront of game developers. That is why I called this publication "At the edge of a knife." This is not an exaggeration for wit, but practically a statement of fact clothed in a spectacular literary expression.



In 2004, at the same time when Doom 3 was released, Half-life 2 came out. Unlike Carmack's brainchild, HL2 uses a combined technology for bump mapping and instead of using normal maps as a carrier technology, it uses photo-textures with bump support ( disabling which does not greatly affect the picture), and also increases the polygons on the characters. As a result, the geometry of the levels remains the same and works as before on the basis of the BSP-tree, but the skillfully worked light makes the picture as accurate as possible. All this is “multiplied” with realistic water, with photo-realistic textures, decal shaders, and special effects with different blending modes.

In conjunction with the characters in which at least 5,000 thousand HL2 triangles are concentrated, there is no need for normal maps to simulate the volume of characters, since volume is already there. Together with the above-mentioned photo-textures it turns out more than worthy rivalry. Which offered the players an alternative solution to the image in games. Amazing event.



As a result, two products appear on the market that technologically look like day and night. The picture differs fundamentally. Players are divided into two camps, and as is often the case, they begin to shower opponents with mud, pushing forward the dignity of their favorites, skillfully or ineptly obscuring their shortcomings.



According to the mind - you need to take and rejoice. According to the mind - two different games are better than two identical. But, alas, the player in the mass (and generally the consumer) has never been so clever as to allow two entities to exist in the same universe without constant comparisons. So any “sandbox with typewriters” is compared to Grand Theft Auto. And any shooter is measured by “crises”.

Carmack's brainchild is being criticized. Normal maps as a carrier technology make the picture somewhat unreal and plastic. The black shadows of Doom 3 are contrasted with the practically photographic chiaroscuro Half-life 2. Many are not touched by the fact that Carmack's light is dynamic. What is he moving. In real time.









Half-life 2 . , Doom 3, , -. : FarCry, Chronicles of Riddik, UT2004. . , FarCry -, — . . . . . … .



After the battle, Doom 3 and Half-life 2 on the battlefield were “pulled up” by the other developers. The Titans have already held their own demonstrative battles, each flashed its own strengths and weaknesses. Those who came after could only choose what they like and comb. Over time, shaders were refined, the technology got its development. In one year, the gaming industry received two different solutions for the coming years. The ability to combine new and old technology. A cavalcade of hot-haired developers has entered the battle for the minds and hearts of the players.



His ideas, as in other cases, found implementation in other engines. In the form of combined technologies. The results of which we now see everywhere. Literally everywhere. Bare photo-textures are not so frequent. Most often these are materials. Complex shaders using diffuse textures, normal maps, specular maps, glow maps, etc. Those.all that Carmack used, but in a more advanced and combed way.



Note: Today I can take almost any engine, for example, Unity3D, and putting the sun on the light source on the stage, get those very “shadows” for the whole scene. I can cover the world with thousands of triangles covered in hundreds of textures with normal maps. This is not the next-generation of technology (next-generation of technology), this is a budget engine, with a budget price calculated for both PC and mobile applications. Today it's all prose of the day. And I have this thanks to that breakthrough, that technological leap.



Where did John go? Where did he go next? Virtually all were witnesses of the next milestone of his work. Since these events are the deeds of today, and not the tales of bearded history. The term "mega-texture" heard by many. Also, many people know that the word “mega-texture” is often used as a common noun, almost as a strong swear word. Is it so?

Milestone 7 - final

Working in one of the Russian offices on the production of another domestic shooter, we observed the hype associated with the technology of mega-textures. As developers and players, we very closely followed what was happening in the industry, because each project had to contain some kind of modern little thing. In the end, you need to have something that can be expanded in a press release? The technology developed by Carmack caused tooth gnashing. Video clips where artists of id Software covered geometry with brushes and any number of textures that a soul could wish for, provoked fierce envy.



And there was something to envy. The technology meant working with ANY amount of textures, with the support of normal maps of these textures in a convenient editor, where the artist ANYTHING was not limited. Since In the end, all this canvas, written by them, this monstrous mega-texture was cut into multiple fragments, which would then be loaded as ordinary textures, with which we cover the geometry and objects. I can not remember the exact year of the appearance of these videos with all the desire, and I'm very afraid of lying.









In my opinion, for the first time in the history of id Software, the game developed in their womb received a competent picture. Really charming and stylish. Because I mostly regard their games before Rage as shooters (we read wonderful shooters), but not as finished, let alone artistic works.



I will only add that, as an artist, I have never worked in domestic offices, being provided with convenient domestic tools. He was always wretched and always had incredible crutches, a pack of bugs and restrictions that he had to fight. Never have our developers cared about the convenience of working with the engine, and the experience of others was never a pointer to them. Everybody invented their own wheels. Aliens - no one ever touched. Therefore, this technology seemed not just promising. She seemed a miracle.



The game certainly raspiaril. Perhaps even excessively. A beautiful game for consoles! Stable frame rate! Frame rate above possible! There were no slogans. And when the time came, the “syndrome of unfulfilled expectations” multiplied by the “sour start” worked in all its glory. Where sour or cranberry we call a lot of bugs associated with visualization. What was good for consoles turned out to be unstable on thousands of possible PC configurations. Particularly unlucky owners of ATI video cards. They got more bugs than the lucky owners of NVIDIA cards. What was not noticeable on consoles, namely the “texture LOD”, or the fast loading of higher-quality textures when turning a character — looked awful on the PC. Not to mention the fact that the unique world "weighed" about 25 gigabytes, which was extremely unusual for the player.

And even with such layouts, textures in a number of places, and when approached, looked soapy. If you imagine for a second that the whole world of Rage is covered with 1024x1024 textures and imagine that almost the entire distribution of the game is cache textures (about 20 gigabytes), then returning HD quality (resolution textures of 2048x2048) to the game would turn it into 80 gigabytes on hard drive. The event would be unprecedented. And did our cars handle such a set of textures?



The big question.







Similar phenomena in the gaming industry has not yet been. But it all turned out to be a crumpled sluggish start and anger of the players. I must say that gaming journalism is much softer to the game. On the same Metacritic, 30 out of 32 publications put the game high marks in the region of 78 points out of 100. Russian Absolute Games has naturally distinguished itself. He very eloquently illustrated the general tendency to measure the quality of games by the resolution of textures, and not by their artistic value. What clearly says "original filed" review .



Man is cruel by nature. When not satisfied. A gamer, he seems to be a man too. And if he does not get what he needs - he begins to smash everything around no worse than English football fans. The reasons for the pogroms were. The game, focused on the console has all the characteristic of their diseases. You can start and end with invisible "blockers" that block the player's path to those areas where he can climb. Those. the situation where you can jump on one stone is quite real, but not on the other one nearby. The sandbox was miniature. She was immediately compared to GTA. The comparison is not in favor of Rage. Is it legitimate? I do not think. The word "sandbox on wheels" does not mean that the game was focused on the GTA. But didn’t PR help? The world of Rage is godlessly beautiful, but also godlessly static. Against the background of other games where physics plays an important role in increasing interactivity at the level - Rage loses great. Etc. Disadvantages can be found quite a few. But the merits are not enough. I think that is why the ratings of world gaming journalism were so high. The player with them, for the most part, turned out to be - do not agree.



As in the case of the other works of John Carmack, I see another breakthrough in this game. Another advance of time. The next technology, which will be used later, will be used partially or will become the cornerstone of future technologies in the gaming industry world. No one bothers to use this principle, for example, but in the form of a hybrid technology. No one bothers to "paint" in this way, worlds consisting of cloned buildings. No one bothers to use normal physics in games of the Rage class.



Rage gave players something more than another game from id Software, not a classic id shooter in the sense of John Carmack. He gave the players a completely unique world. And in this case, the phrases from the press releases about a world that is completely unique - true. For once.

Epilogue

John Carmack was on the front line to promote the 3D-Action genre at least five times:

• For the first time with what will be marked in history as the first shooter, of those that are without exaggeration considered the progenitors of the genre.
• The second time with the well-known on the whole planet shooter Doom, which popularized the shooters, as a genre.
• For the third time, with the first truly 3D Quake shooter.
• For the fourth time with another technological breakthrough and the flagship of the new technologies widely used today (Doom 3).
• And for the fifth time, the last at the moment, with technology, which for the first time in the history of CI gave artists the opportunity to create a first, three-dimensional, truly unique and non-repeating world.

The history of his latest invention has not yet been added. The size of games using mega-textures is outrageous, according to the players. The quality of the textures is outrageously soapy, in their opinion. You can not see the grains of sand in an optical sight, soap interferes. So just around the corner increase HDD spaces. It means that the increase in GPU capacity is not far off.



And if you look back at the history of CI, then you should not look for this failure of Carmack's invention. Smart people and smart companies will surely adopt this technology, modify it or, as it has been done many times already, on the basis of the discovery, hybrid technology. John Carmack's contribution to the gaming industry is still weighing.



Once upon a time, a person who would say that soon in each game character would have 10 thousand triangles would laugh at him, now this is reality, if not to say, ordinariness. Then why is it so difficult to imagine a world consisting of mega-textures, a much larger image than is used in games now? World written by artists?

Once a man sitting on a horse could laugh, and did it, looking at the first self-propelled mechanism. Now we live in the world to the eyeballs of clogged smoke machines, where the movement of horsemen on the streets is more likely to cause curiosity and attention than the rumble of another gasoline car.



PS

It would seem that after such a crushing fiasco, the future of technology and games on the id Tech 5 engine is a big question. But here on the horizon, the figure of BJ Blazkowicz (BJ Blazkowicz) appeared armed, if not strange, with id Tech 5 rifles . For five years, not a word, not in spirit, but it has returned. And how did you come back? With fanfare and fanfare, effectively reviving the web-covered series. Isn't it symbolic? Years pass, technologies change, oculuses rift, and Blazhkovich always remains Blazhkovich.

Backdating notes

In order to reduce visible text, in order to reduce the number of panic attacks and text-based fear, "Notes in hindsight" are brought into a separate bunker hidden from uninteresting eyes. The current number of notes is 8 , the last edit was made on June 20, 2013 at 20:52 MSK .