[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][size=2]Just wondering, color me naive. The guy used to be the "3D engine" God in the community back in the day. It's like everyone used to hang on his every word + presentation, even 3D hardware vendors.

But it seems like ID's relevance in the engine market has completely disappeared in last decade. Think of CryEngine and the countless other things developed by hundreds of other developers.

Carmack will always be an uber-programmer and highly respected, but my whole point is - is he still considered the 'top dog'?




by all means, ID seems to be marginalized in the 'engine world' right now..

[/font]

Of course his opinion is still relevant. Just by the nature of being such an expert in his field his opinion would be relevant, even if he stopped making games and dedicated his time to buildin dem rockets.

Technology stack today is a commodity.

For big publishers, such as EA, the entire cost of development (design, art, code, testing, packaging) is somewhere between 10-40% of entire cost of product. That's not even counting the franchises as a whole. It simply doesn't matter, revenue is completely unrelated to technology. By consequence, it doesn't matter.

[color=#1C2837][size=2]

By consequence, it doesn't matter.[/quote]
[color="#1C2837"][size=2]

[color=#1C2837][size=2]It does not matter in the "industry". And here in the US, all that matters is industry (which industrially fights to keep things that way).

Technology stack today is a commodity.

For big publishers, such as EA, the entire cost of development (design, art, code, testing, packaging) is somewhere between 10-40% of entire cost of product. That's not even counting the franchises as a whole. It simply doesn't matter, revenue is completely unrelated to technology. By consequence, it doesn't matter.

But stays that way because of middleware, does it not? I mean if they had to build an engine every time that would raise time and cost significantly. So I would think it does matter.

You're referring to his recent comments that DirectX is better than OpenGL? Listening to the conversation on IRC last night it would appear he made that comment a few years ago when DirectX10 was released. I think his opinion is still valid. Rage isn't exactly old technology.

Certainly I think we're at a point where the impact of his work is less visible -- back in the day iD was basically first to come with Wolf3D-style, DOOM-style and Quake-style engines. We haven't had any super-huge paradigm shifts in graphics (like say, if someone came up with a viable ray-tracing engine) only a steady and much less earth-shattering advancement. Still, though the advances that have happened may not be as in-your-face as they once were, there's still a lot of great technology being invented, and Carmack has been in that mix all along -- Think Mega-Texture.

Another part of this perception is that there are games which have usurped the "graphics crown" -- for example, Unreal 3 or crysis -- despite being, largely, a collection of clever hacks of fairly pedestrian technology. Not to knock that, as that's largely what real-time graphics is -- but just because something looks better, doesn't necessarily mean they're pushing the boundaries in any new direction. For example, practically no one is working on, or at least talking about, truly multi-core renderers. Carmack's mega-texture, while simple in concept actually is a fairly substantial new technology that fundamentally changes what is possible in games, as well as having benefits for artist's work on the production side (which is perhaps its biggest feature, from a business perspective, given that budgets now skew towards art production so heavily.)

Another thing is the hardware side -- we've reached the point of "good enough" for lack of a better term. We'll always be happy to eat up more resources, of course, but we've reached a point where we can scale our solutions down to current low-end hardware with acceptable results. From another angle, look at each generation of console we've had. Is the difference between the NES and SNES more pronounced than say, the difference between the Xbox and Xbox 360? I think it is -- that is, the delta between console generations becomes less pronounced with each passing generation of hardware, and this also comes simultaneously with consumers' expectations of progress further obscuring technical progress -- oppinion is less often now "Wow! Its amazing they can do this now!" to "Finally! Its about damn time!"

I don't think Carmack is any less influentialor interesting today than he was 10 or 15 years ago.

Carmack recently did some project work on the iPhone, a platform he had absolutely no experience with, and made one of the most graphically impressive apps on it. He knows how to play with the hardware well. If you care about performance, eeking out extra speed for your games, or if you care about graphics, he was the first to implement most of the major algorithms in in 3d graphics in ways that allow them to be run in realtime. That doesn't mean he's always right in every prediction he makes - but he'll certainly be alot more accurate then you or me.

He recently wrote something on Bethesda's blog, by the way, (id software was bought out by ZeniMax, the same people that owns Bethesda), if interesting in figuring out for yourself whether he's still relevant or not.

Right now if you asked me who I pay attention to in the graphics space my answer would be, in order; DICE, Epic, CryTech, iD.

So, yes, I think the things he says are still relevant although due to lower visibility these days I find the things coming out of other studios to be more intresting and directly impact my job more. Still if he didn't come out with intresting/useful/insightful things from time to time I wouldn't follow him on Twitter

But, honest, right now, I think the most impressive stuff is coming out of DICE; some might point at the recent UE video but, to quote a licence 'sure it looks nice, but it is running on an i9 with 3 fermi cards...' where as DICE have their stuff working on a PS3

Right now if you asked me who I pay attention to in the graphics space my answer would be, in order; DICE, Epic, CryTech, iD.

So, yes, I think the things he says are still relevant although due to lower visibility these days I find the things coming out of other studios to be more intresting and directly impact my job more. Still if he didn't come out with intresting/useful/insightful things from time to time I wouldn't follow him on Twitter

But, honest, right now, I think the most impressive stuff is coming out of DICE; some might point at the recent UE video but, to quote a licence 'sure it looks nice, but it is running on an i9 with 3 fermi cards...' where as DICE have their stuff working on a PS3

I'd say john carmack as an individual knows as much about everything related to graphics programming as anyone. I'd say John Carmack is one person that doesn't need constant deliverables to have his advice be pretty relevant. He's developing the best looking mobile engine, a really solid next gen game engine, and building rockets ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

As a team I would agree Dice is doing very well, but for an individual...