http://www.esreality.com/post/2810435/john-ca...ellowship/

Well i have another opinion on this person.

He isn't the father of 3D engine as most people think. He does'nt look like a healthy human. He is megalomaniac. The great J. Carmack is a myth totaly made.

He had no influence on what made the succesful idsoftware games a success in their particular specificities. Doom art design and speed, Quake movement and overall design.

He was responsible for the low input response time in idtech3 engine. But then again Doom 3 mouse input is totaly buggy. He on the other hand is the one responsible for locking FPS to 60 in id engine. Showing us that he has no clue what was praised in the succesful idsoftware games. He never decoupled id engines from beeing FPS dependant. He also isnt responsible for the amasing mouse accel features we have nowadays that are FPS independant.

that low input engine is a big reason quake > *

otherwise i would of played a lot more unreal tournament '99 :P

good job it's only your "opinion" then, isn't it?

you are describing stuff that carmack never cared about in the first place. I dont think he gives a fuck about videogames and how to play them but rather the technology surrounding them.

Exactly, the guy is not a game designer. He's a programing genius who wrote revolutionary engines that are in many ways unparalleled today. There is no game as smooth as quake

So if Carmack is not the father of 3D engines... then who would be more appropriate for that title?

Look people did 3D before carmack, its pointless saying so and so did what as all these people helped each other along the way.

What matters is he did a lot of great stuff from start to finish when he was young and much of this was his own doing, its not like today where you can download unreal engine 4 and have all the good things done for you by default. He was one of the best engine/3D gurus around. IMO the best. Even Valve went to see John.

He was arguably the most influential game programmer in the 90's, which is kinda the decade where modern gaming really took off.
But even carmack owed some of his talents to other greats.

People like Tim Sweeney also deserve huge respect too, unlike carmack Epic's engine went on to really dominate and their engine/editor has been great since day 1.

Its too bad I never liked the unreal movement or mouse input.
I just can't play it.

Ah yes, Tim Sweeney.... The guy who wrote ZZT while Wolfenstein 3D was almost finished. And went on to (co-)write the Unreal engine which followed 2 years after Quake was released.
Of course the Unreal engine was a slight improvement to the idtech1 and even less of an improvement to idtech2 (which was also released for about a year). It then got blown away by idtech3. Which was fairly similar in quality as the UnrealEngine2 (which took an additional 3 years on top of the idtech3 release).

Only in recent years (from around 2004) the UnrealEngine gained popularity which is not due to it's quality but mainly due to it's noob-friendliness tools. Something which Carmack only found out near Rage... (That allowing artists to make stuff easily would improve the overall quality of what they made)

You seem to think that FPS started with Q3 vs Unreal.....

Carmack took the steps to get from PacMan -> Quake (through wolf3d and doom).
He didn't do that completely solo... But he was one of the first to really use "complex math for visuals" and certainly was/is the best at it.

Don't matter how elite you are IRL, on ESR someone will always think you're a c**t.

Love it!

At least he's as honored as Jamerio now

Carmack used gaming as a venue to explore newer ideas - AI, VR etc.

He was always a technology kind of a guy.
What I remember from him talking in 90s he was already obsessed with pushing the boundaries of technology even further. John's answer to questions about Quake? "Honestly, it's a tech demonstrator. Of course I had fun making the game, and entire design team had a blast with the ideas the engine presented to them, but apart from that, I'm still searching to go further in terms of 3D and transition to VR if it ever takes off". That was more or less his stance then. And entire gaming shtick demonstrated it all to well. All Quakes, Doom3, RAGE - it was Carmack's playground. When he realized that he hit the brick wall of money rationing by publishers, politicking and tech limits of "civilian" computers he decided to ditch it and go beyond computer games.

I don't blame him, and the entire progress of the genre only showed that he jumped ship in the best moment possible.

Carmack may or may not produce something revolutionary, there's an undeniable fact that he was a pioneer in many 3D computer technologies and gaming ideas. But that was long ago. Carmack has moved away from this and now he's in a totally different basket, so to speak. His silo of expertise translated well into Occulus and AI projects and he expanded from there.

He is one of tech greats of 90s and early 00s when we talk about game engines and ideas about 3D calculations and optimalizations. But that is long past.

Post what he realy created himself.