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QuakeCon 2012 - John Carmack Keynote

QuakeCon Official

11K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 6 people: 6 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2012 to 2018.
  • Presented by John Carmack
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 14 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

445K views14 years ago6 recommendations

Game developmentSystems programmingUnity, Unreal and GodotRenderingPerformance and optimization

John Carmack delivers a wide-ranging keynote on software engineering, static analysis, game engines, Linux support, and early VR development.

John Carmack delivers his keynote at QuakeCon 2012.

Why it's here

6 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Highly recommended as an engaging and deeply technical talk by John Carmack covering graphics, VR, and software engineering.

SonOfLiliton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

…rest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): link to this video…

hotwireon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - link QuakeCon 2012 - link to this video I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. link

jcron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What happened to Augmented Reality?”

Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it. Start Here: link to this video You might also enjoy: link

wh-uwson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Is it possible to create a world like in the movie Matrix?”

John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year link to this video

SonOfLiliton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: link to this video But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew). I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

ramidarigazon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]”

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. link to this video link link

erikbyeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Id Software Programming Principles”

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers wen…

adamorson Hacker News • Disputes

On “John Carmack Argues Against Native Linux Games”

The thing about Carmack and Linux is, that everything he says is based mostly on the QuakeLive port id did a while back (edit: he says this here link to this video ). The port was released as an afterthought and quite a while after the Windows version), it wasn't publicized anywhere so naturally, people ignored it. From this experience he concluded that Linux isn't financially viable and/or there are no people interested in gaming on the platform. Now I'm not saying that Linux is financially viable, I don't know that. I just think that - a lot of people do pay for games on Linux (look at Humble Indie Bundles, look at the indie titles or the recent titles on Steam) - I know people who pay for games but…

adamorson Hacker News • Disputes

On “John Carmack Argues Against Native Linux Games”

There is an offical, native Linux client that no one knows about. It was released in 2009. And because no one actually bothered with it, he concluded that the WHOLE platform is disinterested. link to this video

Arjunaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering”

Interesting comments on Mac and Linux platforms 1: "Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms. I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early. But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongl…

Arjunaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Beta Late Than Never (Steam Linux Beta)”

"It's about time a major player got behind Linux ..." What about id Software? They have a long-standing history of support for the platform, including John Carmack's philosophy and advocation of OSS that has driven his contribution of id Software game engine source code to the community, up to and including id Tech 4. He even cares so deeply about the topic that he worked to keep id Tech 5 free from the shackles of proprietary code, because he wants to eventually release it as open source. He said (italic emphasis is mine): "'Do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this?' And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open…

Arjunaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “LLVM and Clang 3.2 released”

For those that follow game development, John Carmack had this to say at QuakeCon 2012: "But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there." 1 1 link to this video

Arjunaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering (2012)”

Previous discussion: link Here is the link to the transcribed portion of the talk (starting at 00h:30m:02s): link to this video

Arjunaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Quake Live goes native and drops OS X, Linux”

…ket, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality." 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video -- Based on John's comments regarding Linux, they just are not seeing the return to make it a priority. He mentions that Mac does better than Linux, but perhaps not enough, again, to be a priority.…

fitzwatermellowon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Is there ever a reason to use ActiveX?”

I suggest parrying their ActiveX thrust with a counter-attack argument for NaCl. link If you have to do something inside a browser, Native Client is much more interesting as something that started out as a really pretty darn clever x86 hack in the way that they could sandbox all of this in user mode interestingly. It's now dynamic recompilation, but something that you program in C or C++ and it compiles down to something that's going to be not your -O4 optimization level for completely native code but pretty damn close to native code. You could do all of your evil pointer chasings, and whatever you want to do as a to-the-metal game developer. -John Carmack, OculusVR 1 1 link to this video

tdicolaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “OnLive Game Service Shutdown, Sony Acquirer”

…ess models that doomed it from the start? IMHO game streaming is pretty much doomed if the future of gaming is ultra low latency and high framerates for virtual reality. There's just no way a streamed game could work with Occulus Rift, etc. and have low enough input and display latency to be believable. edit: I think it was his 2012 QuakeCon talk: link to this video…