

John Carmack Interview - shawndumas
http://www.nowgamer.com/print/feature/1308

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jakelear
I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Carmack recently (here's the photo
proof: <http://jacoblear.com/carmack.jpg> ) and was able to listen to him talk
casually, as opposed to in an interview or speaking event. He doesn't turn his
brilliance on and off, it's there all the time.

When I was a kid, I wanted to do 2 things, make video games and go to space.
Here we have a man who is a legend in the games industry, and also started a
company sending rockets into space. He's awesome.

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johnyzee
"I just turned 40 and I can be programming for another 40 years; there’s a lot
yet to do!"

I love John Carmack.

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tszming
"...At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting
to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device.
But when I asked how many peple had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android
store, there was a big difference. You’re just not making money in the Android
space as you are in the iOS space."

Interesting

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TillE
But...are there _any_ $20+ games on the Android market? Are there any $20+
iPhone games, for that matter?

People will accept significantly higher prices for iPad games, because there's
a different class of games that can be played on a tablet device. A phone's
too small.

There's a bit of a catch-22 going on here in general, where Android users are
spending less money on apps because there are fewer really good apps
available. I'm one person who owns multiple devices. But I wind up spending
lots of money on iOS because 1) there's plenty of good stuff, and 2) the app
store is nicely designed to make me buy things.

~~~
pmh
The question he asked at Quakecon 2010 was actually "who has spent at least
$20 on the Android app store?"[1], not just on a single game. Your catch-22
scenario still holds, though I think the quantity and quality of free apps in
the Android app store has also raised the bar for pay apps.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SdC8LVODY&feature=player_detailpage#t=542s)

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seanalltogether
I'm always happy to hear when developers optimize for refresh rate over
graphical complexity, especially if competitive play will be involved.

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kenjackson
Do you think 60Hz is the right rate? Just seems like such a huge jump over 30.
Does 48 make more sense?

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chipsy
In competitive play it makes a big difference.

Each frame of a 60Hz game spans 16.66ms, while in a 30Hz game it's 33.33ms.
Depending on how well the engine is coded, there will be at least one frame of
latency between input and reactions, and maybe more. So we could be looking at
the difference between 33 and 66 milliseconds of input latency, at least. This
doesn't even consider latency from input to the computer, or from the computer
to the display.

Now consider that we _react_ to events within about 200-300ms. 66ms of latency
on top is going slow things down considerably, and when games are poorly coded
and dump a few additional frames on top - which could happen because of
propagation through events and subsystems, network latency, or animation
concerns - the control starts to feel "wrong" in a hard-to-identify way.

~~~
barrettcolin
Digital Foundry has a series of interesting articles about measuring input lag
in console games; I think this is the first:
[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-
factor-...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-
article)

~~~
qrybam
Interesting article. I'm not much of a console gamer (not much of a gamer
anymore in general) but those figures are horrifying for a PC gamer to look
at! 100-150ms lag (not counting any network lag on-top) would be pretty hard
to swallow for me, but I'm biased and have a bit of a purest view on these
things. I guess the most important thing is that you have fun - in which case,
if the game achieves this but lags a bit, who cares?

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aresant
This is why Carmack keeps shipping incredible products:

"I am more excited about what I’m doing and what I’m working on than ever
before."

Great advice to those of us building companies, along the lines of the "do
something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" quote banging
around here recently

