

Interview with John Carmack (on Rage, id Software) [video] - kenshi
http://www.cdaction.pl/news-7673/john-carmack-opowiada-o-rage---pol-godziny-goracego-materialu-prosto-ze-studia-id-software.html

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davi
"unlimited numbers of 128,000 x 128,000 pixel textures, terabytes of source
data" (part1, 3:33)

rare to hear about images this large in routine use. cool.

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on id's experience with developing for multiple platforms at once: build up in
house expertise; have a build system that does automatic tests against each
platform at once (part2, ~7:30)

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on the future of gaming, and the cloud: imagines a 100 petabyte data store, a
World of Warcraft-sized texture, people interacting with it using consoles
that have no optical media, just an ethernet port (part3, 6:45)

~~~
timdorr
The images themselves aren't that large, but are procedurally generated from
sprites/stamps. But it's still damn impressive that they can keep up with that
number of stampings at that scale. It's even more impressive when you figure
they can do it in 1/60th of a second.

~~~
modeless
The images aren't procedurally generated; they really are that large. Stamping
is just an easy way for artists to generate an image that large; the stamps
are baked into the texture as soon as the artist places them, and afterward
the artist can go back and individually edit every pixel.

Obviously you can't ship an image that large on a DVD, so there's a lot of
compression that has to happen, and a lot of that data will eventually just
get thrown out. I believe id is using a system that uses recorded player
sessions to figure out which parts of the texture are likely to be shown on-
screen in actual gameplay.

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pistoriusp
Damnit, that's cool.

I recently read "Masters of Doom." It's the "stories" of John Carmack and John
Romero. I enjoyed it thoroughly and recommend it highly.

In the book they describe a "android like hum" that Carmack makes when he
talks. I'm wondering if this is the "Iiiiii" noise that he makes in this
video.

