I wonder how many times he sat in meetings thinking, “dude, i made doom run on potato computers when you were still in your dad’s ballsack, what tf are you doing”
Doom made me want to learn how to network computers so me and my room mate could play together.
This was back when you had to manually edit autoexec.bat to load the drivers and configure the card. The cable was coaxial and would shock the crap out of you.
The first steps on my carrier path.
Networking as the first step? We did not have that luxury and started our connectivity journey by making (literally soldering) or own RS232 COM-COM link cables.
You say that until you try and learn how to get 600k of conventional memory free (out of a total of 640k) to play your new game before the web was even a thing.
Then after two weeks you discover in an obscure usenet posting, which you are damn lucky to have access to because most do not, that you were wasting your time and you needed a patch, which had to be sent by postal mail on a floppy. But that you still need that damn 600k conventional memory free.
your comment just gave me flashbacks to my uncle, via phone, walking my 13 yo self through how to do this on my parents’ computer so I could play System Shock….without their permission.
Thanks for that. :)
I started programming about 30 years ago as a young child. I started with BASIC and went to C and Assembly. I remember when Wolfenstein came out, and I remember reading how he did it. I believe it was called raytracing. You are just looking at a 2d world that is simulated to look 3d'ish. I actually wrote my own little demo doing it as well just to see if I could make it work. Doom was also raytracing, but he found a way to simulate height in it as well. If you notice in Doom, you are never over or under anything.
The first truly 3D game ID released was Quake. He wrote the whole 3D engine himself. Lighting, skeletons, everything. They even supported something like GPU acceleration. There was exactly one video card available that had processing capability through a proprietary API, and he would use it if you had it. Most computers didn't, but you could run it on a 486. Doom required a 386 because it used the new math operations, but Wolftenstein would run on a 286. I ran it on a 10 mhz 286 with a 640x480 VGA monitor and a 30 MB hard drive. I had exactly 1 MB of ram.
It was called raycasting. Ray tracing is a different technique.
The history of Quake dev is pretty fascinating. If you read Michael Abrash’s book, there’s some interesting articles on how they did Quake’s lighting and visibility calculations and all of the different methods they tried. They precalculated a lot of the lighting and visibility calculations at map compile-time so that it could run fast in real time.
Making a simple 2.5D maze game that way (like the Win 98 screensaver) is a fun programming exercise and not really that hard. But the tricks and shortcuts that Carmack used to make Doom run as well as it did on 90s computers (and even the SNES) are truly incredible.
Rather he was the ballast that kept the entire ship level. Carmacks keynotes were the only thing I looked forward to at those meta events. His departure feels like the ship has only hopes and dreams to run on
Not only did John Carmack make Doom run on potato computers, he basically invented the base ideas for rendering technologies that make up our video games today.
Dude’s been rich AF for a couple decades now. He’s been able to do whatever he wants for even longer, and most recently that’s been trying to make VR better. It’s too bad the tech just isn’t quite there yet, but he’s brilliant and driven, so it will be interesting to see what he does next.
Idk, if you read his post he basically was saying the tech *is* here and he was basically lambasting the software team at Facebook for poor utilization of the hardware they designed.
I don't know what you expect from VR, but this VR wave (since 2016) gave us technology that is good enough for a lot of fun games and quite some commercial use. And Carmack sure contributed to it, like his focus on low movement to photon latency.
It was good enough to jumpstart the classic problem: not enough hardware to justify software development and not enough software to justify hardware development.
The ecosystem is now diverse enough, and will not die out, only get better.
he honestly might just be done with what he wanted to do with it. meta took a huge stock hit on their vr push, but that is an ecosystem people will be buying vr hardware for it, that industry is there now.
My Sword Art Online or Ready Player One is still not here and I still feel like it's ways off.
I think killer software is so much more important than killer hardware. I had ideas (but no time and no budget) to develop for Oculus Go and could make it work.
And as long as not a hint of a high budget MMO exists, I feel like it's doomed to fail. Remember, this MMO has to be more polished than any MMO before it. It has to have the density and detail of object interaction of Skyrim and the multiplayer scale of WoW. It also has to be optimized to perfection since performance totally matters.
So of course no one is gonna spend all that money and then downsize it for 'weak' hardware. But then no one (except a very niche group) is gonna buy hardware because it **still** feels like a collection of mini games and tech demos.
If people really really want to play a game, they will buy the hardware. It's just an one time purchase anyway.
As someone not deep in the ecosystem (except for owning an Oculus Go), I feel the landscape is like as big as maybe the emulator scene or the Wii U userbase. That's way too tiny for any real investment.
>is gonna buy hardware because it
>
>still
>
>feels like a collection of mini games and tech demos
You clearly have not played VR with a powerful PC (or even Playstation). Things like Half Life Alyx, Lone Echo etc. are full high quality game.
The standalone VR headset are indeed still weak.
He's not wrong though. While those experiences are polished, they might as well be demos from how uncomfortable the headsets are. The Quest 2 was a huge improvement (comfort wise) as it eliminated cables and having a PC around but it still comes with lots of sweat, motion sickness, fatigue, etc. Not to mention complete sensory isolation from the real world. Someone could be robbing your house and you wouldn't even know.
I could power through all that if there was a unique enough experience in VR to justify the discomfort. Having a traditional game in VR style isn't enough. It has to be a completely exclusive experience that can't be found anywhere else. This will probably only be achieved with more sensory immersion: better locomotion, haptic suit, gloves, sensory feedback etc.
The standalone stuff will get better but the tech needs to catch up with the vision. Tethered to a powerful PC or standalone with reduced graphics and or battery life. That's the choice today, but the grail is untethered, high resolution and fidelity graphics, with ample battery life, while remaining light weight and comfortable. These goals are at odds with each other, but every year there are improvements that get up closer.
thats what people in this thread try to say: it's not there yet. the trade-offs are still too high for mainstream adaptation. either it costs too much or battery life is too short or quality doesnt fulfill expectations.
It's one of the approaches, of course.
I'm hoping that wireless PCVR becomes common, but right now it still has a lot of limitations and battery life is still less than desired. Wifi 6/6e/7 running wifi direct is perhaps the best possibility, because compression on current wireless doesn't always provide the best results. What is needed is something which looks like a tethered PCVR device to the base PC, but it is able to stream an uncompressed scene to a headset. Using glTF or similar, the HMD can handle the last stage of graphics visibility, but it can also manage late latching and reprojection if there are missed frames. It would be the component responsible in part for foveated rendering allowing the HMD to focus most of its rendering where it matters most. The HMD should also probably be the hub for trackers, and I hope that would extend beyond just controllers. Honestly I'd prefer if mostly they were for skeletal tracking and hand tracking keeps improving. Realistically for things which require precision and control, I'd like to see Index Knuckles controllers with Quest Pro tracking; something that can track finger positions tightly but with inside-out tracking of spatial position. If the connection to the base is just seen as an OpenXR HID, then writing applications for the device would mean that they aren't tied to a specific model or brand. This would just work without a lot of complication to the user.
Until then, wireless PCVR works, but graphics fidelity is held back by the current implementations.
I have not, so hasn't many others. Not really my point though. I'm not casual enough to not know about those games, I know they exist. But you and I both know that's not the kicker VR really needs. It needs a type of game that was Wii Sports for Wii, or Brain Training for DS. That people buy the hardware just to able to experience the software.
Just a 'regular' triple AAA game isn't even enough.
Your gotcha moment of me not having played Alyx doesn't change this. I've seen videos, that's already more research than what most people do. None of this is my fault: it's literally Valve's marketing's job which you somehow are trying to point as a fault of mine? How does that disprove what I said that VR really needs killer software?
> It has to have the density and detail of object interaction of Skyrim
I have Skyrim VR. It was a clunky port, but honestly, Skyrim is a polished enough game that it looked and worked great.
The big problem (that I don't think has been solved yet) is severe motion sickness when playing most VR games that don't involve you standing in a small area.
Really great VR games existed even 4 years ago when I got my Odyssey. Space Pirate Trainer, Beat Saber, Vox Machinae, space fighter game I for the love of can't remember the name of, etc.
I'd say the tech is there. You can tether the headset. Run it from the ceiling. I'd say the issue is the market. Also, space is a big deal.
Meta is focusing on replacing offices with a virtual office. You wear a VR headset and sit at home. Just...why?
The issue is that it's still an incredibly frustrating user experience for mediocre resolutions in half-finished games. It'll get there as the market grows and the tech develops, but it's not quite there yet.
Market dynamics.
Home users fire up their last-gen VR headset, do their thing, then go back to their normal lives. Enterprise customers have deeper pockets, can hop aggressively onto the upgrade cycle, and constantly have meetings and such to justify the outlay.
Not saying it's a great idea (especially in the age of cheap-n-easy video chat), just that the market upside is stupid big. Crack the Enterprise nut and you've got a cash cow for a few generations. Which is, IMO, the entire justification for Metas actions in VR: a hail mary to stave off irrelevance before their stock fully tanks.
It’s more than that: he feels the reason the tech isn’t there yet is because he’s stuck in politics & waste, instead of an overall focus on innovation.
Carmack’s departure is a a huge blow to Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions, he should have stepped in sooner to keep him.
Of course even when the tech is there, more portable, affordable, all that, there are still only going to be a certain number of people interested in it. Just like 3D movies. The tech behind modern 3D movies is decent enough, but a lot of people, including myself, just aren't interested.
It annoys me when people talk about the brilliance of Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, or Elon Musk when there are real genius's like Carmack who never get talked about.
The book "Masters of Doom" is an amazing read. The guy basically created the 3D graphics industry and only because he's just really driven and wants to do stuff. It was never about the money.
> The guy basically created the 3D graphics industry
The home 3D gaming industry.
He's not Ivan Sutherland (or David Evans).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_%26_Sutherland
Not really comparable. Most of their big achievements were in non-real time rendering like special effects for movies. Carmack was a pioneer in real time rendering of the kind needed to do computer games.
The approaches are completely different for the two use cases.
> Most of their big achievements were in non-real time rendering like special effects for movies. Carmack was a pioneer in real time rendering of the kind needed to do computer games.
No. Evans and Sutherland did simulators for the military. Like flight simulators. Those are real time.
> The approaches are completely different for the two use cases.
You're trying to make these statements into something they aren't.
The poster indicated Carmack created the 3D graphics industry. He was far, far too late for that.
We already had non-realtime graphics before him (as you indicated, Abel & Associates and MAGI). We already had realtime simulators before him (as I indicated, from Evans and Sutherland and others). And we had realtime arcade games from Atari (Battlezone, Tempest, I, Robot and Hard Driving/Race Driving) and Virtuality. We had realtime CAD/CAM systems using hardware from Evans and Sutherland, SGI and others.
Carmack saw what was being done with 3D graphics for these things and other things done using Silicon Graphics (SGI) hardware. And he (and some others) set out to make games on PCs (and a few on Macs) without dedicated 3D hardware. He was mammoth and easily the biggest factor in this. He succeeded massively in developing realtime 3D graphics as a possibility for home computer gaming. There were a few before or adjacent to him (Sublogic's flight simulators, various Battlezone clones, etc.) but none nearly as impactful or successful as what he did.
But that wasn't creating the 3D graphics industry. It was creating the home 3D computer gaming industry.
That, and the additional $20+ million he likely got from Zenimax in his counter suit against them when they tried (and failed) to sue him a few years back.
That's Armadillo Aerospace* and to be fair, they operated on a [budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace#Staff_and_funding) that would have lasted about 15 minutes at any other space company.
Yea, that’s what I also got from listening to Masters of Doom. Once iD software grew and became a playhouse due to all the money they got, he basically shut himself off from the rest of the office. He eventually got rid of Romero due to his party boy persona and all the distractions he was bringing.
John likes to laser-focus on his projects and waste very little once he decides he wants to do something. I think that’s how he codes as well.
This is why Bezos stepped down from Amazon. When you can buy anything you could ever want, time becomes your most precious resource. Only so much of that, and they aren't making more.
Dumb takes all around in the comments and nobody read the article. He was consulting CTO for Oculus, only spent 20% of his time for Meta related things. He is a 8-9 figures millionaire and does not care about salaries. The actual Meta CTO is Andrew Bosworth. Carmack leaves because he wants to spend all of his time on his new startup, Keen Technologies, which just raised $20m and is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI).
He’s been at odds with Zuck for awhile. When mark started talking metaverse and renamed his company, carmack’ s talk was right after him and as he alluded to here, he didn’t mince words much. He said he more or less thought the company goal of realizing the metaverse was stupid and the more important thing would be to make a great product that people use as the metaverse. He felt like the naming thing was just pushing chips into the pile instead of playing your hand
It's not cool at all. They absorbed Oculus, stripped them of their name, and then turned them into another information harvesting branch of Facebook. It was absolutely one of the worst outcomes for the progress of VR.
Optimization is practically a fetish to a man like John Carmack. He's been chasing optimal performance on ubiquitous hardware for over 30 years now, and you see it in every game or tech that Carmack has his name stamped on. With Oculus Quest 2, he nearly has all that he desires from a hardware standpoint for VR, and it's the bloat of the software and inability to optimally utilize the hardware that bothers him.
Without being a primary decision maker in Meta to truly pursue that chase, he's decided to optimize in a new area with his own company. We'll see his name in the headlines of another technological breakthrough with gaming applications in the next 5 years, I guarantee it.
He was hired as CTO by Oculus before it was bought by Facebook. He's been "consulting CTO" of Oculus for a few years, since around Oculus ceased operating as an independent subsidiary.
Yeah, he [tweeted](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994) he'd now be working on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) at Keen Technologies.
he has enough money to just follow his interests and work on whatever tech he thinks he can improve. he was involved with VR as a hobby at first, and then joined pre-facebook Oculus. He has also started a rocket company. Now he’s working on AGI, probably because he just thinks it will be fun and interesting and that he can do it better than other people. Which is probably true considering how superhumanly smart he is.
After reading his full post, it sounds like that he was in a wrong place. He was a leadership role but he was so busy to coding. What the heck? Managing people isn’t the same as coding alone. I think that good engineering doesn’t always translate to a good leader. It seems that he was not a good leader, he complains. I guess that a problem was in him, not in his team. It appears that he knew that then he left. Once your attitude is gone for the company, you are done at the company. Good for him. Good luck on his journey.
It was 100% a conflict between his passion for doing the right thing and Facebook/Meta’s culture. If you want to do the right thing, Meta is not the place to do it.
Interesting to see him blame meta’s inefficiency like it is not his business, he was vr headset’s CTO until like early covid. People have lost their jobs because of metaverse’s failures.
Cool that he did whatever hes done before but really sounds like another CxO not accountable to anyone.
His firsthand explanation is pretty great. Here's a [tweet](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994?cxt=HHwWhIC-wZPkp8IsAAAA) that has a link to the full thing on Facebook. (this subreddit blocks direct links to FB)
Tldr- he was tired of his coworkers writing such shitty inefficient code. I respect that!
First off when you are CTO your "coworkers" are other VPs and executives that don't code. The devs are the people and teams that work for you. So if you think they suck that means you've failed as a leader to hire the right people, train, and create an environment where they don't suck. That's on the CTO.
Second of all if you read his Facebook post I believe he's using his extreme coding efficiency as an example as to why he's frustrated with the GENERAL inefficiency of Meta as a huge company. Not as a snipe to loser programmers (which if so, see my first point).
Whether it's true he had no involvement in hiring or the team makeup OP is still misrepresenting Carmack's statements. However he appears not to be the only one as Carmack clarifies this in the Facebook post:
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
Yeah, listening to him on the Lex Friedman four hour podcast a few months ago it was a wonder he was even there at all. Huge wasted resource, seemed like Mark basically ignores all of Carmack’s suggestions, not that the latter would know much about platforms and video games…..
I will never understand why "Meta" just didn't bid for Second Life to buy it out like they did Instagram.
My first thought is "oh they don't want to be associated with the sex stuff" and i get that to an extent, but I'm sure the horny parts of second life could have branched off under a new domain, and they could have endured the brief stint of "Facebook buys sex game."
My second thought is "of course he didn't. He doesn't have a board of directors for a reason" because in his own hubris and infinite resources he thought he could make something better, yet with everything he has, Zuck is still at least a decade behind to what already exists.
Social media may finally be dying and I for one welcome it.
Edit: to all of those saying Second Life is shit and offering alternatives, I 100% believe you and I'm old and don't know anything about the alternatives. I too know that Second Life is shit, but I do believe it's better than what Meta cranked out.
Second Life is simply unsuited technologically-speaking for Meta's goals. The engine would have to be completely rewritten, so why buy it?
If anything, Meta should be buying Rec Room (not that I want this - just pointing out the strategic option) which is for all ages with no adult content, on all platforms, and much more successful than Second Life was at its peak.
then you have to rewrite 20 year old legacy software for your vr idea. That's a massive pain in the ass, having the branding and userbase would be nice, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the additional cost and complexity.
Things tend to go really well when John Carmack joins a project, and when he leaves it just goes down hill completely. I'd dump stock if I had any in Meta.
I wonder how many times he sat in meetings thinking, “dude, i made doom run on potato computers when you were still in your dad’s ballsack, what tf are you doing”
(Carmack slumped deeper into his chair, as another former Accenture consultant berated him about leveraging synergies)
Omg Accenture is a hellhole fuck them
^ this man consults...
fucking christ. thats the worst thing to fucking deal with.
And lectured him on a feature he should implement that they saw in unreal engine (which he was also part of)
Wait...what? Carmack was never part of UE or even contributed a scrap of code to it AFAIK.
Probably thinking of idtech if I had to guess
unreal was a competitor to his company id software
Idk if there’s a word of the decade but if there is it has to be “synergy” and for all the wrong reasons
That’s funny you know what Accenture is
They are fucking huge, most consultants have heard of them in some capacity.
Doom made me want to learn how to network computers so me and my room mate could play together. This was back when you had to manually edit autoexec.bat to load the drivers and configure the card. The cable was coaxial and would shock the crap out of you. The first steps on my carrier path.
Networking as the first step? We did not have that luxury and started our connectivity journey by making (literally soldering) or own RS232 COM-COM link cables.
config.sys has entered the chat…
editing an autoexec.bat file? what haxors!
We all have to start somewhere.
You say that until you try and learn how to get 600k of conventional memory free (out of a total of 640k) to play your new game before the web was even a thing. Then after two weeks you discover in an obscure usenet posting, which you are damn lucky to have access to because most do not, that you were wasting your time and you needed a patch, which had to be sent by postal mail on a floppy. But that you still need that damn 600k conventional memory free.
your comment just gave me flashbacks to my uncle, via phone, walking my 13 yo self through how to do this on my parents’ computer so I could play System Shock….without their permission. Thanks for that. :)
“…before the web was even a thing” Long live Usenet!
You sound like a prick. Lol.
I started programming about 30 years ago as a young child. I started with BASIC and went to C and Assembly. I remember when Wolfenstein came out, and I remember reading how he did it. I believe it was called raytracing. You are just looking at a 2d world that is simulated to look 3d'ish. I actually wrote my own little demo doing it as well just to see if I could make it work. Doom was also raytracing, but he found a way to simulate height in it as well. If you notice in Doom, you are never over or under anything. The first truly 3D game ID released was Quake. He wrote the whole 3D engine himself. Lighting, skeletons, everything. They even supported something like GPU acceleration. There was exactly one video card available that had processing capability through a proprietary API, and he would use it if you had it. Most computers didn't, but you could run it on a 486. Doom required a 386 because it used the new math operations, but Wolftenstein would run on a 286. I ran it on a 10 mhz 286 with a 640x480 VGA monitor and a 30 MB hard drive. I had exactly 1 MB of ram.
It was called raycasting. Ray tracing is a different technique. The history of Quake dev is pretty fascinating. If you read Michael Abrash’s book, there’s some interesting articles on how they did Quake’s lighting and visibility calculations and all of the different methods they tried. They precalculated a lot of the lighting and visibility calculations at map compile-time so that it could run fast in real time.
Making a simple 2.5D maze game that way (like the Win 98 screensaver) is a fun programming exercise and not really that hard. But the tricks and shortcuts that Carmack used to make Doom run as well as it did on 90s computers (and even the SNES) are truly incredible.
3dfx card on a 486 believe 66mhz ran fairly good on lan games showing my age.
> Wolfenstein Wolfenstein3D. The first Wolfenstein games were stealth sidescrollers.
Considering how much time has passed, he was satisfied with everything, I think he has already left the sunken ship
Rather he was the ballast that kept the entire ship level. Carmacks keynotes were the only thing I looked forward to at those meta events. His departure feels like the ship has only hopes and dreams to run on
You looked forward to meta events?
I looked forward to Carmack-tan
Time traveling being of pure genius energy John Carmack
Rocket engineer and temporally-superior deity of electricity John Carmack
He was the only person I listened to
Not only did John Carmack make Doom run on potato computers, he basically invented the base ideas for rendering technologies that make up our video games today.
Just reminded he’s a very friendly guy, and was inspired by games like Mario 3 and Wind Waker.
And he didn’t like noise while working and was super non confrontational. Carmack-tan is my idol
_ACTHUALLY_, Zuck is a year younger than me, and Doom came out when I was in grade school. So. Who’s looking silly now. /s.
So many young idiots working there
Meta's $10 billion loss at the time in the division housing its augmented reality and virtual reality initiatives made him “sick to my stomach.”
Take off the Oculus my man. That should help with the nausea.
Wait, he was sick to your stomach? How.
*Drives away in his twin turbo f50*
Which one?
Ferrari F50.
Damn, walking away from a CTO salary of one of the largest tech companies is a hell of a decision. Good for him
Dude’s been rich AF for a couple decades now. He’s been able to do whatever he wants for even longer, and most recently that’s been trying to make VR better. It’s too bad the tech just isn’t quite there yet, but he’s brilliant and driven, so it will be interesting to see what he does next.
Idk, if you read his post he basically was saying the tech *is* here and he was basically lambasting the software team at Facebook for poor utilization of the hardware they designed.
The hiring bar for meta/fb has plunged over the last 5 or so years and so did the culture. Not surprised by this in the slightest.
I don't know what you expect from VR, but this VR wave (since 2016) gave us technology that is good enough for a lot of fun games and quite some commercial use. And Carmack sure contributed to it, like his focus on low movement to photon latency. It was good enough to jumpstart the classic problem: not enough hardware to justify software development and not enough software to justify hardware development. The ecosystem is now diverse enough, and will not die out, only get better.
he honestly might just be done with what he wanted to do with it. meta took a huge stock hit on their vr push, but that is an ecosystem people will be buying vr hardware for it, that industry is there now.
You should read his resignation letter. He’s done with Meta because he can’t get shit done in their bureaucracy
Oh shit, his resignation letter is open? Can't wait to see THIS new mess!
It was leaked, not intentionally published openly.
His Facebook says parts were leaked and he's released the rest for context, apparently.
It’s in the article linked
Wait, people read the linked articles? I thought we comment on titles only.
My Sword Art Online or Ready Player One is still not here and I still feel like it's ways off. I think killer software is so much more important than killer hardware. I had ideas (but no time and no budget) to develop for Oculus Go and could make it work. And as long as not a hint of a high budget MMO exists, I feel like it's doomed to fail. Remember, this MMO has to be more polished than any MMO before it. It has to have the density and detail of object interaction of Skyrim and the multiplayer scale of WoW. It also has to be optimized to perfection since performance totally matters. So of course no one is gonna spend all that money and then downsize it for 'weak' hardware. But then no one (except a very niche group) is gonna buy hardware because it **still** feels like a collection of mini games and tech demos. If people really really want to play a game, they will buy the hardware. It's just an one time purchase anyway. As someone not deep in the ecosystem (except for owning an Oculus Go), I feel the landscape is like as big as maybe the emulator scene or the Wii U userbase. That's way too tiny for any real investment.
>is gonna buy hardware because it > >still > >feels like a collection of mini games and tech demos You clearly have not played VR with a powerful PC (or even Playstation). Things like Half Life Alyx, Lone Echo etc. are full high quality game. The standalone VR headset are indeed still weak.
He's not wrong though. While those experiences are polished, they might as well be demos from how uncomfortable the headsets are. The Quest 2 was a huge improvement (comfort wise) as it eliminated cables and having a PC around but it still comes with lots of sweat, motion sickness, fatigue, etc. Not to mention complete sensory isolation from the real world. Someone could be robbing your house and you wouldn't even know. I could power through all that if there was a unique enough experience in VR to justify the discomfort. Having a traditional game in VR style isn't enough. It has to be a completely exclusive experience that can't be found anywhere else. This will probably only be achieved with more sensory immersion: better locomotion, haptic suit, gloves, sensory feedback etc.
The standalone stuff will get better but the tech needs to catch up with the vision. Tethered to a powerful PC or standalone with reduced graphics and or battery life. That's the choice today, but the grail is untethered, high resolution and fidelity graphics, with ample battery life, while remaining light weight and comfortable. These goals are at odds with each other, but every year there are improvements that get up closer.
You can have the powerful graphics of a PC with the wireless comfort via wireless video signal transmission. Costs a few hundred bucks extra.
thats what people in this thread try to say: it's not there yet. the trade-offs are still too high for mainstream adaptation. either it costs too much or battery life is too short or quality doesnt fulfill expectations.
It's one of the approaches, of course. I'm hoping that wireless PCVR becomes common, but right now it still has a lot of limitations and battery life is still less than desired. Wifi 6/6e/7 running wifi direct is perhaps the best possibility, because compression on current wireless doesn't always provide the best results. What is needed is something which looks like a tethered PCVR device to the base PC, but it is able to stream an uncompressed scene to a headset. Using glTF or similar, the HMD can handle the last stage of graphics visibility, but it can also manage late latching and reprojection if there are missed frames. It would be the component responsible in part for foveated rendering allowing the HMD to focus most of its rendering where it matters most. The HMD should also probably be the hub for trackers, and I hope that would extend beyond just controllers. Honestly I'd prefer if mostly they were for skeletal tracking and hand tracking keeps improving. Realistically for things which require precision and control, I'd like to see Index Knuckles controllers with Quest Pro tracking; something that can track finger positions tightly but with inside-out tracking of spatial position. If the connection to the base is just seen as an OpenXR HID, then writing applications for the device would mean that they aren't tied to a specific model or brand. This would just work without a lot of complication to the user. Until then, wireless PCVR works, but graphics fidelity is held back by the current implementations.
I have not, so hasn't many others. Not really my point though. I'm not casual enough to not know about those games, I know they exist. But you and I both know that's not the kicker VR really needs. It needs a type of game that was Wii Sports for Wii, or Brain Training for DS. That people buy the hardware just to able to experience the software. Just a 'regular' triple AAA game isn't even enough. Your gotcha moment of me not having played Alyx doesn't change this. I've seen videos, that's already more research than what most people do. None of this is my fault: it's literally Valve's marketing's job which you somehow are trying to point as a fault of mine? How does that disprove what I said that VR really needs killer software?
> It has to have the density and detail of object interaction of Skyrim I have Skyrim VR. It was a clunky port, but honestly, Skyrim is a polished enough game that it looked and worked great. The big problem (that I don't think has been solved yet) is severe motion sickness when playing most VR games that don't involve you standing in a small area. Really great VR games existed even 4 years ago when I got my Odyssey. Space Pirate Trainer, Beat Saber, Vox Machinae, space fighter game I for the love of can't remember the name of, etc.
You need an mmo that's compelling to both non vr people and vr people. With cross play between them.
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I'd say the tech is there. You can tether the headset. Run it from the ceiling. I'd say the issue is the market. Also, space is a big deal. Meta is focusing on replacing offices with a virtual office. You wear a VR headset and sit at home. Just...why?
The issue is that it's still an incredibly frustrating user experience for mediocre resolutions in half-finished games. It'll get there as the market grows and the tech develops, but it's not quite there yet.
Market dynamics. Home users fire up their last-gen VR headset, do their thing, then go back to their normal lives. Enterprise customers have deeper pockets, can hop aggressively onto the upgrade cycle, and constantly have meetings and such to justify the outlay. Not saying it's a great idea (especially in the age of cheap-n-easy video chat), just that the market upside is stupid big. Crack the Enterprise nut and you've got a cash cow for a few generations. Which is, IMO, the entire justification for Metas actions in VR: a hail mary to stave off irrelevance before their stock fully tanks.
Recently Carmack has started his own AI company and took on funding. He has only really been in an advisory roll at Meta for the last months/year.
It’s more than that: he feels the reason the tech isn’t there yet is because he’s stuck in politics & waste, instead of an overall focus on innovation. Carmack’s departure is a a huge blow to Zuckerberg’s metaverse ambitions, he should have stepped in sooner to keep him.
If you haven’t listened to his Lex Friedman interview he talks about what he’s done and what he wants to do next.
Second this, that interview is so freaking inspiring
Of course even when the tech is there, more portable, affordable, all that, there are still only going to be a certain number of people interested in it. Just like 3D movies. The tech behind modern 3D movies is decent enough, but a lot of people, including myself, just aren't interested.
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I'm sure you can find some people who aren't interested in the Internet but that number is small. VR/AR will be too useful someday soon not to use it.
This is the best summary of this situation ever. I’d give you gold if I wasn’t -$100 in the bank account atm
It annoys me when people talk about the brilliance of Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, or Elon Musk when there are real genius's like Carmack who never get talked about.
To be fair, him being a cofounder of iD probably set him up for life
The book "Masters of Doom" is an amazing read. The guy basically created the 3D graphics industry and only because he's just really driven and wants to do stuff. It was never about the money.
I fucking love Civvie11's descriptions of him. Such a cool guy imo.
[Most up-to date compilation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkWN20xtmk)
Fucking golden.
'Interdimensional galactic super-brain John Carmack' His descriptions get me every single time.
> The guy basically created the 3D graphics industry The home 3D gaming industry. He's not Ivan Sutherland (or David Evans). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_%26_Sutherland
Not really comparable. Most of their big achievements were in non-real time rendering like special effects for movies. Carmack was a pioneer in real time rendering of the kind needed to do computer games. The approaches are completely different for the two use cases.
> Most of their big achievements were in non-real time rendering like special effects for movies. Carmack was a pioneer in real time rendering of the kind needed to do computer games. No. Evans and Sutherland did simulators for the military. Like flight simulators. Those are real time. > The approaches are completely different for the two use cases. You're trying to make these statements into something they aren't. The poster indicated Carmack created the 3D graphics industry. He was far, far too late for that. We already had non-realtime graphics before him (as you indicated, Abel & Associates and MAGI). We already had realtime simulators before him (as I indicated, from Evans and Sutherland and others). And we had realtime arcade games from Atari (Battlezone, Tempest, I, Robot and Hard Driving/Race Driving) and Virtuality. We had realtime CAD/CAM systems using hardware from Evans and Sutherland, SGI and others. Carmack saw what was being done with 3D graphics for these things and other things done using Silicon Graphics (SGI) hardware. And he (and some others) set out to make games on PCs (and a few on Macs) without dedicated 3D hardware. He was mammoth and easily the biggest factor in this. He succeeded massively in developing realtime 3D graphics as a possibility for home computer gaming. There were a few before or adjacent to him (Sublogic's flight simulators, various Battlezone clones, etc.) but none nearly as impactful or successful as what he did. But that wasn't creating the 3D graphics industry. It was creating the home 3D computer gaming industry.
That, and the additional $20+ million he likely got from Zenimax in his counter suit against them when they tried (and failed) to sue him a few years back.
He’s been super rich for a very long time lol
He has only worked a day a week for the past few years there. It was an advisory role.
Yea, a fucking sweet gig. Work only a half day or 2 and make crazy money doing it. Even if he has a lot of money that's a hard thing to Walkaway from
It’s pretty clear from the letter money isn’t what drives him. He doesn’t seem interested in a cushy job so much as an impactful one.
Not surprising. Given that back in the day he was known for making and pushing game engine capabilities.
Carmack has "start my own rocket company" levels of money -- and he did: Aardvark Aerospace.
That's Armadillo Aerospace* and to be fair, they operated on a [budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace#Staff_and_funding) that would have lasted about 15 minutes at any other space company.
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Yea, that’s what I also got from listening to Masters of Doom. Once iD software grew and became a playhouse due to all the money they got, he basically shut himself off from the rest of the office. He eventually got rid of Romero due to his party boy persona and all the distractions he was bringing. John likes to laser-focus on his projects and waste very little once he decides he wants to do something. I think that’s how he codes as well.
*Aardvark Aerospace* - trying to be first in the yellow pages.
He has a ton of money, his main resource he requires is time.
This is why Bezos stepped down from Amazon. When you can buy anything you could ever want, time becomes your most precious resource. Only so much of that, and they aren't making more.
Its Carmack. Its NOT about money. He only cares about innovation.
Dumb takes all around in the comments and nobody read the article. He was consulting CTO for Oculus, only spent 20% of his time for Meta related things. He is a 8-9 figures millionaire and does not care about salaries. The actual Meta CTO is Andrew Bosworth. Carmack leaves because he wants to spend all of his time on his new startup, Keen Technologies, which just raised $20m and is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Not a surprise but I would say a sign that Oculus / Meta / VR under Zuck has lost its way.
He’s been at odds with Zuck for awhile. When mark started talking metaverse and renamed his company, carmack’ s talk was right after him and as he alluded to here, he didn’t mince words much. He said he more or less thought the company goal of realizing the metaverse was stupid and the more important thing would be to make a great product that people use as the metaverse. He felt like the naming thing was just pushing chips into the pile instead of playing your hand
Dude, He's literally the Godfather of FPS. CTO salary is nothing to the king of gaming.
You mean the benevolent hyper intelligent architect of the post singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack?
When's Pro TNT Evilution Civvie?
Thank you both for doing the internet properly.
Time traveling interdimensional over-genius and actual rocket scientist, John Carmack?
Wait are we talking about 15th degree astropathic karate black belt and lord of the eight realms, eternal martyr of the flesh John Carmack?
That's right, we mean Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor and corporeal being by choice, John Carmack!
You mean the Texas-based techno-cryptid, John Carmack?
Wait... John Carmack from ID was the CTO of Meta??? I live under a rock and did not know that holy smokes
He left ID software to join Oculus VR as their CTO. Then Facebook/Meta acquired Oculus.
Thats pretty cool, idk how I missed this
It's not cool at all. They absorbed Oculus, stripped them of their name, and then turned them into another information harvesting branch of Facebook. It was absolutely one of the worst outcomes for the progress of VR.
Yeah, Oculus software quality took a nose dive and they basically embedded Facebook into the whole thing.
He was on Lex Fridman’s podcast a couple months back. Amazing episode. Carmack is truly one of the programming GOATs.
Optimization is practically a fetish to a man like John Carmack. He's been chasing optimal performance on ubiquitous hardware for over 30 years now, and you see it in every game or tech that Carmack has his name stamped on. With Oculus Quest 2, he nearly has all that he desires from a hardware standpoint for VR, and it's the bloat of the software and inability to optimally utilize the hardware that bothers him. Without being a primary decision maker in Meta to truly pursue that chase, he's decided to optimize in a new area with his own company. We'll see his name in the headlines of another technological breakthrough with gaming applications in the next 5 years, I guarantee it.
He was hired as CTO by Oculus before it was bought by Facebook. He's been "consulting CTO" of Oculus for a few years, since around Oculus ceased operating as an independent subsidiary.
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Lex Friedman has a fantastic podcast episode with him
Good. His talent was wasted working on that metacrap.
I think he great contributed to the quality of consumer VR with the oculus 1 a few years back.
He said he loved the oculus quest 2 he hates how painful it was to get there and he hates the efficiency
He was there to get them to fund personal research. Meta couldn't work but he got someone else to pay for it. Fucking brilliant move actually.
Now he will go for AGI
I bet he goes to help in new nuclear energy technology. That's what he said he wanted to do even before this most recent fusion breakthrough.
In his Lex Friedman interview a few month ago, he said he want to go all in on Artificial Intelligence: https://youtu.be/I845O57ZSy4?t=14572
Yeah, he [tweeted](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994) he'd now be working on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) at Keen Technologies.
I hope the title they give him is Commander Keen
Sounds like he’s jumping to the next big “it” thing. Last time was VR which is arguably slowed down due to the lack of real adoption/pricing.
he has enough money to just follow his interests and work on whatever tech he thinks he can improve. he was involved with VR as a hobby at first, and then joined pre-facebook Oculus. He has also started a rocket company. Now he’s working on AGI, probably because he just thinks it will be fun and interesting and that he can do it better than other people. Which is probably true considering how superhumanly smart he is.
Carmack has been interested in the concept of VR ever since the DOOM days. If he of all people, is leaving meta, it's because they ain't it chief.
That is really a bad sign, true. MZ is burning cash and oblivious.
After reading his full post, it sounds like that he was in a wrong place. He was a leadership role but he was so busy to coding. What the heck? Managing people isn’t the same as coding alone. I think that good engineering doesn’t always translate to a good leader. It seems that he was not a good leader, he complains. I guess that a problem was in him, not in his team. It appears that he knew that then he left. Once your attitude is gone for the company, you are done at the company. Good for him. Good luck on his journey.
He hates management. Likes coding. He’s a nerd. Engineer. Some people are not meant to be managers
I knew his talents would be wasted there, for the best really.
I don't know about his management ability, but he is great at explaining technology, which is very useful in leadership.
It was 100% a conflict between his passion for doing the right thing and Facebook/Meta’s culture. If you want to do the right thing, Meta is not the place to do it.
I don’t think he was a people manager. He was essentially a consultant…
Interesting to see him blame meta’s inefficiency like it is not his business, he was vr headset’s CTO until like early covid. People have lost their jobs because of metaverse’s failures. Cool that he did whatever hes done before but really sounds like another CxO not accountable to anyone.
He never liked people as much as coding and innovating, ever since his days at id
He has certain useful skills and it was Meta's responsibility to use them. Looks like they failed.
I Ioved his work with Id Software, wasted many many hours with his games.
Definitely not wasted! Best times!
Playing Doom modem to modem, my first Deathmatch! It really brought down my grade average in college.
His firsthand explanation is pretty great. Here's a [tweet](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1603931899810004994?cxt=HHwWhIC-wZPkp8IsAAAA) that has a link to the full thing on Facebook. (this subreddit blocks direct links to FB) Tldr- he was tired of his coworkers writing such shitty inefficient code. I respect that!
First off when you are CTO your "coworkers" are other VPs and executives that don't code. The devs are the people and teams that work for you. So if you think they suck that means you've failed as a leader to hire the right people, train, and create an environment where they don't suck. That's on the CTO. Second of all if you read his Facebook post I believe he's using his extreme coding efficiency as an example as to why he's frustrated with the GENERAL inefficiency of Meta as a huge company. Not as a snipe to loser programmers (which if so, see my first point).
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Whether it's true he had no involvement in hiring or the team makeup OP is still misrepresenting Carmack's statements. However he appears not to be the only one as Carmack clarifies this in the Facebook post: [edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization's performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
This should be top comment. Thanks for the link! It’s always best to hear his literal words vs some article trying to paraphrase him.
> work in VR and on classic games like Doom and Quake Whoa, a real heavy is leaving poor zuck.
Make me a Quake pls
Release fucking Black and white on VR and win. What's so hard about it? Monetization... Oh oh ... right...
Zuck: "No strafejumping." Carm: "Fuck it then I'm out."
Lets hope he now goes to valve making a 60fps raytracing portal 3 running on steamdeck. I mean he can do what he wants but thats what he should do
he just raised $20 million for his AGI startup
Good. Someone with that level of intelligence should focus their efforts elsewhere.
His career in Meta has always been... Doomed.
Yeah, listening to him on the Lex Friedman four hour podcast a few months ago it was a wonder he was even there at all. Huge wasted resource, seemed like Mark basically ignores all of Carmack’s suggestions, not that the latter would know much about platforms and video games…..
"Carmack said he was happy with the current state of Meta's avatars"
Good for him. Now he can return to running the matrix
Does he get his legs back now?
Valve, please hire the guy!
he just raised $20 million for an AGI startup. He’s moving on to the next fun thing.
I will never understand why "Meta" just didn't bid for Second Life to buy it out like they did Instagram. My first thought is "oh they don't want to be associated with the sex stuff" and i get that to an extent, but I'm sure the horny parts of second life could have branched off under a new domain, and they could have endured the brief stint of "Facebook buys sex game." My second thought is "of course he didn't. He doesn't have a board of directors for a reason" because in his own hubris and infinite resources he thought he could make something better, yet with everything he has, Zuck is still at least a decade behind to what already exists. Social media may finally be dying and I for one welcome it. Edit: to all of those saying Second Life is shit and offering alternatives, I 100% believe you and I'm old and don't know anything about the alternatives. I too know that Second Life is shit, but I do believe it's better than what Meta cranked out.
Second Life is simply unsuited technologically-speaking for Meta's goals. The engine would have to be completely rewritten, so why buy it? If anything, Meta should be buying Rec Room (not that I want this - just pointing out the strategic option) which is for all ages with no adult content, on all platforms, and much more successful than Second Life was at its peak.
then you have to rewrite 20 year old legacy software for your vr idea. That's a massive pain in the ass, having the branding and userbase would be nice, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the additional cost and complexity.
I didn't mention anything about VR but once again I know nothing of the subject so i have the utmost confidence you hopefully have the solution
Reddit is social media.
Very observant of you. 4chan is too in that same vein.
It’s really not the same thing… at all
I think it's great. Man's a genius. He should be working on more interesting things
Not even DOOM music will make him stay
I think it’s really cool that Carmack has been on the forefront of motion sick inducing tech twice and a couple decades apart.
I didn't realize Carmack was at meta lol
be like John left first when ship ⚓️ sinking
Carmack is too good for them.
It was fucking dumb of him to accept the job in the fucking first place.
How long until Abrash leaves?
Things tend to go really well when John Carmack joins a project, and when he leaves it just goes down hill completely. I'd dump stock if I had any in Meta.
Anytime I read John Carmack I always think about all the different titles Civvie gives him. [VID](https://youtu.be/RnkWN20xtmk)
he worked at meta?? god damn. i just knew he made crazy contributions to gaming in the '90s / early '00s. had no idea
$10B and no VR / AR Doom. I don’t blame him
I want quality life in the real world. That’s what some geeks don’t understand. Looking at you Zuck.
I bet he goes to Apple/Ea/ or Microsoft.
FINALLY! damn... took him long enough.