Few notes about Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2009

[deanjo]

Just a few tidbits from Quakecon, nothing linux specific but there is a comment about the next source code release.



Carmack stated that the source code for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is almost ready to be released and just needs approval from ZeniMax. The release of the Doom III source code will most likely happen sometime after the release of Rage, again pending ZeniMax approval.



Currently Rage is set to be released sometime in 2010, but that could change as we all know.



Carmack says their experiment with Quake Live (http://news.bigdownload.com/tag/quake-live) will continue for a while (you can expect to see new maps, skins and other content) but admitted that their initial business revenue model with in-game ads isn't working as well as they had hoped. They hope to gain more revenue by adding a premium service down the road that will let people buy their own Quake Live servers.



Nothing about linux ports though. Notice that everything is tagged, pending Zenimax approval now.

Rest of the highlights (or lowlights depending on POV) can be found here:

http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/08/14/quakecon-2009-john-carmack-keynote-highlights/

[Setlec]

well most likely quake live will have a linux port also Mac OS too, if i believe the QuakeLive forums. Also "IF" ZeniMax don't bother about linux let's hope that IdTech 4 engine will be released ASAP after the Rage release date. It sadden to me to say that i've lost my faith in Id Soft for linux gaming!

[xav1r]

Well, it was among the announcements that the mac and linux versions of QuakeLive were going to be available on august 18,I believe.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/14/mac-and-linux-users-joining-quake-live-community-august-18?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_joystiqhttp://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/14/mac-and-linux-users-joining-quake-live-community-august-18?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_joystiq

I didnt see that part about the Wolf Enemy Territory source code release. I thought Carmack meant the source code for their iphone version of wolf3d. It's great to see Wolf:ET source code too if it's the case.

[Setlec]

the wolf3d iphone source code is already available at Id Soft FTP! (ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/wolf3d/wolf3d_iphone_v1.1_src.zip)

cheers

[Irritant]

How are they going to deal with the Creative Labs patent for the shadow code?

[Setlec]

they will probably remove from the source code.

[deanjo]

How are they going to deal with the Creative Labs patent for the shadow code?

IIRC pretty much all the previous code releases had some sterilization done to it before release.

[Irritant]

Well, if they flat out removed it, that would suck, because the shadows are one of the major features of the engine that separate it from tech 3. I guess they could rewrite it the way Darkplaces did it, and the way we did it for CRX, making changes to avoid the patent infringement, but my hope was that Creative Labs would just drop this whole frivolous code patenting bullshit in the first place. It's an utterly ridiculous concept to patent code. Seriously, I should just patent some absurdly common code just to show how stupid it is.

[deanjo]

Well, if they flat out removed it, that would suck, because the shadows are one of the major features of the engine that separate it from tech 3. I guess they could rewrite it the way Darkplaces did it, and the way we did it for CRX, making changes to avoid the patent infringement, but my hope was that Creative Labs would just drop this whole frivolous code patenting bullshit in the first place. It's an utterly ridiculous concept to patent code. Seriously, I should just patent some absurdly common code just to show how stupid it is.

Ya, I've been working on getting my "Hello world" code patented. :p

[Julius]

Hmmm ET source release? Didn't expect that, but it is really good news!

[whizse]

Hmmm ET source release? Didn't expect that, but it is really good news!

Interesting. I wonder if anyone is planning on doing a free implementation of the game, à la OpenArena. Open Enemy Territory perhaps? ;)

[L33F3R]

Interesting. I wonder if anyone is planning on doing a free implementation of the game, à la OpenArena. Open Enemy Territory perhaps? ;)

ET is free beer, it would be unlikely.

[whizse]

Ah, that's right!

Perhaps some of the mods will go stand-alone? We'll see...

[Julius]

I think it is more interesting to see the engine advancments done already to the quake3 engine ported to the ET engine.
ET has much better scripting and gameplay features already included, which would make it together with a modern renderer really a nice platform to make (open-source) mods on.

[xav1r]

ET is free beer, it would be unlikely.

Yeah, but only Open Arena is Free Beer AND Free Speech. ET is only Free Beer. Very different. The point of OpenArena is not that it's just a freebie, but that all its contents, graphics, sounds, animations, are 100% FREE software-like. ET gfx, sounds, and such are closed and copyrighted.

[nanonyme]

Ya, I've been working on getting my "Hello world" code patented. :pMaybe you could get a patent for "Hello world" with obfuscated Perl? Would probably cover originality...

[yotambien]

Yeah, but only Open Arena is Free Beer AND Free Speech. ET is only Free Beer. Very different. The point of OpenArena is not that it's just a freebie, but that all its contents, graphics, sounds, animations, are 100% FREE software-like. ET gfx, sounds, and such are closed and copyrighted.

Well, I get your point perfectly, but in this particular example (OpenArena) the "free as in free speech" saying is not very fortunate.

[xav1r]

Well, I get your point perfectly, but in this particular example (OpenArena) the "free as in free speech" saying is not very fortunate.

Why do you say that? I don't see the unfortunate. Another example of Free as in Speech and Beer besides Open Arena would be Nexuiz.

[Dragonlord]

Nothing wrong with copyrighted content in a free engine. Important is the engine not the content. This is up to the devers to make.

[L33F3R]

Yeah, but only Open Arena is Free Beer AND Free Speech. ET is only Free Beer. Very different. The point of OpenArena is not that it's just a freebie, but that all its contents, graphics, sounds, animations, are 100% FREE software-like. ET gfx, sounds, and such are closed and copyrighted.

yea but you think 95% of the people who play it give a damn if its freedom software? I certainly don't. That said, I strongly advocate free software but like the rest of the free world I have the freedom to use non-free software and often times exercise that right.

Open arena is crap anyways. I offered my services to them but they seem too stuck up to actually make a game worth playing. Not saying im a great artist but anything is better then the garbage they have right now.

[xav1r]

yea but you think 95% of the people who play it give a damn if its freedom software? I certainly don't. That said, I strongly advocate free software but like the rest of the free world I have the freedom to use non-free software and often times exercise that right.

Open arena is crap anyways. I offered my services to them but they seem too stuck up to actually make a game worth playing. Not saying im a great artist but anything is better then the garbage they have right now.

Yeah, true. I myself dont care too much about that either. I was answering the question that there could be a Free-like "OpenTerritory" for ET if the source code is indeed released. True, there's a big debate over at the FOSS camps, whether choosing to use non-free software should be a freedom too. But that's what the BSD license is for. :)

Well, that's somewhat of a subjective opinion about OpenArena. It's lacks polish, and leielol is, well, a pain to work with, but its fun to play ocassionally. What do you think if nexuiz?

[L33F3R]

it isnt bad. I have had some good hours on it. :p

[RabidWeezle]

Nexuiz is a great engine, pretty decent models, pretty nice maps. Just wish people out there would make mods for it. I would love to see a "Nexuiz Fortress", or Nexuiz-Strike :D Back on the original quake (from which nexuiz is a major update to), we saw lots and lots of mods. Some of those mods (ctf, teamfortress) that became a staple in FPS gaming that we know it. Where have all the modders gone? //sorry if this was all kinda off topic.

[xav1r]

Nexuiz is a great engine, pretty decent models, pretty nice maps. Just wish people out there would make mods for it. I would love to see a "Nexuiz Fortress", or Nexuiz-Strike :D Back on the original quake (from which nexuiz is a major update to), we saw lots and lots of mods. Some of those mods (ctf, teamfortress) that became a staple in FPS gaming that we know it. Where have all the modders gone? //sorry if this was all kinda off topic.

Well, interest in modding decreased a little when quake2 was released, apparently it wasnt as attractive to modders as quake1 was. Although there were some very important mods for it, like action q2, then q3 came along and it was mostly about trasfering all those q1 mods to it, like 3wave, q3f, and so forth. I suppose it's just more difficult to make mods for todays games. It's just a very big amount of work.

[mirv]

Well, interest in modding decreased a little when quake2 was released, apparently it wasnt as attractive to modders as quake1 was. Although there were some very important mods for it, like action q2, then q3 came along and it was mostly about trasfering all those q1 mods to it, like 3wave, q3f, and so forth. I suppose it's just more difficult to make mods for todays games. It's just a very big amount of work.

Carmack made a note of that in answer to a question about Rage. He mentioned that the game is not intended for modders predominately because it would simply require too much work. He didn't say it wasn't possible, just that with the amount of effort required to make the maps & other things, modding will likely not occur and so they're not aiming for it with that particular game.

[Dragonlord]

Which has one big problem: if it's "that" complicate it's not good neither for pros. KISS rules... no matter where. Make it complicate and it's with high likelihood a failure in the long run.

[L33F3R]

Where have all the modders gone?

HL2 :p

either that or they got jobs.

[mirv]

Which has one big problem: if it's "that" complicate it's not good neither for pros. KISS rules... no matter where. Make it complicate and it's with high likelihood a failure in the long run.

He didn't say complicated - just that it required a lot of work! That basically means people need to do it as a job, not as a hobby thing.

[xav1r]

He didn't say complicated - just that it required a lot of work! That basically means people need to do it as a job, not as a hobby thing.

Well, you know, back on the quake 1 modding days, it took modders' cutting edge pentium pro computers days to compile a q1 .bsp. It might be hard, long work now, but those who really want to do it have the needed hardware and skills to pull it off.

[L33F3R]

the teams can be very large and thats not always a good thing. I can tell you ETQW maps, done right, takes somone with no life and an expresso machine.

[Julius]

Another problem is that less and less people/teams just do it for the fun of doing it (since it is so much work) but rather as a way to enter the industry. Thus their mods often end up being just as boring as commercial titles as that is what they are trying to create as a show-piece.

So people... the fun is where the Open-Source games are, not with mods:
www.freegamedev.net

[RealNC]

Yeah sure :P I take Doom 3, Grid and GTA4 over those any day :P

[tuke81]

Well, it was among the announcements that the mac and linux versions of QuakeLive were going to be available on august 18,I believe.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/14/mac-and-linux-users-joining-quake-live-community-august-18?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_joystiqhttp://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/14/mac-and-linux-users-joining-quake-live-community-august-18?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_joystiq


Jep it's now available for linux, working fine with firefox...

[deanjo]

iD's CEO took a bit of a shot at opensource development today as well on Shacknews:

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1182


Shack: He also mentioned that the iPhone edition of Wolfenstein 3D will soon support custom levels.
Todd Hollenshead: John likes the idea, just like with the new stuff, just like with the old stuff, of releasing the editor, letting the community make content, having that be part of the game.
I mean this in a complimentary way--John is basically a nerd at heart. I think he has some nerdy concepts that he clings on to. I think they're cool and all that, I think that maybe this consortium of Wolfenstein 3D iPhone developers that's out there across the world isn't as large as John might like to believe.
It is kinda cool, the idea that you give these people these tools and they'll make all this content and they have fun making it and it enhances the user experience for the people that buy it and it makes the game more popular, which sort of turns back around to result in more sales of the game.
Now, in theory, that's great, but I don't know it it actually works as well in practice.
Shack: It's similar to the open source debate.
Todd Hollenshead: Yes. They post on your site all the time, or they used to anyway: "Pokey the Penguin says Linux is free if your time is worthless." [laughs] That was one of my favorite quotes. To a large extent, I think some of that stuff is, you get what you pay for.

[djack]

It is kinda cool, the idea that you give these people these tools and they'll make all this content and they have fun making it and it enhances the user experience for the people that buy it and it makes the game more popular, which sort of turns back around to result in more sales of the game.
Now, in theory, that's great, but I don't know it it actually works as well in practice.

Is this guy being deliberately blind and offensive or what??

OK, he's a CEO and not expected to know all the nitty-gritty, but surely he can't just be blindly unaware of the masses of really successful mods for iD's (and others') games? I really, really hate it when people have such a bad case of recto-cranial insertion syndrome that they will be that dismissive and insulting towards those who have clearly contributed to their success.

[L33F3R]

Is this guy being deliberately blind and offensive or what??

OK, he's a CEO and not expected to know all the nitty-gritty, but surely he can't just be blindly unaware of the masses of really successful mods for iD's (and others') games? I really, really hate it when people have such a bad case of recto-cranial insertion syndrome that they will be that dismissive and insulting towards those who have clearly contributed to their success.

your right, look at dota for warcraft 3

[xav1r]

Is this guy being deliberately blind and offensive or what??

OK, he's a CEO and not expected to know all the nitty-gritty, but surely he can't just be blindly unaware of the masses of really successful mods for iD's (and others') games? I really, really hate it when people have such a bad case of recto-cranial insertion syndrome that they will be that dismissive and insulting towards those who have clearly contributed to their success.

Dude, man, chill, he's an accountant, he used to work for Arthur Andersen. :D

[whizse]

Not exactly news but worth noticing:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1244727

I'm kinda curious if they would be interested in some sort of community sponsored deal to pay someone for the port?

[deanjo]

Not exactly news but worth noticing:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1244727

I'm kinda curious if they would be interested in some sort of community sponsored deal to pay someone for the port?

For those that would just rather read it here instead of opening up another browser tab/window....


> Dear Mr Carmack, I am just wondering if the graphics renderer for
> Rage is still
> built using OpenGL 3.* as a target? Will id still port to Linux if
> user numbers are
> small or not as big as say Mac OS or Windows?
>
> Gratzi,
> naikon89

The PC and Mac versions are still OpenGL 2.x.

We are not currently scheduling native linux ports. It isn't out of the
question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If
there are hundreds of thousands of linux users playing Quake Live when
we are done with Rage, that would certainly influence our decision...

John Carmack
> Ok, it must be alot more difficult to port
> than older id software games :(

Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics
technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It
probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the
closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the
fully tested and tuned experience...

John Carmack
*sigh* to bad shitty non-nvidia drivers give him an excuse to use.

[Dragonlord]

And here again we see why monolithic engine design is a relic of the past and not scalable enough to meet the needs of today and in the future.

[deanjo]

And here again we see why monolithic engine design is a relic of the past and not scalable enough to meet the needs of today and in the future.

It's not so much the engine as the lack of consumer demand and the poor state of linux's chosen graphics subsystems. This does make something very clear though, the future of quality commercial games on linux rests solely on the efforts of projects like wine (sorry Svartalf, but it's true).

[bridgman]

Am I the only one who interpreted Carmack's response as primarily saying "new games cost a heck of a lot more to port than old games, and as far as we can see the market has grown but not enough for a port to make sense" ?

The graphics subsystems are already being addressed; I think one could make a pretty case that even the open source drivers will reach an appropriate level in less time than a port would require, and an iD engine is one of those apps that everyone will be sure to support properly.

The big unknown that I see is still market size; which is a combination of (a) widely varying numbers for Linux market share, (b) an apparent bias towards low end systems (eg netbooks) which may not be able to run Rage usefully, and (c) not enough market data for sales of Linux-specific SKUs to make a case for how much additional sales will result from providing a Linux client vs hoping Wine will suffice.

The only really credible market share numbers suggest maybe 1% market share for Linux vs 8% for MacOS, although there are all kinds of seemingly reasonable numbers around (from individual distros) which suggest a much larger market share for Linux. It seems to me that the most useful thing we could do here is to paint a consistent, credible picture for game developers of the market potential for native Linux clients.

I don't know if the required data even exists; I can tell you that if it does it's pretty darned hard to find.

[deanjo]

The graphics subsystems are already being addressed; I think one could make a pretty case that even the open source drivers will reach an appropriate level in less time than a port would require, and an iD engine is one of those apps that everyone will be sure to support properly.



IIRC Bridgeman you were the one saying that we can realistically eventually expect ~70% performance of what a binary blob can provide when it comes to 3d performance. That would mean that you would have to have at least +1 generation card above the minimum specs of an equivelent blob based or windows system. Then you also have to account for that games such as Rage are going to push system hardware fairly hard and to use that +1 graphics card you are also going to have to wait until proper and decent support is added for that card in the opensource drivers. This all adds an additional amount of time to get a good enough solution utilizing FOSS drivers and it would not be unreasonable going by previous "time to execution" of the FOSS solutions to be 1 - 2 years. By that time the world has moved on and the game is old news. Until that time comes where opensource solutions can offer same day acceptable solutions to when a 'A' title is released I can't see 'A' titles seriously being ported to linux.

[bridgman]

IIRC Bridgeman you were the one saying that we can realistically eventually expect ~70% performance of what a binary blob can provide when it comes to 3d performance. That would mean that you would have to have at least +1 generation card above the minimum specs of an equivelent blob based or windows system.

+1 model, not +1 generation, right ? Even a midrange board will give decent gaming performance these days, and a high end card usually offers more than enough performance to make up for the difference in driver efficiency... or you could just take the eye candy down a bit.

AFAIK the Rage engine is targeting DX9-level hardware, so recent and current GPUs should be fine as long as the driver functionality (specifically level of OpenGL support) is there.

Then you also have to account for that games such as Rage are going to push system hardware fairly hard and to use that +1 graphics card you are also going to have to wait until proper and decent support is added for that card in the opensource drivers.

Yes, that's the time I'm talking about, but it's more of a one-time effort and doesn't have to be repeated for every new GPU.

The delay would also be a lot shorter for the binary drivers - my point was that *even* the open source drivers would probably have the required level of support by the time the engine was ported.

This all adds an additional amount of time to get a good enough solution utilizing FOSS drivers and it would not be unreasonable going by previous "time to execution" of the FOSS solutions to be 1 - 2 years.

You're including the time it took to catch up from 6-ish years of not supporting open driver development; we would only see that delay again if we stopped supporting driver development and had to catch up again.

By that time the world has moved on and the game is old news. Until that time comes where opensource solutions can offer same day acceptable solutions to when a 'A' title is released I can't see 'A' titles seriously being ported to linux.

I said "even the open source drivers". With the Catalyst driver we run pretty much the same OpenGL stack for all OSes, so if the game runs on one OS then similar support will be available on Linux at the same time, and I think we are seeing enough activity in the open source drivers to have confidence that adequate OpenGL support will be available there as well.

[deanjo]

+1 model, not +1 generation, right ? Even a midrange board will give decent gaming performance these days, and a high end card usually offers more than enough performance to make up for the difference in driver efficiency... or you could just take the eye candy down a bit.

30% increase in performance would generally require more then just a one step upgrade in model in the same family.


AFAIK the Rage engine is targeting DX9-level hardware, so recent and current GPUs should be fine as long as the driver functionality (specifically level of OpenGL support) is there.


Don't be so sure about that. The Siggraph presentation of the challenges of the idtech 5 engine shows that for id to achieve the goals that they set out for themselves some massive parallelization is going to be needed. (Read cuda/openCL)

http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/05-JP_id_Tech_5_Challenges.pdf


Yes, that's the time I'm talking about, but it's more of a one-time effort and doesn't have to be repeated for every new GPU.

The delay would also be a lot shorter for the binary drivers - my point was that *even* the open source drivers would probably have the required level of support by the time the engine was ported.

You're including the time it took to catch up from 6-ish years of not supporting open driver development; we would only see that delay again if we stopped supporting driver development and had to catch up again.


It's not only the drivers that you have to worry about, in the case of idTech 5 ogl 2.1 support may suffice for it. However other games may require OGL support at a higher level that mesa currently provides. The mesa ogl level usually takes about a year to get the next level supported. Plus with idtech 5 it is more then likely going to have to use a GPGPU solution for it's parallelism requirements. openCL support is still a relative unknown on anything but Nvidia right now in linux.


I said "even the open source drivers". With the Catalyst driver we run pretty much the same OpenGL stack for all OSes, so if the game runs on one OS then similar support will be available on Linux at the same time, and I think we are seeing enough activity in the open source drivers to have confidence that adequate OpenGL support will be available there as well.

I can't say I share your optimistic view. Doom 3 for example had some big issues with the catalyst drivers when it debuted, and recently had issues with even ET:QW despite it being out for a while. That being all said and with Carmacks comments, native linux support is unlikely for idtech 5, which means that wine and kin is probably going to be the only solution out there to run those games. In this scenario the free drivers have ALOT of work to do to properly support the requirements of such an endeavor.

[mirv]

idtech5 won't require gpgpu systems, it's just that it might help if there's spare processing time to use it for a given engine job. They already do things such as additional processing whilst the graphics card is busy just to keep their timing constraints, so they really don't rely upon gpgpu stuff, more just parallel processing (threads, multiple cpu cores, etc).

[deanjo]

idtech5 won't require gpgpu systems, it's just that it might help if there's spare processing time to use it for a given engine job. They already do things such as additional processing whilst the graphics card is busy just to keep their timing constraints, so they really don't rely upon gpgpu stuff, more just parallel processing (threads, multiple cpu cores, etc).

Required, no, required for a satisfying experience, more then likely. Really, read the siggraph presentation.

–Anticipate CUDA, OpenCL, Larrabee support

[mirv]

Required, no, required for a satisfying experience, more then likely. Really, read the siggraph presentation.

I did read it. I also listened to most of the keynote (it's two hours long, so I did skip some parts). I was merely pointing out that idtech5 isn't about leveraging gpgpu - the paper quite clearly state about parallel processing and making an engine to take advantage of a range of possibilities.
It just seems these days that people think that gpgpu is the answer to everything, but it's really not that useful if your graphics card is too busy drawing graphics to spare the time to compute something else.

[Dragonlord]

It's not so much the engine as the lack of consumer demand and the poor state of linux's chosen graphics subsystems. This does make something very clear though, the future of quality commercial games on linux rests solely on the efforts of projects like wine (sorry Svartalf, but it's true).
I meant more the ever increasing range of hardware and software ( OS, drivers, apps ). Supporting all these different setups is a chore and getting optimal performance out of all of them is neigh impossible. We had this back in the old days where each app had to support everything on it's own ( like including own printer drivers or graphic drivers ). Back then we figured out that placing an OS between the hardware and apps solves this problem. But in game development we are still in stone age which is the cause of all the problems we have currently with games, engines and porting.

[deanjo]

I did read it. I also listened to most of the keynote (it's two hours long, so I did skip some parts). I was merely pointing out that idtech5 isn't about leveraging gpgpu - the paper quite clearly state about parallel processing and making an engine to take advantage of a range of possibilities.
It just seems these days that people think that gpgpu is the answer to everything, but it's really not that useful if your graphics card is too busy drawing graphics to spare the time to compute something else.

Your right, GPGPU isn't the answer to everything. These tasks can be done as well with raw core speed but we see right now that every major hardware player out there has basically abandoned this route in favor of parallelism. You don't see roadmaps with a 5 ghz cpu anymore, you do however see roadmaps and plans with cpu's having cores in the hundreds. It just happens to be right now that the solutions that are available to day that offers the most parallelism with being effecient at it happens to be GPU's.

[deanjo]

I meant more the ever increasing range of hardware and software ( OS, drivers, apps ). Supporting all these different setups is a chore and getting optimal performance out of all of them is neigh impossible. We had this back in the old days where each app had to support everything on it's own ( like including own printer drivers or graphic drivers ). Back then we figured out that placing an OS between the hardware and apps solves this problem. But in game development we are still in stone age which is the cause of all the problems we have currently with games, engines and porting.

I get what your saying now, although you can't really blame the software devs. They are just trying to make use of the hardware that is available now.

[Dragonlord]

That's correct. It's also a problem since the large game development companies base their income to a large degree on licensing engines, especially re-selling their engine with new iterations. While good for business this is bad for solving the problem. But so far any sub-par solutions got overtaken by proper solutions so this day is coming for sure :D

[Dragonlord]

Your right, GPGPU isn't the answer to everything. These tasks can be done as well with raw core speed but we see right now that every major hardware player out there has basically abandoned this route in favor of parallelism. You don't see roadmaps with a 5 ghz cpu anymore, you do however see roadmaps and plans with cpu's having cores in the hundreds. It just happens to be right now that the solutions that are available to day that offers the most parallelism with being effecient at it happens to be GPU's.
Multi-core is not a solution neither unfortunately. What you gain with parallelism you loose with synchronization work. And games tend to be highly correlated. Some parts can be done in parallel like rendering and physics but that's as far as it gets. I think the development goes in a wrong direction there. Trying to parallelize something that does not lend itself well to parallelization is a problem. For graphics and physics I do see the solution but not for games in general.

[deanjo]

Multi-core is not a solution neither unfortunately. What you gain with parallelism you loose with synchronization work. And games tend to be highly correlated. Some parts can be done in parallel like rendering and physics but that's as far as it gets. I think the development goes in a wrong direction there. Trying to parallelize something that does not lend itself well to parallelization is a problem. For graphics and physics I do see the solution but not for games in general.

Well another potential area that can be highly parallelized is AI. Pre-calculation of possible event outcomes has massive benefits. Nothing demonstrates this better then IBM's efforts on their chess platform, without this paralellism their chess engine would be slow as molasses. Apply that capability now to general games and the AI can potentially become far more sophisticated then current single threaded solutions. There is great potential for general gaming in such a scenario.

[L33F3R]

Multi-core is not a solution neither unfortunately. What you gain with parallelism you loose with synchronization work. And games tend to be highly correlated. Some parts can be done in parallel like rendering and physics but that's as far as it gets. I think the development goes in a wrong direction there. Trying to parallelize something that does not lend itself well to parallelization is a problem. For graphics and physics I do see the solution but not for games in general.

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?

[nanonyme]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?Then you need more brute calculating capacity. Again. Or figure out something new altogether. Some do think silicon is getting past it's expiry date...

[mirv]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?

That's why companies make a lot of money from licensing engines - someone else takes care of that little problem!
It seems to me that most people are going the route of pooling together a group of jobs, and then scheduling them with whatever can run them (gpgpu, cpu, whatever) - but this is still new territory, and it will take a while to sort it all out. And there's what the hardware people do as well that will help influence everything.

[L33F3R]

Then you need more brute calculating capacity. Again. Or figure out something new altogether. Some do think silicon is getting past it's expiry date...

i was going to mention that. The proof is in the clock speeds. 4.04ghz for the power 7 which isnt even out yet......

[deanjo]

i was going to mention that. The proof is in the clock speeds. 4.04ghz for the power 7 which isnt even out yet......

Well architecture has a lot to do with it as well, I don't think that anyone would conclude that a 3.8 Ghz Pentium 4 HT 672 is the fastest x86 processor out there still.

[Dragonlord]

so if you cant just add more threading then what should be done?
Be smart. Brute force solutions tend to be slower than solutions with brain. A good old saying of rendering is "the fasted triangles to render are those you don't render at all". There are many tricks which reduce the work load. But here again the problem with the dated engine design I mentioned comes into play. You have to use so many tricks that you can not get them done properly and optimized in the short TTM ( time to market ) alloted to game development projects. Hence companies try to fix the shortcoming in clever design with brute force. A battle you can't win in the long run.

[Max Spain]

Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics
technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It
probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary
drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere
else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the
closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the
fully tested and tuned experience...

Bridgman you've been a HUGE champion for us Linux users with the open source drivers, and we all appreciate that. Perhaps you can help bridge a communications gap in this situation. Maybe Mr. Carmack needs some assurance from AMD/ATI's Linux driver programmers that they will help design their drivers so Rage can be run on Linux using AMD/ATI HW. If you could show this to some of the Catalyst folks maybe they could get a dialog going.

[bridgman]

Bridgman you've been a HUGE champion for us Linux users with the open source drivers, and we all appreciate that. Perhaps you can help bridge a communications gap in this situation. Maybe Mr. Carmack needs some assurance from AMD/ATI's Linux driver programmers that they will help design their drivers so Rage can be run on Linux using AMD/ATI HW. If you could show this to some of the Catalyst folks maybe they could get a dialog going.

I suspect the key point from the text you quoted is :

If you are restricted to it only working on the closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the fully tested and tuned experience...

... although I don't expect many Linux users to agree with that logic :D

On balance it doesn't seem likely that fglrx is the pivotal issue but will ask if we can get some clarification.

[Max Spain]

While I too would love to have a fully open source system, the drivers are still in their infancy. Full 3d support will come, but I don't think id should give up on Linux until that time.

[deanjo]

While I too would love to have a fully open source system, the drivers are still in their infancy. Full 3d support will come, but I don't think id should give up on Linux until that time.

Not sure if Rage will even still be in any other place but the bargin bin by 2013.

[Julius]

Bump... any news on the Wolf:ET source release?

Seems like Zenimax is not really in favour of a release?