Game Developer's Conference 2004: Carmack Addresses the Masses

Final Words

Seeing John Carmack speak was an amazing experience. There isn't another person in the gaming industry with as much knowledge and influence as John Carmack, and id Software is definitely one of the leading game development houses in existence. Everything from Commander Keen to the upcoming Doom 3 has been a testament to John's talent.

Even though we have an eternal chicken and egg situation with games and hardware chasing each other around, it is good to hear from the horse's mouth that we will be seeing real time movie quality rendering become a possibility in the next decade. With games like Doom 3 and Halflife 2 on the horizon (and having seen glimpses of some other totally unreal realtime 3d at GDC) it's easy to see we are well on our way. The second generation of DX9 hardware, coming down the pipe Real Soon Now^TM, is also bringing some much needed speed to the table, and what we will see from PC game developers over the next few years should prove to be very awesome stuff.

We wish all luck and skill to those warriors on the forefront of game engine development. The place where creativity, diligence, and mathematics meet is a strange and wonderful land. Here's to few timetable slips and ever more powerful debuggers. The future looks as bright as the sun after being run through a high dynamic range shader.