To kick off our Spring 2017 Commencement, we asked honorary doctorate recipient, John Carmack, to speak to students and community members on campus here at UMKC.
So the best industry professionals got the pipeline to 100ms, so I rewrote everything and reduced by it an order of magnitude. Yeah, that sounds like a John Carmack thing.
@@EvoPortal "The industry / authority is all-knowing" is something only autistic people believe. Every organization is a bureaucracy, its agility inversely linked to its size.
@@EvoPortal bruh, the industry was doing it before John Carmack and then John explained to them exactly what is being lost by deciding it isn’t important.
So. First he revolutionized the PC game industry (and the whole game industry while he was at that) by being part of the development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, etc. Then he went do do rocket science. Now he is pretty much a central figure in VR research. What a legend.
One (of the many) signs of an intelligent person. I knew someone that would always brag about enjoying when things go wrong because it's a chance to learn something new. In high stress situations he excels and is a very successful man.
Carmack just goes off! I love that about him,full of information and when he starts to speak you can really see the love for technology. You sir are my major inspiration when it comes to technology and programming. Massive respect for this guy!
I get the opposite man, he seems extremely down to earth, he makes it feel like knowledge is less of a gift from the gods, more of a self ascertained thing
Important to realize that Carmack did everything he did with only high school level math concepts. 3D rasterization can be done with all linear algebra, trigonometry, very basic calculus and maybe matrix multiplication. Even on those terms, Carmack himself says that everything he'd ever done could be done better, including mistakes and oversights that he was embarrassed about in hindsight. In other words, his greatest successes were made with hard work and obsession - but NOT particularly superhuman intelligence and talent. Carmack himself is very humble even about his own proudest technical achievements, and even when he does give himself credit, he stresses the thousands of little small decisions rather than any stroke of genius.
Revolutionized the whole 3D industry once with Doom and then Quake and then a few times over... hobbiest space rocket engineer and now also revolutionizing 3D all over again with VR... Oh and while he's at it he will just re-write digital video, why not?... John Carmack doesn't get as much attention as he should be getting. Hot damn.
"Doom and then Quake". It largely ended there. Along came Unreal, Tim Sweeney, and the Unreal Engine powering many games today. Sweeney's software renderer(a render option for Unreal) was probably the biggest technical achievement in graphics software ever created. Everything else is incremental. Sweeney's engine powers 100:1 of 3D games compared to id tech. Carmack foundered with misguided steps. His backing of Intel graphics in the late 90s, and his eventual mega texture model throttled the Id Tech engines. He failed to keep Id software as a cohesive team in the development of Quake. As for the present day, Elon Musk is doing it in terms of space. VR is just another system that Carmack as siezed on, like that Intel thing in the 90's. VR might see its day in 10 years. By then Carmack will be focused on discovering something else. Dont get me wrong, he is gifted, and gaming has benefited hugely. But these days there are hundreds of Carmacks, that are making better decisions.
"Doom and then Quake". It largely ended there. Along came Unreal, Tim Sweeney, and the Unreal Engine powering many games today. Sweeney's software renderer(a render option for Unreal) was probably the biggest technical achievement in graphics software ever created. Everything else is incremental. Sweeney's engine powers 100:1 of 3D games compared to id tech. Carmack foundered with misguided steps. His backing of Intel graphics in the late 90s, and his eventual mega texture model throttled the Id Tech engines. He failed to keep Id software as a cohesive team in the development of Quake. As for the present day, Elon Musk is doing it in terms of space. VR is just another system that Carmack as siezed on, like that Intel thing in the 90's. VR might see its day in 10 years. By then Carmack will be focused on discovering something else. Dont get me wrong, he is gifted, and gaming has benefited hugely. But these days there are hundreds of Carmacks, that are making better decisions.
Carmack is crazy in a good way. A damn genius of a programmer. Romero may have been the architect of DOOMs levels but without Carmack figuring out how to make the engine run and run on the slow hardware of the early 90s there wouldnt be FPS. Hes a master of optimization too making code run on the slowest system possible and he would often stay after everyone else had left frying to make things work as best as possible or working on a problem until it was solved
Slowest system did not work much for me. My brother tried hooking up our Acer computer (Windows 95, 100 mhz) and HP computer (windows 98, 333 mhz) to run doom for modem play. It would not work at all. I only did modem play on the HP Computer connecting to the friend of my brother's computer and vice-versa for doom. The friend's computer was fast enough to keep up.
Been a huge fan of John ever since I was like 5 years old. Followed his genius. The man is an absolute genius. I'd say he is the number 1 massively underrated/unrecognized human on the planet
46:00 FINALLY! Yes, slow camera pans in modern videos always stutter!! And this is the first time I've ever seen someone point out the stuttering on modern video playback!! It's always frustrated me that not only have we not got this right yet for some reason, no one talks about it!! This never used to happen on old CRT TV systems.
1:06:35 Samurai mastered the art of moving in the low awareness bit of our FOV, and using environmental cues or outright distraction. It's because of how we prioritize data collection for local storage (brain)
I love Carmack. His a supergenious on the one hand and on the other hand a die hard gamer / gamer fan. His absolutely right how gaming today has taken ginourmous steps backwards in latency. Most of it is contributed to display technology, but not all.
Never heard a lecture of this caliber, for this length, with the complete and total lack of any "umm" between any sentence. Astounding. Also, the lecture itself was pretty good too. :)
Superb lecture! I loved the way he just casually mentions some technical challenges which arise from the industry and the public adoption and not inherently from the engineering complexity.
Ahh yes John Carmack he is an amazing person, but also an instrumental person in industry today without his contributions we would not have many of the things that many people take for granted today!
yeah i mean carmack propably was (and maybe even still is) autistic. from what ive heard about him in his youth he maybe even was in some way severely autistic. but its not like he´d care.
@Joey Mantka The names that their parents gave them were "John" (Carmack), "Mark" (Zuckerberg), "Bill" (Gates), "Steve" (Jobs)... Absolutely normal and ordinary names. The surnames might not sound super common, but that's because there is a handful of "common" surnames and then you have a long tail of less known surnames. IMHO, success is a mix of talent (genetics), hard work (practice and persistence) and luck (being in the right place at the right time). In the case of Carmack, he clearly is extremely gifted and he is well known for having a strong work ethic. I recommend you the book "Masters of Doom" if you want to know more about Carmack's early years.
He lives through what he explains. Normal people very rarely presents issues which they are passionate about. I have opportunity to present both sides of the spectrum. And I am two different people while doing both types of presentation. And it's not related to boredom. Those are lacking parts of the full picture which don't allow you to go with the flow, so the stress and stutter sometimes kicks in. On the other side, you have full knowledge at many scales. Like high-level points, process maps, value stream maps, steps and stories on each level. You also have nothing to be ashamed of while saying this is a detail where another person comes in to help and very briefly describe this person's area of expertise.
One way to augment fovieted view (sorry if misspelled) - combine eye tracking with coarse analysis of changing in scene. You should increase resolution where you looking, where are most changes happened(because it probably next point of interest) and use previous frame to enhance coarse rendered parts of current frame.
From watching a lot of these when you get to the point of understanding one, go back and watch one of the previous ones you've seen. It's like going over the hurdle of learning a new language. I know you might not have the mental capacity to endure another 1-2 hours of basically full on mental warfare, but trust me, it's worth it. You learn a lot, what he is saying here in a span of 1-2 hours will take you(and it probably took him) months / years to learn and understand properly. And the way he explains it is so smooth, it shows that he discovered these things on his own and not just read them up online or in a book.
If every engineer cared about quality of their work in every aspect like John we would be in so much better situation technologically as a human race than now, where too many tricks and compromises and cost savings have made the entire technology stack so much more complicated to work with in order to achieve a high quality result. Now you pretty much have go down in every layer and correct something that has been done wrong or neglected.
Then every engineer would have to spend at least the same amount of time learning as John, have as good conditions for it as he did. That's just impossible, dude.
@@IamFilter94 If you read most of his .plan "blogs", it's quite clear that learning and writing Quake was more important to him than the rest of his life (bar blowing up Ferrari engines). I've never met anyone who comes close. He's a machine.
Very inspiring. About "taking control" of technology, revealing the layers upon layers and allowing opimizing for your use case rather than the vendor-chosen one, for example benchmarking.
Non-stop talking from start to finish, barely a stutter in between. It's amazing, every talk. And he's somehow always talking about something interesting. Just a constant flow of information and I don't think he memorizes any sort of script.
The real problem is that there is not enough diversity in John Carmack. Why does he have to be a white CIS white male? He should step down and allow someone from the ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789+ community to be John Carmack. Enough cruel oppression! Where's my Twitter account!
@@alichamas63 He's a hyper-intelligent alien artificial intelligence that came to Earth, he doesn't have a gender. Probably why the gender studies class invited him when they saw he was non-binary, as he's a quantum supercomputer rather than functioning on 1s and 0s binary systems :D
@Joey Mantka "Bill/William Gates" is a really common name, if not to say "ordinary". "Carmack" can't be so uncommon either, if they had even the unrelated "Adrian Carmack" in the small id team which developed Doom. The reason these names sound so distinguished is because you're hearing them over and over again. So you're confusing cause and effect.
I'm not a CS person but was roughly aware of who John was. I've just watched QuakeCon 2013 talk on light physics and rendering, and now I've watched this. His lectures are great and I might be hooked
There's great stuff going all the way back to 1996, look up carmack keynotes on the internet archive. Also check out Michael Abrash's keynotes from 1998 and back.
The amount of smart things that John Carmack says in 1 hour like ( Opportunity is the delta between what people have and what is possible ) is greater than most people say in their entire life. Incredible.
if it werent for so much competition for peoples attention from mass entertainment and corporate advertising many more people could develop skills in this area and we could cultivate waaayy more dense monologues and discussions like this. alas most people are trained to have the attention span of a duck and would rather talk about sports or other entertainment trivia than engage with interesting and practical problem solving.
The most amazing thing about Carmack is how he can basically call everyone everywhere incapable idiots, without actually saying it or getting worked up about it.
It's official: game dev / 3D graphics programming / VR, all that jazz is pure rocket science. The man said it himself. Took code from his rocket ship and copied over to the pc project: 13:56. Nuff said.
1:01:38 A little known fact: RAW is not "raw" information from the sensor...it's actually heavily processed already by internal software. The "formula" used in this processing is very different from manufacturer to manufacturer and may include corrections for lens effects, sharpening, etc even if you do not actively decide to use specific modes. In some cases you will also have low pass filters on top of the sensor..etc.
Does he have any ties to San Antonio, Tx? There are a bunch of Carmacks' down there - they were involved in some bowling alleys and Trinity University for some time. Nice highly thought of and distinguished family. Wish them well.
I asked the question about VR for low vision people at 1:12:18 Kind of stumbled with my words. I shouldn't have given any background info at all and just got straight to the point but it was on the spot and I hadn't been planning to ask the question until right then so I kind of stumbled around. If I attend another tech talk then I will write/type out my question in advance so that doesn't happen. Still it was neat to get to be there, ask one quick question and shake the man's hand. I'd been a fan of John Carmack's work since I got to play Commander Keen 4 in 1992 and I'd say he was the #1 inspiration for me to pursue my CS degree at UMKC. At the moment, I'm working on trying to port Super 3D Noah's Ark to the PSP. :)
1) He did some great things with map design/etc. in Doom. People who do similar things in modern games should not forget or ignore the awesome design present in "old" games like Doom. 2) Most of the rest of us are not talking about anything because we don't have credentials with that much value.
Yeah, I like romero but I feel like he's still living in the past. He is clearly way past his prime, he has abilities, but he needs more than Doom now to stand out. He recently released a fifth episode for the original Doom. The original fucking Doom, dude come on.
8:02, I don't think so, John. I remember playing Tomb Raider in PC and Playstation and feeling a huge difference in response times compared to 2D fighting games like Street Fighter Alpha 2.
It's actually hilarious, as soon as he mentioned the stutter / hitching in video on digital monitors, I started noticing an audio hitch in this talk every 5-10 seconds
I can imagine how much of a game changer it'll be when we have the technology necessary to communicate directly with the eye. Really interesting talk to listen to.
