A bit too late. I mean… Oculus success is something that has already happened, don’t need more credibility.
If you are like me, you only need to poke around this webpage,
http://www.riftenabled.com/admin/apps
…the download button is a “come and play with the technology”. The retrofited support for old big games. The native support in unreal, unity and source.
Here’s how John breaks it down:
Well yeah, but he just shut down Armadillo. So the gap between priorities is in question.
And now, imo, we know why he shut it down, not enough time to focus on it credibly.
Well, fair enough - there are other space companies who have leapfrogged Armadillo, but the Rift has the potential to change things in gaming.
I got to play with a friends Oculus dev kit for an hour or so over the last weekend and it’s pretty impressive. Most of the claims you read online about it being incredibly immersive are true. It’s not hard for me to see why Carmack believes in it. He actually spent some time talking about it and answering questions during his talks at Quakecon this year and it was obvious to everyone watching that he is most definitely a true believer. Hell, I am seriously close to picking one up and trying my luck at writing code for it myself.
That said, I have to add a caveat. I don’t think I’d buy one now unless I wanted to develop software for it. For one, the software support isn’t there yet. That problem will be fixed with time. The biggest problem with the dev kits right now is the screen. It’s too low resolution and the “screen door” effect is very noticeable. If you were to play a game such as ARMA where enemies can and will shoot you from hundreds of meters away then it becomes a problem since at that distance the size of the enemy could be smaller than a pixel on the screen. That problem should be fixed in the consumer version, but there is no set release date to my knowledge.
Oh yea, I’m waiting for the consumer version.
I played with the dev kit for just a few minutes last month. It actually made me kinda ill. :) Not sure if a higher res/lower latency & less pronounced screen door effect would help that or not. I was way more stoked for the Rift before I tried it out, but am willing to give it another shot.
There is evidently a calibration process that can supposedly make a big difference. From what little I know about the project my best guess would be latency is probably the biggest culprit in making people sick. Or it could be as simple as your brain/eyes/inner-ears are conspiring to ensure your VR-enabled future sucks.
This is great news. Once Carmack applies his savvy to figuring out how to solve the latency issue, I’ll be happy to live in the Lawnmower Man world in about 5 years time.
This news got some surprised reactions because it was starting to look like Carmack was out of his Oculus phase.
Doom BGF was cancelled after it was supposed shipped with the dev kit. Carmack hadn’t spoken about the Oculus in months despite talking for hours about it at other Quake Con talks. There was a rumor floating around that Carmack was frustrated that the Oculus folks weren’t doing enough about latency and had basically split ways.
Now it’s looking like the tension perhaps in the other direction. Carmack wanted to work on Oculus stuff but couldn’t do it without actually stepping down.
Carmack’s little post was adorable, nice to see people able to work on what they love.
I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!
It is a big change of pace to go from working on carefully engineered code for the long haul to PANICKY STARTUP CODING FOR THE NEXT DEMO.
It’s not often the “End of an Era” and “Awesome News!” are one and the same.
We need to kickstart a project to clone Carmack for future generations.
The Oculus project is a better place for Carmack anyway. It’s moving in an interesting direction. id Software on the other hand…
The fall of an empire has always been very interesting. By the way, is there even anyone of the original Doom developers still around at id?
Yep, Kevin Cloud.
I agree, but it truly is the end of an era if he’s going to discontinue next-gen game engines. The years spanning Doom , Quake, Quake 2 were about the most exciting and thrilling gaming times of my life. They coincided with the release of hardware accelerated graphics cards, and of course, Quake truly heralded online Internet gaming. Sad to see him go (if he is leaving) but no doubt an Oculus is in my future.
To be fair, iD’s engines are no longer “mainstream”, they’re in some bethsoft games, Unreal and Unity (talk about coming out of nowhere, there) are. Turns out the editor is more important that cutting-edge graphics (although neither of them is that good, still, they’re better than the competition)
Anyway, interested to see what he’ll deliver now…
As you point out, they’ve not done anything of interest or excitement since Quake 2. (Well, I really liked Quake 3, so let’s move the benchmark to there?)
I think he should have left a long time ago. I’d quite like to see a 1-5 person studio with him a the lead programmer.
id’s creative director, Matt Hooper, left back in Feburary. He’s started working at Oculus with Carmack. http://www.linkedin.com/in/hoopermatt
Hehe, so much this.
Is Carmack considered the best (or at least, the most visible best) programmer in the industry?