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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

Carmack on the acquisition:

> Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832...

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The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.

>had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them.

No kidding. You want to keep a guy like Carmack in the family in whatever capacity you can, because he carries such deep respect in the industry. It was a stupid thing for ZeniMax to burn that bridge.

Carmack's pull as an individual among tech folks, is unrivaled in gaming.

I can bet that many people would willingly taken pay cuts (or more-likely skipped on pay bumps) to work for a team led by Carmack.

Almost all of the other pop-culture figures in game development such as Todd Howard, Kojima and the like are designers, producers or story writers.

Carmack is the only one that is a proper coding guy.

______

Maybe Carmack comes back to lead Windows mixed reality ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and PCVR ? True wishful thinking right here.

I think a few of Nintendo's star players are (and were) coders as well as designers going back to the assembly days.

Late Satoru Iwata famously coded Pokemon Stadium battle system without design document, only by looking at the gameboy source code. He later became Nintendo CEO.

Just wanted to point out a small discrepancy here: As his bio on Twitter says, he's currently an independent AI researcher. But also sometimes consults for Oculus VR, although not actively employed there anymore. [0]

It'd be very interesting to see if his return to Id might spark some changes :)

[0]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially left for AI research.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y

I am guessing Carmack "retiring" from Oculus is something akin to "went from 80 hours a week to 40".

yeah he sounded like he was tech lead for the project, i am surprised to learn he's "independent"

Most of the higher level Oculus engineers are very in tune with what is happening within Oculus and the industry. There is constant discussion internally about it, and Oculus still knows more about VR than anybody else. Source: I was one of them.

I think every non-manager employee these days should be "independent." Some may not have noticed, but tech company managers have gone insane and turned their ego up to 11 echoing the current political climate. Anyone who is a famous dev or even a grunt that shows they have basic competency is going to be an immediate management target.

What grudge is he even talking about? The lawsuits?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/oculus-cto-john-carmack-is...

Perhaps, but also perhaps that recent thing where Nine Inch Nails released an LP with the Quake 1 soundtrack [0], had some notes from John Carmack and American McGee to be included with the record and Zenimax forced NIN to remove the notes [1]. Though of course people saved it [2].

[0] https://store.nin.com/products/quake-vinyl

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1306279981459308546

[2] http://handscandance.com/quake/NINQuakeBooklet.pdf

Carmack left Zenimax because they wanted him to work on sequels instead of VR. They only started caring about VR once the $2B Oculus acquisition was dangled in their faces, and then scrambled to find a way to get a slice that they didn't earn.

I didn't buy DOOM because I didn't support Zenimax's cynical lawsuit/cash grab. Maybe now I'll get DOOM after the Microsoft acquisition closes.

I hope you do — Zenimax aside, it’s a damn good game.

Is there a source for this? Because I always thought that it was the other way around - Carmack was rather bored, sold the company and moved somewhere else.

He sold the company in 2009, long before Oculus existed. He intended to continue working there [1] and he did for several years. AFAIK he didn't start dabbling in VR until 2012 and didn't leave id until 2013, after attempting to work on VR stuff there for a while which was seemingly blocked, e.g. DOOM 3 BFG VR support which he promised but Zenimax never released.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2009-06-24-bethesda-parent-company-...

Confirmation from the man himself: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1312272675222491136...

I thought ZeniMax won in court?

They lost on their claims against Carmack, had their award against Oculus reduced and injunction denied, and ultimately settled out of court. I strongly disagree with the magnitude of the damages sought.

Carmack also sued them separately for failing to pay him for part of their id software acquisition. They settled out of court again, with Carmack saying the settlement "fully satisfied their obligations" to him.

Interesting, didn't Rage pioneer the on-demand texture streaming approach? It fits well with the DMA SSDs in the coming console generation.

Wow, that's now a decade ago.

I believe it did, in addition to mega-textures in video games.

What I am hoping for, and been hoping for a while, is for game engines to start integrating AI into workflows. There are some tools out there that do leverage machine learning to some extent, but what I would love to see are tools for instance that can take a video shot of an actor and then infer the bone structure a decent degree and transfer that animation into the model. Or a tool that allows style transfer of an image onto a 3D model so we can have realistically dynamic brush tools for environments, also integrating Face generation GANs onto models to reduce sculpting effort. Not to mention tools that can dynamically and infinitely scale 3D models based on material information.

I know some tools exist that can do some of these things at an okay degree, but it can be taken even further.

Truly the power of AI in video game tooling has yet to be unlocked, but I believe video games as a medium is in the position of being able to push for practical applications of new and exciting research, second only to CGI films. It's exciting what's in store for the future and I'm sure Carmack can appreciate the kind of breakthroughs that Microsoft would be able to foster

Texture streaming was a thing before Rage.

ID tech implemented megatextures earlier also, Quake Wars heavily relied on that feature.

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