De techdemo van UT(2) doet al een tijdje de ronde over het internet en nu begint men een beetje af te vragen wat Doom3 nu eigenlijk zal gaan bieden. VoodooExtreme nam daarom de gelegenheid om John Carmack eens te interviewen.
Ook worden er vragen door Brandon Reinhart (3DRealms), Gabe Newell (Valve Software) en Chris Rhinehart (Human Head Studios)Voodoo Extreme -- Given that you've made a public declaration that Id has the strongest programming team it's ever had, what's your personal role in the software development? Up til now it would appear that you've always had your hands in whatever is going on, is this going to change in the development of Doom3?
[John Carmack] -- Jim [ Dose - new programmer, formerly of Ritual] and Robert [Duffy] have large blocks of code in the new game and UI scripting that I haven't ever looked at, and Graeme's sound system will be another one. Jan Paul's bot code in Q3 is one big black box to me.
It has been a strong temptation to just say "I am working with Smart People, they can handle it", but that would not be a good plan. I need to build up more discipline about reviewing all parts of the code, because my global knowledge of all aspects of the project has always been an important part of making good decisions.
Voodoo Extremist Brandon Reinhart; 3DRealms -- Where do you derive inspiration now that you are the master of your industry?
[John Carmack] -- There are some things lost as you progre through a large learning curve. Early on, there is the bewildering sense of how huge a field is. Then you move into the fun part where you have enough grounding to understand the i ues, and you are constantly getting the flashes of insight as you understand the solutions that other people have developed, and you begin to formulate your own approaches.
Eventually, you reach a point where the field starts to dry up a bit, and you find that you can sometimes read an entire book and not feel that you really learned anything new. There are certainly still an infinite number of things to learn, but the mean time between epiphanies increases.
Most of the motivation remains internal. Being able to see The Right Thing, then program it into existence out of thin air is still the core wonder of programming for me.
Another way to supplement things is to start learning something from a completely different field. I have been reading Sutton's "Rocket Propulsion Elements" like I used to read Foley and Van Dam's "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice" - practically every page has something new for me to integrate into my understanding.Ga dus maar vast een Intel P4 halen want Doom3 belooft zwaar te gaan worden, als we dit interview mogen geloven.