Wired: Prepare to Meet Thy Doom:
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For years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. in their detail. When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood’s more measured pace – incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Innovators will focus on optimizing existing code, and major revisions will happen less frequently. In effect, Carmack will be obsolete. “There’s a real chance that the next-generation rendering engine will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time,” he says. “Programmers will move from being engine coders to being technical directors in the Pixar style.” …
Eventually, Carmack says, real-time rendering will be so dynamic that animators will be able to produce films using game engines. Motivated modmakers will have the tools – for free, if Carmack has his way – to bring to life a vision as compelling as the new film Finding Nemo (see Swimming With Sharks). In his book Pattern Recognition, William Gibson writes about a “Garage Kubrick.” Carmack foresees a Basement Disney.
The ideal Carmack has always had in mind is the Holodeck, the immersive simulation device on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s science fiction, of course, but a major influence on his thinking all the same. “When I create a game, I’m not telling a story,” he says. “I’m creating an environment in which interesting things will happen.” If, as Carmack believes, graphics engines are reaching a plateau, “now is the time to do a generalized environment” that would be the ultimate mod – a programmable virtual reality like the Metaverse described by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. …
Even with all that processing power at his disposal, Carmack then squeezes out every ounce of performance he can. For the game’s monsters, he created an algorithm to reduce a 500,000-polygon character to a mere 2,000 when viewed at a distance – just the amount to ensure the game’s speed. Carmack also fixed the tendency for shadows to invert when the viewer’s eye was inside the darkness by calculating the shadows from above instead of from the player’s point of view. The technique inspired several dissertations and a name: Carmack’s reverse.
“It was one of those really elegant solutions,” says Carmack, that could come only after grueling hours of work. “There’s this cultural stereotype of a person staring off into space until a light bulb turns on, but that’s just intellectual laziness. You have to get inside a problem and work it.”