WHO IS CARMACK?

[TheShiz]

a great book called "Masters of Doom" came out recently that tells the story of carmack and romero, It was really interesting, I finished it in a few days. I made a thread about it when it came out:

thread about book

 

[Deeko]

WHO IS CARMACK?

I am, fool.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: TheShiz
a great book called "Masters of Doom" came out recently that tells the story of carmack and romero, It was really interesting, I finished it in a few days. I made a thread about it when it came out:

thread about book

real twisted guy from what i've read about his childhood. probably interesting to work with but u probably wouldn't want to know him.

 

[Phuz]

Carmack is the man! Read some of his .plan files... giving a whole new meaning to 'techno bable'...

Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual
dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight. Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape around the triangulation line.

He's a smart man.

The future is in floating point framebuffers. One of the most noticeable thing this will get you without fundamental algorithm changes is the ability to use a correct display gamma ramp without destroying the dark color precision. Unfortunately, using a floating point framebuffer on the current generation of cards is pretty difficult, because no blending operations are supported, and the primary thing we need to do is add light contributions together in the framebuffer. The workaround is to copy the part of the framebuffer you are going to reference to a texture, and have your fragment program explicitly add that texture, instead of having the separate blend unit do it. This is intrusive enough that I probably won't hack up the current codebase, instead playing around on a forked version.

This is why he works so closely with ATi and nVidia.
He brings next generation video cards to their knees before they're even released to the public.

 

[Phuz]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: TheShiz
a great book called "Masters of Doom" came out recently that tells the story of carmack and romero, It was really interesting, I finished it in a few days. I made a thread about it when it came out:

thread about book

real twisted guy from what i've read about his childhood. probably interesting to work with but u probably wouldn't want to know him.

From what i've read he's a VERY strange guy to work. Very dissociated.

 

[TheCorm]

No, all wrong...it is infact me...I changed the O in my surname to A....

 

[Moemar]

Originally posted by: BatmanNate

Originally posted by: yllus

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski
you do realize that all the "hot" chix0rs that hang out with him are escorts(hookers)

You do realize that women who are not escorts or hookers are also sometimes attracted to millionaires with fast cars and big houses?

That just makes them hookers of a different sort.

Aren't all women hookers of some sort?

 

[Nemesis77]

He works hard, and he plays hard !

 

[Marauder-]

Eh - I'll pass on Masters of Doom for $20 - I'd rather buy used at $5 at a later date - but it does look like a good read.