QuakeCon 2012 - John Carmack Keynote

QuakeCon Official · 445K views · 2012 · 3:36:39

Open on YouTube

Tech pioneers & interviewsGame programming & enginesVR, AR & spatial computingtalkdated

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN rates his QuakeCon keynotes among the best technical talks, and cites this one for the VR segment and for his views on Linux gaming.

What it is

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2012 to 2018.

What Hacker News said

Strong rec SonOfLilit · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at [LINK] I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker. Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff

Strong rec hotwire · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [LINK] QuakeCon 2012 - [this video] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. [LINK]

Recommends jcr · 2012-08 · on “Ask HN: What happened to Augmented Reality?”

Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it. Start Here: [this video] You might also enjoy: [LINK]

Recommends wh-uws · 2012-10 · on “Is it possible to create a world like in the movie Matrix?”

John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year [this video]

Recommends SonOfLilit · 2013-04 · on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: [this video] But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew). I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

Recommends ramidarigaz · 2014-09 · on “Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]”

If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. [this video] [LINK] [LINK]

Recommends erikbye · 2017-02 · on “Id Software Programming Principles”

Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his "genius" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers wen

Cites Arjuna · 2012-08 · on “John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering”

Interesting comments on Mac and Linux platforms [1]: "Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms. I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early. But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongl