#FollowFriday: John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack

#FollowFriday: John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack

If you’re a Twitter user, then I’m sure by now you’ve seen the weekly #ff hashtag show up. The tag, which is a shortened form of #followfriday, indicates the Tweeter’s (Twitterer? Tweetist?) showcase of recommended people to follow. Our team at SideQuesting follows several great people in the gaming industry, from journalists to developers, critics to other gamers, and we’d love to share these folks with you. Each week, we’ll be selecting one interesting person in the industry to follow on Twitter for a variety of reasons. Come back every Friday to see who gets the award.

This week we heap or praise on an industry legend. While most people know that
John Carmack is an industry vet, I’d guess that far fewer are aware that he also has more technological know-how than you could fit in a Tetsuo.

Code porn. That’s probably the best way to describe Carmack’s tweets. If you like looking at lines of 0’s and 1’s, melt when you see if/then statements, and think the word “source” is naughty, then you should be following the guy. “Single draw call test scene at 800 x 600 x 32 bit texture x 4x MSAA at > 2000 fps. GPUs are really, really, really fast nowadays.” Totally. Oh, and I think we all know the feeling when: “I strive to write pure functions, but then I go and stick something else in idLib::Print(), underneath practically everything. :-/”

John also throws down some actual opinion on game design, like that of framerate and input lag, which is something that we’ve noted on several occasions is a showstopper for Kinect. He writes: “While not important for hand controllers, I believe 120hz is critical for an HMD to actually feel “real”.” He also opines on privacy for gamers, asking “laptop privacy screens sound like the right thing, I wonder if they can be formed onto a curved surface without ruining their properties.”

But really, it’s his knowledge of science that makes his Tweets that much more interesting. Did you know that “…the average lightning bolt contains about 250 kilowatt-hours”? We didn’t. Or that “It is interesting how the lack of phosphor persistence with laser projectors allows saccadic eye motions to to grasp the raster pattern.”? We now do. John’s a wealth of information, and it’s a joy to follow him.

You should too. Follow John at Twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack, and tell him why YOU think that the refresh rate of standard CRTs is better than LCDs.