This is amazing. John Carmack has become like the Lone Ranger of code optimization. He shows up out of nowhere, makes your game run 20 times faster, then rides off into the sunset. "Who was that masked man?" "Oh, he's John Carmack."

It's the 'Mysterious Optimizer' Perk. In Fallout4 there is a perk you can unlock called: Mysterious Stranger. When you're stuck in a gunfight, this stranger has some probability of showing and assisting you. John Carmack to help me optimize my code ... awesome!

>In Fallout4

He's actually available in Fallout 1, 2, 3, 4, and New Vegas. :)

It's based on old spaghetti westerns like Shane, Pale Rider, etc with Clint Eastwood. He's always given the title akin "Mysterious Stranger" or "Man With No Name".

Which in turn is based on the protagonist from Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the "nameless rurouni."

I feel like this needs to be an xkcd

Followed by a five-comic arc leading up to a duel between Carmack and Stallman.

Wouldn't they be on the same team, begrudgingly? id games have always gotten GPL releases.

And I remember reading somewhere that Stallman was cool with games being closed source.

Wasn't that why Michael Abrash was hired by id way back when?

He's Michael Abrash's padawan, gone full Jedi.

If Carmack only made Minecraft 20x faster, that would be extremely disappointing. That's just the low-hanging fruit.

Judging Minecraft by its blocky world is very unfair and shortsighted.

Game world is not only de-facto voxels. Its transparent, masked and oblique voxels that interact with each other or other entities, like farm blocks by water blocks, lava blocks with burnable blocks nearby, plants growing up, hostile mobs spawns and lines of sights, mobs pathing as they follow player, fellow mobs or random points of interest for wandering, etc ect.

What makes you think I was judging Minecraft solely based on its low-detail graphics? Yes, its rendering code has historically been comically inefficient to the point that third-party hacks have made huge differences in frame rate and usable draw distance, but that's hardly the only thing Minecraft implements poorly.

The combination of using Java and being coded naively means that there's a huge amount of pointer chasing and unnecessary dynamic memory allocation that can be easily cut out without even needing to dip into the data structures and algorithms literature to try for asymptotic improvements. There's no SIMD and no concern for cache locality. Last time I checked, it didn't even look like terrain generation was done in a separate thread from the interactive game logic, let alone in multiple threads. The game only simulates dynamics within ~128 blocks of a player, but if you've got two players miles apart they're still simulated on the same thread.

I do fully understand that the dynamic modifiability of Minecraft's game world means that it is always going to be hungry for memory bandwidth and will be latency-sensitive. But that doesn't mean it has to be inefficient. The Pocket Edition (not Java) already showed that huge improvements are possible, because they were necessary to get anything resembling Minecraft onto mobile platforms. There's a lot more that can be done when you're back on a platform that has sufficient RAM capacity and a ton more CPU power relative to RAM speed. There's a lot of latency that can be eliminated and a lot more than can be hidden from the user without breaking the game. The development process meant that hardly any of the early fundamental implementation decisions were made with the much later features in mind.

I think notch's success proves that it's better to make something than whine about how it's implemented

Imagine a gentle world in which the person you're responding to is merely commenting on the relative ease with which Minecraft could be optimized, and pointing out some of the reasons for this, without casting aspersions on anybody or complaining about anything. Would such a world necessarily look different from ours? Would it be inconsistent with the comments in this thread?

It's not even commenting that "Minecraft -could- be optimized", it's that "Minecraft -has- been optimized (for the mobile platforms)".

Only if your barometer of success is a monetary one. I happen to like playing Minecraft when I'm not making something and killing it and iterating (yeah bruv), and it makes my future computer from beyond the moon chug at times. (I don't point the blame at Java nearly as much as at the naivete of its development, however, and it has gotten somewhat better over time.)

I used to develop my apps on 5-10 year old computers for precisely this reason. Their limited cache, RAM, etc would show both hotspots and trouble spots fast because the app visibly couldnt perform well (or crashed lol). Ignoring microoptimizations, algorithmic and architectural changes benefiting old PC often made new one scream with performance.

I've worked in computer graphics for a long time and to be honest, I've never seen any performance problems that you're describing. Rendering is smooth even with complex scenes.

Minecraft already runs fine. Making it 20x faster is great, but beyond that, you're running into PCMasterRace type optimizations that only 6 people in the world can see.

Minecraft only runs fine on the fastest hardware. I've got an i7-4790k that runs at 4.4GHz for single-threaded tasks. Just flying through a minecraft world in a straight line in creative mode needs 80% of one core to keep pace with the world generation. No laptop can run the game smoothly as-is. That 20x performance improvement is needed just to get into the territory of reasonable performance on the kind of low-end hardware kids typically have available.

> Just flying through a minecraft world in a straight line in creative mode needs 80% of one core to keep pace with the world generation.

But that's the absolute worst case, nobody actually plays the game like that.

People don't spend most of their time in-game that way, but they definitely do it. Especially when looking for an interesting places to set up.

Multiplayer gets much worse though, god forbid you have several people exploring new terrain on a server.

And god forbid you play with any of the mods that add faster railways[1] or jetpacks[2] or boots that make you walk faster[3], etc. It's a bummer that the optimizations are coming to the less moddable version, MC is a great platform for people to build new gameplay on.

[1] http://ftbwiki.org/Railcraft

[2] http://ftbwiki.org/Simply_Jetpacks

[3] http://ftbwiki.org/Boots_of_the_Traveller

Or, you can make it run on old hardware, and new underpowered hardware like netbooks, Raspberry Pi, and phones.

Note that the article is about a C++ rewrite of Minecraft rather than the Java version.

I think he may be the best refutation against people who don't believe in 10x engineers. Imagine you want to create a VR prototype and get to hire 100 average programmers with some experience in the industry, and you're up against Carmack with a month until your demo...

Carmack is just insanely productive. He had a working prototype of the GearVR Netflix app three days after he started working with Netflix to develop it, and pretty much finished the app a week later.

Have a read about how he developed the app:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/09/john-carmack-on-developi...

It's almost beyond belief what he managed to accomplish in one and a half weeks. Hacking the Netflix video decoding system, fine-tuning the UX control heuristics, working around DRM limitations, optimizing the power draw and thermals, and much more, all on top of implementing the very polished app itself.

He explained in a talk how after Netflix sent an engineer to work with him, the poor lad had to quit of exhaustion and go back home. Carmack's colleague said something like "hey you broke the Netflix guy"

Was it this talk?

http://www.twitch.tv/oculus/v/17538854?t=3h31m00s

Yeah, the YouTube is better quality, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk&t=55m50s

This link will start playing as Carmack tells the "broken Netflix engineer" story, while recounting how he finished the app in that incredibly short timeframe.

Thanks for sharing. I wound it back to the start and started to watch it.

John made an interesting premise of the gap VR is trying to fill. Essentially, it is filling the gaps that is in your real life with VR. Hmm...Would it better to strive for improvement in your real life?

Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.

There's a repeating motif in reactions to disruptive technology, where the technology is first viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from other Old Activities that existed before the technology, and people who aren't early adopters only look at the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.

We saw this motif of oppositional reaction in how people viewed the internet: people are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world; people are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the real world; he's meeting someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with people, etc. But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "cyberlife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is simply a part of Reality, sans prefix and with a capital R, instead of being boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".

There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent: we're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other; every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.; you can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity. But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you're sitting in a restaurant that you just found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones have inextricably woven themselves so far into our lives, that if you ask someone how their smartphone life compares to their real life, they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.

I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.

> The video surface was a little more problematic. To provide smooth playback, the video frames are queued a half second ahead, tagged with a "release time" that the Android window compositor will use to pick the best frame each update. The SurfaceTexture interface that I could access as a normal user program only had an "Update" method that always returned the very latest frame submitted. This meant that the video came out a half second ahead of the audio, and stuttered a lot.

> To fix this, I had to make a small change in the Netflix video decoding system so it would call out to my VR code right after it submitted each frame, letting me know that it had submitted something with a particular release time. I could then immediately update the surface texture and copy it out to my own frame queue, storing the release time with it. This is an unfortunate waste of memory, since I am duplicating over a dozen video frames that are also being buffered on the surface, but it gives me the timing control I need.

Oh, Mr. Carmack...

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Surf...

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Surf...

And I only started coding for Android last month. I guess I'm an 11x programmer. :) ducks

Those APIs aren't available from the NDK, without an extra JNI performance hit.

Also I bet they don't behave 100% the same way, in regards to timing, across devices.

In graphics programming at the level Carmack develops, every ms counts.

He explicitly said he was using SurfaceTexture. That is a Java API, there is no SurfaceTexture in the NDK.

Somehow I don't see him using Java, but if he said so, then ok.

I don't think people disbelieve that 10x engineers exist. Just that 98% of those who claim to be one are wrong.

10x engineers don't exist in a process heavy workplace (eg: scrum agile). They're more like 2x engineers.

Yeah, there's no way you could have a John Carmack in an enterprise. They'd go absolutely bat poop crazy.

Right. Like almost any other subject, there will be a handful of people at the top and below them many more who are likely very good at what they do, but will probably never achieve what the top x% do.

I consider myself one that's very good, but I look at people like Carmack and realize I will never be one of them...that won't stop me from trying to though!

I disbelieve.

That said, I don't contend that some people are not at some point 10 times more productive than others. I contend that anyone can be just as productive, and often are, were or will be, although the manner in which they should be productive is absolutely not clear-cut. Society as a whole shapes how we act. Diversity in its composition allows what we rely upon.

For instance, I would not be as productive at work if I had to take care of a few children on my own. Similarly, I am extremely unproductive while gardening, and don't intend to spend the time to improve.

You're making a far stronger claim than denying that some people are not 10x more productive than others. You're claiming that anyone can be just as productive as anyone else.

That seems to either be such a strong claim that it's trivial to refute, (i.e. a newborn baby, or a quadriplegic with severe mental retardation, etc.), or too nebulous and ill-defined to be of any use (i.e. said quadriplegic is productive in cultivating character in carers?)

You're practically coming out and saying that all humans are equal and the only productivity differences can be attributed to other factors. That's a ridiculous position to take.

And extremely easy to disprove at this point with brain scans vs capabilities. We know enough about the brain now to understand that some people are born with advantages (or disadvantages), whether that's in memory or social skills.

To be fair, he gets to do things he is really into, compared to mentioned 100 average programmers that probably works on some less stellar projects, often bogged down with red-tape and middle management o-plenty

He "gets" to do it because he became one of the best at it. I'm certain anyone that becomes the best at something can make money doing it!

He admits that he works long hours to get that productivity though[0]. He's probably 10x better than many who would work the same hours as him, but I'd be willing to bet if he limited himself to 40 hours a week he wouldn't still be 10x better. (Not trying to make any judgements either way, just an observation & prediction.)

0 - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/684475417726595072

Not all 10x programmers are created equal.

Some of them leave a disaster in their wake. They're fast because they're sloppy, and don't take the time to refactor their new code into something maintainable. The team pays the price for that later.

I'm not suggesting John Carmack is one of those bad 10x developers, but they do exist. Just something to keep in mind.

Such 10x programmers are perfect for some situations, for example building a prototype.

It may be wise to leave it as a prototype and build V2 from scratch after that point - taking many of the best parts from the earlier experiment. I've been on the former end enough times where I'd rather the next team of engineers didn't use it as the base. I often learn many lessons from building V1 which would be a strong base for rebuilding it properly.

Erlang creator Mike Williams: “If you don’t make experiments before starting a project, then your whole project will be an experiment”.

Unfortunately many startup founders don't see the dev process as experiment-driven, rather as a monolithic beast the continually needs evolution and refinement. The opportunity costs of rebuilding a prototype-quality app using lessons learned from it vs building on top of it are real - rebuilding is not always as risky as many people make it out to be. Context matters.

People like Carmack are only relevant for extremely technical problems such as VR.

I don't think Carmack would have the productivity of 100 average guys if he was working on a typical CRUD business application.

People with ability that does not go beyond CRUD are not relevant at all. A generic CRUD interface can be auto-generated by a machine.

If you have exactly one individual to hold up as proof of your point, for all practical intents & purposes, you've just proven the opposite.

Carmack is such a boss. If your interest is piqued every time you hear about him, make sure to read Masters of Doom:

http://amzn.com/0812972155

My single favorite non-fiction work. (Probably better than any fiction I've read, too) Even if you're not a gamer, this book has such a great story and has so much to offer when it comes to software development in general.

Same here. I read this every year -- it motivates me like no other work or fiction or reality. I bought a few copies for friends, and it seems to have similar effects on them. I can't recommend it enough.

You may also like "Racing the beam", which is not so long on human interest but has a lot of great technical, social and business perspective on the Atari era.

I listened to the audiobook for around 15 minutes and just couldn't see what's so good about it. I think it was the reader's tone and voice (Wil Wheaton) that made it sound... is "rad" the word? I might try reading it in eBook form instead.

I found it fun to listen to, but the author had this weird habit of foreshadowing everything as if there was always some huge earth-shattering reveal around the corner.

"And this wouldn't be their last obstacle moving in to the lake house … [Next chapter]: Also, John stubbed his toe on a door."

Between that and Wil's enthusiastic reading — buying in to each and every one of those sure-to-be-disappointing wind-ups — it was kind of exasperating. But I'd say it's worth it, regardless. I'd agree it's probably way better as an eBook. There was lots of interesting stuff, and some glorious nostalgia :)

I didn't like Wil Wheaton's reading of Ready Player One either. The main character came off as, I don't know, whiney I guess. I have nothing against Wil Wheaton himself. The reading just didn't do it for me.

Masters of Doom is a great book though. I read it a couple years back. I recommend picking up a copy if the audiobook isn't working out.

> The main character came off as, I don't know, whiney I guess.

Well, the main character is whiny, and I found the book to be terrible, so I don't think your opinion is too off base.

I feel the same way. Which is odd considering how many people suggested it on /r/audiobooks. But I found the nostalgia pandering to be a bit much.

hear hear. I cannot honestly understand why that book is so popular.

Shit, I just blew coffee all over my laptop at reading that Wil Wheaton voiced it. I wouldn't be able to hear anything but a starry-eyed Mary Sue Crusher rendition of the book. Nothing against the dude but the association is strong.

Read it. It's worthwhile.

Is that because that's just the primary association you still have for him, or because that's just what came to mind? I'm wondering because Wil Wheaton has had quite a bit of positive exposure over the last decade, enough so that even while I don't really follow the stuff he does all that closely (or at all), I still hear about it enough that my primary association for him is no longer the ST:TNG character

I read the ebook. I skipped a lot of it and just read the interesting parts. I would recommend skimming it.

It was probably the voice that was annoying - I read the paper copy and really enjoyed it. If you like books like Hackers, Crypto, Soul of a New Machine, What the Dormouse said etc. you'll probably like it.

Ugh! Thanks for the warning. I can't stand Wil Wheaton.

Was so disappointed to find out he did the audio book version. Unlistenable

Give it another chance. It's worthwhile.

I just finished this book 5 minutes ago. Can't recommend it enough.

You might also enjoy the Blizzard book:

Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Blizzards-Video-Gam...

Great book. I wish there was more literature in this vein. Some other fun reads from the Blizzard team at http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/

Here are a couple of additional things to read if you liked those: * Jordan Mechner - of Prince of Persia / Karateka [1] * Ready Player One - fiction - but in the same vein [2]

[1] Jordan's website w general links: http://www.jordanmechner.com/

The Making of Karateka - 1982- 1985 : http://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Journals-1982-1985/dp/...

The Making of Prince of Persia - Journals 1985-1993: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985/dp/...

[2] Ready Player One - http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/03078...

If you want to watch the Oculus connect talk where Carmack discusses this it's online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk

Carmack talks are fun to watch - I think it's worth checking out.

When will people realize you just need to put Carmack on the stage at 4pm and let him go until he tires himself out? You just shouldn't put an end time on a Carmack talk.

Shit, maybe there just needs to be CarmackCon where it's just a start time for his keynote which just sort of seamlessly blends into a hackathon.

Or maybe we just need to start a petition for no end time on his talk at Connect 2016.

From the linked article: "...when Facebook acquired Oculus in July 2014, Notch “blew up about it,” as Carmack puts it. Notch referred to the social media company as “creepy” and publicly stated that it wasn’t the partner he was envisioning when he backed the original Oculus Rift when it was just a Kickstarter project."

The more I read about Notch, the more I'm convinced that Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and getting him out of the scene was the best thing for Minecraft. He strikes me as an incredibly fortunate but oddly emotional individual who was way over his head once his creation took off.

To be fair to Notch, a huge chunk of Oculus fans were devastated by the unexpected Facebook acquisition, not just him. /r/Oculus was in flames the day it was announced. Notch put it this way "I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition." Gamers at large were really disappointed because Oculus was a games focused device and then suddenly it's owned by a social networking company whose only reputation for games is being a place for friend-pestering, "free"-to-plays (the exact opposite of what most self ascribed "gamers" want for the future of gaming). It makes sense that they would be worried. I think Oculus has done a good job allaying those fears but it makes sense that oculus fans would cautiously optimistic.

How is it fair for Notch to be upset at Oculus being bought by Facebook when he sold his company to Microsoft shortly afterward? Not to mention he sold simply so he could check out and retire whereas Oculus sold because they actually needed to -- Notch's tiny little $10k investment wasn't even remotely enough to jumpstart the VR revolution.

As far as I can tell, FB has treated the Oculus project with incredible respect, and not a single fear has come true.

I understand there was legitimate reason to worry over the Facebook acquisition, but I still strongly believe that Notch (and many others) took it too far.

> How is it fair for Notch to be upset at Oculus being bought by Facebook when he sold his company to Microsoft shortly afterward?

Not only did he address this ("I’m aware this goes against a lot of what I’ve said in public. I have no good response to that."), his public posts about it were fairly measured after his first response (which was mostly a few negative tweets):

> I have the greatest respect for the talented engineers and developers at Oculus. It’s been a long time since I met a more dedicated and talented group of people. I understand this is purely a business deal, and I’d like to congratulate both Facebook and the Oculus owners. But this is where we part ways.

It's silly to expect consistency in people's reactions to everything -- I doubt you are "fair" with every reaction you have to things that affect you -- but, regardless, "I still strongly believe that Notch (and many others) took it too far" is an (ironically) excessive reaction to what actually happened.

> "I still strongly believe that Notch (and many others) took it too far" is an (ironically) excessive reaction to what actually happened.

I don't agree at all. Your quote concludes with an attempt to completely sever ties with Oculus. I do not believe this was in any way a measured or reasonable reaction at the time. The nature of the underlying action is not changed by the fact that it happened to be phrased in a relatively respectful way in that particular post.

> Your quote concludes with an attempt to completely sever ties with Oculus.

While technically true, that again makes it sound dramatic for no apparent reason. Choosing to not work with a company because you're uninterested in being associated with what they do is not something beyond the pale, even if many others have no problem with that thing.

To take a topical example, did Jonathan Blow "completely sever ties" with Microsoft because he has The Witness on PS4 and not the Xbox One because Sony actually cared about indie developers at the time he was looking at consoles to develop on? I guess you could say that if you wanted some click bait (and I'm sure more than a few gaming blogs did), but don't pretend that it's somehow getting to the "nature of the underlying action".

I understand your point of view, but the Minecraft deal with Oculus wasn't even particularly public or well-known at the time (they had only been in discussions for two weeks before the acquisition, and it wasn't official yet). Notch "announced" it very dramatically by announcing that it was cancelled.

To me, this feels like an action that was intended to stir controversy, but I will admit I could be wrong. You may see it differently.

As for Jonathan Blow, I'll refrain from commenting because I don't know anything about that situation.

I probably would have pre-ordered the new Oculus if it wasn't now owned by Facebook. Now I will wait to see if any Facebook login is required, and how Facebook treats the Oculus ecosystem.

Facebook has a pretty good record of non-interference with acquisitions, especially in the user-facing sense that you're describing. It will be even more true for Oculus, because Oculus was not a competitor to Facebook like Instagram, and, to a lesser extent, WhatsApp.

Facebook buying Oculus was a two-billion dollar bet on virtual reality being the next big platform, and to have that bet pay off, Facebook has to play the long game, and let Oculus and the virtual reality market grow.

Facebook isn't stupid or myopic enough to require a Facebook login to use Oculus products. It makes absolutely no sense when you consider the reasons that Facebook bought Oculus.

I don't tend to make bets on large companies with dominant market positions acting in their own best long term interests.

Why not? That's a very strong statement. I could think of a countless number of bets that trivially match your criteria (i.e. even odds Facebook will not stop selling ads this year), that you'd be crazy not to take.

There are lots of reasons. But I looked at your comment history and decided not to jump on the "interpreting discussion threads as logic statements" train with you. Apologies.

Fair enough. Do you think informal discussions benefit from a focus on thematic engagement, rather than logical minutiae?

You're comparing something known (the Rift as offered up for pre-order by FB-owned Oculus) with something unknown (the Rift as it might have been offered up for pre-order by an independent Oculus).

Many details might have been different in this alternate history: price, timeline, quality, bundled games, future games as funded by Oculus, and more.

Unfortunately I don't know if any of us really have the information necessary to make a truly correct comparison.

Of course we don't have that information. If Oculus had not been bought by Facebook, it could have been bought by anyone include shudder Disney. Who knows.

My excitement for and willingness to spend money on the Rift was greatly decreased by the Facebook acquisition. It is of course still quite possible that the Facebook acquisition was a good move that will benefit everyone.

The device will stand alone without Oculus software (besides drivers), so you definitely will be able to use it without a Facebook login.

> As far as I can tell, FB has treated the Oculus project with incredible respect, and not a single fear has come true.

They haven't even released a consumer product yet. It's awfully early to say that it's being handled either well or poorly.

Yes they have -- the Samsung Gear VR. You wouldn't even know that it was associated with Facebook in any way. The Oculus Store is accessed via your Oculus account. There's literally no mention of Facebook anywhere (I'm not sure as I haven't used the particular app, but I haven't heard of the Oculus Social app on Gear VR being tied to Facebook either).

If Gear VR is any indication, then the fear that Facebook is going to mess with things obnoxiously is unfounded. I don't think we'd have as polished a product as we'll get with the retail Oculus version had the Facebook deal not happened.

That's a good point, and I agree with you to an extent. But there have already been plenty of opportunities for Facebook to muck things up since the acquisition. The fact that they haven't done so in any way does count for something in my mind.

Also, I think the increasing pressure from HTC and Sony is showing pretty convincingly that Oculus would have been in a lot of trouble if they didn't receive solid financial backing from a larger partner like FB. The Vive has already pulled on ahead of the Rift in terms of offering a much more versatile tracking solution in the form of the Lighthouse stations. PlayStation VR is the sleeping giant in the room that nobody's really talking about.

Oculus is not going to be able to rest on their reputation for long and still win the VR game. VR is slowly becoming high stakes; it's not a harmless little Kickstarter campaign anymore.

If it's true that they're not making any money on the $600 CV1, then it seems to me that they desperately needed FB or a similar partner.

Ultimately, we're faced with a dilemma where the deeper we go into the Oculus + Facebook timeline, the further we move away from being able to predict what might have happened if Oculus had never been acquired. If FB does something to upset people (like requiring FB login), there might be a lot of outrage, but nobody will be able to say for certain that Oculus could have even remained competitive without FB. It won't be long before we reach a point where nobody will be able to competently know what we should be comparing FB-owned Oculus to in this hypothetical alternate timeline where Oculus was never bought.

The good news is that if Facebook does seriously muck things up there are great competitors who will gladly take your money instead. I just don't think there's any sense in condemning the Rift based on some hypothetical future wrongdoing from a company that has so far treated the platform quite well, especially taking into account the fact that we don't really know how well Oculus would have fared without the acquisition.

For one, Microsoft actually makes and sells games and consoles. It's always been a big part of their DNA.

Because of people like you. He wanted out. He didn’t want to be internet famous anymore, being questioned by smug know-it-alls. And good on him. Would have done exactly the same in his place, heck, even sold to much, much, much worse companies than Microsoft.

I'm not trying to attack anybody. I sympathize very much with the stresses of being placed unexpectedly into the public light, and I did not and will not criticize his decision to sell.

Regardless, I wasn't trying to ask why Notch sold. I meant to ask why it was not fair for Oculus to sell if it was fair for him to sell. Asking this question is fair game since Notch chose to make his condemnation of the acquisition exceptionally public.

> why it was not fair for Oculus to sell if it was fair for him to sell.

It probably felt unfair to him because Oculus was kickstarted by gamers (like Notch), and Minecraft was self-funded.

Since the backers (gamers) felt like they were stakeholders on Oculus, they probably were disappointed that Oculus was bought by Facebook, rather than Bethsida or Valve.

> How is it fair for Notch to be upset at Oculus being bought by Facebook when he sold his company to Microsoft shortly afterward?

From personal experience, I think we often are most vehemently angry about behaviors we feel like we are dangerously close to falling prey to. The closeted gays who are white-knuckling a righteous straight life are often the most vocally opposed to people who give in to homo temptation.

I suspect Notch was wrestling with those issues for years, and trying to harden himself against temptation. Selling to Microsoft wasn't necessarily a compromise to his values. It's possible that deal was fundamentally different to the Oculus deal in some way that matters to Notch. But it makes sense to me that he'd have strong opinions about how to go about doing something he was also struggling to figure out how to do.

People are entitled to their opinion. I think the issue is that due to Notches success people attribute more weight to what he says. In reality, I think his comments were just those of another Occulus fan who'd hoped things would head in a different direction.

I don't see a distinction between raising kickstarter money and later selling to Facebook vs early access money and later selling to Microsoft.

Notch promised Minecraft would eventually be released open source when he was raising early access dollars, and he seems to have completely reneged on it with the sale to Microsoft.

Oculus got acquired by Facebook and still afterwards released the complete hardware schematics for DK1, the kickstarter project, for anyone to use on Github.

The Facebook acquisition still probably wasn't a good thing; they seem to be want to turn what are essentially Monitors+tracking into game consoles with exclusives etc. You'll have a headset from one company and have to buy the equivalent spec headset from another just to get access to all the games. It's going to be like a future where Skyrim 2 were only released for BenQ monitors. You may already have a monitor with a panel made to the same spec in the same fab, but now you have to have an extra monitor you hook up only occassionaly to play some of your games.

They've said they might port their store to other PC headsets, but have made no real commitments.

Do you really think not having Facebook around would have meant the Oculus wouldn't have gotten an exclusive store similar to an Apple, Valve, Google or Amazon store?

Essentially you are future-worrying about something that historically has not happened. The only thing that comes close is the whole Microsoft/XBOX indie parity clause, which they eventually just took away.

My guess is that Oculus will not be the only game in town (Vive, and I'm guessing many other challengers) and that other HMD will be competitive enough where Oculus cannot do something completely unreasonable such as forcing developers to only develop for their store. Strategy wise it would be terrible too as that splinters a market that may or may not actually be mature enough to splinter.

PC Gamers are the biggest targeted market for HMDs (in terms of already having the hardware and the desire to buy one) and generally don't stand for this kind of thing. Most people don't object to Steam as a store because they haven't done something bad as to lock out a game.

It's the exclusive games I was talking about, not the concept of an app store.

>Oculus cannot do something completely unreasonable such as forcing developers to only develop for their store.

I'm not future-worrying, they already have 20+ titles that they have paid for store exclusivity with.

I'm not saying I love exclusives but options does Oculus have for making a profit if it isn't from hardware sales?

They should do it from hardware sales. Just like most other PC peripheral manufacturers. They had to solve a chicken-and-egg problem to get things started, so it is somewhat excusable. But precedents like this tend to stick around.

Seeing as the Vive and Playstation headsets are looking competitive with Oculus and likely more to follow, it does feel that trying to profit from hardware alone is going to be a difficult strategy for sustainability. Given Steam has so many devoted followers as well, I think Vive's partnership with Valve is going to be tough to compete with if you want to rely on hardware sales.

I'm not saying exclusives are the solution but I'm curious how Oculus plans to profit given the competition is already heating up.

They should have kicked ass on product. Instead they got caught with their pants down at the Vive announcement.

And PSVR is going to be competitive with the Oculus recommended spec machines, which are 3-4X as expensive, due to smart choices in panel (less nominal resolution but more sub pixels saving 25% of performance for comparable quality; 60fps reprojected to 120Hz, saving another 33%). Both choices combined give it nearly a doubled performance boost relative to the hardware it is running on, allowing a similar quality of experiences for potentially close to a third of the total cost.

And Oculus won't even have motion controllers until potentially the end of next year.

> They should have kicked ass on product. Instead they got caught with their pants down at the Vive announcement.

Amusing how everyone seems to think that Vive will be the best product on earth while Oculus will be "just Oculus", "not kick ass", "not great" etc. with nobody having either one so far. The power of "We love Valve" vs "We hate Facebook" seems to be really interesting from a PR/Marketing perspective.

I have a Vive and I've tried Oculus CV1. They are very, very, similar. 90hz, 1200x1080 per eye, low persistence OLED with global update, large fresnel lenses.

Until you get to input and mobility: Xbox gamepad vs motion controls. No contest. Yoga-mat scale standing without full rotation vs. room scale, walking around with 360 rotation: again, no contest.

Oculus wins on weight so far, though I haven't tried the Vive Pre yet.

Yeah, I don't think he was really prepared for or interested in all this fame. He wanted to be just another experimental indie dev, but every time he made a game for a game jam or something, the gaming media would explode with "NOTCH MAKES NEW GAME" stories and his piddly little three-day speed-typing game or whatever would get 100 times as much attention as the entire rest of the jam. I imagine that would wear, after a while.

From recent news, it sounds like he's now given up trying to be normal and is trying out being an over-the-top hedonistic rich guy, and doesn't enjoy that either but doesn't know how to stop.

To be fair, the majority of HN comments on the Oculus acquisition also took a similar upset tone, more than I've ever seen (except for maybe the announcement of Angular 2), so Notch's opinion only seems odd out of context.

In fairness to Notch and Minecraft, he'd stopped having anything to do with Minecraft since like a year after the public beta was released. In fact he once said that the first time he'd played Minecraft since handing it over to Jens was when the acquisition was announced, and even then it was the Console version, not the PC version.

You're very much correct however, he himself will admit that he definitely prefers just making small games with small fanbases, and that he's not really suited to being a public figure.

Man, would I ever love to see some before and after code.

every worry I had about this product is now less of a worry: The man who wrote QuakeC is now on the job.