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New Doom Details
Lasso Bob writes: "The Shugashack has a ton of details from Carmack's QuakeCon talk that happened just a couple of hours ago. We can expect a Linux port as well as OSX port for sure. Yeah!" Sounds pretty cool -- stuff like probably a big graphics jump and other fun to be had.
This will be id's seventh basic iteration of a first-person shooter. In the previous six, none have had a story more substantive than "You're stranded on an alien planet (or the equivalent thereof). Shoot things." They've always relied on flash and graphics for user immersion. All well and good back in the days of Doom, when the rules were less clear-cut (and a masterpiece like System Shock could get buried by the dual factors of shareware distribution and a commercial distributor who just didn't give a rat's ass about it because they couldn't pigeonhole it).
Now look at what's happened since Quake II. Half-Life redefined the rules of the genre thanks to that terrific storyline. System Shock II, Thief and its sequel, Soldier of Fortune, Deus Ex...a strong storyline has become the rule rather than the exception, something to set you apart from the crowd in a single-player FPS. FPSes even get dinged by reviewers for not having a strong storyline. Gabe Newell buried a landmine in John Carmack's sandbox, and Carmack and his team have proven in the past that they haven't got the inclination to deal with this kind of threat.
(This is why I wondered about the ex-id players and their particular solo efforts. Daikatana's storyline always seemed to be a joke to me, and it turned out to be as shallow as expected. And even having Lewis Carroll as source material, I have very little hope that Alice will have some meat on her bones.)
I'm not big on multiplayer gaming due to my inherent asocial tendencies, so I look for strong single-player elements in my FPSes. However, I purchased both Quake III and Unreal Tournament. Why? Because I know what side my bread is buttered on. The greatest storyline in the world won't save a game that's behind the tech curve. My money voted for id's and Epic's development efforts in engine creation and other basic tech. I trust each company to give us magnificent efforts in technical achievement; I just don't trust them to do stories.
My thought on Doom III is that it's going to be a terrific glorified tech demo. However, I'll be incredibly and pleasantly surprised if Carmack and company pull a rabbit out of their hats and give us a story. I'll be waiting for this, but wary.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
The 2 weeks is for Quake 3:Team Arena, not Doom. The Shugashack article is about his QuakeCon speech, not just Doom.
I'll be grumpy all day if they don't port to BeOS!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm betting that Carmack's evangelism of the newer Mac platforms will mean a resurgence of Mac gaming. Not that people haven't always been gaming on the Mac, but most of us will admit that Mac ports have been of secondary concern for most of the top games and companies for the past few years. (Of course, as an aside, I'd like to note that my intro to computer gaming was on a Mac, with Wolfenstein 3D and a Mac-only game called Barrack--anyone remember Barrack?)
I've noticed a bit of an increase in Mac ports of big-name games and an increase in advertising for them in Mac sections of ads from CompUSA and the like, and coincidentally(?) I've noticed this spike since a couple months after Carmack started praising the Mac as a game dev platform. Has anyone else noticed this, or have I killed too many brain cells and am now just imagining it? I'm curious as to what others think about this, and how others think Carmack's support might be positively affecting Mac gaming.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's time to change that "Quake" topic icon for an "id Software" one.
-jfedor
> what happened to that? apart from it: can you imagine ID coding something in c++
First of all, the fact that none of our deployed games used OOP does not mean that I don't think there are benefits to it. In the early days, there were portability, performance, and bloat problems with it, so we never chose to deploy with it. However, all of the tools for DOOM and Quake were developed in Obejctive-C on NEXTSTEP. Q3 also came fairly close to have a JVM instead of the QVM interpreter, but it didn't quite fit my needs.
I'm still not a huge C++ fan, but anyone that will flat out deny the benefits of OOP for some specific classes of problems like UI programming and some game logic is bordering on being a luddite. I still don't think it is beneficial everywhere, but, if anything, I think we are behind the curve on making the transition.
> Carmack basically said, that single-player games suck from a money/replayability point of view
This was a balancing act in company morale and politics. My first choice for future projects would be to pursue the snowcrash-like extensible virtual worlds, but most of the company wants to work on a game with a story. We have three new hires coming on soon, so we are growing somewhat to support it.
> In the same interview he said, that he doesn't like integrated editors, and will never do so.
That was a significant change in my stance over the last year. Did I actually say "never"?
You can just take the short answer of "I was wrong", but here is the longer argument (I went over this some in the talk):
Historically, we could make better games by using exotic and expensive development hardware or software that differed significantly from our deployment platform.
While early games with integrated editors were hurting their 640k memory footprint and forcing developers to work with a 320 or 640 res screen for tool development, we were using NeXT workstations with megapixel displays for our tools.
Given the option of a good rendering technology that required a lot of preprocessing, we bought first a quad alpha, then a 16 way SGI to do the processing.
Even when we moved the editor to WinNT, it used intergraph workstation graphics, while our deployment platform was mostly still software rendered or possibly Voodoo based.
The key thing that changed (after that earlier speech) was that the optimal development platform is now the same thing as the optimal deployment platform: x86 + nvidia.
That is important. The tools/editor/game HAD to be separate before. Now, the question has to be looked at with a fresh view.
There was a lot of code that was present in nearly identical form in the utils, editor, and game. Misc functions, image loading, model loading, pk3 filesystem support, etc. It was one of my big goals to make all that common.
The obvious step would be to make libraries out of them, but I have something of a personal dislike for managing code that way.
Rather than just endlessly debating the issues, I just took a day and combined the utility code into the main project. It went well, and I was happy with the many thousands of lines of code that got removed, and the increased functionality that resulted. Later, Robert did the same thing with the editor.
I do fret about code bloat issues, but I feel quite good about all of the common and not-quite-orthogonal code that has been removed, and in the scope of the entire project, it really isn't that much space -- it adds maybe a megabyte to the executable, but it will never be paged in if you are just playing the game.
I do think there are real benefits to the user community from having the tools with the game -- my earlier objection were always based not wanting to give up any possible advantages that we could have as developers.
The advantages are going to be especially strong for the linux and mac platforms: the entire tool chain will be available from day one on every platform the game runs on.
John Carmack
"In game editor" is probably being confused here somewhat. I am NOT talking about running around in the game, moving brushes around as you play. The editor is still a completely different user interface, with multi-view outlined drawing in addition to a 3D view. It just happens to live in the same executable as the game, and shares lots of code with it.
John Carmack
I get too good at my games and deathmatch is unfair against less experienced players on my network so I always look out for a good co-operative game.
What co-op games really need is a don't look at me shrug (simular in theory to q2,q3 taunt animation), for after you shoot your teammate in the back with a double barrel.
It's turtles all the way down.