Quake 4 Announced

Warrior-GS writes: "This just in from QuakeCon in Texas: Id Software and Raven Software will be joing forces on Quake 4. Id and Nerve Software are also going to working on some unspecified game. Carmack is giving his talk right now. GameSpyDaily has all the details."

Comments

Re:anyone know?

[eXtro]

Most Open Source software is developed to the point where its no longer fun to develop it. This means that the final bit of scripting to ease installation is left by the developers.

But, as a point of reference I noticed that FreeCiv was one of the installed packages on my system. I've never played it, I've never even looked at it. I started up the server, typed "start". It responded that more players were needed, so I started up the client. Again I typed "start" in the server window. Bingo, I'm playing.

I'm not entirely sure where the hours of set up are involved. Perhaps people on the short bus type really really slowly.

Re:Yawn...

[grammar nazi]

Here is a list of many of Q3's substantial innovations over Q1, Q2, and pretty much every other game to date:

Volumetric fog. This was not done in a video game before Q3

Delta packets - Q3 was designed from the ground up to be a networked game and innovations such as delta packets resulted from this.

Ballistic parametrics - Instead of bullet positions being relayed over a network, Q3 relays position, velocity, acceleration. Remember physics? This is enough to describe the entire trajectory, making for a large bandwidth saver.

Linux (thank you Loki) - It took a *long* time for Q1 and Q2 to be playable in Linux. Loki accomplished this quickly

What else did I miss?

Do what he wants.

[DarkHelmet]

Everyone has always complained that the Quake games seriously lack the gameplay in order to make it worth playing over and over. In that light, here is what I think id should do:

1. Make a bunch of maps using the doom engine.
2. Add in one more weapon to the Doom2 engine (How about a triple shotgun, to go on that 1-2-3 punch?)
3. Make a couple of monsters out of sprites, and make their AI crummy.
4. Instead of midi covers of Alice in Chains, do FM synth versions of "Baby One More Time" and "Genie in a Bottle"
5. Include a picture of Carmack in the game box, with a shirt that says, "Shag off: I can do what I like."

Call this game Quake 4 just to screw with people's heads. Then come out with this Über-engine called Doom 3, and sell it to everyone.

HAH!

Re:Yawn...

[SumDeusExMachina]

You missed a few...

SMP support

Full-screen 32-bit color rendering

Curved 3D surfaces

That's just about all that I can recall besides what you mentioned.

Re:Yawn...

[nakaduct]

it's just run-jump-kill

That's like describing golf as "swing-swear-walk". Quake or Golf: as a beginner it's chaos with random bouts of unexpected good luck.

But watch two good players in a rocket duel on a fast, jumpy map... it's as artful as swordplay, or as close as you'll get on a computer. They'll dodge and feint, probing for holes in the opposite's guard, suffering small wounds for better position, and then sacrificing the position to inflict greater injury.

It's hard to recognize innovation while it's happening. Before Q3, shooters were about aim and item management. Number three introduced technique as an integral game element.

This guy expresses the same point, better than I can. I put my words first anyway, because he's dead:

Let me explain in terms of the martial arts. As a beginner you know nothing of stance or sword position, so you have nothing in yourself to dwell on mentally. If someone strikes at you, you just fight, without thinking of anything. Then when you learn various things like stance, how to wield a sword, where to place the attention, and so on, your mind lingers on various points, so you find yourself all tangled up when you try to strike. But if you practise day after day and month after month, eventually stance and swordplay don't hang on your mind any more, and you are like a beginner who knows nothing ... . The cogitating side of your brain will vanish and you will come to rest in a state where there is no concern.
-- Takuan, 16th Century Japanese Zen teacher, in explaining the shift from unconscious incompetence, through conscious incompetence and conscious competence, to unconscious competence.

Re:attention spans and the changing gaming world

[kin_korn_karn]

Oh, but they're designed that way. It's a one-shot consumer product. If there was a game that you never got sick of and played for years, forsaking all other games, how would design houses make money? There are a finite number of people in the world that want a particular game, and they are, for all intents and purposes, an indestructible non-decaying product. You don't typically need to buy multiple copies of the same game, so they have to make multiple games to stay in business.

The sad part of the game industry is how all the small shops are folding. That's our (the gamers) fault. Our demands for production value are so high these days that the overhead associated with creating even a modest game is staggering. You need artists, $10k/license 3d modeling packages, specialized motion-capture equipment, powerful workstation-class PCs, shop licenses for Visual C++ and the DirectX SDK, kickbacks to hardware mfgs to get reference HW to test your code on, tons of marketing, junkets for reviewers, and so forth just to be competitive in the market, which has grown to the level of having games in the middle of the aisle in Wal-Mart.

Gaming's become as diversified and complex a business as movies or TV. And like the movies, mainstream gaming is distilling down to a few large publishers (Infogrames, Sierra, MS), and mostly puts out crap. The gems still come from the independent guys who somehow get picked up by a big studio. Bioware/Black Isle and Interplay comes to mind.

Re:Quake4 + Mac

[ptbrown]

Nonono... Carbon is just a compatibility hack. Real apps should be build with Cocoa, but I'm sure Carmack doesn't need to be told. As we all remember, OpenStep (now Cocoa) was the original development platform for Doom and Quake. So when he says that MOSX is his "new" development platform, he really means "old".

Quake4 + Mac

[Thaidog]

I hope they have a carbonized version that *works* with OS X.... OK flame away like you're all from San Fran... (no dip to SF though..)