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: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?

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: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".