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QuakeCon id Software Keynote Coverage
ruiner5000 writes "If you are not at lucky enough to be at this year's QuakeCon, then you might be wondering what John Carmack and crew are up to. Well, John is a father of a baby boy as of yesterday, so he was not here for his traditional talk on what id is up to. Instead, he appeared on pre-recorded video, followed by normal Q and A session with other id personnel. AMDZone has full coverage of the id keynote, including some pics for your enjoyment. If you want to know about the next engine, the Xbox, OS X, and Linux ports, id's standing on piracy, or Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering, then give it a read." S!: There's also continuing QuakeCon coverage over at GameSpy, including a long interview with Todd Hollenshead.
That AMDZone server took about a milisecond of slashingdoting to go down.
the next engine,
working on it, won't be done before next year.
the Xbox,
Same demo shown as on E3, "The game, to put it simply, looks great, and it reminded me a lot of the recently released Chronicles of Riddick", dolby 5.1 sound, not as good as PC.
OS X,
Port runs, no plans for release, platform (I'm guessing they mean videocards) sucks too much.
Linux ports,
Linux server done, client will be out when Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
id's standing on piracy
It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
Carmack's vision of game engines for movie rendering
next engine will be Good Enough.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Yeah exactly. Doom3 refuses to install if you have software it dosn't like. Cd copying stuff like deamon tools. Ironic considering the only way to bypass this if you have a legit copy is to download a cracked version.
Site slow. Here's the text:
Quakecon 2004 is in full swing. id's baby Doom 3 has just been delivered, and yesterday id genius John Carmack became a proud father as his wife gave birth to their first child. This meant for the first time John was unable to give his traditional state of the id talk. Luckily a DVD was cut of his talk which was played for Quakecon attendees looking for their Carmack fix. This was followed by a question and answer session with questions taken on cards from attendees. What follows if our summary of Carmacks talk with a look at thoughtful questions from the Q and A. Expect hints and the new engine and game, Quake 4, and the dedicated Linux server, and Linux client port as well as id's view on piracy, and the further blurring of movies and gaming, and the tools that make them.
Carmack talked a great deal about the technical features of the Doom 3 engine to explain new features he is working on for the next gen engine. He explained features like floating point blending, and how he enjoyed the unlimited instruction count of modern video cards. He also touched on polygon count which used to be a limiter, but he says now and going forward that is no longer the case.
He also talked about the art and craft of game engine design. The complexity has changed tremendously and an important feature of modern engines he believes must be giving the designers the tools they desire.
He gave us a look back at the beginnings of the Doom 3 engine. He took the Quake 3 engine, and took out the renderer for the first steps of the new engine. While Quake 3 was written in C the core of Doom 3 is C++.
He began research on the new engine two months ago. He is pondering rendering image design issues. He stated that in theory all game engines should draw media from other engines. He believes that by years end they will be rendering scenes with the new engine, but the renderer will not be ready for a year.
Carmack believes that rendering has gotten to the point that it is approaching offline rendering that movie studios use. The new engine will be at that point. While is it has been revealed that Doom 3 can be used for machinima, it is not quite to the level that movie studios will have real interest. Perhaps this is the engine Red vs Blue may could move to?
Carmack pointed out that a single system could be built with multiple PCI Express cards that could rival some rendering farms thanks to much lower latency and could cost in the $10,000 range. Nvidia indeed revealed in their presentation Friday that they are working on solutions for more than 2 video cards in SLI.
When this hardware is available Carmack expects tv shows to implement it, and lower budget movies. He believes it will take more time to get the blockbuster big effect movies on board, but it is only a matter of time.
Much has been made of the new graphics engine for Doom 3, but Carmack expressed surprise on the interest in the new sound system. Carmack took over coding duties for the sound engine with a goal to make it as simple as possible.
When John took the reigns he cut the code to half of what it has previously been. He made a point of saying that the code was very simple, and it did what the designers wanted it to do. In fact the sound editing is fully integrated to in game. You can manipulate if fully and see the effects immediately.
This real time rendering is a goal for the new engine not only for sound but also for graphics rendering engine. Carmack wants the designers to have as close to real time manipulation of the engine as is possible. An example he cited was vis times for Quake 3 would be around 30 minutes, but in the Doom 3 engine it is real time.
Carmack next hinted at a timetable for the next game. He does not want it to take as long as Doom 3. For Doom 3 the designers had broken tools for a year, and that will not be the case with the next game.
The next game will have a single player focus with simple multiplayer added on with the mod and othe
It's that only one-fifth of their product line has upgradeable video hardware. You want to buy a Mac right now? With an upgradeable video card? You get a G5. You get a "choice" of how fast you want it, but the iMac, iBook, eMac, etc. barely come with enough VRAM to run Quartz Extreme.
.
Oh, and PCI Radeon 7000s with Mac roms still go for around 80$ on ebay (the last time I looked). Nevermind something like, say.... AGP. The pricing on Mac graphics boards is absoluttely disgusting
So as a mac user, your options are video that can't even run current games (my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better), or paying out the smegging nose for something that'll do the job.
Of course, once you have a decent video board, your game options consist of Blizzard, iD, Epic, and whichever of the various companies have ported the DnD games.
I was at Quakecon a few years back and if my memory serves me correctly, not only does he have a wife, but she is damn hot.
I had used clonecd in the past, had uninstalled it 2 years ago, and Doom 3 refused to install, claiming that it couldn't read the cd until after I regedited away the lingering registry entries from clonecd.
Completely bogus, especially because clonecd was not installed anymore, and I've never used it to make an unauthorized copy of anything (I use it so I don't have to expose irreplaceable game cds to my 4 and 1 year olds. They're bad enough on my disks, you wouldn't believe how many children's game cds and DVDs they've nearly destroyed (most can be fixed with a DVD doctor).
I had long ago switched to using Alcohol (even kids game cds now feature the most sophisticated protection methods)--and I promptly unloaded it and disabled the virtual drive it offered, but Doom III still insisted it couldn't read the CD until after I scanned my registry for clonecd-related entries.
I briefly considered returning Doom III, but my desire for virtual blood and gore exceeded my indignation at being labeled a pirate by id.
Copy/Pasted:
Actually this is statistically proven. All scientists, engineers, even poets produced their best work before raising families.
Of course it could be a youth thing or even a male thing, as statistically histories "greatest achievements" have been done by men. Please don't label me as sexist, I assure you I am not.
In fact it makes more sense if it is only men who are affected by this as it is young men who are trying to appear impressive in order to get a mate. Hmm, it makes you reconsider your timeplan for marriage etc. eh?
Here's a link to download video I took of the id Software Q&A session which was right after Carmack's taped address. http://planetquake3.net/download.php?op=viewdownlo addetails&lid=2104