Carmack Discusses Delay of Q3A Source

Time Doctor writes "John Carmack moved to a blog format, and updates everyone with his thoughts on graphics and why licensing delays the (still) inevitable Quake 3: Arena source, when it was expected before the end of 2004."

Comments

Some TA Stuff is out

[00Monkey]

I'm not sure exactly what it is but there is some source for something in Team Arena out:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/source/

Insight into programming in the gaming industry

[cgenman]

"The work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring."

Re:this does suck

[Cylix]

Not so!

The quake world base was expanded quite well I think.

If you look at some of the clients that are still around today. FuhQuake, QuakeForge and of course ezQuake. (though they all appear to be dying/dead now).

Now, eQuake has done an excellent job repacking Fuhquake and providing some excellent work building that out with addons. The biggest improvement was dynamically retextured objects at run time.

So with the quake retexture project the grahpics aren't half bad.

Though all those simply build out on an existing platform and enhance the QW client/server line.

Tenebrae, which I believe is now defunct, had some excellent work in this area. Tenebrae2 looks visually appealing and was based on their work with the Tenebrae engine (quake 1 source). Bump mapping was introduced as well.

Of course look for yourselves...

Though unreleased, Tenebrae2 looks really good, but I really don't believe developement has gone very far lately. (www.tenebrae2.com)

I think T2 has been one of the better evolutions I've seen from the original Quake source.

Now go grab eQuake and then pick up XQF

Re:Well at least he has a good point.

[Apathetic1]

A few reasons...

It runs on everything. There aren't very many games I can play with my housemates because my Windows machine is the only one in the house.

The level design is great. Maps like Entryway or Dead Simple are the perfect size for two to four players because there's room to run but not so much that you never see anybody else.

I love the weapons, the plasma gun in particular.

Don't get me wrong, I still fire up Quake 3, Tribes, C&C Renegade, etc. occasionally but I always find myself coming back to Doom.

Someone remembers Bolo?

[AsmCoder8088]

I can remember back when I was maybe ten years old and me and my brother would hook up a couple of PowerMacs to the network and play Bolo together. It was really fun, because back then games that were written specifically for the Mac seemed to have a special quality in them that a game tied to another platform did not; some mysterious feel about them that could only be experienced on a Macintosh.

In Bolo, the graphics were very fine and had good color, the refresh was excellent, and you never had any flicker. Also I think that because Macs were natively designed with a good 16-bit sound system in them (unlike DOS machines at the time with a little beeping speaker), game designers were inspired to write software for this platform. Who wants to play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on a PC when you could experience the game and all its gloy with full 16-bit sound on the Mac? Sadly, game developers moved away from the Mac with the introduction of DirectX on the PC, and most of the games now-adays lack that mysterious and inspiring quality in them. And Bolo was a network game written way back before Windows was sold to the Masses. Oh well... I'm 17 now, and enjoy writing software using Visual C++ for Windows anyway.

Re:real reason for delay: Doom 3 is shit

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine capabilities have nothing to do with how Idsoftware envisioned Doom3 as a game. Multiplayer support out of the box was not their focus this time around and was announced early on that it wouldn't be.

The D3 engine itself and the underlying netcode is quite capable of supporting far more than 4 players. D3 netcode is still better than UT4's

When Quake 3 shipped, it faced similar critisism. Most people didn't have the video resources to play it and it sucked up more cpu cycles on the servers. How soon people forget.

I do however think idsoft missed the mark when they assumed the single player aspect would be enough to make a winning title. I'm more inclined to think they will be successful with this next generation engine commercially. It's well placed to support the company for the next 4 years, with sales to other game developers alone.

We will also see what idsoft cranks out over the next couple of fiscals. It may very well tell us what direction they forsee the company moving into, or whether this really is the retirement swan song of the senior owners.

Tough beans.

[The trees]

To the new licensee, I say tough beans. While there wasn't really an official announcement, it was fairly well known that Carmack was planning on releasing the source soon. Either they decided that it was worth it to pay and have it right away (instead of waiting for it to be opened), or they somehow missed this information when they researched their purchase. In the first scenario they have no reason to complain when it's open-sourced, since they were expecting it. In the second scenario they can complain, but only that they made a poorly informed purchase.