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id Software Working on New Title
id Software has announced that, powered by the 'magic' of a new Carmack-crafted engine, an entirely new franchise is on the way. GamesIndustry.biz reports that the venerable FPS development house is hard at work on a completely original game. Without ties to Doom or Quake, the company hopes to begin moving in some new and interesting directions. "Id's last major internally developed title was 2004's Doom 3, which utilized new technology created by Carmack. In the interim, id's technical director has been heavily involved in bringing games onto mobile, including Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves. 'Our first task at id is as a single studio developer,' [Todd] Hollenshead continued. 'That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises. The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet.'"
And, that Carmack is working on it. Which, apparently to some people, is as good as Jobs promising a new product -- pure magic.
I bet there will be audible squeals from some people over that alone! (Note: not me, I'm too old to squeal over such things. =)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...Now without even a name or description! Why waste time making up a name, story, and rigged-up screenshots for your new vaporware? Just claim that you're working on something new, but it's so new and revolutionary you can't talk about it! No hassles with release dates or feature lists...those id guys really ARE geniuses.
"Mr. Carmack, how's your new game?"
"People will bow to it."
http://xkcd.com/386/
Hey everybody, we have something really great, but we cannot show you. We cannot even tell you any details. It is built on this amazing engine that is so amazing it is not even finished yet, so we really cannot show you anything. But it was designed and devoloped by this A-number one developer...the man is a fricken genius! Yeah, he did this awesome game you played four years ago.
Nothing to see here...
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Quite true. I also found the quote 'Our first task at id is as a single studio developer' to be quite telling in that regard, especially when, from my perspective, id games have become synonymous with "Game Graphics Engine Technical Demo++"
With Unreal and Source taking strides, maybe technology is getting to a point where the return on investment of in-depth super genius work in a graphics engine is too low to justify.
After all:
Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
- John Carmack
More Twoson than Cupertino
Will id's new engine support bleeding edge features such as brightness? *ducks*
Indeed. Just one example, look at Beryl/Compiz, Vista, OS X. I would argue that operating systems wouldn't have come this far, visually, if it weren't for the Quake series. Thanks to Quake, OEMs were increasingly compelled to include dedicated graphics processors in every box. There was a time when Carmack's decision to completely drop software rendering was considered risky. It's a risk id took, and every modern computer user (even if they never play any game) benefitted from it.