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The Aftermath of QuakeCon
Dr. Eggman writes "This past week quite whispers and rumors became fact as two FPS giants, id and Valve joined forces to bring id games back catalog to Valve's Steam. This marks a huge influx of old classics as well as opening up the possibility of bringing some of the newest, most anticipated id games to Steam. That wasn't the only news, of course. There were many announcements by the FPS veteran: Quake Wars is slated for October 2nd release. Quake 3 is coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Their next big game is called Rage , and will feature the id Tech 5 platform technology. All the details can be found in Eurogamer's full convention report. Probably the most interesting news from id was the revelation that they're working on a web-browser based version of Quake 3 . It's going to be completely free, supported by ad revenues."
Boy, I hope this can satisfy us while we wait for the colaboration with Infocom to bring us a text based version of Quake 4.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Great- Quake 3 without mods. Just what I wanted...
Why are we getting a free version of Q3 when we still have to pay $10 for Doom? The game is so old, I've had to re-buy it 3 times-- once because the disc actually decomposed, and again when I left it by a tree and the tree grew over it, and finally when MIT procured it for carbon dating. Come on, give us old-school gamers some slack!
Carmack also said yesterday in an interview with Game Informer that "there will be a Doom 4" at some point and "there's going to be a Quake Arena sequel." The Quake Arena sequel will be built with the id Tech 5 engine. Also, Carmack stated that id Tech 5 will probably not be changed to Direct3D 10 for the PC version of Rage (the engine uses OpenGL). http://gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803 .1731.12214.htm?Page=1
Well, its not Doom, but the original Quake maps were open sourced by Mr. Romero recently: http://rome.ro/2006/10/quake-map-sources-released. html
This marks a huge influx of old classics as well as opening up the possibility of bringing some of the newest, most anticipated id games
Great, the variety of Id's library is amazing. Futuristic/Horror Shooter 1, Futuristic/Horror Shooter 2, Futuristic/Horror Shooter 3, and of course the legendary Futuristic/Horror Shooter 4.
See here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You forgot: Futuristic side scroller, grid pattern WWII shooter and their other line of futuristic/evil monster shooters!
God spoke to me.
Considering I can play a Quake-like game on my Palm Pilot. I wouldn't be surprised if iD could pull this off.
From what I've heard the various DOS games that id has put on steam seem to use the DOS emulator DOSbox to work. DOSbox is GPL but it seems id has neglected any idea of following this license agreement. Do you think this could cause some problems?
Before you get the rumor-mill started. Why don't you show us iD violating the GPL?
You forgot the Wolfenstein series -
Historically Innacurate/Horror Shooter 1,Historically Innacurate/Horror Shooter 2, Historically Innacurate/Horror Multiplayer Shooter 1
"just how dead pc gaming is"
... They say similar things with each new generation of consoles. They "speculate" about the "end of PC gaming". When in reality, its not speculation, its a sales pitch. Also the PC always ends up with more powerful processors and graphics cards than the consoles. They want us to believe their consoles are so much better than the PC.
... plus the Wii is doing well on game play not technology. The trend is towards technology becoming less important.
That's just PR talk from the console companies
If anything, we could be nearing the end of the consoles. Within 5 years we are likely to have cheap Terra-scale processing power, so its likely we will be doing things like real time ray tracing of 3D worlds. Beyond that, we are likely to be getting into diminishing returns on graphical improvements. With entry level PCs getting ever cheaper, even low end PCs in even just 5 years from now will be far better than any current console
The PC is here to stay, but I can't say the same for future generations of closed source consoles, which limit the number of applications on their systems.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Ugh. They have yet again left the music out of the Quake 1 and 2 games from Steam (they left the music out of Quake 2 that was bundled with Quake 4). While it is certianly a sad thing for Quake 2, it is a TRAGEDY for Quake 1, which had it's soundtrack done by Trent Razor. It is a shame to leave the music out of these great games...
Will iD be upholding their tradition of being native OpenGL? That means there shouldn't be a problem getting it working equally well (even better, in fact) on Linux or a Mac than Vista.
.deb on the valve website, anyone? :)
Doom 3 worked much faster on Ubuntu for me... In XP with full settings the game was borderline unplayable but on Ubuntu - as smooth as could be!
iD is still the only really major developer i can think of that makes their games openGL native and Linux friendly... Hopefully this collaboration with Valve is another sign that other developers will collaborate and follow their lead.
PS Steam available as a
You can already play a browser based deathmatch game here:
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http://www1.rasterwerks.com/game/phosphor/beta1.a
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...that in his keynote, Carmack stated that Quake Zero was probably going to be more along the lines of 2.5d than 3d. Also, and I find this odd that nobody has written about it, Carmack talked for a bit about what they were originally working on before Rage, a game called Darkness, which was more of a survival horror game and got shelved because they didn't feel it was coming together at the time.
In order for PC gaming to retake developers from consoles, it will have to lose the openness that makes the PC great. Mostly, the reason that PC gaming is dying is because of the relative ease in copying games compared to consoles. It's why most game stores will not buy used PC games, but will buy used console games.
Now consider that it's easier, cheaper and faster to develop games for PC versus consoles. Those three reasons are very important to publishers, yet the PC market is being neglected in favor of consoles. Now ask yourself why, and you'll probably see the writing on the wall.
I was both at QCon and at the Keynote... and I gotta say it was pretty awesome.
The best part of the Con by far was the release of public beta 2 of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. My crew spent billions of hours over the past two days (with little sleep) battling it out in that game.
Another highlight for me were the tourney finals last night. Watching Toxiq and that other guy (can't remember his name sorry) go at it through all 4 Quake games was a blast...
The keynote was _very_ good... with a lot of little bombs dropped in between the big announcements. As others mentioned... the biggest thing was me is that there is going to be a Quake 3 Arena sequel that is built on id Tech 5... it should be awesome!
I'm not really sure why all these haters have come out against id Software... they're a great bunch of guys that still do things the old way (just keep hacking at it "until it's done"). They show a lot of passion towards their products and truly embrace the community (I mean, Quakecon alone is free) even GPLing old game engines.
Really, I don't think there is a better gaming company out there to support....
Friedmud
"Mostly, the reason that PC gaming is dying is because of the relative ease in copying games compared to consoles. "
... they want better DRM on it etc... but even if they were loosing 90% of the games to piracy, they would still be earning serious money. The PC in the future is going to become a lot more wide spread than it is now.
Which means they are going to want DRM on PCs to stop copying. As they are already pushing adverts in games (which I hate), its not much more to make every PC game a client which requires phone home authorisation from a server each time the game starts up etc. They can also serve patches this way as well. We are just seeing the start of online distribution of games. Up until very recently the publishers and especially the distributors have been scared of downloadable games. (No wonder as most disk based distributors would go out of business). Its only recently we have something like Value's Steam. Now we have ID wanting to use Steam. Online distribution of games is going to evolve and its still very early days for it.
PC gaming is not going to die as you keep saying. We have two pressures on PC games. One is from console companies who want people to believe PC gaming is failing. The other is from companies afraid of online distribution and so want to make us believe PC gaming is going to fail. Both types of companies PR departments are pushing these ideas in the news/press and its an ongoing theme with them.
Also in a way, custom hardware is also another way to control a console, as it provides some lockin to prevent or limit cross platform development. This lockin also provides a degree of control over who develops for the closed platform. But even then developers are moving towards more generic games engines to allow easier development on multiple platforms. (Which unfortunately means they are less likely to really push a home computer or console the way developers did in the 1980s and 1990s. Again we see a tread towards more generic solutions, in this case from the software developers).
DRM and custom hardware lockin are two forms of control. Many of these companies want control and closed systems provide more control. That doesn't mean PC games are going to die. It just means the companies want more control, but ultimately they want money more than they want control. If they could access a future market with 100 million consoles or a future market with 2 billion TVs (with embedded PC cores) then they would still want to access both markets. They may complain about the future TV PC core market
I don't think they will ever stop piracy, no matter how much they try to control everyone. So they are just going to continue to complaining about it. PC gaming is here to stay.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
It is, in fact, possible -- even easy -- to download and burn many games and play them on consoles. It's even safer than doing the same for PCs, because it's a lot harder to put spyware on a console.
Piracy is really no more a threat to PC games than it is to music or movies. Which is to say, it's not a threat.
I don't know how you could have arrived at this conclusion.
That may be true if you're making a Flash game or something. PCs are cheaper than console dev kits, so yes, the barrier of entry is lower.
However, the PC is not a game platform the way a console is. It's more like an infinite number of platforms. There are two major video card manufacturers, and a few minor ones -- and Intel might become a major player in the future. There are two different processor instruction sets (x86 and x86_64) even in the Windows world, and more on the Mac or Linux -- not to mention the shading languages for the video cards themselves. There's at least three major versions of Windows you'll want to support -- 2k, XP, and Vista -- and all of those have more than a few permutations. There's CD drives, DVD drives, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives -- the only way you can guarantee that everyone can read your game is to ship a CD, at which point you exclude people who only have floppy drives. There are way more keys on a keyboard than buttons on a controller, and you better bet the users are going to want to customize them all.
Compare that to a console -- the most variation you're going to get is, some PS3s have 10 gigs, some have 50 gigs. Some Xbox 360s have a hard drive, some don't, and some have HD-DVD, but all have standard DVD. And all Wiis are basically the same. It is actually possible to pick one console and go for the lowest common denominator -- for example, go Xbox 360, standard DVD, and don't use the hard drive. That's simply not possible on the PC, because there is no lowest common denominator that will actually work everywhere, and support even close to the amount of power you'd get with that Xbox game I just described.
Now, it certainly would be possible to develop an abstraction on top of the PC. For example, you could develop your game in C# or Java, or do the low-level stuff in C++ and most of the logic in Python, meaning most or all of your code isn't even aware of the CPU architecture it's running on. You could develop strictly for OpenGL, strictly by the spec (with no vendor-specific extensions), or you could write a wrapper around all the vendor-specific stuff so you can use it in an abstract way. You could, in short, develop a platform for the PC that is as easy to develop for as a console.
But that takes time and money, and it also takes skilled programmers -- and judging by the number of "loading" screens you see in modern games, the industry is either badly in need of skilled programmers, or is just plain lazy.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Pretty much a non-issue now. The Notices have been added back. This looks like a classic "oops", not a conspiracy.
We need to get together and demand that they provide the music we paid for! They should rewrite part of the game to make it play the songs as MP3s. If not, they should at least provide the music for downloading so we could burn it to CD. Can anyone provide contact numbers for these folks? If we call enough times, they have to listen to us, right?