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ZeniMax, Parent Company of Bethesda, Buys id Software
CelticLo writes "ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of noted game publisher Bethesda Softworks, today announced it has completed the acquisition of legendary game studio id Software, creators of world-renowned games such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and its upcoming title, Rage. In an interview with Kotaku, John Carmack said, 'We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured. And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes.' The press release confirmed that id's projects will remain under Carmack's control."
I saw Carmack give a talk a couple weeks ago and OpenGL came up in the Q&A session.
Carmack's take on it was that OpenGL had not continued to be update to take advantage of newer technology and had therefore largely fallen into disuse, though he also said that the graphics code was not that large a portion of their codebase so they could fairly easily write OpenGL and Direct3D versions of their engines with minimal effort.
The name is still around, but it's definitely not the same company. See Wikipedia for the full history.
Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
What more do you want from a game?
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
It's a game, the fun stuff is the point. Literary content is superfluous. If you want literary content, read a book. If you want to have fun and shoot stuff, play a game.
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OpenGL has certainly not fallen into disuse, in fact it is the standard 3D API for the PS3, Apple OSX and I believe the Nintendo Wii (correction?). And add to that list any non MS operating system. Direct 3D is Microsoft only so you are limited to the Xbox or Windows.
I think it's fair to say it's fallen behind. I say this as someone who used (and still uses) OpenGL for years. OpenGL is still being developed, but features seem to be coming available on DirectX first, and driver support is more likely to be poorer for OpenGL in my experience.
I thought consoles used their own custom APIs?
I hardly think that games developers are worried about "limiting" themselves to all Windows PCs, and the XBox - just think, they could be writing for Macs!
Also consider the fact that OpenGL is not only geared toward hardware acceleration but can also be rendered in software if desired. Direct 3D is hardware only.
There are software implementations, but I forget if it's available in drivers by default? Are there any platforms that actually use software OpenGL?
I am fully aware of the fact that yes hardware rendering is the way to go but with today's multicore and specialized CPU's and GPU's we might find ourselves using software rendering systems running on gp-gpu or super multicore systems.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "software" system running on a GPU - that's what we have today. GPUs are already using multiprocessing (far more so than CPUs). For years, 3D programmers have been writing software to run on the GPU ("shaders"). The only thing missing from the old traditional software renderers is writing the code to do things like the rasterization, but why reinvent the wheel doing the boring stuff? Even if rendering moves back to the CPU, it'll be easier to use libraries to do this work.
Fixed function pipeline "hardware" went out of fashion years ago (in fact DirectX 10 has dropped support for it AIUI). Usually when people talk about "hardware" vs "software" renderering these days, they mean using the GPU versus CPU. I'm not sure how you are distinguishing between them, if you are talking about running "software" on the GPU?
And OpenGL has the advantage of being open source so drivers can be open source or developed to take advantage of certain features. Optimizations can easily be made to the driver and open source 3D drivers can be easily written.
OpenGL is not open source (though there exist some open source implementations), you probably mean it's an open API.
You might think so, but that's not what's happened. OpenGL 3 seems to demonstrate the inefficiency of "run by committee" - there's no evidence of features coming on OpenGL first, rather we have to wait ages for them to be approved by the committee. As I say above, my experience is that OpenGL drivers are more likely to be inefficient.
E.g., if someone wants to take advantage of OpenGL's open nature and write OpenGL drivers for my Intel graphics card that runs as well as Direct3D, please do so. But I don't see it happening.
From QuakeWorld 2008
Carmack also reiterated that the current plan is to open source Doom 3's engine sometime next year.
Carmack: "What we can't do is we can't take time away from [other projects]... it does take effort to get these things together. If we are still heads down trying to get Rage out the door, I'm not going to task somebody with putting together the Doom 3 source distribution. But when Rage ships, you can expect the Doom 3 source code to be coming out."
Sounds like they're waiting to get Rage finalized rather than on any licensees to finish shipping Doom 3-based projects.
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