|
id's Carmack & Stratton QuakeLive Interview |
|
| Author: Roger LaMarca & Drew Campbell Published: 2009-02-24 |
|
 |
| John Carmack autographing a laptop at QuakeCon 2008. |
"That was a real conscience decision on our part. I'm actually looking through the Quake III code base right now for some ISO development stuff, and I am probably going to have to make some significant changes to get what I want to get out of it. You go in there and you say, 'Oh compile vertex arrays are completely irrelevant nowadays. Everything should be in vertex buffer objects and all this or that.' But the bottom line is it didn't matter at all. Any system today will run the game at 100-125 frames per second cap and any decent system will run it with 4x anti-aliaising.
"So, any significant technology changes that would go in would require new content to wind up taking good advantage of them. And that was one of the things that when we made the transition from Quake 3 to Doom 3, we noticed the content generation patches got so much more expensive. However, we think that there's enough advantages to staying with this level of technology in that it's so broadly supported, it's so high performance, and that it doesn't require the latest tweaky driver versions that sticking with that and giving everything the kind of brush over that it got so that it's more polished and a lot cleaner than when you go back and compare it side by side with the original stuff. But it was consciously chosen to not be aggressive there, and it's a damned good thing we did too because already we're over twice our expected development time. If we had done technology things on that too, it just would have been a horrible thing, so I'm very confident we did the right thing on that side because there's a lot of synergistic advantages to it. The fact that it's not so high tech on there means that you can run it fine on your desktop with multiple web pages up so you can actually have the little pop up advertisement in another window there, playing some full motion flash ad while you're actually running in the game without it horribly destroying everything. And I think it's a good point design.
"I look back at it and there's not too many things that for that set of resources that we're consuming there that I would change really dramatically. The project was all about here's how we're going to exploit the web interface, the social networking sorts of things on there, and take the core gameplay which we've always thought was good to the next level. We really got to sit back and integrate the nearly decade long sense of experiences people have had with the game and now we're tuning and polishing the net code, making changes in the game play code that are all subtle things that make the game 5% better here, 10% better there without any radical changes. And it's kind of nice to do that especially in contrast to where we are with our big mainstream projects like Rage and Doom 4 where we really are trying to tear everything up by the roots and redo it all. Doing a polished and evolved job on this is a nice contrast." -- John Carmack
Check out all our QuakeCon 2009 videos including the John Caramck keynote and the id Software press conference.
Julie Stepan mingles with the nerds waiting in the BYOC registration line. If you haven't been to QuakeCon before, you'd be surprised of the amount of crazy people which turn out for the event. We have some costumed crazies and a guy who looks like John Carmack.
Video from all around E3 2009. You will see booth babes, the Nintendo, Activision, Microsoft, and Sony booths along with many others. There are also special appearances by Mario, Sonic, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Videos from the first ever QuakeLive tournament at QuakeCon 2008. All videos, which include expert commentary, are available for streaming and download in High Definition.
A look inside the company that brought us Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein. Experience id with High Definition video and pictures.
