It's a little hard to believe that id Software co-founder and master programmer John Carmack has never spoken at the Game Developers Conference but that changed today when he made one of the day's keynote addresses in front of a large audience. Here are some highlights:
To get this out of the way first, no new Doom III footage was shown and Carmack said the game was "pretty close" to release.
Carmack confirmed that id is already thinking about their next first person shooter project after Doom III is due. Unlike Doom III, which is in its fourth year of development, Carmack said their next game is only supposed to take a couple of years to make, mainly due to the fact that they don't plan to make a huge graphical leap as they did from Quake 3 Arena to Doom III.
Carmack revealed that he and id thought about, and then dropped, a plan to revisit Quake II, remaking the same exact game but use an all new graphics engine as a way to show off the engine without having to concentrate on game development.
Carmack talked about how game development is getting more and more expensive and how more and more people are needed to make major game releases (He said he wouldn't be surprised to see a game with a budget of $100 million fairly soon). However, he also said there is still room for a small team to create games that can have mass appeal and be successful, like teams who make web based or small downloadable titles. (These sentences give the impression that JC may embrace XNA later on)
Carmack said predicting what new hardware will be out in the future and what it will do is basically a guess furthur out than five years, although he did say his unique position as creator of some of the most graphically intensive games tend to influence how graphics hardware companies make their future products.
While true photo-realism in games is still down the road a ways, Carmack said other aspects of games, like physics and AI, could become more important.
Carmack admitted that their success in creating the first person shooter genre has also created a Catch-22 for the company as people expect more of the same from id with little room for branching out into other genres.
In a Q&A after the keynote, Carmack stated that he wondered why future game consoles like the PS2 and the Xbox 2 will likely use multi-processors, saying such technology has not worked well for consoles in the past and wondered why this way of working was back in vogue again from console makers. ( I think many comsole programmers agree on this point. )
The final question was about his manned rocketry project. Carmack said they continue to test their rockets and hope to have a manned launched within a year or so. ( I hope JC will not be in the rocket.
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