According to a tweet from the developer, Bethesda’s lawyers are “skittish about the patent issue” surrounding the code for “Carmack’s Reverse,” which is a stencil shadowing technique patented by Creative Labs and jointly created by the id legend and other coders.

id Software contracted the use of the tech for Doom 3, but providing a source code using the technique would have been a litigation issue.

No word yet on when the updated source code will be released.

Thanks, Shack.

“DOOM 3 source is packaged and tested, we are waiting on final lawyer clearance for release,” Id Software’s resident wizard John Carmack tweeted.

At Quakecon 2011, Carmack said the source code would be sent into the wild after RAGE’s release in October.

As well as enabling mods to be launched as stand-alone games, the release of the source code enables fans to develop community patches fixing bugs or increasing compatibility, or even overhauling graphics.

Thanks, Blue’s News.

Previously, players could only tweak VSync, Texture Cache and Anisotropic Filter to get the visuals they were after. The new patch adds a bicubic-upsample option as well as a texture detail option.

This information comes from a tweet John Carmack sent out yesterday, “We have a bicubic-upsample+detail texture option for the next PC patch that will help alleviate the blurry textures in Rage.”

Thanks, DSOgaming!

Speaking with Kotaku, creative director Tim Willits agreed with Carmack, stating that when the game was submitted to the “build system,” for testing, the console versions were “solid and bug-free,” but  there were issues on the PC end.

“We have had video drives issues that have caused problems and frustrations with our PC fans,” he said. “Everyone at id Software is very upset by these issues which are mostly out of our control. We are working with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia to help them identify and fix the issues with their drivers.

“We’ve had assurances that these problems are being addressed and new drivers will be available soon.”

Carmack, although censoring himself, called the PC launch issues a “clusterfuck”, stating the team thought driver issues during development were mostly worked out.

“We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch,: he said. We had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.

“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either.

“Issues with older/lower end/exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms.”

When asked if this could have been avoided if RAGE’s primary design platform were on PC instead of consoles, as the team at id has noted several times, Carmack reiterated id went the opposite route for a reason.

“You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements,” he said. “We chose the latter.

“We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it.

“Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases.”

Yesterday, id updated the Bethblog with download links for AMD and Nvidia drivers, and today, it has updated the page once more with more RAGE-specific updates.

RAGE was released in the UK today.

Austria and Switzerland have both pulled the game from sale, although it remains available in other territories.

A tweet from id Software’s John Carmack suggests problematic in-game imagery is at the root of the trouble:

“The iOS App Stores in Switzerland and Austria just lost Wolfenstein Classic due to the offensive swastikas,” he said.

Wolfenstein Classic is the iDevice port of Wolfenstein 3D, one of the earliest first-person shooters, which sees players storming a Nazi stronghold. Id Software famously built on the game’s success with Doom and Quake, both seminal titles in a genre which now dominates the industry.

Thanks, GameInformer.

[image]

“In the Doom 4 project, we decided the multiplayer is 60 frames per second, but the single player is 30 frames per second, so you can have twice as many demons coming at you,” id’s lead engineer John Carmack told Gamasutra while discussing the pros and cons of frame rate and hertz levels.

Although Carmack pushed to have RAGE run at 60 fps, he feels the game’s racing sections require it, while DOOM 4 won’t.

“They’re valid decisions to go each way, and part of it also was because in a driving environment, you notice 60 frames per second a lot more than you do when you’re just walking around. So, that was also part of the deal.”

In the full interview, Carmack goes into greater details on the motivations for the decision, including trading off smoothness for “pretty pixels” and balancing frame rate with greater hertz levels – so maybe go have a read before you start composing your angry retorts.

Carmack also revealed the Doom 4 team includes a dozen programmers, as opposed to RAGE, which had up to 18.

“As soon as Rage ships, the core tech team is going over to help the Doom 4 team,” he added later.

Thanks, Blue.

• Sony’s asked Japanese gamers what accessories they’d like for the Vita. A UMD drive is the clear favourite so far.
• North Korea has denied allegations it’s using gold farming in harvest foreign currencies.
• Nintendo has filed its Wii U trademarks but doesn’t own WiiU.com or NintendoWiiU.com – oh oh.
• Id Software’s John Carmack has said the PlayStation 3 is the second-best console ever made. And the Xbox 360 is the first. Hurh hurh.
• Gamepron has a lovely quote about dwarfs as they pertain to Lord of the Rings: War in the North.
• EA has told Reuters it’s optimistic about holiday sales. Good-o.
• Facebook spin-off Maple Story Adventures has attracted 1 million players so far.

Today’s unrelated street art.

id’s John Carmack has said that those who’ve bought and opted to install a 360 version of RAGE will find themselves with 22Gb less space on their HDD.

For reference sake, id’s Tim Willits told VG247 last year in France that the game would come on two discs for 360, while the PS3 version would be on one Blu-ray.

In terms of the install itself, Carmack gave a simple ultimatum in his Quakecon keynote (as spotted by TSA): everything or nothing.

“On the 360 we don’t have a partial install option; it’s all or nothing, which is kind of unfortunate,” he said. “It means you have to install 21/22GB of stuff which takes a long time but if you’ve got it and you play it on the 360 that’s the way to go.”

RAGE releases on October 4 in the US and October 7 in the UK for PS3, 360 and PC.

Steam sales and Facebook blackmailing

Todd Hollenshead took the stage to announce that RAGE iOS will be free for a week as soon as id’s Facebook page reaches 100,000 likes. There will also be Steam new sales every day during QuakeCon as well as a QuakeCon pack which includes every id and Bethesda game available on Steam for $69.99. Pre-purchasing RAGE or Skyrim takes $20 off that, and if you pre-purchase both, you’ll get another $10.

Brink is also free-to-play on Steam until this coming Sunday, and it is also 50 percent off.

After Hollenshead stepped off the stage, Bethesda’s Pete Hines stepped on to chat about what games to expect at the event. Tomorrow there will be a Skyrim public demo with “tidbits” and “new pieces of info,” as well as a Prey 2 live demo.

John Carmack takes the stage

Carmack began his keynote speaking about RAGE, which he called the “most enoyable id game that we’ve ever made,” before announcing he was going to “spend some time” going over RAGE’s visual tech and that after his talk, the audience would be “megatexture experts” afterward. He never said they might cry due to there, once again, not being any word on DOOM 4, but, we’re sure some wept anyway.

Apparently, RAGE has pop-in issues if you turn around quickly, which is the “reality of how the tech works,” according to Carmack. He mentioned an artist which started designing things that weren’t comfortable for the tech, because RAGE is not a “texture island.”

This led Carmack to speaking about anistropic filtering and how when transferring the game to Xbox 360, the game started off at half detail because it wasn’t optimized. It is now, but artists were pretty much “crushed” when they had to compress all the textures for it to work on consoles.

The solution was found by virtualization of texturing, because loading texture blocks directly from DVD or a hard drive would cause “significant lag,” on the console, so a second layer cache was created. According to Carmack, Blu-ray, which is used by PS3, has little available memory, and OS takes too much memory. Luckily, id worked around this with Sony by convincing it to give the team a few more gigs, and it used an HD photo derivative for compression which is a more “sophisticated encoding method,” which allows the developer to provide more game detail.

Carmack admitted id had issues getting RAGE up to 60fps on PC, despite the format having “ten times as much power” as consoles. However, using reactive rendering, it slowly scaled the resolution to fix the framerate issue; however, if something unexpected happens, things can go wonky, so this is just a few of the reasons why it has taken the team so long to release RAGE.

“Three generations down the line, we’ll be taking 30 years to make our next game,” said Carmack, which incited general laughter from the audience.

Graphics “do still matter,” but id decided to up RAGE’s frame rate instead of graphics.

Carmack went on to suggest in his keynote that current graphical methods are a bit unsustainable, and while graphics “do still matter,” id decided to up RAGE’s frame rate instead of its graphics. Most games go 30fps, RAGE went 60fps.

He then revealed that he has started a “new project,” which has him “exploring some things.” These “research engines” could be added to the PC version of RAGE via updates. He loves PC, apparently, calling it “crazy” how much power they have to work with on the platform, and said the firm put 192GB of RAM into a test server, to, well test it obviously.

Carmack said the code is at ten times the bitrate and the firm plans to release it as patch on PC to “test the extra benefit.” He also admits that textures up close don’t look all that great in RAGE, so the team is considering a potential downloadable release of a “super quality pack” on PC.

According to the id man, Doom was too dark which caused people not to be able to see everything, so the team used regular lighting and post-processing in RAGE. Post-processing “mucks up” pixels sometimes, he said.

He then went on to talk about coding and writing good software, which can be deterministic. It works or it doesn’t and if enough people become involved, it can become “disturbingly statistical.”

Content in RAGE is finished, he said, but code is complex so looking back on it: “if we had backed off on the complexity a bit, we could have shipped two games in the time it took to make RAGE,” he said. He said production and QA is under the main roof now, where as back in the Doom 3 days, id just made a game and sent it off to the publisher.

DOOM 3 source code

Carmack said once RAGE is released, id will focus on giving the DOOM 3 source code to the public. It will be released sometime this year. Carmack said this is also a challenge to other developers to release old source code. It helps the development community and id.

Q&A

After his keynote, Carmack opened up the floor to questions from the audience, where he spoke on a myriad of subjects. Here’s a few bits, bobs, and quotes:

Doesn’t “really have anything to say , ” about DOOM 4. It’s the “year of RAGE.”

• Someone asked him about Doom 4. Carmack said this was the year of RAGE and he doesn’t “really have anything to say about it.” However, it scales to 60fps on PC, the RAGE guys are all moving over to DOOM, and id is still “hoping to do RAGE 2.”
• A browser-based Wolfenstein is “off the table.”
• Quake Live “has not been a business success.” The next Quake will be internal, but nothing’s in the works right now.
• Mobile titles could be our best shot at bringing back “the golden age of modding.”
• “Our future games will have dedicated servers.” RAGE will not, apparently.
• Carmack hates it when there are tons of kernels running.
• He was asked about static analysis, non-mutable variables, and he talked about how he has “voxelized the entire world,” and participates in “voxel-casting”.
• Carmack hasn’t been playing with rockets in three months due to RAGE crunch time. He is also not accepting any more contract work, because he doesn’t want to get trapped as “small company that does government work.”
• He is not interested at the moment in Linux or Mac, as the main RAGE release is the focus at this time. “We’d like to support all that,” he said, but Linux is furthest “down the totem pole.” So it’s not out of the question, but not scheduled at this point.
• id games could work on Android, but at the moment, resources are the main issue as the firm needs a “clear business case” to prove it would be worthwhile.
• Id Tech Five will go open source eventually. “Could be ten years.” Depends on when people stop using it for official projects.
• Carmack talked about how we’re already in the future with Kinect tech, tracking, etc.

You can review the liveblog yourself below.

[Original story by Johnny Cullen, contributions by Patrick Garratt and Stephany Nunneley, liveblog by Nathan Grayson.]

Here’s the full thing. We’ll be there.

• Welcome and Annual Keynote with John Carmack – Thursday, August 4th at 2:00pm
• Skyrim Presentation – Friday, August 5th at 1:00pm (Todd Howard, Bethesda Game Studios)
• 20 Years of id Software – Friday, August 5th at 2:30pm (John Carmack, Tim Willits, Todd Hollenshead, Kevin Cloud – id Software)
• Ultimate Origins: The Games That Influence Us – Friday, August 5th at 4:00pm (Raphael Colantonio, Arkane; Harvey Smith, Arkane; Matt Hooper, id Software; Marcus Smith, Insomniac)
• Prey 2 Presentation – Friday, August 5th at 5:30pm (Chris Rhinehart, Human Head)
• Community Managers: Un-moderated! – Saturday, August 6th at 1:00pm (Abbie Heppe, Respawn; Adam Pyle, id Software; Matt Grandstaff, Bethesda Softworks; Nick Breckon, Bethesda Softworks; Ryan Schneider, Insomniac)
• First-person Perspectives – Saturday, August 6th at 2:30pm (Mackey McClandish, Respawn; Drew Murray, Insomniac; Tim Willits, id Software; Julien Roby, Arkane)
• PC Perspective Hardware Workshop – Saturday, August 6th at 3:30pm

Said Bethesda PR today: “In addition to the lineup of presentations and panels, attendees will also have the opportunity to check out various exhibitors on the show floor, including BAWLS Guarana, the U.S Air Force, Cooler Master, CPU Magazine, Dell Computer, Diamond Multimedia, FSP GROUP USA CORP, Glitch Gaming Apparel, Grow Up Japan Co., Ltd., Gunnar Optiks, Hi-Rez Studios, IN WIN Development, Intel Americas, Inc., Plantronics and Psyko Audio Labs, Inc.

“QuakeCon 2011 will take place at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, TX. The event remains FREE to general admission and BYOC attendees thanks to the support of id and Bethesda Softworks, as well as the QuakeCon volunteer staff and the 2011 event sponsors and exhibitors. Doors to the QuakeCon BYOC will open on Thursday, August 4th at 9am and will remain open through 12pm on Sunday, August 7th.”

Go. You really may as well. It’ll be fun.

“It’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles,” id Software machine whisperer John Carmack told IndustryGamers.

“People have exaggerated the relative powers – the iPad2 is not more powerful than the 360. It’s still a factor of a couple weaker. But the fact that it’s gotten that close that fast – that means that almost certainly, 2 years from now, there will be mobile devices more powerful than what we’re doing all these fabulous games on right now.”

He also commented on the perfume-soaked allure of convenience, noting that mobile games and cloud gaming both use that bait to reel in many a customer. “A whole lot of convenience can make up for [what's lacking],” he said, referring to cloud gaming’s latency and graphical shortcomings.

So then, the future is now. Now-ish. Angry Birds with HDR lighting, disturbingly accurate pig destruction physics, and DirectX 26 support, here we come.

Skyrim will be publicly demoed for the first time by Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard, while the first public demo also of Prey 2 will see Human Head project lead Chris Reinhart behind the sticks.

The RAGE demo will be given by design director Matt Hooper, with the id shooter also available to play on the showfloor this year for the first time.

Bethesda also confirmed that John Carmack’s annual keynote will happen on August 4. Watch as the id techmaster gives the talk that will separate the men from the boys, as the hardcore sit and wait to see if we’ll finally get DOOM 4 shown to us at last.

QuakeCon takes place from August 4-7 in Texas.

He was quick to say that nothing was rolling officially, though.

“We went from the Quake 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe. We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction,” Carmack told EG.

“We think that would be a more interesting direction than doing more Strogg stuff after Quake 4. We certainly have strong factions internally that want to go do this.

“But we could do something pretty grand like that, that still tweaks the memory right in all of those ways, but is actually cohesive and plays with all of the strengths of the level we’re at right now.”

id CEO Todd Hollenshead added: “People shouldn’t worry that we’re ever going to orphan or abandon Quake. We are huge fans of the game internally.”

id’s next game, RAGE, releases in October for PS3, 360 and PC. DOOM 4 is next afterwards.

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer, Carmack said the next generation of consoles are just a couple of years away and after that, hardware makers may realize technology has been tapped out.

“That’s going to be a challenge for the next-generation of consoles, to show that the pack-in title is going to look more awesome than what you get on the current ones that people will want to go spend $300 on a new console,” he said. “They’ll be able to do it on the next generation, but it’s going to be much harder. And whether it’s even possible another generation after that is an open question.

“There are lots of valid reasons to like a stable platform, to be able to have stable skill sets and tool sets to be able to build things in a controlled way without that terrifying jump.

“There are a lot of factors that can go on there. And shoot, once we’re out ten years cloud-based gaming is almost a shoe-in. It’s not a shoe-in this year or next year, but if you look ten years out, piping everything over a broadband connection, there are huge advantages to doing that. There are a lot of different factors there, where computing power is getting so ridiculously cheap and we carry so much of it around.

“People’s telephones could be their home console, and it just beams over to the TV set when they’re there and they want that experience. Do we want these separate walled gardens: here’s what we’ve got on our PC, here’s what we’ve got on our console, here’s what we’ve got on our mobile phone? There’s at least an argument that you wind up carrying around enough processing power with you to satisfy all of those and you dock them into different things when you go there.

“It could play out in lots of different ways. There’s not one valid path to the next-generation of technology…Cloud-based infrastructure has lots of interesting technical challenges of its own as well as development wins for doing things that way. That’s at least three directions things could go right there. And any one of them could wind up dominating in some way.”

Carmack added that he is happy with the current generation of consoles, and for the time being, he doesn’t feel “terribly constrained” as the current-gen isn’t “tapped out” just yet.

You can read the full interview through the link.

Speaking in a much quoted interview with Gamespot, id Software’s resident rocket scientist said that while he has yet to get a good look at Vita, he believes Sony has “learned a lot from the PS3, and they’ve gone out of their way to make sure that the development is as easy as possible,” on Vita.

“However, I wouldn’t want to be the executive making the decision to launch a new portable gaming machine in the post-smartphone world,” said Carmack who thinks Vita could end up competing with Sony’s Xeperia.

“I think that they’ve picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that, they’re going to have you program for it like a console, so it’s going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there.

“But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they’re shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it’s going to look pretty pokey. You make a game that’s fun and quick to do, and you grab low-hanging fruit with the technology there. So, even if that plays out, such that people find that they can easily bring over their full-on, full-blown AAA console titles and put it on [the Vita], that’s going to give it a reason for existence.”

Thanks, VideoGamer.

In an interview with GameSpot, he admitted that there was a presentation on Wii U held for all ZeniMax/Bethesda-owned studios before the console’s unveil at E3 last week.

Carmack opted to skip it to finish work on RAGE, but admitted there is now equal footing with the new console.

“The technology level on there brings it up to parity with the other consoles, which is nice for us,” he said.

He added that, whilst it was “not suitable” to bring id Tech 5 to Wii, it was possible to create a RAGE title for Wii using the iOS tech used in RAGE: Mutant Bash TV. Nothing ever came of it, though.

“Previously, the Wii was not a target. Id Tech 5 was just not suitable for the Wii at all. We seriously talked about possibly using the iOS Rage technology that I built for that for a Wii game. It would fit perfectly from a technology standpoint, and I think would have been really pretty cool as a Wii game, but we decided that it wasn’t the right time to jump into the Wii market.

“But now that we’re looking at another platform that is eminently suitable for the technology, I’m sure we’re going to try and bring it up on there. But it will become a market question of do we think that there will be people there that won’t be served by one of the other SKUs?

“If you’re going to have a serious hardcore game on there, the Wii is usually the hardcore gamer’s second or third console. Even if we could have shipped Rage in full glory on the Wii, it probably wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense because people that want Rage probably also have a PC, 360, or PS3 that could do the game better justice.”

Carmack went on to further add that he’s excited for the touch-screen controller.

id’s next game, RAGE, was recently held back a couple of week to the start of October for PS3, 360 and PC.

Because of the length of time spent on the game, Carmack said it caused his opinion to change regarding the desire to constantly be focusing on better technology, and from here on out, such matters should not get in the way of game development.

“That’s the biggest thing when we look back on this generation,” Carmack told CVG. “We had, at one point or another, seven years of work that went into it. It’s a foregone conclusion that we’re never going to throw out that much of the code base ever again. If we have eight times the resources on a next gen console, we can’t spend a decade writing the optimal technology for that. We need to be able to be at a point where we rewriter sections that matter and have an impact, and reuse as much as we can.

“A lot of the things we do nowadays, with the AI and the animation, is really good enough. Every aspect of Rage could be made better if we wanted to spend another two years on it, but it’s not the optimal use of [our] resources. I’d be happier if we produced two games in that time. And that’s actually my personal marching orders for technology development going forward.

“I made the conscious choice that we can do something that looks arguably best of breed here [with Rage] and still run at 60 frame per second, and saying ‘I foregone all of these graphics algorithms in favour of a game that’s going to be more responsive’. You can look at that as the turning point where we no longer think that building the prettiest pictures is the best way to deliver value in games.”

The full 20-minute interview with Carmack can be viewed through the link to CVG.

Rage is set to arrive on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in September.

Thanks, Develop.

“It’s interesting when you look at our technology licensing — it was never really a business that I wanted to be in,” he said.

“In the very early days, people would pester us, and we’d just throw out some ridiculous terms, and we were surprised when people started taking us up on it.”

Carmack than said that he didn’t want to be involved in supporting a lot of outside teams, as it restricted them from experimenting with that they had.

“I didn’t want to be in the process of supporting a lot of outside teams, because you feel beholden to not make radical changes when it’s going to pull the rug out from lots of other people,” he explained.

“When it’s your own team, you can make the sensible decision that [a big change] is going to be worth it, that it’s going to suck for a while, but we make our way through it. But you don’t want to do that to other people.”

Carmack acknowledged that Gears of War developer Epic Games is a dominant force in engine licensing in this console generation.

“Epic’s done a really good job of building up a support structure for [engine licensing]. The market was ours to keep, but we abdicated because we weren’t willing to put that effort into it.

“We didn’t want half our company to be about managing technology licensing. Epic has gone and done a great job with it.”

He continued: “If you have a team that’s up to speed and going great with Unreal technology, I don’t care at all. It’s not a personal affront to me if somebody wants to choose a different technology to build a game upon.”

Carmack said that id Tech 5 is “not magic” and while the engine is great for making certain types of games such as RAGE, it might not work with certain others like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which requires rendering cities with lots of surface area.

“The megatexture direction [in id Tech 5] has some big wins, but it’s also fairly restrictive on certain types of games,” he said.

“It would be a completely unacceptable engine to do Skyrim in, where you’ve got the whole world, walking across these huge areas.”

Last year, id Software announced at QuakeCon it was no longer licensing id Tech to outside parties unless it was working on Bethesda-published games.

“The Nintendo market is a tough market for us to get into,” creative director Tim Willits told Eurogamer.

“A lot of first party games, a lot of licensed games – those are the ones that have done the best on that platform. I’d love it if we can get a hardcore FPS community going and build on it, but it’s tough.

“I think we should keep our toes where we know best,” he concluded.

Willits also commented that “stability in the consoles is good”, allowing developers to put their experience on both major consoles to good use, concentrating on game design.

In contradiction, id’s legendary head of technology John Carmack told Gamespot the studio’s next major project after DOOM 4 is probably destined for the next hardware generation.

“I am working on next-generation engine technology and what we’ll be doing with graphics when we start really rethinking it. It’s likely that the project after Doom 4, the next major one, will be designed around being cross-generational,” he said.

Asked whether a sequel to RAGE is on the cards – a likely candidate for this next project – Carmack said is is planning on it.

“We haven’t got a formal, official announcement, but we’re certainly headed in that direction,” he said.

RAGE, id’s first new IP in years, is due on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September.

Carmack’s in LA this week to pimp RAGE. We tried to embed this, but the code’s borked. Hit the link to watch it.

“I think cloud gaming will eventually be a significant part of the landscape,” Carmack told IndustryGamers.

“Consumers have shown over and over again that convenience can often more than offset some quality issues, and there will be significant convenience wins possible there over optical media or digital downloads.”

Carmack said he felt the change was “inevitable”, although he didn’t want to guess at adoption rate.

Otherwise, the engineer said “all the obvious trends” would continue.

“Another console generation, big MMOs on PCs, more movement towards digital distribution, smartphones encroaching on dedicated gaming territory, and so on,” he said.

” Blockbuster games will continue to increase in development cost, but gaming should continue to have a much more vibrant ‘low end’ than, say, the movie industry.”

Looking back over his career, Carmack said the industry had changed at a startling and exciting rate.

“The challenges available in game development have grown at least as fast as my knowledge, and I have never reached a point where I felt that there weren’t interesting and exciting things to learn and work on,” he commented.

“If anything, I almost feel overwhelmed with the available directions to focus on … Twenty years ago you could look at a platform and consider it as something that could be grasped nearly in its entirety.

“Today, your cell phone’s total complexity is beyond anyone’s capacity to completely comprehend, to say nothing of your personal computer and the internet it connects to.”

id’s next game, RAGE, is the first to run on Carmack’s new engine – idTech 5. It’s due on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September. The studio also has Doom 4 in the works.

[image]

Speaking to gamesTM, Carmack said it was much better to build with PS3 and 360 rather than Sega Saturn or PS2, something he said were “quirky, cranky, architectures.”

“The PS3 is still far and away better than anything else that’s ever been made… except maybe the 360,” he told the magazine.

“It’s a great time to be a developer,” he added. “It’s not like working with the Sega Saturn or the PS2, where these are really kind of quirky, cranky, architectures that are not, well, architected, I would say.”

He added: “Because I do favour the 360, it doesn’t mean I have anything all that negative to say about the PS3.”

id’s next game, RAGE, releases this September for PS3, 360 and PC.

Thanks, NowGamer.

Speaking in the latest Steamcast, Newell chatted about getting a Quake engine license through his id pal Michael Abrash in order to develop Half-Life 1 around it.

“One thing that everyone should remember is that Valve got its start through the support and community mindedness of id,” said Newell, “so if it hadn’t been for John Carmack, Jay Wilbur, Michael Abrash supporting us and encouraging us in what we did, Valve wouldn’t have gotten its start.

“When someone like John Carmack says, ‘Yeah, I’m actually really interested to see what you guys do with the Quake engine,’ you know, that gets your attention. When Michael Abrash says, ‘Yeah, I know you Gabe, we worked together, and you have skills that will be valuable in this space’, you can come into this not thinking you aren’t bringing anything to the table. You actually have stuff that you’ve learned and can do that will be valuable in game development.

“Those are the things that made it easy to jump off a cliff and start a video game company when people who you respect very highly, who have in fact been very successful in this space, encourage you to give it a go; that makes it pretty easy.”

Newell went on to say such confidence in his team has inspired him to do the same with new developers.

“We really are all in this together, and the more effective we are as a community in gathering and supporting talented and smart people to build the kinds of entertainment we love the better of we’re all going to be. So we really mean that, and view our activities in this area as being of long-term benefit to all of us,” he said.

You can listen to the Steamcast through this QuickTime link.

Thanks CVG.

• Gamefront has a preview of upcoming content and changes to Lord of the Rings Online. We’re rather excited, personally, because: Hunters rule, Guardians drool.
• Kinect’s Kudo Tsunoda is back, and he is keynoting the MI6 conference on April 7.
• Duke Nukem Forever’s website has been updated with Aliens and chick surveillance. A French maid who likes to polish floors, a redneck woman with large assets, and a set of twins to motorboard. Nice.
• Total War: Shogun 2 won’t have DirectX 11 support at first, but a patch will add it a few weeks after launch.
• THQ’s Danny Bilson doesn’t like brushing his teeth in games like Heavy Rain. Thankfully, he enjoys it in real-life.
• Speaking of Total War, TF2 has some TWS2 items available, and there’s also a Steam sale on Total War games.
• Valve sent us a press release announcing an original song by recording artist The National will be included in Portal 2. Not “Terrible Love”, we’re guessing.
• TV super-manufacturer Samsung believes it will be a while yet before we have a glasses-free 3D TV experience.
• Dark Horse is to release a comic based on RAGE. Nice.
• PC game sales this weekend include: Westward, Battlefield Bad Company 2, World of Goo, and Singularity. BigDownload has more on this for you. There’s more here as well.
• Shadows of the Damned producer Shinji Mikami had told GameTrailers that the game was toned down a bit by EA. Really?
• Bethesda has said it will take a competent gamer 20-hours to play through the single-player portion of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.
• PlayStation Suite is apparently coming to Tegra 2 devices according to nVidia. (Thanks, Crysis)
• John Carmack has told bit-tech that Direct3D has emerged as a superior graphics API.
• Evil Avatar has posted the latest Sims Medieval Webisode.
• There’s some new LEGO Star Wars II screens over on Gamespot.
• Masakazu Eguchi has said work is continuing on Mega Man Legends 3, despite not being green-lit by Capcom yet.
• Jane McGonigal is at PAX East. She gave a talk on how ‘Games Are Bringing Out The Best In Us‘.

Speaking with The Dallas Morning News, the id Software wizard believes the new handhelds will be the last of their kind due to the insurgence of the smartphone and tablet market.

“The smart phone may turn out to be 80 percent as good at gaming as a dedicated gaming platform,” he said. “People are going to carry their smart phone, and if it’s an 80 percent gaming device, how many people in the gaming market will be satisfied with that? One of the things that we’ve seen is the type of games that people play on the smart phones, at the moment, tend to be pretty casual games.

“If that’s what the consumers are going to trend towards on there, there may not be much as developers we can do about that. You don’t always get to build pyramids just because you want to.”

Carmack added that some developers are a bit reluctant at the moment to consider smart phones and tablets as gaming devices, because consumers are still willing to fork over $40 or $50 for a DS or PSP title. These same consumers, Carmack believes, are still a bit shy when it comes to spending money on a downloadable game on their smart phone or tablet, no matter how inexpensive.

3DS is out in March and Sony plans to have NGP in stores in time for the holidays, and you can bet the farm the industry will be watching these devices more closely than ever.

Thanks, RipTen.

Treyarch: “negative” gamers are industry’s greatest problem

What happened: Black Ops developer Treyarch took gamers to task for being “angry entitled fans who look to be contrarian, sometimes simply for the sake of being contrarian” instead of lauding creators who “try new things.”

What it means: You’re probably feeling an uncomfortable, overwhelming urge to jam a finger in Treyarch’s face and shout “Look who’s talking. You haven’t ‘tried new things’ in years.” And, in part, you’re onto something. But so is Treyarch. Gamers have become distressingly cynical as of late. Don’t believe us? Look at review score scales. In many circles, if a game scores an eight or higher, it’s good; seven or lower and it’s bargain bin material. In essence, we have three levels of praise and seven angles from which to tear a game to shreds. A bit uneven, no? And don’t even get us started on dismissive “lol new game from is guna suk” comments before you’ve even seen the damn game. So, where does this ugly cynicism come from? Is it a result of a giant gray tidal wave of samey sequels? Or are developers like Treyarch only taking the “safe” route because cynical gamers won’t accept anything else? Perhaps everyone’s at fault here.

Sony taking an “open stance” with PS Suite expansion to other platforms

What happened: SCE CEO Kaz Hirai expressed interest in putting his company’s “hardware-neutral” mobile gaming platform on every handheld device short of an Etch-a-Sketch – but not until Sony has the resources to do so.

What it means: Like it or not, phones – in all their various sizes and (thankfully no-longer-taco-esque) shapes – have grown into one of game development’s most fertile soils. After all, nearly everyone has a phone, so that’s one hell of an installed base. Sony, at least, seems to realize how crucial these little slices of sci-fi are to the future of gaming, but the jury’s still out as to whether the Japanese giant – with its slow-but-sure Android-centric start – is capitalizing quickly enough. However, a unified platform like PS Suite could certainly work wonders on app store organization, which – nowadays – is like wandering through a maze full minotaurs and crushing depression. Also, we’re sure smaller developers wouldn’t mind having a way to stand out from the crowd. The bottom line? There’s gobs of potential in Sony’s plan, but dedicated execution is what’ll make it sink or swim, and this is far from the only thing on Sony’s plate.

Schappert: Mobile connectivity more important than 3D

What happened: In EA COO John Schappert’s eyes, 3D’s certainly not leaping from the cradle to the grave, but for now, EA’s focus lies elsewhere. “I’m mostly interested, with all the mobile devices that are coming out, in how they’re being connected to one another and how the same IP is shared over the top,” he said.

What it means: The 3D vs. connectivity argument potentially presents yet another chapter in the never-ending tug-of-war between how we play games and when – and where – we play them. Companies like Nintendo – unsurprisingly – have decided to add an extra dash of spice to the games themselves, but who knows where everyone else will stand when the dust clears? EA, it seems, is betting the farm on connecting devices until it’s formed a videogame Voltron (Madden, coming to your giant lion robot that doubles as a foot this fall), and so far, we can’t argue with the results. Dead Space on iPhone, especially, does an excellent job of demonstrating the method behind EA’s alleged madness, preserving the franchise’s core values while providing new insight into its universe. And that’s only right now. The possibilities are immensely exciting, which is why guys like Ken Levine and Randy Pitchford are praying that a new breed of “next-gen” living room juggernauts doesn’t barge in and trample it all down before it really has a chance to take off.

John Carmack researching next-generation gaming graphics

What happened: If anyone can get a new generation of graphics off to a great start, it’s id’s resident master of tech and tweets we’ll never be able to understand, right? Maybe not: “I have a couple more research projects to undertake in the coming year, but the technical work I am most excited about doesn’t have anything to do with graphics,” he said.

What it means: Craving a new helping of hyper-realistic eye candy? Get in line – and maybe bring a tent, because it’s gonna be a long wait. On the upside, incremental graphical leaps will probably – at least, temporarily – put an end to the days of, “Buy our vapid, mindless game because, look, water that’s not Vaseline and realistic eyebrow physics!” Kick out that crutch and, hopefully, big-budget games will be forced to mix things up creatively. On the other hand, new generations often bring an influx of new IPs, and even the most creative guys and gals around will eventually hit a wall with old tech. At any rate, the current generation’s going into overtime, platforms – through downloadable titles, peripherals, new business models, and things of the like – are becoming truly differentiated, and, well, we never thought we’d still be this excited more than five years into a console cycle.

Sony pegs NGP for “2011″ in London, drops mega-details

What happened: Sony apparently spirited a bunch of developers away to some offshore island (It’s called London -Ed) and revealed a smattering of new NGP features, including – perhaps most excitingly – the ability to essentially move a full-resolution, 60 fps PS3 game straight onto NGP. No compromises.

What it means: This could be the thing that ensures many gamers never see the world – except via disinterested peripheral vision – again. That holds especially true if save data can leap back and forth between PS3 and NGP. More than anything, though, it raises questions. The bean-spilling, cat-debagging developer “source” implied that additional features will be required to justify a blast from the NGP shrink ray. And two “different” games creates an opportunity for two “different” price tags – and likely a slobber-knocking one-two punch knockout for your wallet. If that ends up being the case, we’re hoping there’ll at least be a substantial discount for buyers of both versions, but there’s no telling at this point. In an ideal world, this unified approach to NGP and PS3 development would put us a step or two away from true connectedness between gaming platforms. Unfortunately, this isn’t an ideal world.

According to Carmack, progress in graphics for each generation was an obvious step up, but now and days its getting a bit harder to make such grand leaps.

“Games today look incredible, and there are few things that we can’t do a pretty good job of rendering with the available techniques, so it is much more a question of balancing and trading off the development process against the fidelity of the product,” he explained over on the Bethesda Blog.

“We have to be reactive to hardware trends, and there are still large bodies of work in the offline rendering world to consider, but I don’t feel huge pressure to radically rework our graphics architecture right now… Still, I have done a fair amount of research work this year to help clarify our next generation directions, but so far they have mostly been negative results – I know we won’t be rendering with a triangle intersection ray tracer on the next gen, for instance.

“I have a couple more research projects to undertake in the coming year, but the technical work I am most excited about doesn’t have anything to do with graphics, but instead with the data management and work flow through the development process.”

And who wouldn’t be excited about data management and workflow through the development process, John

Last year during QuakeCon, id’s CEO Todd Hollenshead told VG247′s Nathan Grayson the firm made a “strategic decision on part of the overall corporate strategies of Zenimax, Bethesda, and now Arkane,” not to license out its newest gaming engine, id Tech5.

“One of the reasons in the past that we licensed technology is that we only had one team working on games, so we couldn’t really leverage the tech to its fullest extent until we licensed it out to other teams to use it,” he said. “Especially in a tech industry, engines have a fairly rapidly closing window of best use. To some extent, that’s not an issue as much anymore since we have multiple teams.

“The other thing is that we really do think id Tech 5 offers us a competitive advantage with respect to what we can do within game development. And so we want to keep that within the id/Bethesda/Zenimax family.”

You can read the full Q&A with Carmack over on the Bethesda Blog.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

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