Quakecon keynote news

Things are things from the Quakecon 2011 keynote.

• Sales on everything, including their iOS games.
• Fatal1ty isn’t dead yet.
• Instead of a sports car like in past years, they are giving away a truck (pretty sweet one though).
• Rage is a game. They think you should buy it.
• Skyrim will soon be a game. They think you should buy it.
• Prey 2 will eventually be a game. They think you should buy it.
• John Carmack took the stage at 2:35
• He likes Rage.
• He admits Rage has pop up issues if you turn around fast, due to this not being a perfect world.
• If you don’t know what anisotropic filtering is, beyond that option in PC games that makes them look better/play worse, half of this talk will be over your head.
• Carmack hates Bluray! HE IS BIAS!
• Twisted Sony’s arm to get access to more of the PS3′s memory. They can do that?
• id had trouble getting Rage up to 60 FPS on PC. DIRECTX IS BIAS!
• Jokingly: “Three generations down the line, we’ll be taking 30 years to make our next game.”
• Says current graphical methods are unsustainable.
• Carmack has a test server with 192 GB of RAM. I recently upgraded to four.
• Carmack admits textures in Rage don’t look that great up close. He has no PR filter. (Which is why this is the best keynote in the industry each year.)
• Potentially could be a “downloadable super quality pack” for PC. Artists were pissed when they had to compress everything.
• Programming languages have fanboys too.
• We are past the one-hour mark. Does he make it to two?
• Probably could have shipped two games by now, but Rage‘s code is super complex. (Their last game was in 2003, so, yeah.)
• Carmack likes the mobile games because they let him get back to the Good Old Days of him sitting in a dark room by himself, coding for days on end.
• Wants to mess around with old consoles, make his team develop an Atari 2600 game as a programming exercise. DO WANT.
• Doom 3′s source code will be released this year. Good to see Zenimax didn’t try to stop him. He also challenged other devs to release their old source. Hopefully that gains traction.
• It’s after 4:00 and he’s taking questions. No Doom 4 this year either?
• Has high hopes for mobil games bringing back the “golden age of modding.”
• “Our future games will have dedicated servers.” IMPORTANT NOTE: Rage doesn’t.
• John Carmack has voxelized the entire world. God help us all.
• He hasn’t visited Armadillo Aerospace (his rocket company) in three months. Rage crunch time.
• Turning down contract work from NASA. lol
• Mac and Linux ports of Rage a ways off. Linux at bottom of the totem pole. Wait, wasn’t Rage being developed for simultaneous release on Mac at one point?
• Would like to do Android ports of iOS games, but want proof it will be worthwhile. Just put a rookie programer on it and hope for the best.
• Yup, two-hour mark.
• id Tech 5 (Rage engine) will go open source eventually, but could take up to a decade.
• Last question from the audience. Some guy rambled about art for several minutes then asked something about censorship. BAH NO ONE GIVES A SHIT WHERE’S DOOM 4?!
• Wait, more questions? But I… OK.
• Someone asked about Duke Nukem Forever. Rage has been in development for seven years. Just sayin.
• Finally, someone asks about Doom 4! John Carmack has nothing for us on that front. You’ve all wasted your time.
• Rage team members are starting to move over to Doom 4 though. So look for it in 2018 (jk)!
• 5:00. Still talking.
• Quake Live “has not been a business success.” So don’t count on any more browser based games from id.
• The next Quake game will be developed internally, but nothing in the works yet. Quake 4 was made by Raven, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was Splash Damage.
• That’s about it.

Make of this what you will.