Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Behind the scenes, in the gelatinous chamber where the RPS Hivemind’s life-sustaining anti-plankton is grown, Jim and I had a brief debate. “We should have a weekly iPhone post”, quoth he. “But so many people will be angered by such a thing”, quoth I. We both then stared at our own iPhones with a mixture of pride and shame, and we wondered. How would the goodly, but sometimes distressingly irate, readers of the Rock, the Paper and the Shotgun feel about such a thing? While we continue to wonder, we can at least justify this: John Carmack, the Great Brain of id Software, talking about the trials and tribulations behind the upcoming iPhone port of Doom, and the issues inherent in visually tweaking (or not) a true-blue PC classic.
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Carmack was talking up Quake Live today over on Gamasutra. “A lot of this project was about doing something that the PC was going to be better at than the consoles,” he told the big G. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carmack’s comments is that he wants to see some of the web functionality from things like social networking sites to find their way into the browser-based game platform. “”For years, I’ve often thought about the fact that a lot of people spend vastly more time on websites and forums about the games that they’re playing than they actually spend playing the games themselves. We hope to have some aspect of that here.”

Quake Live went into open beta last night.

Eurogamer wrote up the Carmack keynote over here, in which he covers future tech and Quake Live stuff. The trailer, which you can see after the jump, is essentially the same footage as the E3 trailer, but with another section tacked on the end. It shows some kind of battle-racing tournament feature, with some shots of the racing itself. Hard to be sure how it’ll play off any of this, but it’s all Id Tech 5, and looking fairly amazing.
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Carmack has been interviewed about Quake Zero over on Gamesradar. For an old Quake III creature like me it was pretty satisfying to see the big man say this:

Quake III Arena was always my personal favorite id Software game. It’s such a pure activity kind of game – more of a sport than a movie. And I’m excited to have this opportunity to bring back the pure type of gaming as opposed to the “everything and the kitchen sink” modern design. We have no pretensions about it being the best multiplayer game in all types of things, but for any player looking to test their [deathmatch] skill, I think Quake III Arena is the best there ever was.

He’s not wrong.

While I understand about one word in forty, I do like hearing Carmack speak about what he’s been up to. His recent interview with PC Perspective is a goldmine of Carmack-thinking. For example, this is what Carmack’s been up to recently…

“It involves ray tracing into a sparse voxel octree which is essentially a geometric evolution of the mega-texture technologies that we’re doing today for uniquely texturing entire worlds. It’s clear that what we want to do in the following generation is have unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel across everything. There are different approaches that you could wind up and try to get that done that would involve tessellation and different levels of triangle meshes and you can could conceivably make something like that work but rasterization architecture does really start falling apart when your typical triangle size is less than one pixel.”

I empathise. When triangle size gets less than one pixel around here, it’s complete chaos. Jim starts screaming, Walker just flakes out completely and it’s only Alec who keeps his head together, reassuring us that triangle size will be back at more than a pixel shortly. However, I have managed to decode some stuff.
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