uakeCon’s big event is Friday night – John Carmack’s keynote speech. We had the opportunity to catch up with things since our CES interview and get the important details about id Tech 5. Will it work with DX10? Wii? What is Rage? What’s going on with Doom 4? What the heck is Quake Zero? Carmack spills the beans on the next Quake Arena project and a whole lot more in this extensive QuakeCon interview!

Game Informer: When we interviewed you at CES this year, and QuakeCon two years ago you weren’t too thrilled with developing for multicore systems. Obviously now, that’s the case across all platforms. Were you kind of at the point with id Tech 5 where, you said, “We give in?”

John Carmack: You have to take advantage of what’s on the table. Although it’s interesting that almost all of the PS3 launch titles hardly used any Cells at all. We hired one of the best PS3 guys around who did the Edge Acceleration technology for Sony – he’s on our team now so we’ve got some of the best PS3 experience here. In fact when we were doing all of the tech demos, we’d bring in the developers and they’d walk over and say, “it’s running on the PS3!” (laughs) They’d sit there and stare at it for a while. 

There’s no doubt that with all of the platforms that we have running here PS3 is the most challenging to develop on. That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not that it was a boneheaded decision because they’re a lot closer the fact that they can run like this [points to the 4 different gaming stations running Rage] – they’re a lot closer than they’ve ever been before. It’s a hell of a lot better than PS2 versus Xbox. But given the choice, we’d rather develop on the Xbox 360. The PS3 still does have in theory more power that could be extracted but it’s not smart. We don’t feel it’s smart to head down that rat hole. In fact, the biggest thing we worry about right now is memory. Microsoft extracts 32 megs for their system stuff and Sony takes 96. That’s a big deal because the PS3 is already partitioned memory where the 360 is 512 megs of unified and on the PS3 is 256 of video, 256 of memory minus 96 for their system…stuff. Stuff is not the first thing that came to my mind there. (laughs)

The PS3 is not the favorite platform but it’s going to run the game just as good. To some degree there’s going to be some lowest common denominator effect because we’re going to be testing these every day on all of the platforms, and it’s going to be “Dammit it’s out of memory on the PS3 again, go crunch some things down” That’s probably going to be the sore spot for all of this but because we’re continuous builds on all of these we’re going to be fighting these battles as we go rather than build these things out and go, “Oh my God we’re so far away from running on there.” Which is the situation where Enemy Territory is suffering with at a degree right now, and a lot of other people have that. 

GI: Will this engine support any DX10 features?

Carmack: No, not currently. We’re not expecting to. We’re not sure if we’re going to be a Vista title or not. There will be some support benefits by being Vista only. It depends when we get the game done what the adoption has been. But it’s a OpenGL title on the PC and Mac right now, obviously D3D on the 360, and the PS3 it’s kind of an in between where it’s Open GLES but we do a lot of direct command buffer writing there. If necessary we can move the PC version over to DX10, but there’s not much strong pull for us to do that. All of the toolset is in OpenGL, I wouldn’t want to convert everything over.

GI: You didn’t seem to hot on DX10 or Vista at CES.

Carmack: Microsoft has done a great job with all this stuff. I mean, I honestly think that DX9 with how it’s implemented on the 360 is a clearer and more open API than OpenGL is. It doesn’t hide the state.

That’s sort of the Microsoft way. They start off with a piece of crap, and then over a number of versions taking a lot of people with them over the painful route they eventually get to something that’s better than what they are competing against. It’s a valid strategic direction. I think they’ve come out at the end with a good platform and a good product. Some of the DX10 stuff I don’t think there’s going to be huge draws for the features there, but a lot of what they’ve done with the structuring of the API I think are still positive things to do there. I think they have a good team with solid engineering there.

GI: You’ve got all the platforms except one. Could someone theoretically use a light version of id Tech 5 to develop a Wii title?

Carmack: We could port the Megatexture stuff over, we could port most of the engine over there, but you wouldn’t be able to use the same set of original content. There’s a bigger gap there. We don’t have any major intention to port this entire technology platform to the Wii. What I am kind of hoping for is if Orcs and Elves is big on the DS I want to do Orcs and Elves for the Wii. You know wave the wand in the air.(laughs) My whole reverse engineering for the platform. I still have high hopes for that. Start on mobile, go to the DS, go to the Wii. Then maybe wind up on the 360, PC.

I’m thrilled that Nintendo has had great success with the Wii because while Nintendo has never been my favorite company – relationships between id and Nintendo – we’re not a good match in general. We match better with Microsoft with how they position the 360. But one of my tenets that’s near and dear to my heart is the significant improvements that are going to be done are with IO devices and the Wii I think is a really good demonstration of that. They’ve taken something that’s much less powerful but it has an innovative IO device. But the fact that they did something different it added a lot of value.