QuakeCon 2006 (Page 4) - Speeches and Panels
I'll go ahead and
admit that this page probably isn't going to be that interesting, but
it does have pictures of John Carmack, as promised! You'd
probably be better off getting videos or audio of these.
So this is what
the id Software panel looks like. People ask questions and the id
employees try to answer them.
You want to
answer this one? I don't want to answer it. You? What
about you? Me? Not me. Fine, I'll answer it. I
can't remember what the question was, but their reaction was rather
humorous.
Just to mix
things up a bit (and since my photos were in this order), here's a shot
of the nVidia QuickDraw tournament. The rules were pretty simple:
when you signed up, you filled out a form that got placed in the
tumbler on the right. A couple times every day, 2 names would be
drawn, and the people selected would have 5 minutes to get to the stage
or another name would be drawn. The two players would then face
off in a 1 vs. 1 Quake4 match and the winner received $1000.
You're probably
having difficulty identifying this man since his name tag is turned
around, but this is John Carmack. He just got up on the stage and
talked... about whatever was on his mind. He certainly had no
shortage of things to talk about, from the problems of multithreaded
programming for multiple cores to real life rockets. This GameSpy article
by Sluggo has a few highlights, for those that are interested.
Of course he
couldn't stand up the whole time. There was just too much to
cover. After his time slot was up, he offered to stick around and
answer any additional questions. Several gamers flocked to him
like flies to rotting gibs. Admittedly, I was one of them.
He seemed like a pretty cool guy. All of the id Software guys
were. I must say, though, and I hope he doesn't take offense to
this, he was a lot shorter than I expected. I mean, he's this
huge figure in game development, and nearly every gamer recognizes his
face, but...
... he can
completely disappear in a small crowd.
Here's one of the
Splash Damage panels. They had at least 3. One to talk
about Enemy Territory Quake Wars in general, one to talk about modding
for it, and one to talk about how they went from a mod development team
to a commercial game development company.
Here's a shot of
their editor. I think it's basically Radiant with support for
terrain, ambient lighting, and some of the other new features they've
added. I asked plenty of questions about megatexture and came to
find out that it wasn't really anything special. Carmack even
said so himself. It's just one large texture, and the high res
areas of it are loaded/unloaded based on your proximity to
them. Basically it's just a new buzzword that the media has
taken off with. id/splash damage are more focused on the gameplay
than the technology here.
I will mention a
potential point for concern for modders, though. While it sounds
like it's pretty easy to make megatextures with the tools they have,
they're going to be very large -- like 400-500 megs (compressed), so
redistributing them could be difficult. Megatexture is not
required, however. You can make maps in the same manner as you
would for Doom3 or Quake4.
[continue to page 5]
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