Finished John Carmack's yearly Quakecon keynote today. It comes in a little over 3 hours and is jam packed with information about all things gaming and tech related. The video is linked above and I took notes on the things I felt were interesting.

• First part of the keynote he talks about Rage and apologizes for the PC launch.


• He talked about Doom 3 BFG Edition and that it will run at 60FPS on consoles and higher on PC.


• He wants to Open Source Doom 3 BFG Edition but its unclear if thats possible. Might be able to just release parts of it.


• Talked about what part of the Doom 3 codebase has changed. Much is similar in Tech 5.


• The rendering engine was improved over time.


• Carmack wants to port Doom 3 to the Wii U, Vita and iPhone. Development and time constraints won’t allow it.


• Doom 4 will be done when its done, no date to announce.


• People felt Rage would be like Borderlands or Fallout 3 and that wasn’t what they were trying to do. People understand Doom, so Doom 4 will be an easier sell.


• iD is closing down its mobile development.


• Doom 3 BFG Edition is less of a survival horror game and now an action shooter with the recent changes:




• They brightened things up.


• The flashlight is attached to your gun now.


• Less ammo stinginess, more liberal amount of ammo.


• He thinks its more fun now and less masochistic as gamers are much less hardcore these day.


• Recently he played Super Mario 3 and it was pretty hard, newer games are fun, but not really challenging.




• iD games can’t take 6 years to create anymore. Hopefully Doom 4 won’t.


• Feels like he has grown a lot in the last year as a software engineer.


• NASA’s software engineering reports are not too useful to Carmack.


• He is doign much more software engineering stuff like code reviews and helping the team learn best practices.


• Carmack thinks Cloud Gaming is the unquestionable future of gaming. When he sees Gabe Newell he tells him this.


• Its faster to send a packet over the web to Europe than it is from the back of your computer over a cable to your monitor. He thinks that is wrong and we shouldn’t put up with it.


• Carmack is very interested in head mounted displays.


• Doom 3 BFG Edition will work with head mounted displays and 3D tvs.


• He doesn’t care about Windows 8. XP and 7 are just fine for him.

Here are the rest of the Quakecon panels featuring people from iD, Bethesda and Valve:

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/08/04/quakecon-2012-keynote-panels/