id's Carmack demos new game technology at WWDC

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 08:37

Business IT - Technology

John Carmack, owner and CTO of Quake developer id Software used Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference to give the first public demonstration of his company's next-generation game technology that separates the mechanics of a game from its visual appearance.

Once the model representing the game world has been created, the colours, shapes and other visual aspects can be adjusted without impacting on the programming side.

Tools to be provided by Id mean "They have unlimited flexibility to change as much as they want on the surfaces with no impact on the performance or the stability of the game," said Carmack.

So once the game developers have done their part, artists can be let loose on the visual appearance "to make it look as good as we have time or resources to do." Multiple artists can work on different aspects of the world at the same time.

"We're pretty excited about what we're going to be doing with this technology" for the Mac, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, added Carmack.

He also teased the audience by mentioning another Mac-related announcement being held over for QuakeCon in August - "we can't quite go into [it] right now," he said.