John Carmack Discusses Rage and Doom 4 (with Gamasutra)
Scotticus ORLYus | 26 Aug 2011 | 3:45 AM CST (-6 GMT)
via: Gamasutra, of course
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6461/carmack_on_rage.php
Ah, interviewing Carmack the great. We at the TiltCast should be this lucky… It was a revealing interview. But rather than succumb to web journalism habits of regurgitating an entire body of work, we’ve opted to provide just the bits we at the TiltCast thought were interesting or important:
In discussing Rage, John Carmack wasted little time before tipping the promise of Rage 2.
“We are at that point now where I’m looking back at the things we could do better and the things we will do better with Rage 2.”
Carmack has been working on some interesting angles, not the least of which was testing 120 fps over 60; he found only a handful of gamers noticed the difference. But, this is a major issue for him:
“…we’re running at two times the framerate of almost all the competition, and that’s something that I’m really personally proud of, because that was a hard-fought battle internally. Because life is just easier when you’ve got 33 milliseconds instead of 16, but I think it matters.”
Interesting note about Mega-Textures: they were almost the last thing to go into the game! There’s a team of programmers he calls the “stamp squad” and they run through the environments, slapping down the Mega-Textures with minimal effort or error.
And, finally, in one single comment about developer staff numbers, Carmack also admitted a much anticipated future product:
“It’s like 15 or 18 on Rage. Which is a large team. Actually, one of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time [with] recently is static code analysis of everything. It’s interesting when you’ve got a multi-million line code base with 15 to 20 programmers, plus another dozen on the Doom 4 project. They’re all kind of working on the same code base.”
So, with that, we can expect Doom 4 to be close on the horizon, and it should run and play similarly to Rage. And Rage will get a reprise sooner than later. Fun fun fun!
