id Software Demos Their New & Very Powerful Gaming Technology

John Carmack — the man responsible for terrifying millions with Doom — is back at it again with a new gaming technology that is set to change the gaming world for the better.

Premiering overnight Australian-time was a new technology introduced by John Carmack of id Software at Apple’s WWDC07 Expo. Many Mac-centric things were announced as you’d expect, but one new gaming technology was first shown to the world running on a Mac.

While Steve Jobs of Apple was running the show, Carmack came out and said: “So the last couple of years at id we’ve been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it… this is the first time we’re showing anything we’ve done on it publicly.”

This is id Tech 5, a new gaming engine that — while shown running on a Mac first — will support the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 also. The id Tech 5 engine aims to render memory constraints on artists and designers obsolete when designing new games.

“What we’ve got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track,” Carmack said.”They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the colour of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game.”

John Carmack is someone who is normally quite vocal about developing in the gaming software industry. While id Tech 5 is being made for most of the next-generation systems, Carmack seems to look more favourably on the Xbox 360 as the easier console to develop for.

Earlier in the year, Carmack spoke about development for both the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo DS citing that the PS3 isn’t good from a developer standpoint and that id Software made soon begin development on a DS game.

But for gamers hoping that their DS-bound project might be the next Quake or Doom, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. Carmack said “We’re hoping to do a DS game version of Orcs & Elves, moving over and enhancing the cell phone game on there, which would be our first real direct entry back into the Nintendo world.”

At the end, Carmack hinted that another Mac announcement would be made at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Source

More images can be found at Engadget

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