id_notes/John C/1998-06-16

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Name: John Carmack

Email: johnc@idsoftware.com

Description: Programmer

Project: Quake 3

Last Updated: 06/16/1998 17:16:28 (Central Standard Time)

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6/16/98

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My last two .plan updates have described efforts that were not in our original

plan for quake 3, which was "quake 2 game and network technology with a new

graphics engine".

We changed our minds.

The new product is going to be called "Quake Arena", and will consist

exclusively of deathmatch style gaming (including CTF and other derivatives).

The single player game will just be a progression through a ranking ladder

against bot AIs. We think that can still be made an enjoyable game, but

it is definately a gamble.

In the past, we have always been designing two games at once, the single

player game and the multi player game, and they often had conflicting goals.

For instance, the client-server communications channel discouraged massive

quantities of moving entities that would have been interesting in single

player, while the maps and weapons designed for single player were not ideal

for multiplayer. The largest conflict was just raw development time. Time

spent on monsters is time not spent on player movement. Time spent on unit

goals is time not spent on game rules.

There are many wonderful gaming experiences in single player FPS, but we are

choosing to leave them behind to give us a purity of focus that will let us

make significant advances in the multiplayer experience.

The emphasis will be on making every aspect as robust and high quality as

possible, rather than trying to add every conceivable option anyone could

want. We will not be trying to take the place of every mod ever produced, but

we hope to satisfy a large part of the network gaming audience with the out of

box experience.

There is a definite effect on graphics technology decisions. Much of the

positive feedback in a single player FPS is the presentation of rich visual

scenes, which are often at the expense of framerate. A multiplayer level

still needs to make a good first impression, but after you have seen it a

hundred times, the speed of the game is more important. This means that there

are many aggressive graphics technologies that I will not pursue because they

are not apropriate to the type of game we are creating.

The graphics engine will still be OpenGL only, with significant new features

not seen anywhere before, but it will also have fallback modes to render at

roughly Quake-2 quality and speed.