On the Epic's legal troubles, and id Tech 5: What we're good at is making technologies for games, and John is known for being the best in the industry at making great rendering solutions. His technology is easy to work with for making the game run very well and very effectively.
It's not all things for all people, so that gives us the opportunity, when people come see the technology, to let them make the decision on whether or not this is going to work for them. Our goals are not to license to everybody, but to provide a good licensing solution to people who see believe it's going to be great for the type of game they're making.
The thing about the unique texturing solution is that it fundamentally breaks the boundaries for the artists. They can create anything they want t create.
Artists have been working with limitation for a very long time, and they create a universe that is fundamentally tiled out of textures that are repeated, and they go back in and cover up the fact at it is tiled with decals and different overlays. And that creates more geometry and more overhead and slows down the game. Basically they're trying to do something in real time that they can do better prior to that in the data they create.
And that's a huge opportunity for our tech to create a completely unique outside terrain - more detailed than what people see in Quake Wars, but that concept - or you could be inside a closed environment and like a haunted mansion or something like that, and every aspect of every character, if you want it to be, can be unique. You're basically leaving it up to the artist and the art team to decide whit their parameters are. They don't have to be restricted by the technology anymore. And because it's such a scalable solution, you don't really have to worry about where it's going. We've got our tech running on Mac, 360, PS3 PC, and it's all one asset set and it goes to these different platforms and it runs fine.
On the state of the game industry: Games do take longer to make. And the types of games we make do take more people. ... Wolfenstein 3D took a handful of people 6 months to make. Doom took less than a year with less than 10 people. Back then you could come up with an idea and get it into the world really fast.
I remember back in Wolfenstein, when I worked on a character that was taking me more than a week I thought for sure they were going to fire me. Times have changed. You can't really get anything done in a week because we're dealing with very complex and detailed things.
It requires artists and designers that have significant talent. These guys could make it in any business. The guys who work here at id could be illustrators, they could work in the movie industry ... but they've chosen to work in games. So that's really different than the way it used to be when I first started. But still, on a fundamental level, you're still creating cool stuff. You're still bringing things into the world that nobody has ever seen before or thought of before. That aspect is still the same, and I hope that doesn't change.
On working in games: When I think back about the kind of stuff I was doing as a kid, whether it's drawing new characters for comic books, or writing up ideas for D&D adventures and stuff ... really this is sort of an extension of that. I just get a chance to do it at 42, which is pretty nice.
On John Carmack: When a guy in his spare time [designs a cell phone game] and makes rockets, that's pretty much all the signs you need to know you're working with a true genius.
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Russ Pitts is an Associate Editor for The Escapist. His blog can be found at www.falsegravity.com.
