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I had a chance to speak with Timothee Besset, id's Linux guru, after the keynote; although he couldn't comment about a Wolfenstein port, a Quake Zero port is probable. Personally, I'm not concerned given id's consistent commitments to both multi-platform development and open source software in general. Thanks to TTimo and id for the great event!

Continuing coverage:

Someone beat me to the question about Linux and open source gaming! Carmack is proud of the code he's released, and he will open source the DOOM III engine in the future, and years and years from now, id Tech 5. He also says that knowledge informs their decisions while developing new engine technology. This response got the biggest applause of the session so far, which kind of (pleasantly!) surprised me. :]

Although it wasn't specifically addressed, I'll follow up with Timothee Besset to verify that Quake Zero and Wolfenstein will also have ports.

8:35PM - Someone asked if id had licensed the Havok physics engine; Carmack responded that although Raven used it in Quake 4, id had no plans to incorporate a third-party SDK into their codebase that would complicate open sourcing it later.

Rage will have cooperative multiplayer, such as multiple player-driven vehicles or a driver and a gunner in the same vehicle. There may not be a traditional deatmatch mode however.

Carmack is troubled by the impact of patent law on game development, and finds it reprehensible that useful ideas can be declared off-limits by a patent holder. He also voiced the opinion that any sufficiently complex project runs afoul of any number of patents. Unfortunately, he doesn't forsee reform on the horizon, and the whole situation depresses him if he thinks about it too much.

8:50PM - There was a question about the utility of higher video resolutions than even 1080p (1920x1080); Carmack thought that current displays are nearly at maximum utility for the human eye, and that he was looking forward to retinal scanning to raise efficiency (i.e., only rendering pixels that are actually being viewed I think).

The rising number of CPU's in desktop systems was the next topic; while parallelizing rendering across many cores isn't too difficult, splitting up game code efficiently has been problematic, even with Quake Wars: Enemy Territory.

Rage (and id Tech 5) still utilizes OpenGL like their previous games. Carmack hasn't seen anything in the latest iteration of DirectX, 10, that he would like to have for his projects.

The next question concerned the development of OpenGL 3.0. Carmack does consider DirectX 9 to be a better/cleaner API than OpenGL, and while he would like to see it improved, he hasn't had the spare time to contribute.

Rage's outdoor lighting is pre-generated for speed, which Carmack finds sort of disappointing since he prefers a unified lighting model when possible. Moving objects in the game have dynamic shadows as in DOOM III tech however. Indoor lighting isn't locked down yet and may use a combo solution.

Crusader here at QuakeCon 2007 I'm way behind on id Software-related news that I'll have to post shortly (in particular, a Linux Enemy Territory: Quake Was beta dedicated server was released to the Bring Your Own Computer LAN), but right now the John Carmack keynote is about to start, and I'm going to make an attempt at "live-blogging" the speech and announcements. Hopefully this works...

6:15PM CDT - The main stage room is filling in as deafening techno music I can't identify plays.

Todd Hollenshead, id CEO, has taken the stage and is thanking the volunteers and staff for making the event possible. Moreover, QuakeCon 2008 will be taking place at this same venue on July 31st through August 3rd. He is also thanking the attendees for beta-testing Enemy Territory, as a beta build (Windows) was released here.

6:25PM - First announcement: ETQW will ship on October 2nd, 2007. Also, Raven Software and Threewave (the CTF guys) are developing the next Wolfenstein title, although no additional info was mentioned at present.

Wolfenstein the Movie was mentioned next, along with the initial production team, although I didn't catch the names. Next, id is partnering with Valve to offer their titles over Steam - since there's no Steam Linux port, I guess this is kinda moot for us.

6:30PM - Quake Zero: a free implementation of Quake III: Arena for browser play and supported by advertising. Hollenshead says that Carmack will provide more details shortly.

6:40PM - id Tech 5, id's next engine, is "platform agnostic", allowing third party developers to create uniform content for PCs and consoles. John Carmack then took the stage to present the trailer for their next title. The movie had some of the same driving footage we had seen at MacWorld, but it was interspersed with the traditional id first-person gunplay. At the end, the project's name appeared: RAGE. Carmack stated that after DOOM III, they started a new game they ultimately weren't happy with, so it was scrapped after a year in favor of a post-apocalyptic "Road Warrior"-esque driving-shooter that became Rage. It will also probably ship on 2 DVDs.

7:00PM - Quake Zero is being created by id's new second team, which is still being staffed. It uses trimmed-down Q3A assets, and is a "web game", although I'm not sure if that means it's actually played from within a browser.

Carmack considers Q3A his favorite id title due to the relative elegance and simplicity, and thinks Quake Zero could become rather popular. He says they'll make an effort to get QZ on the Mac, so I presume it'll have a Linux port eventually, like all modern id titles. In particular, he wants QZ to help identify areas of latency on the x86 architecture that are not well-understood to improve game performance in general.

7:10PM - "Darkness", the now-dead project, wasn't a 60Hz title (game ticks), but Rage's vehicular gameplay needed the smoother framerate. At 30Hz graphical effects are rather unconstrained, but they have to make careful decisions with each new visual effect to maintain Rage's target framerate. There will also be a demonstration tomorrow showcasing Rage's content creation tools.

7:15PM - Texture virtualization has freed id's artists to use art of almost completely arbitrary resolution without worrying about blowing their scene budget.

7:20PM - ETQW uses 32k x 32k terrain texture sizes, but Rage has 64k x 64k and 128k x 128k levels.

id also now has dedicated tools and support programmers to ease content creation for third-party id Tech 5 engine licensees. Animation, particle, sound, and materials editing all have dev utilities.

7:30PM - Carmack thinks one unfortunate side effect of simultaneous development for multiple platforms and having a high target framerate is less upwards scalability on the PC-side than in previous games. Rage may stress current-generation consoles, but be a moderate load on a state-of-the-art PC when it ships (although that means less desperate upgrading for us!).

7:40PM - Wolfenstein doesn't use id Tech 5, but Raven's fork of DOOM III has a lot of neat new features in it, and Carmack isn't really involved with that project on a technical basis (id's Kevin Cloud coordinates dev with Ravensoft and Threewave). Carmack made it a point to emphasize that Wolf is a cross-platform project regardless, and I would hope that portability should make an eventual Linux port easier .

In the future, Carmack wants id Tech 6 to have virtualized geometry, so that artists can add models of arbitrary complexity without worrying about performance.

7:45PM - Q&A has started!

An audience member asked about user-made content, prompting Carmack to voice his opinion that the golden age of the mod maker has passed, as the challenges of modern game development are too difficult for hobbyists. He does like seeing DOOM's source ported to every platform that has a compiler though.

Someone wanted to know what the specs of Carmack's workstation were; he wasn't sure exactly, but he did say he prefers to lock down the specs of his work system at the start of a project to avoid having the distorted sense of game performance a bleeding edge box can induce.