Back from E3. I was only there for saturday, but it was a blast. Thresh is a freak of nature... a freak with a Ferrari now. We've gotten some rest and can get back at it now. Sorry nothing exciting here, but I haven't gotten out much lately.

Quake II was amazing. The main things I saw that were different from my Quake 2 Preview #1 from last week was the all new weapons textures. These were amazing and really added to the game. The weapons shown (railgun, submachine gun, futuristic shotgun, and laser) were wonderful looking. The weapons were offset to the right and moved around depending on what was happening. One some weapons, you'd even see the guy's hands readjusting their grip if you let is sit idle. Unfortunately, the few monsters that were shown had broken AI so you couldn't see all the cool stuff I saw last week. One other cool thing I saw was American McGee's subway train (see Quake 2 preview for screenshot) that launched and subsequently blew up. This was very cool.

Jun 22:

Ok, I'm finally updating my .plans at the top like everyone else...

E3 was interesting, and the tournement went extremely well.

You would think that the top deathmatchers would be an evenly matched group, seperated by mere milliseconds of response time, and the matches would be close.

Its not like that at all. There are master players. And there is Thresh.

We were watching him play with our jaws hanging open. I don't think he was killed a single time in the finals. He did things we had never seen before. It was amazing to watch.

I feel a lot better about the contest now, because even if the sixteen finalists weren't necessarily the sixteen best players due to internet issues, I do think that the grand prize winner IS the best single player.

The level of sportsmanship was gratifying, especially given the stakes. No sore losers, no tantrums. Everyone was cool.

After the finals, a japanese champion (highroller) asked for a match with Thresh. I expected him to pass, considering the pressure of the tournement, but he happily accepted, and delivered an eighty-something to negative-three beating (which was accepted with good grace).

I don't see much point to any more big tournements until a few more of these mutant superpowered deathmatchers show up...

As far as everything else at E3 goes, I saw a bunch of good looking games, but I am fairly confidant of two things:

Nobody is going to eclipse Quake 2 this christmas. Different tradeoffs are being made that will appeal to different people, and there are going to be other products that are at least playing in the same league, but Q2 should be at the top of the pile, at least by the standards we judge games. Several licensees will be picking up all the Q2 features for their early '98 products, so games should get even better then. (ok, I guess that is just my cautious, long-winded way of saying Q2 will rule...)

Some notable companies are going to ship longer after us than they are expecting to, or make severe compromises. I wouldn't advise holding your breath waiting for the quoted release dates. Relax, and let the developers get things out in due time.

Ugh. I haven't coded in three days. Withdrawal.

June 22, 1997 (part 2)
------------------

If I seem a little temperamental, it's because people keep asking me the same questions in e-mail and on IRC. So I'm putting answers in my .plan so that folks can come here for a single central source of information.

Anyway, once again, if you're buying a board today for Quake, get a 3Dfx Voodoo board -- Obsidian, Monster3D, Flash3D, or Righteous3D, whatever, they're all basically the same for GLQuake (and Quake2).

Okay, now that THAT'S out of the way, let me make it clear that I can't comment on upcoming boards. If I have access to prerelease boards, in all likelihood I can't comment on them because of NDA issues. If I don't have access to a prerelease board, then I can't comment because of lack of knowledge. So PLEASE, quit e-mailing me asking me what board you should get or if you should hold off on getting board for several months! The answer will remain the same -- until I say differently, the 3Dfx board is the one to get.

One more time, if you want to get the best board today for GLQuake, you should get a 3Dfx Voodoo-based board. In Christmas things will be different, but I'm not psychic, so I can't tell you what board to buy for Christmas.

I CAN say that I'm pretty interested to see how well the NVidia RIVA 128, ATI Rage Pro, PowerVR PCX2, and Rendition Verite V2200 will perform.

Slipgate: What did you see? Can you describe anything?
Lithium: I saw everything baby :>. Man, Quake 2 really will make people spooge, it was one of the most impressive things I saw at E3.
Slipgate: So go on.... describe cool things you noticed and stuff.
Lithium: I can't remember the weapons I saw, but I know there was a chaingun and a laser pistol type weapon.
Slipgate: Yup..... enemies?
Lithium: The game of course had enemies, the ones you saw in the screenshots... Very impressive modeling... I was impressed...
Slipgate: No new enemies were shown off? As in, all the enemies had been seen before in screenshots?
Lithium: One thing that really caught my attention was the sky...
Slipgate: The sky... tell me about the sky, I've been hearing about it.
Lithium: OK. There was 1 that was a stationary background consisting of a palace type creation...very cool, the other was a night sky with dark grey clouds, an animated sky. It was very cool. The crowd loved the game, and think it will be a huge hit.
Slipgate: Wow.
Lithium: The demo allowed people to actually play the game and get a feel for the engine.
Slipgate: Did you see the female at all? ... A feel for the engine? how much different could it be?
Lithium: No, i have heard that the female might not be included.
Slipgate: Well, they intend on the female/male option, but the "current" female model might not be in, and the whole female idea is an experiment anyways.
Lithium: The engine isnt much different, I wasn't completely swept off my feet by the current weapons (I mean the chaingun (rotating chain gun which q2 had) has been around for a while).
Slipgate: What about the railgun (the weapon in the Adrenaline Vault pic)?
Lithium: Oh yeah...the railgun was cool...it of course had a light blue spiral that emiited a magnetic field apparently that forced a metal piece at extremely high speeds towards an enemy. The booth was extremely crowded at all times, so mostly I was on my tiptoes grabbing glances... Will be truly a spectacular game...
Slipgate: Any breakable things in Quake 2 or Hexen 2?
Lithium: Didn't get that far in Hexen 2, and not sure about Quake 2... people were just having fun watching the monsters. Well I have to tell you that it will be worth the wait. It is one of the few games actually waiting to use the Quake 2 engine. Man I can't remember much more about Quake 2, might have to ask Redwood or something. I saw way to much to remember everything :>.

The gameplay already resembles, say, dark forces (*puzzle wize*) as I had to do some crouching (already bound to the "c" key) in order to blow out a couple of computer screens (animated very well) in order to disable some force barriers (transparent FBs).

I could hear the sounds much better, and American is doing a very good gob IMHO. I kept making the sound from the rail gun all damn day long when expaining the weapon to others... yes, I am a nut.

The AV pics are, of course, of the Rail Gun. This is the same weapon that has the *incredible* trails of blue spiraling-corkscrew particles, that fade ever so smoothly...

I shot the head off one of the enemys then watched him wiggle on the ground for a sec before I Gibbed him to all hell. The gib animation is very very smooth, with gibs of different sizes that kind of linger (not for long) in the air, while the blood move a little quicker to the ground. Great dynamic there.

There was a map called jail4_e3, so you'd think there is a jail theme for one of the missions (obviously) but its still early in development, so who knows if it remains.

Got to play the map with the monorail that was in the sshots... It looked great.

June 22, 1997
------------------

Slight clarification about yesterday's .plan. Yes, Direct3D is available on WinNT as of SP3, however as far as I know it's only DirectX 3, NOT DirectX 5 which is available on Win95. Not only that, I don't think that hardware acceleration works under WinNT with Direct3D yet. Yeah, like I have the time to deal with Microsoft's incompetence.

While I'm here, just wanted to mention THAT THERE WILL BE NO GLIDE VERSION OF QUAKE! Doing a native Glide port offers us _nothing_. Nothing at all. No performance increase, no new features that we want to support, no more access to customers. Nothing. The OpenGL drivers that 3Dfx is working on give us all the performance, features, and customer support that we could ever want.

For those of you who attended E3, I have just one thing to say...

There are those who can talk shit, and there are those who can deliver the shit.

Quake II is going to be id Software's best game ever.

Prepare yourselves.

June 21, 1997
------------------
I've looked at the SGI multitexture specification and it looks like we can use it pretty much as-is and only require IHVs to implement a subset of it for Quake2, so this may be the route we go.

We're now beginning to look at mass particle extensions. Particle systems are currently being rendered with lots of independent triangles, which is horribly wasteful, since we're transforming 3x the data we need. All we really need is a scaled point API (the regular GL_POINTS primitive is for unscaled points which aren't what we want), preferably one that allows us to batch up a bunch of particles in a single particle system and pass it into the driver. I'm talking to IHVs about this right now.

On another note, we are NOT interested in doing a Direct3D version of Quake2 at this time, nor for the forseeable future. While DirectX 5 has the much improved DrawPrimitive API, it's a dollar late and a day short. We committed to OpenGL quite a long time ago, and it satisfies our needs in every way. Sure, if something drastic happens and OpenGL "just goes away", and IHVs quit working with us, we may have to reevaluate our position at that time. But that time isn't now, and we're very happy with the way things are going.

Supporting Direct3D right now offers very few benefits, would likely require a significant amount of engineering time on our part, and would probably turn into an absolute support nightmare. Not only that, the main thing that Direct3D offers us is broader driver support on low-end hardware, and to be honest, support for slow, feature-poor hardware is not high on our list of priorities.

Another problem with Direct3D is that it is tied directly to Win32. With OpenGL we get hardware acceleration with very little trouble across a wide range of platforms, including SGI, WinNT, Win95, and other platforms. Direct3D isn't even available on WinNT today, and WinNT is our primary development platform. Asking us to switch to Win95 as our development platform is NOT likely to go over well.

So, I hope that clears THAT up.

Hey Slipgate,

First of all, I worship your page. Love it. Q2 is gonna "Rule the Cosmos." Anyway, I was wondering if you'd wanna do a blow up (or get a blow up from someone at id) of the pic from the Avault. It looks *very* interesting.

Thanx,

Tanus
tanus1@hotmail.com

Ismail,

I'm sitting in our hotel in Atlanta right now looking over the press materials picked up at E3. So far it's been a great show, although quite taxing on the mind and body. It's hot here... very hot.

QUAKE II is being displayed at the Activision booth in a huge display next to Hexen II. Three terminals are available using very large monitors. I was informed that they are running the demo on 64MB video cards based on 3Dfx technology. The GL version, which is absolutely astounding, runs perfectly smoothly. I was also told that GLQuake II runs at a decent frame rate on a P166 with a 4MB 3Dfx card. As you can tell, 3Dfx has made quite a showing as well.

Lighting effects are very cool as are the monsters. The death sequences are cool, and you can see enemies physical features change when attacked (i.e. blood splatters and holes aappear, and arms and heads can be knocked off). One of the coolest weapons was the railgun, which fires a blue energy attack that could easily take out most enemies. The one omittance was AI control. Enemies stand still. They'll attack and pursue, but only when aggressed. Impressive stuff.

I'll have more tomorrow, and there's some good information in our News recaps going up every day.

Btw, I met Tom Hall today (face to face, finally, after 18 months of e-mail!), and we got to play Daikatana. It was decent, although it could be better as development continues. The main weapon in the Greecian era is a discus; go figure!

Cheers!

-Martin

June 20, 1997
------------------

We're figuring out how to deal with multitexture extensions. SGI wants us to go the "official" route, which is to do whatever the ARB decides, but we're operating on a bit of a tighter timeframe than this really allows. For expediency we've already started developing a _really_ small API for multitexture support under OpenGL, one that is only really appropriate for Quake2 and that will hopefully go away after the official multitexture API comes through. This API is currently a whopping two functions and one extension string, and is all we need to get support with PowerVR and 3Dfx, but until John gets back from E3 I can't move on it.

Just found out that the PowerVR doesn't support all the blending modes we want, which SUCKS. I'll say this one more time -- support ALL OpenGL blending modes if you don't want your hardware to suck! If the PowerVR ships enough units then we may have to do some hack for them (and maybe folks like 3DLabs in a similar boat that don't have proper alpha blending) and use white lights only.

The net effect of this is that if we support the PowerVR or 3DLabs Permedia chips that in all likelihood their owners won't have colored dynamic lighting.

I know, that sucks, but it's not our fault if hardware sucks.

The most impressive aspect of Quake 2 to me is the weapons animation. The guy's fingers twitch as he clutches his weapon. Colored lighting. The kinematics of the enemies. The animations in Quake 2 are overall far better than any others I've seen. Quake 2 reminds me a LOT of what I've seen of Turok's animation, actually. When you fire this chaingun type weapon, the longer you hold down the mouse button, the faster it shoots, and the light it emits changes from red to green to reflect this. The use key is in Quake 2, as it will be in Sin, too.

I could be completely off, but here goes.

I think what American means when he says the monsters will have as many frames of animation as your computer can handle is this: Bascially, the artists will generate the "key" frames for the models to be animated with. But, if for example, it takes 1 second to get from frame A to frame B, and your computer is running at 30 FPS, the engine will automatically generate the 28 in-between frames. Thus, 1 frame per frame drawn.

That's pretty much correct. When we animate, all of our animations are done at 10 frames per second. If the machine can run the game at 30 frames a second then instead of making the character look like he's going in fast forward, the code does treat those frames as key frames inserting 2 frames in between each frame of the original animation. There is a slight problem with this type of linear interpolation, however. It tends to "over-smooth" the animation and make the model seem excessively pliant or "wobbly". John's currently working on correcting any problems of this nature, though. Overall, I have to admit that the animations do look very sweet with the extra frames via the interpolation.

Hi Slipgate,

Just wanted to drop in my $0.02 about your rant on Gameplay. This started out as an afirmation on your opinions on gameplay but has ended up as "Why Quake single-player sucks."

I thought the fun of Doom was that there were always monsters coming from everywhere, but that if you were quick enough you'd live.

The monsters should not be as tough as they are in Quake. I mean, you could run through Doom fraggin away like Rambo, feeling great. You could run into a room you'd never seen before and be confident that you had a better-than-average chance of living, even on the Ultra Violence difficulty, not pausing to save the game.

Come to think of it, I don't think the monsters in Quake are very well balanced at all. The perfect example is the Death Knight who takes THREE rockets to knock down usually, versus the Enforcer, who can be gibbed with one! The death knight is definitely too tough...

Lets think about this more.

I for one thought the "base" levels of Quake were the most fun. Why? Because the monsters in didn't ALL need to be pummelled away at for ages before they'd die. The enforcer, dog and grunt are fun opponents, you know they're easy shotgun fodder. Then you always get to the medieval levels and the two main opponents become the ogre and the death knight, who aren't all that fun. The ogre is okay I guess, I can believe that he'd need 3-4 double barrels up his wazoo before he'd die. What about the Scrag? Well he's okay, but he disrupts the game-play since the double-barrel is useless for him, and he has this really annoying way of getting in your face, so that auto-aiming doesn't work. IMO, if you're going to have two 'medium death level' opponents like the Ogre and the Death Knight then you need to balance this with plenty of easier bad guys. The Zombies don't count, because although they're great fun (Ithink I could gib Zombies all day) they are fairly few and far between. Perhaps this is one reason that the first mission pack is so much fun - they made the gremlin who is fairly easy to kill and voila you've got a monster that you can send against the player in packs for him to blast away at.

What do you remember of Doom? I reinstalled Doom II on my PC recently and had more fun playing Doom single player than I did Quake. I found that very depressing. I don't think there was a single moment in Quake that compared to the first time I played Doom, was in E1M8(?) and rode that elevator up. Then there was this loud roar as the Hell Demons woke and I thought, "Whoa! I'm in trouble here!"

Waking up Cthon compared, but wasn't the same. And as for Shubby, the less said the better. I don't ever want to beat a boss in such a wussy way again. It just seemed like a cheats way to "win."

Anyway... just my opinion. The great thing is that it seems id realises this and I think I remember from one of the American IRC logs that the monsters were gonna be balanced more like Doom's.

June 19, 1997 (afternoon)
------------------

Got GLQuake running on a PowerVR PCX1. Not particularly impressive, but the fact that it works at all is kind of neat. When we get a PCX2 here I'll do some more testing. Unfortunately we have to use yet another OpenGL mini-driver -- if this continues to be the case, we're going to have to come up with a clean system of switching between OpenGL DLLs. We already run into this problem on Realizm + 3Dfx systems.

We may do some small tweaks to Quake2 to get the PCX2 running faster and more effectively. We don't mind doing _minor_ things to make the OpenGL version of Quake2 run faster on different hardware, just don't ask us for massive rearchitecting of the rendering engine.

June 19, 1997 (early AM)
------------------

All the pieces are finally coming together and I'm getting a real good idea what Quake2 is going to be like. I played through a level (sort of), and with the new lighting, the frame interpolation, new weapons, crouching capability, and the new weapon effects John just put tonight, all I gotta say is:

QUAKE TWO IS GOING TO KICK SOME SERIOUS ASS.

Paul Steed is the UberStud. The new levels look great, the art is cool, and the sounds are awesome. I've been a here less than two weeks, and I'm truly reaching my first "holy fuck, this is gonna rock!" endorphin rush.


I love this job.

You wrote:

> plug: 16 and 24 bits textures for quake2! plug: .PNG and .JPG
> formats!

Probably .tga format.

John Carmack

Jun 19:

I'm pretty damn pleased with things right now.

We are just buttoning up the E3 demo stuff, and it looks really good. It is clearly way alpha meterial, but people should be able to project where it is going.

The timing is a bit inconvenient for us, because we still aren't quite through with converting all the .qc work that Cash did over to straight C code in the new engine. The monsters are just barely functional enough to show, with none of the new behavior in. If E3 was a week or two later, the demos would almost be real playtesting.

Q2 is going to be far and away the highest quality product id has ever done. There are new engine features, but the strength of the product is going to be how everything is fitted together with great care. (don't worry, next year will be radical new technology all over again)

----

Sound is being improved in a number of ways.

All source samples are 22 khz / 16 bit, and you can restart the sound system for different quality levels without exiting the game. high quality sound will require more memory than the base 16 meg system. The system can automatically convert to 11 khz / 8 bit sounds, but we are probably going to include a seperate directory with offline converted versions, which should be slightly higher quality. Homebrew paatches don't need to bother.

Sounds can now travel with a moving object. No dopler effects, but it positions properly. (well, spatialization is a bit fucked this very instant, but not for long)

I finally got around to tracking down the little bug with looping sounds causing pops.

I have intentions to do three more things with the sound engine, but the realistic odds are that they won't all make it in:

Voice over network. I definately don't have time to do a super-compressed version, but I can probably hack something in that the T1 players would have fun with.

Radiosity sound solution. Its obvious in retrospect, but it was a "eureka!" thought for me when I realized that the same functions that govern the transport of light for radiosity also apply to sound. I have research plans for next-generation technology that include surface reflection spectrums and modeling the speed of sound waves, but I think I can get a simplified solution into Q2 to provide an ambient soundscape with the same level of detail as the lightmaps. I'm a little concerned about the memory footprint of it, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Syncronized, streaming sound from disk. Special events and movie demos won't need to precache gigantic sounds, and they can rely on the timing.

----

Q2 has a generalized inventory structure and status display that should be adaptable to just about anything anyone wants to do in a TC.

----

On saturday, I give my 328 away at E3. I know that there were lots of issues with the contest, and to be honest, I probably wouldn't have done the nationwide contest if I could have forseen all the hassle (I could have just given it away at #quakecon...), but the finals should still be really cool. It just wasn't possible to make the contest "completely fair". Not possible at all. In any case, I don't think anyone will deny that the finalists are some of the best quake players around.

----

I doubt I can convey just how well things are going here. Things probably look a little odd from the outside, but our work should speak for itself. I have been breaking into spontanious smiles lately just thinking about how cool things are (of course, that could just be a sleep deprivation effect...). We have a totally kick-ass team here.

We are on schedule. (no shit!)

We are doing a great product.

Everyone watch out!

After years of waging war against the alien aggressors, the Earth is on the verge of being completely obliterated. A last effort to bring the mass destruction to an end is underway. Launched from a giant space carrier, you are part of a secret assault force sent through an interplanetary gateway in single-manned pods. Shortly after landing on the alien surface you learn that hundreds of your men have been slashed to just a few. Now, you must do what entire armies could not: fight your way through heavily fortified military installations, lower the city's defenses, and shut down their war machine. Only then, can Earth even hope to launch an air assault. Only then, will the fate of all humanity be known.

> "Three-D is like Technicolor," says Wilson, pooh-poohing
> the value of Carmack's perpetual tinkering with his game
> engines (the latest, code-named Trinity, is due next year).
> "Once you're there, you're there. It's time to focus on content."

If our technology is just like Technicolor then I think it would be fair to say that Trinity will be something similar to a "Holodeck" in comparison with present day media.
I think that Technicolor is nice and all... but it's technology that is 50 years old. Just because no one has really moved basic movie technology forward in the past half a century doesn't mean that 3D game technology is just going to stand still at this point.
If you want to keep playing with your little crayons, be my guest...
but id is about to launch this industry into something that Mr. Wilson obviously has little comprehension of. Stand still in front of this powerhouse and you will be crushed. We've done it before and we will do it again. Just watch.

June 18, 1997 (early AM)
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Short note for a request someone e-mailed to me. The gist of it was "Should we wait for the new breed of cards, or should we just get a 3Dfx Voodoo board now?"

Personally, I think you should get a 3Dfx Voodoo board now. I have two main reasons for this -- I don't know when the next round of good boards (NVidia RIVA 128, Rendition Verite V2200, 3Dfx Banshee, etc.) is going to show up, and I'm not sure how good they are going to be. In all likelihood the RIVA 128 and the V2200 are going to be pretty good parts, but whether they'll be a generational leap over the Voodoo is pretty doubtful in my mind.

So go get yourself a Voodoo graphics board and enjoy GLQuake today instead of waiting for an indeterminate point in the future to take the plunge.

Hope that helps!

June 17, 1997, part 2
------------------

I finished changing QE4 to use multiple GL contexts instead of a single global context with multiple DCs, and it works MUCH better now on the Permedia. The Permedia actually makes a really good level editing accelerator now.

I wanted to see if going to multiple contexts fixed the Oxygen's problems, unfortunately my testing machine finally gave up the ghost, so until it's repaired/replaced I won't be able to do much more testing.

------------------
June 17, 1997

I am rapidly learning that most people's OpenGL ICD drivers are pretty flaky things. The only OpenGL ICD we have that is vaguely reliable is the Intergraph Realizm's, and even it has its share of problems (including a Blue Screen of Death on NT 4.0 SP3 occasionally).

Once again, I'm not down on OpenGL -- it's tough to make a robust driver when there isn't much software driving it. Hopefully drivers are going to get better, and I think that Microsoft's MCD driver model is definitely the right way to go. I highly encourage _everyone_ who is building 3D accelerators to support the MCD driver model -- you may think it's studlier to go with the ICD, but it's not studly to be trashing people's systems because of poorly tested drivers with never-executed code paths.

John fixed a bug in Quake2 where it was looking for a texture bind extension when it isn't necessary, so we gave the Oxygen 102 another chance, and it died again.

Which reminds me: Quake2 is only supporting OpenGL 1.1, support for OpenGL 1.0+extensions is being removed. For those IHVs who aren't 1.1 compliant yet -- get with the program.

Windows OpenGL Lesson O' the Day #1: Don't rebind DCs to contexts on the fly. It's supposed to work, but this just seems to break too many OpenGL implementations -- once again kids, SUPPORT THE MCD DRIVER MODEL.

Windows OpenGL Lesson O' the Day #2: Don't reuse a display list between contexts unless you've called wglShareLists. I forgot to do this and exploded my Realizm. Not good.

I'm still waiting for Rendition to release the OpenGL MCD driver for their Verite, since I think that would make a great low cost Quake level editor board that's also capable of playing GLQuake and Quake2, albeit slowly.

Finally, I'd like to say that most of the hardware folks we've been working with have been very responsive with regards to bug fixes and what not. I'm confident that when Quake2 ships that several decent OpenGL boards, both consumer and professional, will work with it just fine.

I decided to wait until I had something important to write about in my .plan file before updating. My copy of PC Magazine came today which included their list of the "100 Most Influential Companies in Personal Computing". You can check out the list at www.pcmag.com. id Software was ranked 30th, ahead of GT Interactive (41), CUC International (46)(parent of Davidson, Blizzard, Sierra On-Line, et. al.), and Activsion (74) in the interactive entertainment industry. No other game development company was even mentioned. Other companies of note left in our dust: Texas Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices, Sony, Cyrix, AT&T, Xerox, Sharp, NEC, CompuServe and many others. It just goes to show that a small number of highly motivated and talented individuals can overcome competition from some of the world's largest and most recognizable companies.

BTW, after going through some of the stuff from Quake 2 with Tim Willits that we'll be showing at E3, it wouldn't surprise me if we're in the Top 20 this time next year.

Quake, Quake 2, and the stylized are registered trademarks of id Software, Inc.