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Fingers [John Carmack] [American McGee] [John Cash] [Christian Antkow] [Brian Hook] [Paul Steed] [Paul Jaquays] [Todd Hollenshead] [Barrett Alexander]

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal-advice.
If somebody can prove that this technique was used more than a year before the patent application was submitted, then the patent is either partially, or wholly invalid.
It seems to me that if a vidgame with different shapes or colors for multi-players was out before that time, (when was Gauntlet first out?) then the patent is really weak. The example I read was the surfboard with a sail on it. Some company found a home movie showing that some kid had built one, and sailed it, more than the 'year before', making the invention part of the public domain.
Remember, it's not from when the patent was granted, but from when it was applied for.
I once did some research into patents on the chance I would apply for one. It's an expensive and dicey proposition.

Later,
Kyle Marcroft
kylem@one.net

There's a patent that could shake the game industry to its core.

On August 7, 1997, Apogee Software, Ltd. received a certified letter from Mr. Ernest Kettelson of Kettelson Law Offices, Ltd. Kettelson claims to be the attorney representing the owner of U.S. Patent No. 4,662,635, which, if the patent it true and valid, will negatively affect nearly every developer and publisher in the games industry.

In short, the patent covers the use of "real actors or players, making actual plays of the game in question, which have been recorded on video tape, or video disks, or other recording medium." In lay terms, the patent is designed to cover any playback of previously recorded living things, be they people or animals. The patent claim document continues, stating that it covers video games specifically, "...in which previously recorded plays by real living beings are used and displayed on a television screen or other cathode ray tube in accordance with selections made by each player of the video game."

This patent was issued to its owner May 5, 1987.

The letter from Kettelson states that, "An examination of your animated video games such as Duke Nukem 3D indicates that they infringe our client's patent...immediately cease and desist from further manufacture, sale and use of such animated video games."

My question is: How many games does this patent *not* cover!? Any game with filmed full-motion-video sequences, such as Wing Commander 3 & 4, and countless others, are apparently in violation of this absurd patent.

Anyone interested in receiving via fax a full copy of this patent (8 pages) please let me know. Apogee is currently consulting our attorneys on what to do, but it's obvious that we and the game industry must fight to have this patent overturned.

I understand that CTF will be included in Quake 2 and I would like to suggest that an indicator of your current team color appear somewhere on the screen. I know that lots of people float around from game to game and it's tough to hit the TAB key, look for the color attached to your name, and then determine whether or not to waste ammunition on the guy lined up in your crosshairs. Perhaps the background to the face displayed in Quake (assuming Quake2's display follows Quake).

[BloodFire] Dis; do any of the monsters jump in quake2, like over stuff and stuff
[Disruptor] not really bloodfire

[BloodFire] Dis is it possible to describe how cool quake2 is right now
[Disruptor] BloodFire: it gives me a raging erection every day

Hi Slipgate,

Just to answer the supposition you mentioned on your news page, here's my (semi-informed) take on it.

SGI is releasing an OpenGL implementation for Win95. This does not mean that if you have a 3d card you can just copy this into your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory and voila, instant OpenGL support for your particular card. (To simplify) Each card manufacturer will have to put in 'hooks' that will redirect certain calls to the card instead of doing them (slowly) in software.

So, in short what John is saying is that he hopes that every card that has an architecture suitable for OpenGL will do just this and release OpenGL for their card.

One particular thing to note is that this is not going to cure the problem that most cards available today suck for GLQuake/Quake2.

rgds,

I know you used a specialized driver written by 3dfx for the GLQuake stuff. Now that SGI has come out with a general GL library/DDK for Windows 95, will you be using its implementation, or will you still work only with specialized GL drivers from 3D card manufacturers?

We hope that every card that is able to support a full opengl driver will do so.

John Carmack

I just have one question I've been meaning to ask you for the potential Quake 2 level editors out there. In both DOOM and Quake, reactions to actions always ocurred in the same level as the action (a trigger in Quake only affects something in the same level as the trigger, a tagged linedef in DOOM only affects sectors in that level with the same tag number). I've heard over and over about going back and forth through levels to do things like deactivate power grids, etc. Will there actually be a way to set a trigger that causes an effect in ANOTHER level besides the one currently being played? If so, how?

Yes, we have cross-level triggers in quake 2.

John Carmack

>When Quake 2 comes out, will a Quake2 editor be included in the package?

We're planning on releasing QE4 to the public with full source code at some point.

Brian

I went to siggraph last monday to give a talk about realtime graphics for entertainment.

The only real reason I agreed to the talk (I have turned down all other offers in the past) was because Shigeru Miyamoto was supposed to be on the panel representing console software. Id software was really conceived when me, Tom, and Romero made a Super Mario 3 clone after I figured out how to do smooth scrolling EGA games. We actually sent it to nintendo to see if they wanted to publish a PC game, but the interest wasn't there. We wound up doing the Commander Keen games for Apogee instead, and the rest is history.

I was looking forward to meeting Mr. Miyamoto, but he wound up canceling at the last minute. :(

Oh well. I hope everyone that went enjoyed my talk. All the other speakers had powerpoint presentations and detailed discussion plans, but I just rambled for an hour...

I notced that there was a report about my discussion of model level of detail that was in error. I have an experimental harness, an algorithm, and a data structure for doing progressive mesh style LOD rendereing in the quake engine, but I suspect it won't make it into the production Quake 2. Other things are higher priority for us. I may assist some of the quake licensees if they want to pursue it later.

---

A couple data / feature changes going into the latest (and I hope final) revision of the Quake bsp file format:

Back in my update a month ago where I discussed losing automatic frame animation in models to clean up the format and logic, I mentioned that I still supported automatic texture animation.

Not anymore. There were several obnoxious internal details to dealing with it, especially now with textures outside the bsp file, so I changed the aproach.

When a texture is grabbed, you can now specify another texture name as the next animation in a chain. Much better than the implicit-by-name specification form Quake1.

No animation is automatic now. A bmodel's frame number determines how far along the animation chain to go to find the frame. Textures without animation chains just stay in the original frame.

There is a slight cost in network traffic required to update frame numbers on otherwise unmoving objects, but due to the QuakeWorld style delta compression it is still less thatn a Quake 1 scene with no motion at all.

The benefit, aside from internal code cleanliness, is that a game can precisely control any sequence of animation on a surface. You could have cycles that go forward and backwards through a sequence, you could make slide projectors that only change on specific inputs, etc.

You could not independantly animate two sides of a bmodel that were not syncronized with the same number of frames, but you could allways split it into multiple models if your really needed to.

Everything is simple when its done, but I actually agonized over animation specification for HOURS yesterday...

The last significant thing that I am working on in the map format is leaf clustering for vis operations. You can specify some map brushes as "detail" brushes, and others as "structural" brushes. The BSP and portal list is built for just the structural brushes, then the detail brushes are filtered in later.

This saves a bit of space, but is primarily for allowing complex levels to vis in a reasonable amount of time. The vis operation is very sensitive to complexity in open areas, and usually has an exponentially bad falloff time. Most of the complexity is in the form of small brushes that never really occlude anything. A box room with ten torch holders on the walls would consist of several dozen mostly open leafs. If the torch holders were made detail brushes, the room would just be a single leaf.

A detail / structural seperation is also, I believe, key to making a portal renderer workable. I had a version of Quake that used portals at the convex volume level, and the performance characteristics had considerably worse-than-linear falloff with complexity. By reducing the leaf count considerably, it probably becomes very workable. I will certainly be reevaluating it for trinity.

>If it's true that the monster models are all made up of integrated pieces (arms,
>legs, heads) that are seperate, how come we can't have a player model with
>weapons as seperate pieces and just attached at run time as needed? It seems
>like you wouldn't have to have a full fledged player model for each weapon.
>Just snap on a weapon model as appropriate. Or am I missing the point?
>
>Chris Spencer

Keep in mind that just because they are in seperate pieces, it doesn't change the fact they're just considered a collection of vertices. We are investigating ways to reflect weapon changes in the game, but everything's still up in the air.

ps

>Can I ask you a question about in-game cinematics? Is there actually
>going to be areas where you are playing through the level, in the
>middle of the game, and it suddenly halts for a cinematic, then after
>playing it returns to your control, or are cinematics only going to
>occur at the beginning and end of the game, and inbetween levels?
>
>Also, if in-level cinematics are possible, how do addon level authors
>make their own cinematics in the middle of their levels? And do the
>cinematics actually affect anything (like opening a sealed doorway to
>reveal a monster ambush, after which time the control returns to you
>and you deal with aforementioned monsters)?
>

Repeat after me: "The game will never stop for cinematics." The flics will only play at the beginning, the end and POSSIBLY between one or two levels (not too likely, though). Scripted actions by characters in the game will be implemented in some fashion if we can make them cool and useful. This is an action game and all those other companies that make you watch some expensive FMV or time-consuming animations need to remember the name of the genre. Our animations will in no way take away from the game experience, but will in every way enhance it.

ps