Doom 3 nieuwtjes

Carmack talked quite a bit about his views about games moving up to 64-bit colors in the future and that will open up how lighting can be improved in future games. Even thought Doom III won’t support 64-bit color when it is released, he sees it as a natural progression from 32-bit color even though he knows some game programmers have said they see no real need to do so for gaming. Carmack said those kinds of comments reminded him on what some programmers said a few years ago about moving up from 16 to 32 bit color.

Carmack said that the biggest part of the development of Doom III’s engine is basciallt done, although a few more features and graphics optimization are still to be handled. In fact, he said he is already thinking about what he would like to look at for the next engine after Doom and may start some solid research on the next generation graphics engine in the near future and some bits from that research might possibly make it into Doom III.

While Carmack admitted that the current id development team that’s developing Doom III is larger than any id game in the past, he doesn’t see id becoming a huge game development company with a ton of artists, programmers and the like, although he said it would be interesting to see a team create a game which has a ton of art assets.

While Doom III will support 5.1 surround sound, Carmack indicated that the PC version of the game will not have sound hardware acceleration. However, if and when an Xbox version of Doom III is created (the only game console id currently has planned for a Doom III port) that console might have sound hardware acceleration.

When asked by an audience member if by shooting out lights in the levels will the monsters’ sight be affected, Carmack said no. “We assume they are demons from hell and they can see as well as you can,” he said which got a laugh from the audience.

Most of the basic id-style weapons (shotgun, railgun, rocket launcher and so on) will be available in Doom III, according to Carmack.

While the single player portion of Doom III will not be as short as some recent first person shooters, Carmack indicated that the gameplay length of Doom III will not take up a lot of time, saying that most dedicated players could pick it up and play the game over a weekend or so. Carmack said that they would rather create a game that’s richer in content with smaller levels.

Of course, the big question from one audience member was, “When will we get to play Doom III?” After looking at Willits for an answer, Carmack said simply that they don’t want to have a game that’s seen at multiple E3s.