id Software Q&A

The John Carmack Q&A on Maximum PC talks with the id Software technical
director as well as Tim Willits, shedding more light on the tech they are using
in Rage: MPC: It seems like you’ve taken inspiration for
Rage from Mad Max and everything else that’s post apocalyptic and awesome. What
would you say that you’re juiced about and pulling on to make Rage?

TW: For us, it’s all about fun and making the game experience as
enjoyable as possible. During development, whenever we hit a crossroads between
realism and fun, we take the fun path. We would love for game players, after
they finish Rage to say, “that game was fun. I had a great time.”

JC: And that actually, there are some technical points that we tie in
there. I was very proud of the Doom 3 generation, where I unified all these
things: static and dynamic lighting, static and dynamic geometry. It was
technically elegant and wonderful, and was this thing that I was quite proud of
as a setup. We’re making completely different decisions on Rage. I’m not trying
at all to be perfectly uniform or elegant in whatever way. We’re doing a lot
more of the traditional gaming hacks in the technology, because we’re a 60Hz
game. We’re totally blazing fast because Rage is a 60Hz game. We want to be
responsive for the driving side of things, and that carries over into a
silky-smooth sense of play even with all the other first-person sides of things.


That also plays into our grand strategic plan with all this generation of
technology. We’re ramping up to do another Doom game, built on id Tech 5. But
it’s going to be a 30Hz game. Even though we’re not changing the engine, we get
to throw three times as much horsepower at it, so it’s going to look like a
totally new game engine on there, even though it’s going to be built on the four
years of effort that we spent developing this generation of technology.


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