981119 John Carmack interview - AndmaN

PQ: Are the deathmatch levels in Q3 similar to the current generation we've seen for q1 and q2?

John Carmack: Well, they're all deathmatch levels. They're in a number of different styles. We've got a set of levels that are designed to have platforms where looking up and down is not a necessary skill - I think that's important for getting people into the game by keeping a manageable number of skills that you need to know there. But other than that we should cover the entire range. We've got a lot of tight one on one arenas. What we don't have much of yet, and we need to build more, is the larger, really big Quake2 type levels because the internet servers that can support 8 to 16 people have the more stable population bases. When you're smaller than that it crawls in and out of valid ranges of play. It's certainly our goal to have levels for each viable style of play, since we have nothing but deathmatch levels.

PQ: Is id planning on doing anything special after the release, like a DeathMatch level of the month, or something similar to keep the community going or are you going to keep it to fend for itself?

Carmack: We're probably going to let it go on fending for itself. I mean, I look at it as our job to provide the right architecture for all these things to happen in, and with all the levels we're providing it'll certainly take a long time just to play through those. Really Quake and Quake 2 only had a handful of levels that were actually played in multiplayer all that much. So there should be a whole lot more life to it just on that aspect. We're providing all the support we ever have and then more. There's more things that can be done because of the way the architecture is setup.

PQ: Teamplay has become an important part of competitive deathmatch, have you done anything in Quake III Arena to support teamplay?

Carmack: We have a lot of interesting things. The way the levels are hooked together we've got team filters where, since teamplay is kind of a first order part of the game, anything that you'd want to do, like with a trigger, or an action, you can filter it based on teams. You can tie together different sorts of games like, run here and perform this action or hooking up things like locker rooms for different teams.

PQ: Action games these days seem to be very item oriented, as opposed to accuracy, for example where Thresh took control of the Red Armor and wouldn't let Immortal get a hold of it in the second game of the PGL Season 3 match. What are your feelings on some of the stuff like that?

Carmack: Well this is where we run into different views in the community. Quake II had balanced weapons, and that was the big thing where so many people fundamentally believe that Quake was a better game because the Rocket Launcher was the only thing worth having, which was .. well .. we actually disagree with that view. I think it's good to have a variety of types of weapons. I wouldn't believe in making most of the weapons crap and making only one weapon like that, but it's a style of gameplay that we want to be doable by the way the levels are designed rather than by the fundamental decisions in the game code.

981116 Carmack @ PGL - AndmaN

There is one unified graphics pipeline for everything in the world--objects and background together. The BSP still exists but is used only for calculating the world visibility; once the visible section of the world is computed, everything goes through the same pipeline. This means that any graphics attribute you can apply to the world, you can also apply to a model, and vice versa.

id will be building some levels that you can play without freelook. This is because true two-axis freelook is one of the harder things for a novice FPS gamer to learn. Doom was much quicker to get into because you never found yourself looking at the ceiling or floor by accident. They will be building quite a few "training wheels" levels that don't require you to look up or down. Once you get good at them, then you go on to the full 3D levels where you have to use all-angle mouselook to compete.

981110 Q3: Arena minimum specs - AndmaN

It's hard to say what realistic minimum system requirements will be. Right now we'd like the game to be playable on a Pentium/200MMX w/ 32MB of RAM and a Voodoo. This is a pretty common place machine, and hopefully things will be scalable enough that you can run at 512x384 with minimum detail (both geometric and texture) with a Voodoo 1 and get decent performance (although, obviously, not earth shattering).

Right now a RivaTNT is King of the Hill for Q3A performance. However I expect to see good things from the 3DLabs Permedia3 and ATI Rage128. I highly doubt that a V2 SLI is going to offer much, if anything, over a TNT, since the 3Dfx OpenGL drivers are abysmal -- the V2 SLI is _easily_ driver limited at this point. The main reason for this is that we're stressing polygon throughput almost as much as fill rate, and a good driver makes a huge difference for throughput.

981109 MapZone reopens! - AndmaN