Well, this is going to be an interesting .plan update.

Most of this is not really public business, but if some things aren't stated explicitly, it will reflect unfairly on someone. As many people have heard discussed, there was quite a desire to remake DOOM as our next project after Q3. Discussing it brought an almost palpable thrill to most of the employees, but Adrian had a strong enough dislike for the idea that it was shot down over and over again.

Design work on an alternate game has been going on in parallel with the mission pack development and my research work.Several factors, including a general lack of enthusiasm for the proposed plan, the warmth that Wolfenstein was met with at E3, and excitement about what we can do with the latest rendering technology were making it seem more and more like we weren't going down the right path.

I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was importantenough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it. An ultimatum was issued to Kevin and Adrian (who control >50% of the company): We are workingon DOOM for the next project unless you fire us.
Obviously no fun for anyone involved, but the project direction was changed,new hires have been expedited, and the design work has begun.

It wasn't planned to announce this soon, but here it is: We are working ona new DOOM game, focusing on the single player game experience, and usingbrand new technology in almost every aspect of it. That is all we are preparedto say about the game for quite some time, so don't push for interviews. Wewill talk about it when things are actually built, to avoid giving misleadingcomments.

MESQUITE, Texas - June 1, 2000 - id Software, an independent developerof entertainment software, has started work on the next incarnation of DOOM,one of the most popular computer games of all time. Employing an entirelynew 3-D graphics engine, the still untitled project will showcase id Software'slegendary ability to create an over-the-top, story-based single-player experience.

"id Software forever changed computer games with the DOOM franchise, and only id can carry on the cultural and technical tradition of the original masterpiece,"Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software, said. Hollenshead offered few other details.

"We expect to once again dramatically advance first-person gaming both technicallyand artistically with this title," Hollenshead added. "Other than that, iddoes not plan on issuing additional comments until the game is ready to speakfor itself.

The original DOOM was released to critical acclaim in 1993 as shareware andhas since been recognized as one of the most downloaded pieces of softwareof all time. id later released DOOM and its sequels at retail, where combinedthey have sold more than 4 million copies, generating sales topping $100 million.

We have a plan, we have the story, we have the major objectives,we have a professional writer we're working with, and now we have the abilityto make the content, to make the maps. Before we'd make a bunch of stuff andmake a storyboard, but now we have it to start.

The process of building the new engine went much more smoothly thananything we have done before, because I was able to do all the groundworkwhile the rest of the company worked on TeamArena. By the time they were readyto work on it, things were basically functional. I did most of the early developmentwork with a gutted version of Quake 3, which let me write a brand new rendererwithout having to rewrite file access code, console code, and all the othersubsystems that make up a game. After the renderer was functional and theother programmers came off of TA and Wolf, the rest of the codebase got rewritten.Especially after our move to C++, there is very little code remaining fromthe Q3 codebase at this point.

There are interesting things to be said about the upcoming cards,but NDAs will force me to just discuss the available cards. In order frombest to worst for DOOM: · I still think that overall, the GeForce 4Ti is the best card you can buy. It has high speed and excellent driver quality.· Based on the feature set, the Radeon 8500 should be a faster cardfor DOOM than the GF4, because it can do the seven texture accesses that I need in a single pass, while it takes two or three passes (depending on details)on the GF4. However, in practice, the GF4 consistently runs faster due toa highly efficient implementation. For programmers, the 8500 has a much nicerfragment path than the GF4, with more general features and increased precision, but the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's, so I would bea little hesitant to use it as a primary research platform.

· The GF4-MX is a very fast card for existing games, but it is lesswell suited to DOOM, due to the lower texture unit count and the lack of vertexshaders.
· On a slow CPU with all features enabled, the GF3 will be faster thanthe GF4-MX, because it offloads some work. On systems with CPU power to burn,the GF4 may still be faster.
· The 128 bit DDR GF2 systems will be faster than the Radeon-7500 systems,again due to low level implementation details overshadowing the extra textureunit.
· The slowest cards will be the 64 bit and SDR ram GF and Radeon cards,which will really not be fast enough to play the game properly unless yourun at 320x240 or so.

The team is debating the way that DOOM 3's save system will work... it may be significantly different from what players have seen in previous id games.

For the game's human characters, the team has decided that motion capture is the most appropriate technique. The game's monsters will pretty much all be animated by hand, but the humans--most of whom you'll encounter in the early part of the game, before the portal to hell is opened--will use motion data to enhance the realism of their movements.

We offer full dynamic 5.1 channel sound mixing, and multichannel playback of studio sounds. It isn't clear that the market is really there for it yet, but DOOM should be a poster child for surround-sound gaming. We have a nice sound system set up for our demonstration, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if quite a few people go buy one based on the experience.

This has been one of the areas where I know we are going to getsome negative feedback. DOOM 3 will only have minimal multiplayerfacilities when released, because we are concentrating all of our effortson making it an outstanding single-player experience. We have our hands fulljust breaking in the new technology and creating our world, so there justaren't enough resources to go around for doing spectacular multiplayer. Youwill still be able to deathmatch, but don't expect anything revolutionary.We will certainly be doing follow-up titles that refocus on multiplayer. Istrongly believe that it is better to do more games with a tighter focus,rather than trying to be all things to everyone in a single title.