Quakeweek
May 22, 1997


Archives

Carmack's Ferrari Made 'Internet-Ready'

id Renews Business Contract

NY's Dept. Of Transportation Eagerly Awaiting Quake Rally

Raven and Columbia Tristar Sponsor 'Serpent Rides'

Industrial Spy Pleads Guilty

International Red Cross to Begin Operations in Quake

Kasparov Demands Quess for Round 3

id Hires Garth Brooks for Quake 2 Soundtrack

Texas Separatist Holds Carmack Hostage

Jury: id not Responsible for Camper's Death
Carmack Scraps DLLs, Not 'BASIC' Enough


No DLL's DALLAS, TX (The Ref) - In another policy about-face, John Carmack announced today that id Software's upcoming Quake 2 would not use DLL files for program functions, nor will it use QuakeC.

"QuakeC was just supposed to be a little joke between myself and Romero," Carmack stated. "We thought people would look at it and get a good chuckle. Unfortunately they actually USED it!"

Carmack announced his decision to utilize the most common programming language in existence, BASIC, in all future id games. Quake 2 will be optimized to use ROM BASIC/GWBASIC, an interpreted language common to most early IBM-PCs.

"Using ROM BASIC means that we already have an installed base of millions of new Quake hackers, including hundreds of thousands of gradeschool kids. Can you think of a better way to suck in indoctrinate our children into the ways of first-person shooters?

"Besides, this will force us to go back to the pre-386 instruction codes. No more complaints from whining 486 users who can't play Quake. Of course, we'll have to re-write the OpenGL code into a BASIC program, but who wouldn't be willing to wait the extra 'two weeks' for that? It does mean that all the models and maps will be size restricted. I think we should be able to get Quake 2 up to about 5fps if we keep the new player.mdl down around 12 faces."

When asked about cross-platform support, Carmack shrugged. "I was pretty much going to kill it anyway. Quake 2 will be x86-specific, but we'll even that out when Quake 2.5 comes out exclusively on the Rhapsody operating system. Actually, that will still be cross-platform, provided you run the Apple OS on your PC. This does mean however that Quake 2.5 will not be released until we feel Rhapsody is stable. Current projections are sometime in 2037, give or take a few years.

"For those machines without ROM BASIC or the GWBASIC/BASICA interpreter we will also be porting Quake 2 to a web browser plugin module. We feel that the performance increase gained by having a 386 or higher machine will more than compensate for the inefficiency of writing a plugin that emulates a BASIC interpreter. We might side-step that plan and just write it all in Java. Can you imagine the ultimate w00d caused by being able to write Java apps using line-numbered BASIC?

"The biggest stumbling block I'm having right now is figuring out how to plug this ROM BASIC chip into my NeXT machine."