Carmack Scraps DLLs, Not 'BASIC' Enough![]() "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 ![]() 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." |
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