Carmack at QuakeCon dissected

Whilst we couldn't make the trip out to Dallas for QuakeCon this year, it seems like the chaps at TechReport rather saved us the hassle by writing up the cliff notes of Carmack's speech.

John Carmack, the head honcho of id and the creator of its best-loved titles, gave his first keynote speech in 3 years, addressing the state of the gaming industry.

Highlights of the speech include:

• Announcing that his primary work is going into Xbox 360 right now, since it's so easy to programme for
  
• Releasing the source code to Quake 3, as well as its development tools, for public use
  
• Complaining that the PS3's multi-chip architecture won't be as powerful in use as it looks on paper
  
• Suggesting that the upcoming PhysX PPU add-in card won't really be of much benefit, since in-game objects are either 'true physics' objects or not - there's no real 'accleration'.
  
• Revealing that his wish-list for future graphics technology includes true 'unique' texturing, whereby textures don't have to be tiled and re-used, a technique used today and which he called a crude form of compression.

Carmack always sets the agenda when it comes to PC graphics, although we sometimes wish his team might spend a bit more time addressing the playability of games rather than just their graphical quality.

Frankly, we can't wait to see what 3DRealms do with Prey, which uses the Doom 3 engine - awesome graphics paired with cracking gameplay? Looks promising...

While we're waiting for that to arrive, however, why not check out the full synopsis of the Carmack speech, or the QuakeCon homepage, IGN's preview of Prey or give us your own thoughts on Carmack and id in our discussion thread?