Carmack Talks Quake Live 36
CVG spoke with John Carmack about the in-development browser-based version of Quake III Arena called Quake Live. He discusses the development team's reasons for the new project and mentions that current mods will not work. However, he adds, "We're in no way shutting down the original Q3A scene, so anybody who wants to build things with the open-source code is still more than free to do so. That may even become a proving ground for moving things into Quake Live." Carmack also says Quake Live will be fully ad-supported to start, but "it's not out of the question that eventually we'll have some kind of a premium service. But we don't know what it's going to be yet, and we're certainly going out with the completely free-to-play model." We've looked at video clips from Quake Live in the past.
Bad summary (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a difference between launching a game from a web browser and running inside one. Anyway, what are they using; flash, Java or .TRAP?
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Being a Quakecon attendee, I got in as a beta tester for Quake Live, and it's a plugin for firefox. It's basically Q3A running inside a browser.
I haven't played it much though, as it crashes my computer halfway through most matches.
Then YouTube isn't browser based either (Score:3, Interesting)
[Q3A in a browser] would be impossible anyway without a plugin of some sort (which I don't consider to be "browser based" at that point because a plugin is no different than any other native install).
Then YouTube isn't browser based either because it uses a separately installed SWF player to play FLVs. Do I understand you right?
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Re:Then YouTube isn't browser based either (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the interview, the point is for it be like "youtube for fps" kind of, so there is absolutely no barrier to entry. You just make a login and click a button, instead of paying for the game, installing, installing mods, finding servers.
I like the idea. It will help preven the "game age death" that happens with so many games I love.
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While games in Flash have come a long way, Adobe hasn't seemed very interested in including such game specific features to its plugin, which is a shame considering the penetration of Flash. If id can get this out there and installed on a significant amount of browsers it co
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My Ipod touch begs to differ.
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Yep, totally pointless. After all, everyone knows that OSX and Windows, together, have practically no installed base whatsoever....
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Carmack is going to develop the engine entirely in VB Script. It already can run at over 78 FPS in any computer made ten years ago
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They are using a browser plugin that is Windows only for now, but with id's track record of Linux support, it's an inevitability.
It works like instantaction.com, except a whole lot better.
Not this time. No Linux support.
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Last I checked they were going to use JAVA, which would take a game that used to require a P90 and 16 megs of RAM will now need 1GHz and 512MB of Ram to even work properly.
Hooray for inefficient and bloated code.
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Didn't the original Quake Live start out with a Java written Q2? Original requirements for that game were the same as Quake 1.
Unquestionably destined for greatness (Score:1)
From TFA:
We've tossed around the idea of taking the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game (which was actually always more popular than Q3A in the online space) and doing a similar treatment on it with the experience we've gained here. But no effort will be spent on that until we know whether Quake Live was a brilliant idea or if it was a dumb move.
Can't say much about the revenue potential of this venture but ET was a megahit and there is no question in my mind that Quake Live is going to be huge, too.
In terms of kudos, bar poor performance, you can only go up with a good free game.
ET phone home (Score:2)
Can't say much about the revenue potential of this venture but ET was a megahit and there is no question in my mind that Quake Live is going to be huge, too.
But an Internet game like Quake Live is probably going to have to phone home, just like ET.
I hope this catches on for enemy territory's sake (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to play quake 1/2/3 but my interest started to wane by the time q3 was out. But I still play enemy territory which I think would really benefit from unified stats so it could play matchmaker and put the more experienced players together. Of course not just looking at kill/death ratio but focusing the stats on how often the person follows the obj.
They'd have to massage (and change what's tracked in) the stat data to get stuff like that, but for a game like ET it would be worth it (in that it's more important with this game to match appropriately than q3), and would then probably have a better chance at forming a good online community then quake 3 has.
So I hope q3 does good enough to green-light doing it with ET, and carmack even mentions ET always had a bigger community than q3.
But no one seems to know, what does this use? A custom plugin? Cross-platform? He mentioned mac in a video last year but nothing since. Hoping there is a linux client down the road.
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There's a new Wolfenstein coming out (with multiplayer), so hopefully they'll integrate some of the matchmaking and other ideas. But the new title probably precludes a free version.
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Might wanna take a look at Quake Wars: Enemy Territory then.
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yes, q3a != instantaction, but it's relevant that your parent poster mentioned that there's a service that delivers what quakelive is trying to do.
but?... (Score:1)
Will I be able to use something like ioquake3 to play on Quake Live? It's so much more convenient for me than Java or Flash in the browser (Flash would be worse since I mostly run things on Linux).