iD Games premieres next-gen texture game engine at WWDC 2007 for two upcoming Mac, PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 games

11 June 2007

Posted by:Ferry

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 (WWDC) Keynote today Steve Jobbs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, didn’t just talk about their soon to be released iPhone features or Mac software. Video games were also a hot topic! Games developer Electronic Arts announced that it would begin development of games for the Mac platform again, with simultaneous releases as their Windows counterparts: Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need For Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix are all coming in July 2007, with Madden 08 and Tiger Woods 08 to follow.

iD Games next-gen texture tech
iD Games owner and CTO John Carmack premiered his new game engine technology that allows for unprecedented texture detail. To quote him: “So the last couple of years at iD we’ve been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it…

…this is the first time we’re showing anything we’ve done on it publicly.” iD Tech 5… “What we’ve got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track [see above photo]. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game.”

He closed off by announcing a second new Mac game: “We’re going to be showing on a Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 at E3, we’ll have another Mac announcement at E3.”

iD CEO Todd Hollenshead last month dropped a hint about this game by saying: “We are working on an all-new franchise: it’s NOT Doom, it’s not Quake, it’s not Wolfenstein, it’s not Enemy Territory, it’s not even Commander Keen. It is a new id brand with an all-new John Carmack engine and I think that when we show it to people, once again they’ll see, just like they saw when we first showed Doom 3, that John Carmack still has a lot of magic left.”