At Apple"s worldwide developer conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California, John Carmack, the chief technology officer of id Software, a well-known game developer, has demonstrated the company"s new game engine, which, it claims already works on numerous platforms including game consoles. "In the last couple of years we"ve been working, pretty much in secrecy, on a next-generation technology and a next-generation game core. This is actually going to be the fist time that we show what we"ve been doing publicly," Mr. Carmack said during his two minute keynote at WWDC.
The new game engine, which id calls id Tech 5 supports Microsoft Windows-based PCs, Apple Macintosh computers running Mac OS as well as popular game consoles – Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3. No information was released about the game engine itself, though, it was implied that it also features MegaTexturing, a feature in id"s Enemy Territory: Quake Wars game due out this year. "What we"ve got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. [Artists] 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," Mr. Carmack explained.