On that note, and after some applause, the man behind the Quake game engine took questions from the audience. Most of the questions were fairly insightful, indicating that this was an audience comprised of mostly the hardest core of the Quake scene. Even more enlightening were Carmack's answers.

This part of the presentation was a great deal less technical, so if you were having trouble understanding all that "c_game" stuff you'll find that his answers here were a great deal easier to understand. Porting Mods from Quake I and II: "The game side is fairly similar," Carmack said, and porting many pieces of a mod from Quake II to Quake 3 shouldn't be too difficult. However, he also stated that mods will want to be able to take advantage of Quake 3, and that they should work on things like defining trajectories to make motions of projectiles smoother. "This won't be too trivial," he explained, as it will require lots of new coding.

However, as mentioned before, mod authors will have more flexibility with the user interface and physics engine, so in many cases they'll be able to do what they wanted to do all along, no longer relying of hacks and workarounds.

No demo editing in Quake 3? That would mean no more movies like the critically-acclaimed Blahbalicious!

Demo Editing: There will not likely be any demo-editing for Quake 3. Currently (with Q1 and Q2), game demos work using the same networking code as the game itself, which means the releasing the demo specs also means releasing the network specs. That means that people can use those specs not just to edit demos, but also to make client-side bots and other cheating machines. In order to solve this, the demo spec would have to be altered. Carmack said he "may get to it" but there are a lot of tough decisions. It was pretty clear that he was waffling on the issue (he mentioned how demos and the movie scene were a really fun part of the community) but cheating programs ruin the game for a lot of people, and his current thoughts on the matter are that that's more important. So, at least for the time being, it doesn't look like people will be able to edit their demos in Quake 3...

Client-Hacking: On a related topic, he answered a question about what id was doing to prevent client-side hacking. (Hacking the client allows players to cheat in various ways. Small changes, like people making the player models more visible, or large hacks -- like completely fooling the server using automated programs, or "proxy bots," that give the player flawless aim.)

Carmack says they're doing the usual things to prevent that, like checksumming the client data that comes in, etc. The tough part, he admits, is verifying the player models. The client might be checked at startup to make sure it's loading the right data, but even that can be worked around if people are clever enough. Carmack admits we'll probably have to live with people making player skins more visible, etc.

100+ Player Games: The Quake 3 Engine isn't built to support massive games of more than, say, 64 people. The limitation is not so much technical so much as one of preference. "We haven't seen any effective 100+ player games developed," Carmack said. Until someone comes up with what he calls the "Landmark modification" that makes 100+ player games fun, he probably won't take the time to really build that kind of optimization into the server. Carmack is really hoping to see that modification soon, but for the time being Quake 3 seems built around the idea of smaller games.

Carmack talks about the struggles of game developers dealing with driver issues...

3Dfx and Drivers: Answering a question about video cards, Carmack took a moment to talk about the current state of 3Dfx. "3Dfx drivers aren't as good as I'd like to see right now," he admits. While the hardware is up to standards, id Software is working closely with them to try to get their drivers up to the quality that Carmack would prefer.

"It used to be if the operating system let us put the pixels on the screen, then it was all our fault [if something didn't work]," he explained. Nowdays, when game developers have to struggle with getting things through the renderer, "it's always half-and-half with the drivers." While he hopes that this will someday get better, in the meantime he admits (with some regret) that it "will be a major issue with gamers for years to come."

Mouse Filtering: There's no mouse filtering in Quake 3 (QuakeWorld and Quake II had an m_filter command to smooth out mouse sampling). The reason? "Anyone who cares should just get a USB mouse!"

Third Person View and Cheating: Someone in the audience asked about people using the third-person view as a "cheat," (in other words, they'd go into third person mode and use it to look around corners without exposing their character...) Carmack was fairly split on the issue. He knows it can be abused, so we may or may not see third person as an option in the final version Quake 3. "What we might do is lock the angle so you can't look around corners," he surmised.

No Aliases: Quake 3 removed the "alias" command, which would let people string commands together easily. Carmack was pretty frank on the subject: "I have difficulty feeling too much sympathy for the people who build the really complex aliases," he explained. "Some people consider it cheating..."

Hmmm... jumping all around Q3Test2 on a Dreamcast? Could be!

Sega Dreamcast: While he'd already went on the record talking about id's relationship with Dreamcast before, Carmack spoke some more about Sega's Dreamcast after someone brought the issue up.

Things were moving along great between id and Sega before there was a hitch with a mutual NDA agreement that Sega didn't want to sign, and then things got quiet for a while. They've recently started chatting again about a possible Q3:A port to Dreamcast. "Hardware-wise, is't the closest thing to a PC we've got," Carmack explained. They would be able to port basically the entirety of Quake 3 onto the console.

Needless to say, the Dreamcast's built-in modem makes this all the more exciting. It may be possible in a Quake 3 port to play against other console-users over the net (it would certainly be silly to port the game over without adding this feature.) "Bringing console gamers on to the Internet is one of the biggest things we need to do," Carmack said.

Next: Marks on Curved Surfaces, Directional Sound, Locational Damage, Brian Hook and The Doom Movie among other things!