Yesterday, 10th August 2001, several very important statements were made at id's annual QuakeCon event in Mesquite, TX. Here's all the goodness:

• Quake 4 Announcement

id Software is licensing the unfinished Doom III technology to Raven Software to make Quake 4, which is supposedly going to be a single-player focused follow-up to Quake 2. The "stranded in space, fighting off Strogg" setting will be kept, but that's about all the information right now. Raven released a concept sketch for one of the new monsters though.
 
• Nerve Software Announcements

Nerve Software, a freshly-founded company of former id and Rogue employees, has made two announcements. Firstly, they're going to finish up the multiplayer aspect of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Expect some great Day Of Defeat-style missions. Secondly, they're developing a multiplayer cooperative game with the Doom III engine. It sounds like id's Quest idea from a while back, though they've assured us it won't be a massively mutiplayer game.
 
• New DOOM movie shown - UPDATED

Yes, John Carmack showed and narrated a new video presentation of DOOM immediately following the press release. It has been described as "more colourful and impressive than the MacWorld vid". For some ungodly reason id chose NOT to release this video on the Internet, but the German magazine Gamestar managed to secretly take a few pics and some video footage. Here's the eye witness descriptions :

"The most dramatic scene in the demonstration took place in a white-tiled bathroom. A dead body was seen lying on the ground when a pink demon walks up to the cadaver and takes a bite out of its stomach, disemboweling it. The demon, a creature returning from the original Doom games, has been transformed by the leap in graphics quality, and now can be seen walking lithely on its four feet in a way that conveys frightening power." -- Gamespot
 
 

• John Carmack's Speech

Here's a few highlights from John Carmack's annual speech : (I'll try to get more info as soon as I can find a recording of the speech)
 
• As Carmack had stated recently in a Slashdot post, the game is intended to run at 30 frames per second on a GeForce3 with all visual options on. But by the time DOOM is released, next-gen cards will be available (GeForce4 or whatever).
• In the editor, all rendering will be taking place nearly instantaneously (the figure used was 1/4 second) in real time. Don't like that light's placement, or the shadows it casts? Grab it and move it in the environment until you like it!
• Compile times for maps are drastically reduced to about five minutes on most pc's. Compare this to Quake3, where it can take days for a large map to compile.
• Polygon count seems to be a thing of the past. The term "A quarter Million Triangles" was used in reference to models on a couple of occasions.
• id has a verbal agreement with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to do the music for DOOM.
• Carmack said the rocket launcher will likely be in Doom 3, but "it hasn't been modelled yet".
• Since Doom 3 admittly contains zombies and demons as enemies, don't expect huges strides in character AI in the game, according to Carmack. He said he is happy to let other companies handle improvements in human character AI.
• An X-Box version can be expected.
• Graeme Devine is handling a new sound engine from sratch and it will support Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
• Carmack said while there are some cool things happening in massively multiplayer games, don't expect id to be making those types of titles.
• He also mentioned a "GeForce2 mode" that would cut down the graphics a bunch to run decently on our current cards.