READ THIS!!!!!

John Carmack Interview PART 1 HERE http://www.voodooextreme.com/article.taf?articleID=139
If I get it right he said that the engine won't be written totaly from scrath!!!! Tell me what u think!!

I think the game will be out a hell of a lot sooner because of it. If you read how he carefully worded it there's simply no reason to reinvent the wheel with every game.

This is indeed a good idea. Quake engine had passed throught many, many upgrades (counting every licensed engine), and up to this point, the internal declarations (the whole set of commands & variables) will be EXACTLY as in DooM3. There is no reason to rewrite something perfectly done. Carmack´s focus now is on the renderer. Doom3 is having a lot of ground-breaking effects (like bump-map, it´s official), and that´s why he´s starting from scratch the renderer. He also modified the way a level is placed into memory, its VISibility and the way entities interact with the world. That´s everything you need.

Instead of rewriting, for example, all the console functionality, he can use that time to create all those little but important things that represent today´s most beloved single player experiences.

Can someone explain to me what a BUMP-MAP is??

Take a greyscale image, and run an emboss filter on it. The greyscale image is the bumpmap, the emboss filter is the bumpmapping. Then take the bumpmapped image and blend it with a texture.

That's it I think =)