John Carmack plans to make a true cross-platform game engine

[Image: id logo]I’ve been meaning to post about this 1up article for a few days now.

There’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff that can pop out from a Carmack interview, but I find it most fascinating that Id is developing their next game engine, called Id 5 Tech, for all platforms simultaneously, a little bit like when Apple made OSX for Intel and PPC chips. I mention Apple because the Mac is one of those platforms.

People have claimed in the past, and apparently correctly given the game selection for Macs, that Apple has little interest in fostering game development for their machines. For Apple, it seems, the important part is the work, not the play.

But Carmack suggests otherwise:

“Especially the Mac version. That didn’t exist a month before the Worldwide Developer’s Conference. [Robert Duffy] wanted to bring it up on a Mac and we started working on it. Then the Apple people were excited to hear about what we were doing. I told [Apple] that they need to fix a lot of driver issues first so one guy came in and literally camped out in my office for a week just to make sure that demo worked. Apple, though, isn’t as big a market for gamers. It’s not like someone’s going to use Id Tech 5 to create a Mac game, but if you just click a check box and get a game out of it there’s going to be more likelihood of them shipping it.”

I think it’s awesome that Apple is apparently putting some effort into getting their system into the games market. I mean I do virtually all of my digital stuff on my MacBookPro, and I keep a home-made desktop running Vista, exclusively for games. That’s right: exclusively for games. I haven’t even installed Firefox on it.

The benefit of this, of course, is that this rig runs games like lindsey lohan takes drugs. The disadvantage is that it’s a separate machine (so yeah, same thing). I don’t mind keeping a gaming machine separate. In fact I kind of prefer it.

But it would be sweet to put some of my favorite titles on the dock in OSX. What if games could really be put out in both formats simply by ticking a checkbox? Way of future, I’m telling you now.

ps. video from the new Id game at 1up link