What else can I say. Big news on the ID front. John Carmack again was the keynote to the overly popular QuakeCON. This years opening topic revolved around the next generation of gaming on consoles and the obstacles and journeys future developers will have to grab success in the growing console market. There was a very big sense on making game development easier and Carmack was the first to congratulate Microsoft on supplying developers with the tools and APIs to make development easier. It almost sounded like Microsoft had paid him off stating he was glad to see Microsoft exposing new tools for their next generation gaming console, the XBOX360. He went on talking about how as games get more complex and graphics get better the development time obviously increases to the point where anything that can make a developers job easier will justify success and a game that fits the budget.

The other big announcement this year steamed around ID releasing the Quake 3 sourcecode under the GPL. I am sure this will make the Linux and Slashdot community very happy and no doubt the modding community will be having a field day with it. I am very glad to see Carmack recognizes open source as he did before with past Quake releases and values the learning experience other future developers will have.

Oh yeah almost forgot… Quake 4 was formally announced with a ship date of November 14th 2005. Just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.. Carmack flaunted some new Quake 4 screenshots prefacing them with “these were to graphic for E3″

GameSPY has a very nice right-up about day 1 at QuakeCON available for your viewing pleasure here.