We are now live blogging John Carmack's QuakeCon 2007 keynote address as he talks about id Tech 5 and their newly announced game Rage. He started by showing off a new video of the game which showed a Mad Max desert style setting with lots of action, dune buggie vehicles and some amazing looking character models.

Carmack told the audience that originally for their next new project they were working on a game code named "Darkness" that was supposed to be a survival horror game set on an island and full of monsters and magic. However Carmack told the audience that the concept didn't come along as well as they thought and they decided to go in a different direction with the open world setting of Rage. Carmack joked that this game, unlike other id titles, will have a lot of sunlight in its setting,

Carmack admitted that games like Rage are expensive to make, saying it takes "tens of millions of dollars" to do something like that. However, he also said that making cheap games for mobile phones is also a valid development style. Working on the game allows Carmack and id to develop a game to work on a new franchise on a lower level that could move up to a higher end platform in the future. Rage will certainly be a high end game. Carmack told the audience that the title will ship on on two DVDs or one Blu-Ray disk.

Going back to cell phone game development, Carmack stated that their games (Doom RPG, Orcs and Elves and Orcs and Elves 2) have basically the same system requirements. He stated that for their next mobile phone game they want to make it with a higher system requirement. He is also frustrated about making a game on a powerful cell phone that's hampered by slow APIs including Java which he said, "runs things about 1/10th as fast as they should,"

Every id game made for the Mac has been profitable and there are a lot of Mac fans at id which is part of the reason while id Tech 5 was first shown at a Mac event. Carmack said he is thinking about making their mobile phones game. work over an iPhone. He said that that he has a dream of even controlling on of his rockets via a smartphone, saying, "Flying a rocket ship over a phone is a pretty damn cool idea."

Carmack then talked about what they are calling Quake Zero, a way to play Quake 3 Arena for free via a web browser and be supported by advertising. Carmack said this kind of game could be more popular and successful that the more conventional games that id is working on. id is now staffing a new second dev team to work on Quake Zero and later they will work on a full on id Tech 5 based Quake multiplayer title with all the bells and whistles.

Carmack said he has thought about going to Apple, who own everything on their console from the mouse to the driver API for their Macs and see if they can tune the latency while playing a game like Quake 3 Arena. Latency can be caused by a number of factors in games but Carmack said that with Apple's proprietary technology they could figure out where latency occurs in a twitch game like Quake 3 in their own hardware.

Carmack talked some more about actual game development, saying that designers try to make a level in the game play really well and be fun and then the artists come in and make it look good. However the problem with that issue is that putting textures in the enviroment can impact frame rate and other issues in the game. id Tech 5 is being designed so that creating textures for a game in the engine can be put into a level and not impact the level at all.

Carmack stated that id Tech 5 won't have a lot of technical support for third parties who use it but he did say that they are hiring dedicated game engine tool creators to make tools that will be easy to use for third parties. Carmack did repeat that Sony's PS3 console is still harder to develop for than the Xbox 360 but that id has hired a dedicated PS3 programmer to work with them on the game. Both the PC and Xbox 360 version of Quake Wars are running well but Carmack admitted that the PS3 version is still lagging behind.

While Carmack admitted that id Tech 5 and Rage could not work on the Wii, he has thought about making an Orcs and Elves game for the Wii. He has even thought about a PSP game . Carmack said that they might even do a Quake Arena game for the DS console. Carmack says he prefers the simpler games like Quakr 3 than the more complex games like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars which he admitted he gets, "....a little bit overwhelmed...." while trying to play the game.

Carmack said that for id Tech 6 he is thinking that he would like to simplify sculpting in games as they are simplifing handling art in id Tech 5. He is thinking that id Tech 6 might appear when the next generation of consoles (PS4 or Xbox 720) might start appearing.

Carmack admitted that while he doesn't like the idea of a closed network system, he did say that Microsoft's Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 does work well. He also feels that "the golden age of the mod developer has passed" and while they will still offer mod tools its going to be harder to make mods for their more advanced games. However a new mod age might happen for games on a cell phone.

While Carmack is not convinced that hardware physics acceleration like the kind that AGEIA makes he does believe that something really cool, like a completely destructible Quake 3 Arena, could use such support and he would love to see that. He doesn't want to do it, however, as he has too many other projects on his plate.

A question from the audience centered on Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace project. Carmack said he liked the fact that he lives in a country that supports the creation of "homemade" rockets that, at some point, might be powerful enough to reach orbit or even North Korea or Iran.

A question about digital distribution got Carmack to comment on these issues. Carmack said he didn't want to become a publisher and that they will not be taking id down that route, saying that the creation of Steam is a lot more complex than some might believe. He admitted he had not heard how the id games on Steam run on Vista as he was not involved on the programming on those older games.

Carmack shot down a rumor that id Tech 5 would be using Havok as its physics system. Carmack said that rumor started when Reven Software, with Carmack's blessing, removed id's own physics engine from Doom 3 and replaced it with Havok when Raven made Quake 4 with the Doom 3 engine.

Carmack revealed more info about Rage's online multiplayer modes, saying there will be co-op racing modes as well as gunner-on-gunner modes. There will not be any deathmatch style modes in the game.

Carmack is not a proponant of cross-platform play for console and PC games, saying that the technical problems to make that work is not worth the time to handle it. Carmack admits that id Tech 5's code based could make such a system work but it is not a priority.

Carmack said that he finds software patents can be a problem as they go through development, saying that at one time he wrote a solution to a programming problem in Doom 3 only to find out that a separate programmer had done the same thing a month before and filed a patent on it. He feels that the patent process is not what it is supposed to be in terms of software and it depresses him at times to think about how some software development can be kept at bay because of such patents.

Carmack stated that the PC and Mac versions of Rage will run on OpenGL and says that there isn't anything in DirectX10 that he is interesting in implementing. When asked about 64-bit support he stated that the Mac version will likely be 64-bit only and that some of their tools will also be 64-bit.

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