Carmack will move to DX10

ONE OF the Vole's DX10 hitmen has spoken out to scorch rumours that John Carmack won't be making any fancy-pants DX10 games.

Carmack's love of the cross-platform OpenGL language is legendary (with all his titles back to Quake 2 running in the engine) and he recently told GameInformer that he couldn't envisage any reason he'd want to step up to the Vista-exclusive DX10 platform. "There's no massive pull for me for DX10," he told an eager audience.

Especially not, we suspect, when Nvidia is opening up DX10-hardware features for OpenGL just to placate him.

But that doesn't stop Microsoft from making decisions for him. Speaking to Gamastura, the Vole's Rick Wickham said that he thought a Carmack DX10 game was an inevitability. "Stay tuned... I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn't build a DirectX 10 title some day... and I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later," he commented, either knowing more than we do or being more optimistic than we are.

Of course, that doesn't stop multiple third parties licensing a Carmack engine and adding DX10 features to it, but that is a fair amount of work for a licensee.

Microsoft has come under fire for making DX10 Windows Vista only in what enthusiasts see as a cynical bid to drive OS upgrade sales.

It seems that, from Carmack's point of view, there's not much to belay the cynicism. The id Software chief technician is rumoured to be working on a new game engine as we speak, after taking time off to write mobile phone games. What awaits us is unclear, but hopefully it'll have a better plot that Doom 3. µ