Doom is coming…

id Software Partners With Activision on DOOM III™ at Yahoo Finance News officially announces DOOM III, the latest and greatest game from id Software. The game will be shown at E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo), but probably to a limited audience. Still, we can hope that a video emerges soon after.

“DOOM III will change what people expect to see and experience in a PC game,“ said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. “We couldn’t be more psyched about DOOM III, and are thrilled to debut the title at E3 with Activision. Get ready to be terrified.”

The game is based on the latest game engine, appropriately named the Doom Engine, built by John Carmack (Graphics/Networking), Jim Dose (Scripting/Animation), Graeme Devine (Sound/MacOS) and Robert Duffy (Tools/Editing). The game will support Windows 98/2000/XP, MacOS X and Linux. It will be optimized for video cards with onboard Pixel Shaders/Vertex Shaders, but will still run on GeForce2/Radeon cards, though not nearly as realistically. Apparently, all portions of the Quake III Arena engine have been rewritten for this new engine. The sound was redesigned/rewritten by Graeme Devine; the scripting/animation/object structure by Jim Dose; and, of course, a brand-new renderer from John Carmack. Even the content creation is new, with the tedious vis/lighting stages removed and maps loadable directly from text files because the lighting model is completely dynamic now. The turnaround time for editing changes promises to be orders of magnitude faster.

For more information, go to the id software home page, which has, believe it or not, actually been redesigned for the first time since Quake II.