Michael Abrash is Working at Microsoft Again
Michael Abrash is working at microsoft again, due to external reasons. This is the only time anyone has ever left id that we aren’t better off without. 
That does give me an excuse to visit seattle more often and pester the folks at microsft about various broken things…
Look for a hardcover compilation of nearly everything Michael has written later on this year. Michael and I are probably going to add some hindsight notes to many of the articles for the new edition.
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N64 quake is looking really awesome. We got DM5 (the only level small enough to fit before we take a lot of space saving measures) running perfectly in only two weeks. It looks about like glquake with “picmip 1″, and it runs 30fps.
We are going to have transparent water in all the maps, and all the lights will have full color control, so it should look great.
We don’t know what maps we are going to use yet. There will probably be a combination of modified quake, level pack, and new maps. The biggest pain is the tiny size of the cartridge. I am going to implement some more space efficient file formats, and all the maps are going to have the non-essentials crunched out, but we are still not going to be able to fit as many on as I would like.
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Work is progressing well with the new rendering architectures. I have a test harness that can dynamically switch between using a ref_soft.dll and ref_gl.dll for rendering in the same window. I have a lot of work to do before the entire game will run like that, and there may be some incompatabilities with normal quake, because this is aimed primarily for Quake 2.
The interface to the renderers is very cool — it only takes a single file of code to harness and exercise all the rendering features. If we actually release with seperate DLLs, people are going to link the refreshes into their own programs and use it as an object level rendering toolkit… You could write a Quake-like game in visual basic. There is a whole mess of biz type issues with that that I don’t even want to think about now.