John Carmack Speaks on Doom 3 Completion

The industry's most prominent uber-programmer has spoken about Doom 3 and how close the game is to completion.

The programming legend behind the Doom series, John Carmack, has revealed how close id's latest and most exciting project is to hitting the shelves.

In a recent interview with PC Zone, Carmack said: "We're really close. The last level was completed recently, but there's a huge amount of tuning that needs to be done. We've got a few levels, like the ones shown in the demo that are pretty much at the level of polish we're looking for throughout the game. But the other 20-some odd levels are not there yet."

So everything is in place, but essential polishing is taking place as we speak. Interestingly though, it won't be Carmack himself making many of the final touches to the game. In fact he admits to "twiddling his thumbs".

Surely not? "It turns out that the decisions I made at the very beginning about implementation were all really good... I've actually been back in recently doing some more of the game code, which is not what I ever intended to do, but I'm almost sort of twiddling my thumbs sometimes."

The mastermind revealed the extend of his coding supremacy, saying: "In previous games all the code was spawned by me. I wrote the base of everything and then other programmers would take over and extend the things, but it was easy for me to jump in and quickly diagnose any problems or add any feature."

Doom 3 is still scheduled for a release in some time next year, but with polish yet to be added to twenty levels, we're not surprised id isn't committing to a specific date.

John Gold
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games