As expected, id showed some more footage of the new Doom game as an introduction of John Carmack's talk. It was a mix of new and MacWorld footage, and unfortunately, we couldn't tape it. However, it did look simply amazing, very dark and gritty, but also more colorful than the footage from MacWorld. Since Carmack already held a talk on the Doom engine last year, the focus this year was more on the graphics acceleration side of things. He has a pretty good idea on where graphics are going in the next 5 years, and talked about advances when it comes to graphics cards, up to the point where you can get Pixar server-farm kind of graphics on a single card. And the problems with getting Doom to support the various OpenGL extensions by all the videocard makers. During the Q&A session there were a few minor new Doom things. Graeme Devine is programming the sound engine, which will have full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound support. And while Carmack wasn't totally convinced about XBox support last year, he seemed to be more enthustiastic this year. There will be an Xbox port of the game supporting pretty much everything the PC version will have to offer but due to the 64mb on the Xbox, the missions will probably be cut up differently. One of the issues raised was on violence and the amount of gore / blood in Doom with Columbine and lawsuits happening and such. At this point Todd Hollenshead started to look a bit nervous, and Carmack pretty much assured everyone the lawsuits don't effect their design decisions at all and there will be plenty of gore in the new Doom. This was shown during "bathroom scene" of the Doom engine, where blood was smeared all over the tiles, and a body got torn up by one of the monsters.
Also, although there's no official contract yet, there's a verbal agreement with Trent Reznor to provide music and sounds. Steve will add more to this story in a little while.