id Software's John Carmack has posted just the second blog update since he started it back in December, mentioning what he's been working on recently. When not doing work for id's next project or Armadillo Aerospace, Carmack has taken up programming cell phone games. There are plenty of things not to Carmack's liking when it comes to Java and other elements of cell phone programming, which he details in the update.

I have a small list of games that I think would work out well, but what I decided to work on is DoomRPG - sort of Bard's Tale meets Doom. Step based smooth sliding/turning tile movement and combat works out well for the phone input buttons, and exploring a 3D world through the cell phone window is pretty neat. We talked to Jamdat about the business side of things, and hired Fountainhead Entertainment to turn my proof-of-concept demo and game plans into a full-featured game. So, for the past month or so I have been spending about a day a week on cell phone development. Somewhat to my surprise, there is very little internal conflict switching off from the high end work during the day with gigs of data and multi-hundred instruction fragment shaders down to texture mapping in java at night with one table lookup per pixel and 100k of graphics. It's all just programming and design work.