So, with a tummy full of waffles, we attended a talk by Artemis, the mod team working on a new game concept for Quake 3, which, set in Atlantis (I think) revolves around taking a fleece (baaaaaaaaaaaaaah! :) to an alter and giving it to the gods - oi! Stop those "Capture the Fleece" jokes at the back! For reasons I’m still not quite sure of, RR2DO2 later decided that it’d be nice to see if our entity system supported this kind of game concept - and coded it in 37 minutes flat, which included fixing a new bug that he found :)

The mod looks excellent, with a great attention to detail, some very interesting ideas about level design, good in-game models, and what looks like a very addictive game system. I’m positive that two of the girls were part of that Lith and Eve Show (if that’s what it was called) that slammed Q3F in a review once, but I couldn’t be completely sure. This was the show that demonstrated such an insight in to our game-play style, that they felt our class menu’s made things too complicated and should be abandoned in our mod :))))))

Most importantly though we secured Toga Party tickets!!!!

BoboTheSeal shows of how big his is! :)

We then attended an Art talk by our very own concept artist BoboTheSeal and Supergirl from Artemis - they made some excellent points but sadly were let down by some technical glitches with his laptop, resulting in us lot missing out on what would have been an excellent tutorial on skinning :( Still, he was rewarded later with a fantastic Marguerita! And he was careful to make sure that nobody left without seeing Q3F concept artwork :)

At 3pm we were due to head over to the offices of id Software, so we took the opportunity to grab a quick bite to eat for lunch at the local Taco Bell - I ordered a burrito and it was only 65c (about 40p!!) - I ate another three to celebrate how cheap they were, and then almost died of sunstroke trying to walk back to the hotel in a soaring mid-day Texas heat-wave with my body now heavier by about 3lb’s of Taco Bell food mass :)

And so finally, having travelled half-way round the world, at 3pm, the appointment we were most looking forward to was upon us and having secured couple of Taxis, we arrived at id Software’s impressive new offices!

The Q3F Dev Team at id Software’s office in Mesquite, Texas, from left to right: BoboTheSeal (Concept Artist), Wils (Lead Level Designer), Locki (Project Leader), Fluffy (Lead Artist) and RR2DO2 (Lead Coder)

From the minute you walk in to reception there’s no doubt where you are - awards and trophies fill all available space, and though the server ‘satan.idsoftware.com’ might have fallen to that social-demon ‘political correctness’, the fantastic creature artwork lives on, and literally covers almost all available wall-space. By default, everyone that enters id’s offices are effectively under a verbal NDA, so there’s really not much else I can say - except that we made some fantastic headway, secured their agreement on a number of things we’d like to see implemented, their promises to fix a few things that had held us up and received tons of feedback on our progress so far, saw some mind-blowingly good game engine technology, and in truth, will now count that single afternoon as one of the most memorable in my life so far.

As if that wasn’t good enough, Graeme Devine then invited us all to id’s local haunt for the evening!

I’ve never seen so many talented, world famous games developers in one bar. Stranger still is the fact that the place is so un-reserved - I’d honestly expected id to hang out at some really exclusive club - but this place even served Guinness! Solidifying my belief that only in the games industry do you really find people that know how to just have fun, I didn’t witness a single act of pretension or receive any of the condescending lectures I’d have expected had it been a UK based development company we were out with. In my view id Software, and many of the companies who they chose to share their engine with, have a really strong sense of community spirit, an openness to development (both personal and coding) that’s should be envied by all others and mostly, a warmth that you’d never expect from such elevated company.

Robert Duffy (in blue) and Hellchick.

Eric, the id Software techy (in blue) and Jean Paul, otherwise known as Mr Elusive

From left to right: Fluffy Gimp, Wils, RR2DO2 and Locki (it was the Royal Fuck that did that to my eyes honest!)

Already fairly tipsy having spent much of the evening with Robert Duffy, Graeme Devine, Mr Elusive, Kenneth Scott and Eric and from id Software, we were joined by Ritual Entertainment (developers of Sin, and the fantastic new FAKK2) head honcho Mark Doctermann and CEO Ron Dimnant (both of which provided an excellent insight in to game design). From GameSpy we also drank beer with Hellchick and Sal (I think we’re all falling in love with Hellchick).

Mark Doctermann (and wife) and Ron Dimant of Ritual Entertainment, with Graeme Devine just to the right of the picture (top blokey is Graeme Devine!)

Mr Elusive himself - master of the bots!

The best part of the evening for me was being able to explain one of our latest ideas to Graeme Devine (who provided us with a very realistic feet-planted-squarely-on-the-ground critique) and Mr Elusive who spent a great deal of time helping us work out what exactly is and isn’t possible with the bot code - this was very important for us as our target is bot’s with strategy awareness, not just the ability to run about shooting weapons and occasionally target a func_goal item.

Important Note: If you’re ever lucky enough to find yourself in the company of id Software at their local hang-out, resist strongly the urge to accept Graeme Devine’s offer of a "Royal Fuck" cocktail :) I’m sure he was getting me back for missing his talk earlier in the day at QuakeCon.

At around 2am we headed back to id’s offices on Robert Duffy’s invitation to gather up some unused T-Shirts (all of which were unsoiled!) and watch Wils fail to play Duffy’s antique Robotron arcade game with any actual skill :)

Back at the Hotel we all decided Fluffy’s new alias would be Richard ‘I’m not just an artist’ Jolly, as whenever I introduced him to anyone as "this is Richard Jolly, our Lead Artist" he’d whinge about knowing how to code too :)

One of several signed copies of FAKK2, given to us by Ritual Head Honcho Mark Doctermann straight from the trunk of his car!

We also suddenly realised that after 3 days of trying to get invitations, and finally having been successful - we actually forgot to go to the Toga Party! Gah!!! Still we did get signed copies of FAKK2 from Mark Doctermann himself :)

I finally fell asleep at around 4am, leaving RR2DO2 trying to get FAKK2 working on his 4mb video card :) Bastard managed to get it working too!