MTV Multiplayer: How is multi-platform development going for “Rage”? Have you reconciled the differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3?
Carmack: Yeah, we’ve got a really good technical solution for that. Our current technology base is all built from the ground up to support this. And there is a little bit of least common denominator-ing, where usually the PS3 becomes the sticky point in terms of [being] a little bit slower on the graphics, you’ve got a little bit of less memory to deal with but a little bit more processing power. So you kind of have to balance the things between all of that. But our important fundamental decisions do have to be made around what’s going to work on the console, even though people with the very highest end PCs might have a system with a couple times the processing power of what a console has. We can’t do anything specifically focused towards that that would be in any way detrimental to the rest of the market.
MTV Multiplayer: Have you resolved the disc space issue with the Xbox 360 version?
Carmack: It is multiple discs. We think that it’s going to cram onto two discs right now. We’ve been spending a lot of effort on an extra compression method for it, and profiling where we can cut on that. We haven’t made a final call yet about whether we would actually compress things differently for the PS3, which could have a little bit higher quality. But there’s a lot of picky issues on that where the smaller we make it on disc, the faster it loads and other benefits like that. So if we get it to look decent on the 360 on two discs, we’ll probably leave it with that data set on the PS3, but we won’t make that decision final for another six months or so.