Armadillo’s Scorpius craft is the first in a field of entrants to successfully complete the requirements laid out by NASA, which involved ascending 164 feet, flying to a spot 164 feet away, landing, taking off then flying back to where it started. If neither of the two competing craft can satisfy the requirements by October 31, Armadillo will scoop the prize by default, which stands at a cool $US1 million.

And after the cash? Next stop, space.

“Since the Lunar Lander Challenge is quite demanding in terms of performance, with a few tweaks our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space,” says Carmack.

“We’ll be moving quickly to do higher-altitude tests, and we can go up to about 6000 feet here at our home base in Texas before we’ll have to head to New Mexico where we can really push the envelope. We already have scientific payloads from universities lined up to fly as well, so this will be an exciting next few months for commercial spaceflight.”

John Carmack’s Armadillo Finally Wins Lunar Landing Challenge [Gizmodo]

I learned about this key Rage feature a couple of weeks ago in Texas, as I was wrapping up a chat with three of the principals behind the new game from the makers of Doom and Quake. I’d learned why the developers had combined driving with shooting and was teased about a twist to the game not evident in the Rage demos being held for the press. But that was not enough and I asked for more.

“You might want to say that there are a lot of 12s in it,” Matt Hooper, the game’s design lead told me.

Tim Willets, Rage’s creative director laughed.

I’m sure I looked puzzled, so they relieved me of my confusion.

Hooper said he’d once been in a meeting with game industry executives. He was discussing a game and they wanted to know what the 12 moments in the game were. They didn’t mean “12″ as a number of moments, but “12″ as the level of quality of the game’s moments. Any moments that could be merely rated a quality of 10/10 weren’t enough. Even Spinal Tap level-11 moments would not suffice. No, the game would have to have moments that could be rated a 12.

So, yeah, Rage will have 12s.

Rage also does has driving, shooting and sparing use of monster closets, plus a similarity to Fallout 3, the last big game made by the company that just bought id.

The most striking novelty of Rage is the meshing of trademark id first-person shooting with driving gameplay, all set in a wasteland future of Earth. But while the combination is the critical element of the Rage’s gameplay design, Willets said its presence was part of an evolving creative process, not a master plan.

Willets recalled that the Rage development team, which is only about 40 people strong, small by the standards of today’s major game development efforts, began by considering the graphical possibilities of the company’s new id Tech 5. They recognised they could create beautiful and extensive landscape. And they had a problem.

“We’re like, ‘We don’t want to spend all this time making this really cool environment and having people auto-travel or just magically jump to the next level that they would play in,’” Willets said. They wanted gamers to see the sights — and like it. “We wanted the journey to be as much fun as the [action] when you get there. That led to: ‘OK, well we need cars. We’re going to want to have badass cars with guns.’ That led to this kind of muscle car feel with the kind of buggy formats as well. And then, once we had that, that was a natural jump to the racing. And if you win races, you have to reward the player. If you reward them they can buy cool stuff for these cars.” (Read about how all that is coming together in my Rage demo impressions from QuakeCon.)

Some part of that racing-shooting development evolution must have generated a 12. But there comes a risk, when making a game, that your 12s might be the same as someone else’s 12s. Say… the 12s of Bethesda, makers of their own (car-less) post-apocalyptic game that stars a character who also begins his or her adventure leaving a survival vault to discover a wasteland over-run by ragged people and mutants.

Don’t worry, the id guys said. Rage’s post-apocalypse won’t feel that much like Fallout 3. “I can guarantee you that our little interpretation of it — and the fundamentals and the core mechanics — are going to be different enough and feel a little different,” Hooper said. “It’s this action movie that you’re living through… we’re not trying to be an RPG. I think that’s why it’s going to end up being different.”

Fallout 3’s executive producer, Todd Howard, who I interviewed the same day as the Rage guys, let them off the hook. “They’ve had their own development path for a long time,” he said. “I think they’re obviously influenced by a lot of the same things that Fallout is influenced by. A lot of those are just post-apocalyptic things.” Bethesda and id are now owned by the same parent company, ZeniMax Media.

Rage will be different from Fallout 3 and also different from Doom 3, id’s last major game. There was one monster-closet joke that I saw in the demo of Rage that the id guys played for me. A dummy monster pops out of a closet for a mock scare. It’s a harmless callback to the criticized attack surprises featured in Doom 3. Though, Willets said, those monster closets in the game were a throwback of their own to the first Doom. Lesson learned? I pointed out to Willets that Doom 3 was not as warmly received as the first Doom. “Doom 3 did outsell all the other Dooms,” he said. “But Rage is so much different. It’s brighter. It’s more expansive. And there are no flashlights in Rage.” You know what that means: A whole new set of 12s.

As expansive as the visual scope and the virtual terrain for Rage may be, the creators of id’s new adventure talk about creating a streamlined game. “We don’t want to make this overwhelming game that you get frustrated with,” Hooper said. He wants that action movie pacing. Plus, he dropped this comment, whatever it suggests about how the game will evolve: “We want to the player to make meaningful choices.”

Most of the 12s in Rage remain a mystery. What I saw of the game and described a couple of weeks ago remains the extent of what id is publicly discussing about the project — well, short of this tease from art director Stephan Martiniere. “What I can say is a storm is coming,” he said. “From a bright blue sky where everything seems to be happy, suddenly clouds are starting to form. There’s going to be something ominous in the land that’s just going to start introducing itself.”

Could that be a 13?

To those who may not know what they are, “monster closets” were areas of a map where an enemy would be “hidden”, and only revealed when the player “triggered” them by opening a door, or walking to a certain point on the map. It was cheap, and quickly became a royal pain in the arse.

So for upcoming shooter Rage monster closets are no more. id’s Matt Hooper:

[In Rage] when you’re going to the RC-Bomb base [from the demo] to deal with the Shrouded clan they’re doing whatever they’re supposed to be doing. If they’re supposed to be defending against you coming there, they’ll be doing that. If they’re just tinkering or having a conversation they’ll do that. You will never see [a monster closet.]

Good news.

Carmack made those comments on Thursday, during the id co-founder’s QuakeCon 2009 keynote speech in Dallas (the event that spawned the Longest Liveblog In Kotaku History).

Early in his address, he admitted that Quake Live, the multiplayer in-browser web remake of Quake III Arena that went into open beta early this year, was not up to id’s standard yet. Leaderboards and more community functionality around the game need to be improved, he said. Later, he fielded a question from the audience about the future of the game.

Carmack said he did not think the game could survive on internet advertising alone; the only revenue generator currently in place. Instead, he believes it will be necessary for the financial wellbeing of the project to offer a premium version of the game, which might allow players to host games on their own servers. Web ads won’t suffice.

The Quake Live project is grander than Carmack said he had envisioned, which may be as much a factor in spurring this need for player payment as a weak online ad market. But the game, at its base, will remain free, he noted.

Carmack said the “beta” tag will be removed from the game soon, as problems with leaderboards and other technical issues are resolved. Mac and Linux versions are planned to go live this coming week.

Early in his talk, Carmack said that the next year would prove whether Quake Live is a success. Later, when answering that audience question, he said the game wouldn’t be able to be deemed a failure for two years. He hopes such a pronouncement won’t be necessary, of course.

He said the game has been popular, with half of those who register for it returning to play it at least once a month.

This experiment will continue with some tinkering that users may need to pay for.

The official Quakecon schedule is now available for public perusal and my personal calendar has been updated.

The event happens at the Gaylord Texan just next to the Dallas Fort Worth airport in Texas, from Thursday, August 13 – Saturday, August 15. Most people will attend to have LAN parties and shoot each other, virtually, to bits.

While part of the gaming world gets hyped for Madden during those days and some Kotaku colleagues will begin to calculate how many pairs of socks they’ll need to pack for their trip to Germany next week, I’ll be in Dallas. With thousands of gamers. And a batch of top developers who limit their names to three syllables.

Highlights for this Quakecon include id co-founder John Carmack’s keynote to the Doom/Quake/Rage faithful on Thursday.

3:30pm – Main Stage
id Software Press Conference
id Software welcomes thousands of attendees to QuakeCon 2009 and offers exclusive insight into the studio’s latest development projects and exciting announcements.

4:00pm – Main Stage
John Carmack Keynote
John Carmack, technical director of id Software, offers his annual keynote address and audience Q&A, with topics ranging from the state of graphics hardware and the development of idTech5, to his ventures into rocket science.

Expect id’s EA-published open-world shooter Rage to be a big part of the show. I expect to be checking it out.

And then on Friday, Splash Damage’s Paul Wedgwood shows up to do a public demo of the Bethesda-published Brink, followed by Bethesda lead designer Todd Howard speaking for an hour about who-knows-what.

There’s plenty more in the official schedule and some stuff marked on my calendar that I can’t publicise yet (work-related, I promise).

Local Dallas developers, I/Kotaku will have a couple of hours of free time on Wednesday.

Sadly, I’ll be en route to the airport on Friday late afternoon, when this happens:

4:00pm – 5:00pm – Exhibit Hall Event Stage
BAWLS Chugging Competition
If you think you have what it takes, be sure to join in on a QuakeCon tradition where daring attendees attempt to chug a can of Bawls as fast as possible. It’s all about bragging rights and winning one of those coveted Ultimate Power Up tickets.

While its August 18th release date is set in stone, some of Wolfenstein’s gameplay remains up in the air.

The latest entry in the Wolfenstein series features a sequence in which B.J. battles the supernatural side of the Third Reich inside of a giant zeppelin, one of those giant flying airships that everyone thought was a brilliant idea until the Hindenburg went belly up, caught on fire, and exploded. It looks like a great deal of fun, though I’m used to my airship battles being turn-based, so it might take a little getting used to.

And as part of their talk on “virtual texturing”, the company presented some new Rage screenshots, which were dutifully picked up by Shacknews. And my oh my are they pretty. I won’t try and sum up what virtual texturing actually means (it’s something to do with very, very large textures), since it all seems a bit technical, but if that sounds like good reading to you a pdf of id’s talk is at the link below.

Virtual Texturing [id, via Shacknews]

Okay, so it might not be THE Castle Wolfenstein, but it’s a castle in Activision’s upcoming Wolfenstein game, so we’re running with it.

Wolfenstein is, of course, another prequel to the game that started it all, Wolfenstein 3D. It may seem funny, this game being set before that relatively primitive example of 3D technology, but when you think about it it makes sense. Towards the end of World War 2, Germany had all but depleted their supply of polygons, and had to revert to pixels. True story.

In what’s becoming a frustrating norm for PS3 owners, id’s John Carmack has told Edge magazine that while the PC and 360 versions of Rage are running at a smooth 60 frames per second, the PS3 version is managing barely half that, clocking in at only 20-30 fps.

“The PS3 lags a little bit behind in terms of getting the performance out of it,” Carmack explains. “The rasteriser is just a little bit slower – no two ways about that.”

“The RSX is slower than what we have in the 360. The CPU is about the same, but the 360 makes it easier to split things off, and that’s what a lot of the work has been, splitting it all into jobs on the PS3″.

Shame. You’d think nearly three years into the console’s lifespan, someone would have figured out a way around this by now. Unless, you know, there is no way around it.

Carmack: Rage runs faster on Xbox 360 [Edge, via CVG]