Speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco yesterday, id engine wizard took to the stage to praise Apple's OS X platform from a game design perspective, with having re-committed their support for the platform earlier in the proceedings.

With more detailed news now filtering out of San Francisco we learn that id's new game engine was the demonstration revealed, and will be called Tech 5. As well as powering id's new games, Tech 5 will be available for third-party developers to license, and supports the PC, and - in addition to the Mac.

"Since many developers at id have made the switch to the for their personal use, we decided it was now time to bring our core game technology to OS X," Carmack beamed. "After a rapid bring up of the codebase, we were delighted to find that the latest Macs are the fastest systems in our offices for some of the time consuming processing jobs and will be contributing to our process in many useful ways."

Tech 5 promises detailed indoor environments and vast outdoor 'landscapes', with Carmack stating that the new technology almost eliminates texture memory constraints. Which sounds like a good thing.

More on Tech 5 and id's latest as we get it.

By Luke Guttridge