Carmack Shows Off the id Tech 5 Engine

MojoKid writes "id's keynote address from this past week's Quakecon featured John Carmack revealing details of the id tech 5 engine. For more on the subject, GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with id developer Steve Nix about the project. 'I know that when we started working with Splash Damage on Enemy Territory they wanted large, detailed outdoor terrains, and they had some ideas on how to dynamically load the textures and everything, and John [Carmack] said, 'Why don't we try this new approach and make the entire terrain one massive texture, and then just load blocks of texture in dynamically that you can see at any one given time?' So John did the initial work on it, got it up and running, and it just so happened that that work was the basis for what we have in id Tech 5.'"

Carmack is the real deal.

[spocksbrain]

I cannot put into words how awesome John Carmack is. A true pioneer in video game graphics.

Re:Carmack is the real deal.

[mrchaotica]

I cannot put into words how awesome John Carmack is.

And he's even more awesome because he GPLs his old code!

Re:Cmparisons?

[GeckoX]

How can we discuss gameplay when we're not even talking about a game?

The discussion is about game engines, NOT games themselves.

Thus the GP's request to compare 3 game engines, not games.

Given that, what about what gameplay?

Re:Only load what you need: a new concept?

[GeckoX]

Memory footprint of these extremely large textures was prohibitive in the past. Originally this just wasn't possible.

In the beginning, very small textures were all that could be used, and they were tiled everywhere. Ever since then, the workable size of textures has been slowly increasing...but the old habit of breaking things down into small(ish) textures remained.

Technological advances and an 'aha!, we can do that now!' lead to advances such as this that to some might appear 'obvious', when in fact, since they hadn't been done before, weren't so obvious after all.