Carmack Shows Off the id Tech 5 Engine 104
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.'"
Consoles? (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine Final Fantasy XI on the Nintendo DS.
Re:Cmparisons? (Score:3, Interesting)
When they were showcasing the Doom 3 technology several years ago it looked amazing and outstanding and Rage looks the same way too. Now the problem is game play, Doom 3 game play was pretty much non-existent, it was a simple shooter with awesome graphics, no real story or plot to help carry it. And you can argue that id software has never really had much of a story or plot to drive their games but thats expected now. When Doom, Quake, Quake 2 came out you could still get away without having a story or plot to help drive the game. When Half-Life came out they had great looking graphics and a story to help drive it. It raised the bar in FPS games. Quake 3 rolled into the stores and id software was able to bypass the story and plot by simply making it mostly an online game with really basic single player mode. By Doom 3 that wasn't going to fly, and I would say that most of you would agree with me on this, but Doom 3 sucked big time. It looked amazing but playing it was just a joke.
They can showcase all the technology they want. As a gamer that wont buy me over anymore. Games are like a book. The cover can look amazing but what counts is whats in the writing. The cover is the graphics and the writing is the game play, plot, story, etc. Id software tends to leave out the writing and bank on graphics and that wont buy me over this time.
Everything Old Is New Again (Score:3, Interesting)
The new texture technology that JC is demonstrating is fascinating but it really is a neat new twist on a much older trick - using tile-able textures to build up a much larger map, and then using overlays to take it further and make it less predictable.
The basic landscape is built up at some reasonable level of detail for distance shots, with whatever geometry the modeller wants. Then the new techniques are applied to any polygon, anywhere. From the videos, there is a part where JC takes a texture, paints it on either side of the track. At this point, you can see that it really is square tiles - maybe 128x128 in the demo but I suspect it is arbitrary. Then these tiles are blended against other tiles and it's no longer so obvious what is going on. Then the overlays are painted on over the top to provide unique details.
Now - the backend technology to cache all of these separate layers together must be pretty impressive to ensure that the view doesn't stutter as you pan the view. Using this level of organisation for the textures is akin to a smart compression routine, except you are identifying common elements right up front in the form of texture tiles, rather than trying to do it after the fact.
I'd pay serious money to get my hands on the level editors for this tech - but I don't think my salary will stretch to a ID license fee.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:Carmack is the real deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cmparisons? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cmparisons? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah but exactly where were they going to go from Doom 2? It's not like the doom series was big on story to begin with, and I would have to say that as a gaming experience Doom 3 and its expansion was FAR from bad, Doom 3 had some of the most scary and memorable bosses, I agree the story wasn't very cohesive or convincing but it was hardly bad.
The level design was very good and the art was stellar, the real problem was with not breaking up the constant monotony with interesting revelations, etc.
I love how people love to bag on Doom 3 but ignore Halo and Halo 2, the orignial halo's story... sucked real badly! People just get a boner over master chief and cortana. They ripped off the flood from the countless Aliens movies and also from half life, many of the aliens in Halo near the end looked awfully like the ones Half-life 2.
Doom 3 was a pure action game, it wasn't the best but it was by far a lot better then a lot of stuff out there. They nailed the fear factor pretty good in Doom 3 in my opinion.
Re:Cmparisons? (Score:1, Interesting)
Basically, complaining that the id 5 engine isn't good because it's lighting looks a bit weird is like complaining that, for example, Unreal 3's engine is bad because you don't like the textures. Lighting and shaders in modern games are as flexible as textures were in previous generations of games.
In contrast, this kind of virtualized texture approach is completely novel. It's not just about dynamically loading data as you move through the level. The idea is that texture artists don't need to worry about how much space their textures take up. You can quite literally have a level with gigabytes of textures, and have that displayed on a system with only 256MB of video memory. In fact, you can have 1GB of textures just for the stuff on screen, and still have that displayed on a system with only 256MB of video memory.
Carmack engines too specialized? (Score:4, Interesting)
Quake 3 had curved surfaces, no other major engine since then has had curved surfaces.
Doom 3 had a unified lighting model, Rage does not. The unified lighting caused some pitch black areas and made it harder too make large outdoor type levels.
Rage has unified texturing, which makes it harder to use specialized shaders on some surfaces. Other than the texturing and the much better development tools, I don't see much new?