id Software Demos Rage On iPhone, Releases Source Code For Two Games 266
glenkim writes "Kotaku has posted their liveblog of the QuakeCon 2010 keynote, with some big announcements by game developer and Slashdot regular John Carmack. Highlights include a video of the id Tech 5 engine (aka Rage) running on the iPhone 4G at 60fps, with claims that it also runs on the iPhone 3GS. Carmack noted that performance on the iPhone was able to 'kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2.' He also announced the source code release of two games, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Also, Carmack finally admitted that Doom 3 was too dark!"
Slashdot regular? (Score:1, Interesting)
What's his UID?
Commander Keen (Score:5, Interesting)
I want my Commander Keen!
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because there wasn't (Score:5, Interesting)
The engine was a total flop. It didn't look very good, personally I'd say Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004) looked better, and especially for the hardware it required. When Unreal Engine 3 came out, it was done. The complete list of games on the Doom 3 engine is:
Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
Quake 4
Prey
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Wolfenstein (the new one from 2009)
And Brink is using it, scheduled for 2011. That's it. 5 titles, one expansion for the whole engine. Compare this to the about 100-150 games for Unreal Engine 3. Games devs just did not care for iD Tech 4 (the Doom 3 engine) at all.
Re:No it was just too dark (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem was that the shadows were hard. The the real world, light bounces. This is why if you turn on a flashlight, you can see things in the room not in the beam. Light bounces off one surface, then off another and so on. You can simulate this via radiosity on computers. Problem is that is real expensive computationally. You don't do it in realtime. So generally what most games do is a cheap global illumination. There is an all pervasive amount of light applied to everything, and then specific dynamic lighting.
Well in Doom 3, there was no GI, and all light bounced only once. So anything directly illuminated, you saw. However anything else, was completely dark. Shadows were complete, there was no shadowed corner where things were visible, but barely.
I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.
Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? (Score:3, Interesting)
It was actually pretty poor. I guess you you'd never played Tribes, or any of the Battlefield games you could think it was good... but Battlefield: 2142 basically did everything ET:QW did, with better balance, and was released earlier.
The funny thing is that the original Enemy Territory game on the Wolfenstein engine was actually really innovative. But by the time Quake Wars came out, everything they did was old-hat and they didn't improve on it at all. (And in some ways, they anti-improved on it! The grid system for laying out deployables? Welcome to 1995. Even 1997's Tribes let you plop them down anywhere there was a slightly-flat surface.)
Basically, it sold poorly because the balance wasn't very good, nothing in the experience was new, and since it was a latecomer it didn't have the established playerbase of games with identical features they had been released before it.
Re:That's because there wasn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Story goes that when Rage was demoed at the latest E3, the UT engineers walked out of the demo shaking their heads.
iPhone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Screw the iPhone, John. When will ID have an Android version?
The super AMOLED screen on my Captivate is begging For a good game.
Necron69
Re:Commander Keen (Score:2, Interesting)
Several years ago I asked him the same question by phone. Basic story was that his copy of the Commander Keen projects were lost during a move into their new offices, but someone else (Romero) might still have a copy. He also shared that the source code was very simplistic, almost embarrassing at the time we spoke, and that anyone with a little motivation could make a better game engine. Good point, but I still think it should be made available for historical purposes if anyone still has it. I bet comments in the code are just as humorous as the game itself :-D
Re:That's because there wasn't (Score:0, Interesting)
Honestly was I the only one who WASN'T surprised when iD sold to Bethesda (and whoever their corporate overlord is. I forget.) I mean seriously after Tech 4 iD seemed pretty irrelevant. Carmack's been wasting all his time on the rocketry thing (which is cool and all, but he really should've retired from iD and let some fresh blood take over)
iD the independent was cool when they were balls down enough to stay serious about their games, but honestly once everyone started breaking up after Quake (Q2?) to go do their own things, the team that made iD great was gone and they were pretty much riding on their prior shareware fame. Much like shareware, it's time iD faded into obscurity.
Re:No it was just too dark (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.
On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.
Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!
In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.
Re:That's because there wasn't (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder what effect this may have on a future source code release of id Tech 5.
Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's funny: I always wanted Doom 3 in the Doom 1 engine. It would have been a faster, tighter, more enjoyable game.
The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, textures are usually a bunch of smaller files. So your rocks will have some various rock textures, your roads will have some road textures and so on. There are placed on objects and tessellated as needed. The potential problem is it means things can look too much the same. I mean say I have only one rock texture and every rock gets it. They'll all look an awful lot a like in that case.
So the idea with megatexture is you don't do that. Instead you have one single texture for all the ground, and probably all the world geometry. There is no repetition, no tessellation. As with the real world, everything is unique. The game engine then handles swapping in what parts of this massive texture are actually needed at a given time.
Neat idea I'll say that, remains to be seen how it works. Ultimately there's got to be artists behind things and their time is money. Will they really design everything from scratch, or will they do copy-paste but just in the image editor rather than in the game engine? I'm also not sure how it interacts with shaders. These days more and more of games are procedural, meaning you describe things with programs that run on the GPU. I haven't seen if you can have shaders and apply them to given things (like a metal shader that makes metal shiny) or if you have to have one giant displacement map, specular map, and so on.
Re:No it was just too dark (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I have to totally disagree, and I know what I'm talking about, having both developed 3D game engines professionally, and having used real high-refresh rate CRT monitors.
The thing is that a moving object on the screen can only be seen at a single static position with each frame. With 24fps, those positions are far apart, say, several centimeters on the screen. A human can track a moving object with their eyes quite accurately. In a real-life scene the moving object will be sharp and the background motion blurred. However, with a computer screen, the movement is an illusion. The eyes try to track something that isn't actually moving, so the object will appear to be blurred, because it's effectively a part of the 'background' around it. It's not physically moving. At low framerates, the eye's tracking capability can become confused, as the moving object seems to jump from place to place, resulting in a perceptible flickering.
This blurring can be made invisible if the object moves only about 1 pixel per frame*, because then the temporal resolution matches the spatial resolution. This can be achieved if either the movement is slow, or if the refresh rate is high. In movies you'll notice that panning is usually done slowly to keep the movement rate low, but this isn't something that can be done, in say, a 3D shooter, where movement rates are under the player's control and can be arbitrarily high.
I've played 3D games with a true 120fps monitor, and it's amazing how much smoother it makes the game feel. The 60fps of LCDs were a real step backwards in quality, which is why many manufacturers are now selling 'gamer optimized' LCDs with lower resolutions but faster refresh rates.
*) or for very high resolution displays, movement smaller than the angular resolving power of the human eye per frame would work as well.
Re:No it was just too dark (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Commander Keen (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot regular? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty impressive three digit ID.
As far as regularity goes, I read /. every day but comment infrequently... I'd suggest that different people use /. differently.