Rage and the Tech Behind id Tech 5 172
MojoKid writes "id Software's long-awaited FPS, Rage, is set to ship in October. When it launches, Rage will be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. id Tech 5 has evolved considerably since the company started talking about it four years ago, however. While it contains a number of additional features, MegaTexturing remains one of the game's most visible advances. MegaTexturing uses a single large texture to map the terrain of an entire area. Data from that texture is streamed in depending on where the player is standing and what's visible. Effects that would normally be blended in traditional tiled texturing can be baked into the megatexture and streamed off disc when needed. The advantage of megatexturing is that it allows artists to create unique environments rather than resorting to a variety of tricks to hide repetitive texture tiles."
id's Tim Willits spoke with Eurogamer about Rage's development, explaining how their goal of fast-paced action dictated certain design decisions. Rage will make use of Steamworks, but won't require a persistent connection for offline play. However, small parts of optional single-player content will only be available to players who buy the game new. Willits said, "Most people never find them. But as soon as you do, you're like, oh. And then you start to look for it. That's our first-time buyer incentive."
Long term Id fan here... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a long term Id fan here. Let me start by saying the latest id-Tech engine looks awesome, but the buck stops there. The story and the characters look pretty cardboard, when they should be amazing if we're applying the technology uniformly over every possible realm of creativity.
There's a kind of goofy appearance to things, and you can see the split-second jitter when scripted sequences switch between one sequence and the next.
Also this looks too campy. It seems like Id is really missing some of the grit that it had back when it was released Quake. They had Nine Inch Nails do the soundtrack and a lot of the sounds were created by Trent Reznor. All that stuff went away when John Romero left, or at least most of it just fell by the wayside when John Romero forgot he was a cool kid and started making cellphone games instead of gritty grindhouse type stuff.
This appears to be nothing more than an engine release that is dressed up a bit in order to sell the technology.
Look at Battlefield 3; that is the kind of game I expect from Id Software, but we get something kinda goofy.
I'd like to see what Valve would do with this engine if they licensed it -- but I'm not convinced Valve needs it.
No custom maps (Score:5, Interesting)
The unfortunate consequence of megatexturing is that nobody will be able to make custom maps for this. Carmack talked about needing an expensive server with 192GiB of RAM to compile the maps.
The technology is really impressive, but I can't imagine it being worth this. id has always been very friendly to the map/mod community—they're the last company I'd have expected this from.