The Technology Behind ID's Games

orac2 writes: "The current issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on the groundbreaking technology behind iD Software's games, from the days of Commander Keen through to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Graphics technologies covered include the original 2-D buffer trick that made side-scrolling games on the PC feasible, as well as the more modern Raycasting and Binary Space Partition Tree techniques. Carmack is quoted extensively."

Comments

Carmack IS God!

[casings]

I mean, hes not only a very good programmer, he looks like a computer dork, has a phat car, and actually cares what the community thinks about his games. As was the case when there was such a backlash about fixing the bug in the engine of quake2 that produced the strafe jump, he changed it, uproar ensued, he changed it back.

Carmack embodies what every programmer and any kind of computer company should strive to be.

Carmack has embraced the platform-generic opengl, and even coded his engine to be compatible on every major os. I love you carmack, please have my love child.

I MEAN C'MON hes the one responsible for such things as the infamous railgun, and the hilarious warnings about piracy on my copied version of wolf3d, which i still play on my 386 laptop.

The Evolution of the id Engine

[death00]

"There were critical points in the evolution of this stuff," Carmack says, "getting into first person at all, then getting into arbitrary 3-D, and then getting into hardware acceleration....But the critical goals have been met. There's still infinite refinement that we can do on all these different things, but...we can build an arbitrary representational world at some level of fidelity. We can be improving our fidelity and our special effects and all that. But we have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world."

This article highlights how far we have come as game developers. id has been the "poster child" of the game development community, with the majority of other game developers following their lead. Doom III will continue this trend.

The next generation of games is going to be outstanding!

This article gives a great view of where we can be going with new technology. How realistic will games be in 10 years? My guess is that the graphic reality will become nearly indistinguishable from real life, but the greatest innovations will be in game-play. Interfacing with a keyboard/mouse/joystick isn't realistic. Voice control and force-feedback-like technologies are the way of the future, if our computing power can support it.

Kudos to Carmack on 10 years of FPS game design. Here's to the next 10!

Re:Not new or groundbreaking

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean where it says in the article "The answer was a technique known as binary space partitioning (BSP). Henry Fuchs, Zvi Kedem, and Bruce Naylor had popularized BSP techniques in 1980 while at Bell Labs to render 3-D models of objects on screen. "

The point is that Carmack brought it to the world of PC games,

Softdisk

[Sean Clifford]

For those interested:

I joined Softdisk in 1995, a few years after the id guys left. The company was stunned by the success of Wolfenstein and Doom, and by Duke Nukem - also born of Softdisk alumni. It was basically a subscription software company, selling a package (card games, screen savers, etc.) on disk monthly. It was a good model for the 80's.

Softdisk tried to produce a couple of games, one called Greed (later In Pursuit of Greed) which was basically a 3D Doom-clone shooter. There was some neat technology (e.g. curved surfaces), but the art was...uh, well weak. The gameplay was decent, but there were some bugs to stomp and the ship date slipped...and slipped...and slipped. It was released, but didn't live up to the hype. The game was torn to shreds in the reviews. There was a second 3D shooter - developed totally in house, though it was basically a one-man project. The lead (only) programmer left, so it was shelved.

Softdisk finally shut down its on-disk-monthly subscription software and became an ISP/web development company. It was a necessary move, but sad since the company kicked a lot of ass in the 80's with LoadStar and Big Blue Disk.

For those interested, I ran Softdisk's online download software stores on CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL while another dude took care of eWorld. We were selling Commander Keen, Dangerous Dave, and a host of other early games the id guys produced at Softdisk. Last I checked, they were still being sold (at $19.95 a pop, even).

Re:Man... Carmack is 31

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, programming at 7? You must have been a real prodigy.

To program even the slightest bit, you have to understand boolean algebra and know basic mathematical things like recursion. I myself learned to do some real programming when I was 11 (i.e. more than just ifs, I mean calculating something with loops, recursion (though it took 2 more before recursion was a part of my natural programming repertoire) etc.), because before that I didn't have the basic mathematical tools to implement algorithms (and even though I tried to ask my father for help, he wasn't able to explain it at my level...).

Also, if you've programmed for 20 years I'm quite sure you know how to spell "algorithm". There's one guy at the computer science department at the university where I'm studying who was doing demos at the age of 11 (and he actually invented some effects of his own). He has also competed in the IMO and stuff like that, so his quite good in maths (though I've been there once too, but I didn't manage to solve many problems ;)). So I don't think there are that many people who have done anything at younger age.

And fact is that a smart programmer gets better the older he gets. That is if you keep coding. Many people tend to move away to management and they actually start to get worse.

Carmack's real innovation - 2 3/4 D

[Animats]

Carmack's real innovations were in ways to do something that looked like general 3D but wasn't, quite. So his games did things that are easy now, but were really tough on the hardware he did them on.

Flight Simulator pioneered this sort of limited 3D. Bruce Artwick did the original Flight Simulator on machines that didn't have enough power to fill the whole screen with a solid color in one refresh. He wrote a book about how he did it in 1985. The pain, the agony...

Artwick seems to have dropped out of game development, but Carmack keeps pushing what's possible with available hardware.

What About "Descent"?

[SpryGuy]

I seem to recall that "Descent" had arbitrary 3D (along with MAPPING!, which the Quake series simply doesn't have) way way before it ever came out in any id software games.

How come the Descent series doesn't get any respect? There's some AWESOME graphics in them thar games! Smooth indoor/outdoor transitions, even rain on your windshield, not to mention a full six degrees of freedom in moving about.

I loved those games.

Re:What About "Descent"?

[Quantum Skyline]

Personally, I think the guys at Parallax/Interplay are geniuses, although if I remember correctly, Descent 1 came out after Doom 2. But then I'm biased since I own Descent 1, 2, 3 and the Mercenary add on, as well as Descent Freespace, the Silent Threat addon, and Freespace 2. Anyway, here's my promo for Descent:

The key to Descent was the fact that you could simultaneously move in three directions with control. You couldn't do that in any of the Doom clones. There was an original way of thinking: a space shooter with constraints on where you could fly. Most shooters and doom have a map which is essentially 2D. Descent forced you to fly in corridors which could bend at any angle. The map was based on a cube instead of a square, and the cube could be modified to look like a 3D trapezoid. Descent had a 3D map which requires being able to view it in 3D at multiple angles to be able to figure out where you had to go. You had an original storyline that went from Descent 1 through 3. Descent 3 went on to allow movement between two environments (inside and out) and was much more of a thinking game than was Quake or Doom or the earlier Descent incarnations. Forsaken tried to copy the original Descent versions, but fizzled quickly.

Creating a level is easy (anybody remember Devil?) and the newer versions shipped with mission builders. The levels you got from Interplay's Levels of the World contest were hard, but awesome (and in the case of Freespace, those levels were integrated into Silent Threat).

Its a crying shame...Descent 4 has been shut down. But the Descent series IMHO, was groundbreaking. I'm glad to find someone who agrees with me.

Re:How depressing...

[Vulture_]

So, rendering engine improvement is essentially incremental from here?

I believe that, eventually, games will use real-time ray tracers as their rendering engines. This is as different from Quake as Quake is from Doom. It also seems inevitable because of what can be done with it -- most notably lighting/shadow effects, but you also get true curved surfaces, as opposed to the (admittedly very good) approximations used by Quake 3's curved surface support. Ray tracing is also easily SMP-able.

Or perhaps I'm completely off kilter and ray tracing is counterproductive and/or unnecessary. Anyone care to comment?