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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.'"
Are they getting to expensive or are they just tired of nerds? Either way, I dislike the alternative.
Why bother.
I cannot put into words how awesome John Carmack is. A true pioneer in video game graphics.
Here's a few videos of Carmack talking about it:
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
RegardselFarto
The difference apparently is between dynamically loading a whole bunch of different textures (as-needed, which is the traditional way of doing things), and paging through 1 texture.
Screw the engine. What about game play?
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.
Previously, you had to break up your textures into blocks and manually load them as the player moved into the area covered by those textures. This new technology allows you to create one large texture for the entire level and have the game engine automatically break up the texture into blocks and dynamically load them for you.
It makes programming easier, because its one less thing to keep track of.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It also opens up the possibility to stream these textures in line-by-line, instead of block-by-block. No need to waste time/memory loading in a 2048x2048 texture of the next area as soon as it's barely visible if we can do it arbitrarily.
That's because it is DirectX9, atleast on the XBox360, OpenGL on the PC/Mac and OpenGL|ES/whatever else they use on the PS3.
RegardselFarto
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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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?
No Comment.
You're missing the point of the tech demonstrations. Depth of field, motion blurring, and HDR lighting are current-gen features and are commonly featured in games out today. He was rather focusing on the amount of detail (80 GB worth) that was dynamically loaded, and didn't rely on old "hacks" (detail textures heavily repeated over a lower-res diffuse map, etc) to create the illusion of detail at an acceptable frame rate. And do so while keeping the engine both portable and fast is icing on the cake.
That in itself is rather impressive. As an OpenGL developer, I'm no longer impressed by motion blur, volume shadows, and other textbook shaders/effects - I'm more impressed by this.
Sigs are for losers
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.
No Comment.
Eesh! Repeat. id do NOT make the games you want. id make ENGINES and games that showcase them.
A little harsh maybe, but basically correct. If you want a rip-roaring game with a smashing storyline, wait until the first game companies start licensing the tech from id. Until then, like me, you could do a lot worse than forgetting your high-minded, high-falluting city-slicker ambitions and just run around for a while, shooting every demon between you and the blue keycard.
How many shades of brown will the next Quake have? 32k? 64k? 4096k? That's all we really want to know!!
You want to talk wide open spaces. Talk about the military simulator VBS or it's civilian counterpart OPF/Arma. These games may not look the prettiest but they have hundreds of square miles of seamless terrain. Enough so that many branches of the U.S. military signed up for it several years in a row. It has cross sim technology that allows it to talk to other simulators. But most importantly it run a insane resolutions and has view distances that would make a 747 pilot jealous.
I really wish video game makers would get a little more realistic in their shooting games. Real (outdoor) warfare does not occur at 50ft, it happens at about 400 meters, that's almost so far that the guy you're shooting at looks like an ant. And that happens to be real life. Also, someone tell JC if someone is hiding behind a cinderblock wall and I shoot an 7.62 AK74 round at said wall and the bullet happens to land where someone is standing on the other side, they are dead. Bullets penetrate EVERYTHING except HEAVY ARMOR. That means if you shoot a house, someone on the other side of the house may get hit because the bullet penetrated every wall in the house. This is especially true for heavy machine guns (.50cal+) which can demolish a small house with a few dozen rounds.
Also, and almost as important, don't make stupid doors that have a fucking golf ball holding them shut, I just destroyed a god damn super monkey spider droid with a mega doppler 5000 hand blastron laser fink and I can't open this god damn door because someone wedged a golf ball under it's flimsy wooden frame. What's that you say? Don't go in there? It's not part of the level? DON'T MAKE THE FUCKING DOOR THEN! Did you think you had to follow the layout of Walter Reed hospital exactly? I won't care if there is a wall where there should be a janitors closet, just don't put a door in the level that can't be opened, especially a door with a window and a god damn wooden chair wedged under the door knob. BAD BAD BAD!! Anyone remember Red Faction? Where you could blow up the walls. What ever happen to that idea? What kind of future war training are we offering our children?! ->
Ted: Hey Jimmy hide behind those wooden pallets so the Chinese T80 main battle tank can't use it's HE round to kill you
Jimmy: Thank Ted! I'm not sure how long I could have lasted without that great advice
Jimmy, my friends, would be dead. AND PEOPLE LIKE JC ARE RESPONISBLE FOR HIS DEATH! MAKE VIDEO GAMES MORE REALISTEC NOW!! BEFORE JIMMY AND TED ARE DEAD!
I loved Doom 3. Everytime I played I would play at night w/ the lights off. I thought I was going to shit myself sometimes. Gameplay was not the greatest, but the atmosphere was amazing. That alone was worth playing it. Not too many games get that level of emersion from me.
"it was a simple shooter with awesome graphics, no real story or plot to help carry it."
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.
I'm sure Carmack is a great programmer, but his engines are specialized at doing one thing well at the expense of general flexibility. And the one special feature of the engine isn't even carried on to the next generation.
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?