Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Look on the bright side -- she'll still be smiling even when you get close to her.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Here's a few videos of Carmack talking about it:
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
RegardselFarto
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.
And he's even more awesome because he GPLs his old code!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I hear he liquefies all his food in a blender because he considers chewing inefficient.
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.
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!
Sorry you're completely wrong. The mega texture itself is not based on tiles, that's just how they author it. It all gets baked out into a single completely unique texture at the end. So the initial large scale detail really is hugely detailed and extremely high res. Tiling is just a way of quickly painting terrain for outdoor areas, and then you can use an unlimited number of overlays (because they get baked out into the texture) to for example stamp out rocks and stuff to break up the surface. You can easily envision having a mode where you hit a key which brings a screenshot up into photoshop, you edit it however you want, and then project it back into the scene.