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id Software Demos Rage On iPhone, Releases Source Code For Two Games
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!"
It was too dark to play in a well lit area, but the perfect game for playing with the lights out and surround sound. Too niche of an audience to experience the game that way I suppose.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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Proof of Concepts are usually built around one hardware model so they don't have to dick around spending tons of manhours making it work on a wide array of hardware/os'. I have an android, so understand that I say this with zero fanboyism, but Apple pretty much has a more or less single piece of hardware with very small variances in parts used. They could write the software to take advantage of the hardware and have a large number of devices be able to run it. Do that on an android phone and you basically have to pick _one_ phone to do it on. Again, I love Android but lets say they picked the XT720 (the one I have). Well, Cincinnati Bell is currently the only US carrier offering it. They would have a game that would run on a handful of phones. The iPhone just works for their PoC purpose.
Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.
Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.
Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.
...And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.
A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.
B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.
C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.