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!"

Comments

Doom3 to dark?

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[F34nor]

What has a light side and a dark side and holds the universe together?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[stevenvi]

Oreo cookies?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[childprey]

duct tape?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Blakey Rat]

Now he should apologize for the hilariously outdated use of monster closets, terrible storyline, idiotic directorial decisions (no flashlight on guns, only 60 seconds of air!!) and extreme "meh"-ness of the entire Doom 3 experience.

Normally, you're happy when a game experience lasts 20+ hours. With Doom 3 it was more like, "there's more? Fuck me!" Especially after you beat the boss from hell, and have to go *back* to Mars for another few hours of tedium.

Commander Keen

[phrostie]

I want my Commander Keen!

No it was just too dark

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:No it was just too dark

[bertok]

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.

Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!

In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.

Re:No it was just too dark

[binarybum]

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

Thanks a lot you insensitive clod - I did that and the bat living up there came down and bit me.

Re:Slashdot regular?

[Sir_Lewk]

101025

That's because there wasn't

[Sycraft-fu]

The engine was a total flop. It didn't look very good, personally I'd say Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004) looked better, and especially for the hardware it required. When Unreal Engine 3 came out, it was done. The complete list of games on the Doom 3 engine is:

Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
Quake 4
Prey
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Wolfenstein (the new one from 2009)

And Brink is using it, scheduled for 2011. That's it. 5 titles, one expansion for the whole engine. Compare this to the about 100-150 games for Unreal Engine 3. Games devs just did not care for iD Tech 4 (the Doom 3 engine) at all.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[MaxBooger]

The Rage engine, however, should be a different matter entirely. The MegaTexture tech gives developers the capability of porting their present-day Xbox360 and PS3 games to the Xbox4 and PS4 platforms with an immediate boost to graphic quality. If id is smart enough, they will have the game code separate from the engine code. Hell, if they do that, id might do the porting for free. In fact, that might make solid business sense, given the value that id has in the megatex tech. Keep the engine code binary-only.

Story goes that when Rage was demoed at the latest E3, the UT engineers walked out of the demo shaking their heads.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Quarters]

Megatexturing was backported into idtech4 for Quake Wars. While idtech5 looks sexy id made an announcement that will make many developers wary of the engine. Idtech5 can only be licensed if a developer publishes through Bethesda (http://www.geek.com/articles/games/id-tech-5-will-only-be-used-for-bethesda-published-games-20100812/.

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.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine "flopped" because id didn't push it as a commercial engine in the same way they did with id Tech 3. They had been there, dealt with the tech support for external devs and companies, and found they just didn't want to do that again. Aside from a couple of close-knit companies there was no encouragement to use it. Epic, on the other hand, took the corporate angle, focused on building and marketing a sellable engine, and provided a commercial support network that encouraged lots of reuse.

But yeah, don't let the facts get in the way of a good beat-up.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[dan828]

You forgot Duke Nukem Forever! It's going to use the Doom 3 engine!

Re:and why no guns with a flash light on them or d

[jgagnon]

http://www.duckbrand.com/Products/duck-tape.aspx

Re:iPhone?

[rotide]

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.

Re:iPhone?

[Purity Of Essence]

According to GameSpot:

Next up is Android. Carmack asked people in the crowd how many people had Androids (a vocal minority, he assessed), and how many had spent more than $20 in the phone's app store. He said he's been checking regularly to see how popular the phones are, and it's to the point where Carmack is starting to think about when the company will bring its products to the platform. It's probably not going to be in the next six months, he said.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6273388.html

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[aiht]

I disagree. I don't think that post is wearing a uniform at all.

Re:iPhone?

[Darkness404]

...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.

The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stuff

[Sycraft-fu]

Right now, textures are usually a bunch of smaller files. So your rocks will have some various rock textures, your roads will have some road textures and so on. There are placed on objects and tessellated as needed. The potential problem is it means things can look too much the same. I mean say I have only one rock texture and every rock gets it. They'll all look an awful lot a like in that case.

So the idea with megatexture is you don't do that. Instead you have one single texture for all the ground, and probably all the world geometry. There is no repetition, no tessellation. As with the real world, everything is unique. The game engine then handles swapping in what parts of this massive texture are actually needed at a given time.

Neat idea I'll say that, remains to be seen how it works. Ultimately there's got to be artists behind things and their time is money. Will they really design everything from scratch, or will they do copy-paste but just in the image editor rather than in the game engine? I'm also not sure how it interacts with shaders. These days more and more of games are procedural, meaning you describe things with programs that run on the GPU. I haven't seen if you can have shaders and apply them to given things (like a metal shader that makes metal shiny) or if you have to have one giant displacement map, specular map, and so on.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[naz404]

Serious Sam HD 1 & 2.

In a gaming world now dominated by Counterstrikey FPSs, Serious Sam is a throwback to the days of Doom when waves and waves of enemies are just thrown at you. The classic running and gunning bass-ackwards is still a valid tactic in this game :)

Best of all, story mode coop play is supported, a feature missing in most games nowadays.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[ToasterMonkey]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

Uh, without traveling back in time to the 90's PC game market?

Re:Slashdot regular?

[pez]

Pretty impressive three digit ID.

As far as regularity goes, I read /. every day but comment infrequently... I'd suggest that different people use /. differently.