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John Carmack On RAGE For iOS/Android
Andrew Smith writes "John Carmack has an article up on the Bethesda blog discussing the iPhone/iPad version of RAGE, which is said to run at an impressive 60fps. 'Managing over a gig of media made dealing with flash memory IO and process memory management very important, and I did a lot of performance investigations to figure things out. Critically, almost all of the data is static, and can be freely discarded. iOS does not have a swapfile, so if you use too much dynamic memory, the OS gives you a warning or two, then kills your process. The bane of iOS developers is that "too much" is not defined, and in fact varies based on what other apps (Safari, Mail, iPod, etc) that are in memory have done. If you read all your game data into memory, the OS can’t do anything with it, and you are in danger. However, if all of your data is in a read-only memory mapped file, the OS can throw it out at will.' And a tweet by Carmack yesterday suggests that an Android version of RAGE is on the way too."
Is he angry about Android?
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
What is up with that?
RAGE is a 3D game engine that ID has been developing, as well as a title of similar name. If it is everything they say it is, it may replace Unreal Tournament as the default go-to 3D engine for upcoming game development.
The ______ Agenda
a port to our favorite penguin-powered platform is imminent? I think I recall ID telling us there'd be no linux version of RAGE technology!
I wasn't aware it was available on any platform as of yet. Where is the game?
id Software's engine is called "id Tech 5", and is being used in a game called "RAGE". Epic Game's engine is called Unreal Engine 3. id Tech 5 may become one of the more popular commercial game engines, if it proves as technically impressive as Carmack suggests, and has good tools, but I don't think many people expect it to eclipse the Unreal Engine's current status. If anything, CryEngine3 will probably start getting a lot more popular after Crytek releases their free-to-use version, to compete with the Unreal Development Kit and Unity for indie game developers.
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
To break down the question: Why do we need this much fps in a game on a ~4 inch screen?
To understand the importance of the question, we need to understand how human eye works, and how it processes images.
Essentially, we have two kinds of cells in our eye capable of sensing light. One is capable of sensing shades of gray, and other senses a certain color (there are three different cells in this category, sensing different light wavelengths). Notably, cells sensing shades of gray can track many more image changes/second then those sensing colors due to their original purpose - tracking movement (for hunter-prey scenarios). Another thing to note is that while focus of our vision, the area that covers a very small center zone of our field of view houses vast majority of the cells that can sense colors, most of the gray-sensing cells are housed outside focus, in area of peripheral vision.
As a result, when you play a game on a large screen at home, a large portion of the screen's image is sensed by the area out of focus, and when your frame per second counter is below 60ish, the out-of-focus area begins to see separate images, while your focus still sees the flowing animation. This is what causes the uncomfortable discrepancy during high motion scenes when viewer still sees the fluid animation in his focus, but his peripheral vision doesn't, making the image look "choppy".
Now, enter mobile phones. The screen is actually small enough to mostly, if not entirely fit into our focus. This drastically cuts the need for high fps.
So why is Carmack talking about 60 fps on a graphics engine designed for phones? Is he actually clueless about the issue, is it marketing speak, or does he simply want to advertise to developers who may not be as familiar with the issue as he himself is?
It won't eclipse Unreal Engine's status. id Tech 5 will not be licensed to 3rd party developers and publishers. You want to license id Tech 5? You have to publish through Bethesda.
Someone metamoderate the moderator '-5 no sense of humour'.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
idTech 5 isn't going to compete with UE3. They aren't going to license it to other developers (except those publishing through Bethesda) mainly because it's too much hassle to support and they'd rather be in the business of making games than supporting engines.
Mada mada dane.
And I'm sure you also are capable of telling the difference between a CD and an MP3 encoded at 192kbps variable as well. Apart from a small minority of people that get headaches you shouldn't be able to notice a difference until you get down to at least 30fps or so and probably under 24fps.
John Carmack is the id Software guy and id does games('does' used loosely). So we;re talking bout games.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I'd prefer that id spend a little more time on GAME, less on getting said product to run on the phone in your pocket.
I mean, have you actually PLAYED the last 3 crap titles from id? Bleargh.
I will always respect id for what they invented for computer gaming. The number of hours I wasted trying to control Canalzone alone....
But really, they haven't produced a game worth PLAYING since Quake2.
-Styopa
Not that anybody will want to license id Tech 5. Only one non-iD/Bethesda game used id Tech 4: Prey.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
World size, monster count, AI, texture size. If you get it wrong your back to MS 640p Halo and are named and shamed.
Real big new games need real power ie gpu over large displays, cpu, physics, sounds, AI, networking.
This is why I don't buy console games. Something has to give to get it working on a few $10's worth of chips and its the stuff that makes a 'new' game worth playing imho.
Do you really want to be playing a PPC "Apple Mac" port in 2011?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
iOS does not have a swapfile, so if you use too much dynamic memory, the OS gives you a warning or two, then kills your process. The bane of iOS developers is that "too much" is not defined, and in fact varies based on what other apps (Safari, Mail, iPod, etc) that are in memory have done
That clearly reminds me PalmOS (the 3.0 to 3.5 Palm time), where you didn't even have enough RAM allocated dynamically to be able to do such a simple thing as decompressing a Gif file (the lookup table didn't fit in it). Like with the iOS now, the doc was pretty much not clear about how much RAM you could allocate when running an application, but we finally found that we could only count on 32MB !!! So, at the end, after 10 years, phone operating systems didn't evolve much in terms of stupidity... :)
The quad-core PC, fancy GPU and gigs of RAM allow you to run your PC game at a much higher resolution and graphic quality than any current-gen console. If all you want is 1280x720 with no antialiasing, you can probably get away with a dinky $50 graphics card.
Personally, I like playing flashy games on 3 WQHD monitors with all the sliders maxed out. That's 12 times more dots than a standard HDTV, and a bit more rendering detail due to AA/AF postprocessing, so it's understandable that such ridiculous graphics would require expensive high-end hardware. It's not required to just play the thing if you have more reasonable expectations than I.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
surely 01/01/01 (that's 2001) would be nine (almost ten!) years old, and therefore unable to read the article.
honestly, I didn't die hunting down and exterminating mutants like you in the Ed Yourdon milita just to have to tolerate slurs like that!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Each iteration of id Tech always tended to be designed for the game being made and not as a flexible engine, so basically anything that used it was more of an extension of the game id put out (which is to say, a shooter). I've only seen the open source code, but generally id's engines are much cleaner and easier to use than, say, Gamebryo, but Gamebryo has a lot more flexibility (and is a frightening mass of buggy code from when I used it, but that was before it was called Gamebryo, so I'm not sure where it stands today... judging by Oblivion/Fallout/etc, it is still a mess). I have not had any meaningful time to look at Unreal Engine code so I don't know where that one stands, but from word of mouth I'd heard it was a lot cleaner than Gamebryo, but not quite as feature-rich (again, that was a few years ago - Unreal may have caught up).