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Rage and the Tech Behind id Tech 5
MojoKid writes "id Software's long-awaited FPS, Rage, is set to ship in October. When it launches, Rage will be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. id Tech 5 has evolved considerably since the company started talking about it four years ago, however. While it contains a number of additional features, MegaTexturing remains one of the game's most visible advances. MegaTexturing uses a single large texture to map the terrain of an entire area. Data from that texture is streamed in depending on where the player is standing and what's visible. Effects that would normally be blended in traditional tiled texturing can be baked into the megatexture and streamed off disc when needed. The advantage of megatexturing is that it allows artists to create unique environments rather than resorting to a variety of tricks to hide repetitive texture tiles."
id's Tim Willits spoke with Eurogamer about Rage's development, explaining how their goal of fast-paced action dictated certain design decisions. Rage will make use of Steamworks, but won't require a persistent connection for offline play. However, small parts of optional single-player content will only be available to players who buy the game new. Willits said, "Most people never find them. But as soon as you do, you're like, oh. And then you start to look for it. That's our first-time buyer incentive."
I'm a long term Id fan here. Let me start by saying the latest id-Tech engine looks awesome, but the buck stops there. The story and the characters look pretty cardboard, when they should be amazing if we're applying the technology uniformly over every possible realm of creativity.
There's a kind of goofy appearance to things, and you can see the split-second jitter when scripted sequences switch between one sequence and the next.
Also this looks too campy. It seems like Id is really missing some of the grit that it had back when it was released Quake. They had Nine Inch Nails do the soundtrack and a lot of the sounds were created by Trent Reznor. All that stuff went away when John Romero left, or at least most of it just fell by the wayside when John Romero forgot he was a cool kid and started making cellphone games instead of gritty grindhouse type stuff.
This appears to be nothing more than an engine release that is dressed up a bit in order to sell the technology.
Look at Battlefield 3; that is the kind of game I expect from Id Software, but we get something kinda goofy.
I'd like to see what Valve would do with this engine if they licensed it -- but I'm not convinced Valve needs it.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No. This requires a real computer not some "OOH SHINY!!!" piece of shit shat out by sweatshop workers and sold at 500% markup by our fine friends in Cupertino.
A la quakewars?
iPuked when you said that.
Wrong. There is an iOS version. See the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(video_game)
MegaTexture is utterly asinine. Rather than doing anything to ensure quality, it simply shifts all responsibility to the artists. It is a make-work project for artists and serves mainly to raise the cost of making a game.
You do realize that they're not the same game at all, and that the phone version was made just for phones, right?
There's already an iOS version, you creepy troll who will die alone.
You do realize that I said "version" and not "direct identical port" and that the AC is still wrong when he flat-out said "No" and that a "real computer" is required, because, in one form or another, Rage is available for iOS, right?
All I really know about id Tech 5 is that many posters here on slashdot claim to have seen previews and tech demos already, and they say it absolutely sucks.
I recall people saying it pales in comparison to any modern game engine, and in fact doesn't even hold up against Source, which is now 7 years old. Specifics included complaints about the polygon count being so low that you could see visible spikes on the heads, shoulders, etc. of characters and such.
Maybe that was just demos; maybe id is the only company in the world to demo the relevant rendering advances without obsessing over technically trivial things like polygon count in non-production projects. Nevertheless, usually the demos and gameplay movies look way *better* than production product, so this seems like a serious concern.
In fact, if these complainers are truthful and accurate, id Tech 5 is truly nothing more than a very early April Fool's joke.
More graphics, gimmicks and no damn innovation. And I just had a thought. There are actually TWO video game markets: Those who thought Doom/whatever age appropriate FPS was the only game they could ever love when it first came out, and those that played other things after getting bored.
There's just a lot more "Shooter" fans out there.
No, Rage HD is available for IOS, and it's not the same game at all. Rage isn't going to be a gallery shooter like the phone game was.
The unfortunate consequence of megatexturing is that nobody will be able to make custom maps for this. Carmack talked about needing an expensive server with 192GiB of RAM to compile the maps.
The technology is really impressive, but I can't imagine it being worth this. id has always been very friendly to the map/mod community—they're the last company I'd have expected this from.
The game itself is bargin bin material.
But the graphics were utterly mediocre when I saw it at E3. Which was shocking given how some people are desperately trying to hype the game's graphics.
There is no way in hell any other game developer would license the Rage engine.
What the fuck are you babbling about?
This is John Carmack!
John Carmack could code an graphics engine that blows away everything else ever made locked room with 10 ravenous Lions with both hand tied behind his back!
Rage uses megatextures! MEGATEXTURES!
Get a fucking clue and stop trolling THE MASTER and his AMAZING WORK!!!
You do realize that all computer companies outsource their manufacturing work to the likes of Foxconn, not just Apple right?
On the suicide note from your other troll post: the suicide rate at the Foxconn factories are less than the suicide rate at US universities.
There's a video on steam that you can view. It looked good enough to me, but how it actually pans out on your home system may be subject to change/hardware.
gets sucked into steam.. sorry but i rather not be treated as a pirate first and a customer second. sadly most games including many indie titles have now jumped onto this bandwagon.
used to be a pretty avid gamer, not so much anymore. steam pushed me away because i did not want to trade being treated well as a customer for the 'oh shiny' aspect of being able to piss off my isp for downloading multi-gig games and a in game chat function with other people playing other games.
Sadly though this also means that the release of the doom3 source code will most likely be the last time id releases their engine source code to the community. like it or not steam is a drm platform first and foremost. So by tying in steam into id tech 5 means that the release of the source code will be a no go because it might allow others to de-steam other titles easier.
One of the big things with previous iD games is their engines were amazing. They were some of the best things you'd ever seen. Good looking, ran well, etc, etc.
Then we get Doom 3. While the realtime lighting was nifty, after you played a bit it got annoying because everything was overly dark since there was no radiosity or other global illumination. It was also extremely resource intensive, you had to have a really hot computer to run it. Compared to Unreal Engine 2.5, it really wasn't that great. UE 2.5 looked nicer over all, despite not being as "advanced" and scaled much better.
Of course they've then been stuck on that for a long time. UE3 came out and was a far better engine, and we are now on UE3.5, and still nothing new from iD yet. iD Tech 4 has not aged gracefully at all. Brink is a wonderful example. Never mind the gameplay problems, it just doesn't look very good and doesn't run well given how it looks because of the engine.
You can see it in terms of licenses too. iD Tech 4 has a total of 6 games out, almost all of them either iD themselves, or Raven (who has always liked to make games using iD's stuff). UE3 has near 200, and it was released later.
We'll see how iD Tech 5 does.
Am I the only one who thinks that Rage looks a lot like Borderlands, but without the variation in weapons? I haven't come across such a comparison yet, but it was the first (and still prevalent) thought I had upon seeing the trailer.
Modding is still extremely popular, the problem is just that many game engines have poor, if any, tools for modding them. The ones that do have good tools, they get mods a plenty. Have a look at the Nexus sites, Elder Scrolls Nexus, Dragon Age Nexus, and so on to see the massive amount of mods out there.
Likewise, look at Epic. They ran the "Make something Unreal," contest. Tons of mods came out of that, some fairly amazing done by small teams, but also plenty of good maps often done by a single guy. That is using Unreal Engine 3, which is newer and more advanced than Doom 3/iD Tech 4, but just has some top notch tools including an extremely powerful map editor.
Seems to me like maybe just the road he has chosen to take his engine down is not friendly to modders. Not everyone has taken that same road. Yes, it does mean more work on the developer's part. I mean Epic's map editor is just legendary. That thing is as advanced as many 3D renderers. I'm sure it took a lot of work to polish like that, never mind all the tutorials they made. However, against that there is the fact that they've licensed like 200 copies of Unreal Engine 3. Part of that is the high grade tools. If you are a company looking at making a game, maybe you decide to license an engine to save on development effort. Well makes sense to license one with really good tools, since that saves more time.
Well, we have confirmation that Steve Balmer reads slashdot at least.
I can see every little detail of the textures in the lame fucking grindfest! Look at the incredible lighting as I fight the same shitty enemies as in every other goddamned FPS! This millionth hall that I'm running looks INCREDIBLE!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You do realize that I said "version" and not "direct identical port" and that the AC is still wrong when he flat-out said "No" and that a "real computer" is required, because, in one form or another, Rage is available for iOS, right?
In the same way that the "full web browsing experience" is available on your iphone AND your computer... but only if your computer does NOT have flash installed.
wait, am I arguing with an AC? *doh!*
I'm really not too excited about megatexturing from a player's perspective. It seems to me like everything that's ever been said about it has praised it from the standpoint of development, rather than how it changes the experience of the player. Most of the modern AAA games that I've seen lately don't exactly have jarringly bad repeating textures, with the same scrap of paper or broken tile baked-in and repeating every five feet. The fact that they're still going to end up using stamps and other repeating elements to bake into their megatexture also makes that point a bit moot anyways. From a visual/player's perspective the one thing that keeps jumping out at me is the fact that the quality of the textures probably won't be that great, and the fact that they're having to be extremely cautious as to how and where they allocate their texture resources on a map. Perhaps this is largely due to the RAM and media budget on the present console systems, but at least with past titles that were hampered by poor textures, it was probably the simplest and easiest issue to address when modding a game that was ported to the PC.
On the suicide note from your other troll post: the suicide rate at the Foxconn factories are less than the suicide rate at US universities.
Yeah, no nets to catch jumpers at US institutions. Or maybe it's because students at US institutions realize that there is no hope for them, since they weren't born wealthy, and the chinese aren't quite so dis-illusioned with their chances.
... or maybe paying someone for the privilege of wasting your time is more depressing than getting paid for it? No matter what, you're comparing apples to oranges... but nice try. You know there's a journal article being reported on that talks about fanbois taking criticism personally when people attack their company of choice?
Honestly my take on it is that they just bought id for patent coverage and we'ree going to see them f-us in the A with patent litigation in the near future. Id has been washed up for a while, what with Carmack more interested in rockets than graphics engines, and the sellout to ZeniMax was just the last nail in the coffin. Much like the music industry the indie movement which started it got sucked up by the same bunch of publishing douchebags who should never has been allowed near the money. But that is the way of life.
...but I do like Steam.
sorry but i rather not be treated as a pirate first and a customer second.
You say that, but you then admit a few things Steam does, which you just don't care about:
i did not want to trade being treated well as a customer for the 'oh shiny' aspect of being able to piss off my isp for downloading multi-gig games and a in game chat function with other people playing other games.
Well, I do like those things, except my current ISP doesn't suck.
I like being able to buy a game, go do something for 15 minutes, and then have it ready to play, without having to leave the house. At the moment (for the next few days, at least), I'm in a small enough town that the only other real option is buying discs from, say, Wall-Mart -- which isn't exactly convenient, considering I'd then need to do some research and find out if I need to keep the disc around, how I can make backups of that game, etc.
I like being able to buy a new computer, type my Steam username and password, and within a few hours, have all the games I care about installed -- and, surprisingly, with my savegames, keybindings, and other settings included.
I like being able to message a friend, in or out of game, and just jump into whatever game they're playing (assuming we both own the same game), or invite them into mine. For that matter, I like that the Steam dashboard seems to apply to most Steam games, even the ones which (thanks, EA) try to get me to sign up for their own competing service -- I can instantly pull that up and see the current time, a web browser, etc. I can click a player's name from an in-game menu and have it pop the browser open to their Steam profile. All this without alt-tabbing, in a nice translucent overlay so I can see what's happening in-game.
I like that all my games stay patched without me having to check them individually, and I've known Steam to even bother me to update my video drivers occasionally. If I could do everything through a similar package manager (like Windows Update, maybe), I would, but better a unified platform like Steam than each game adding something to my system tray, or having to check each game's website for updates.
If I can find a game without DRM, I'll buy it over Steam any day -- but, surprisingly, the Humble Indie Bundle included Steam activation anyway. If a game includes extra DRM on top of Steam, I won't buy it, which means I still have to pay attention -- I was a hair away from buying Arkham Asylum when I realized it had SecuROM on top of Steam -- and I think Steam itself warned me about this. Most of the time, I'll stick to indie games with Linux ports.
But Portal 2 was one of the best games I've ever played, and I'm not going to miss out on that experience because I can't play it on Linux, or... wait, is there anything else I actually want to do with a game that Steam prevents me from doing?
Sadly though this also means that the release of the doom3 source code will most likely be the last time id releases their engine source code to the community. like it or not steam is a drm platform first and foremost.
Bullshit. Again, the Humble Indie Bundle (at least the latest one) includes Steam activation codes. If you remember, almost all of the original Humble Indie Bundle games released their source. For that matter, you can buy Quake 3 Arena on Steam, and its source is released -- and I seem to remember that id games have included things like CD checks in the past. I much prefer Steam to putting a CD in the drive every time I play -- I've got a terabyte hard drive in my gaming rig, there's no excuse for that.
So by tying in steam into id tech 5 means that the release of the source code will be a no go because it might allow others to de-steam other titles easier.
If so, why wouldn't they have the same problem have existed with other engines? Quake 4 shipped with a CD check
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Call me old fashioned but if they still made games based off the Doom 1&2 engines that had the same quality of artwork, I'd still buy and play them.
Foxconn's factories are a mini-city. I'm sure if you compare US city suicide rates to Foxconn mini-city suicide rates, they'd be comparable. It's only really an outrage if their suicide rate was 3x or more higher than US suicide rates.
I dislike Apple software but as an electrical engineer, I'm a huge fan of their hardware.
these has-beens and the rest of the "gaming industry" are getting owned by flash games is it?
to most people, gameplay will matter a lot more than textures.
that's why enemy territory was 10x more fun than anything id churned out since doom.
Yeah, it's not outrage. Just a bunch of chinks committing suicide because they are being overworked in a sweatshop to make "OOOH SHINY!" toys for Apple faggots like yourself. They have slanted eyes and talk funny so nothing of value lost, right?
I did, at QuakeCon a few weeks ago. The game looked amazing, even on the 360. I didn't get play it on the few PCs they had, but the graphics looked even better. There is an immersive feel that comes with the unique texturing. That is something that doesn't necessarily jump out when you just see screen caps. The texture detail present is evident in every frame, not just the cherry-picked caps or pre-rendered cut scenes. Compared to CoD or GoW, the run&gun perspective is not going to be dramatically different, but for more deliberate movement, there is a very nice unique feel.
iD is not innovating gameplay features, but they are incorporating a lot of nice gaming features...vehicles, less linear storylines, more open world feel. Rage is not as photo realistic as BF3, but it looks very good and its style is a bit more fanciful. To me, the feel of the characters is a bit like Bioshock, a stylish deviation from perfect reality. The lighting and texturing technology and the framerate (even on the 360) is very impressive.
I can't speak to the storyline or the character development--iD only had two or three levels that were playable at the QuakeCon demo. But, I have played and enjoyed the single player iD games, so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And while I am generally more enthralled with idTech based games from other developers (RTCW for example), I expect Rage to be far, far more than a tech demo.
This Slashdot dog piling is ridiculous.
Foxconn's factories are a mini-city. I'm sure if you compare US city suicide rates to Foxconn mini-city suicide rates, they'd be comparable. It's only really an outrage if their suicide rate was 3x or more higher than US suicide rates.
I dislike Apple software but as an electrical engineer, I'm a huge fan of their hardware.
... so, yeah, let's compare an industrial-park-turned-city to a ... regular city. I expect that a highly regulated, patrolled and enforced living arrangement would have less suicides because of the intense amount of oversight. Again, if you want to compare apples to oranges ... you've got another point. But if you'd like to join us in the real world ...
Not only is Rage whatever id Software decides it to be, but there has been talk of porting further Rage technology to the iPad. Obviously, the AC was just trolling, because Slashdot has become a haven for anti-Apple anonymous cowards who cling to their PCs the way grannies cling to rotary phones. Appliance computing is here, it's the future, and it's taking over. Rage will sell more on consoles than PCs.
How similar is this to the iPad version that's been out for a while now? Obviously better graphics, but what else?
Also don't forget that they always end-up opensourcing their previous generation of engines.
As Rage is release, id Tech 4 (Doom3, Quake4, etc.) will be released under GPL.
So, even though no *commercial user* outside of the Zenimax corporation will use it, it will end-up being used for lots of crazy and funny projects by the community. And in the long term of thing, that counts a lot.
(Just take a look at the current derivative of Quake 3's engine - lot's of them even included some Doom3-type of eye-candy)
Meanwhile, for all of its praises, you can't get to hack Unreal Engine.
So yes, id, feel free to do whatever you want with your engines, as long as, in the end, you end up donating them to the community. The community says a big "Thank you".
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Steam means I won't play it. Looks kinda boring anyway.
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