Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
...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!