Topic: id shows "id Tech 5" at Mac show

[idolminds]

Scroll down a bit

This is the new tech id software will be using/licensing. These screen aren't from their new game, though.

"So the last couple of years at iD we've been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it... this is the first time we're showing anything we've done on it publicly." iD Tech 5... "What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game."






id will be showing new stuff at E3...for PC, Mac, 360, and PS3.

[sirean_syan]

So it's a continuation of the mega-texture stuff that Quake Wars is using.

You know, a couple years back I was wondering why someone doesn't try to come up with a way to just convert everything you see in a game into a large texture. That way you'd just have to deal more or less with memory and not geometry allowing more computers to do nicer looking things. With a base amount of processing power and then a decent sized memory bank you could get some nice results. It'd be a little more elegant than simply brute forcing more geometry out of more and more powerful graphics cards. Looks like I wasn't the only one thinking this way.

[idolminds]

In a surprise demonstration during Steve Job’s keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference today, John Carmack unveiled id’s latest revolution in game engine technology with the very first showing of id Tech 5™ running live on the Mac with OS X.

The ground breaking technology unveiled today will power id's new internally developed game and will be available for licensing to third parties. The new id rendering technology practically eliminates the texture memory constraints typically placed on artists and designers and allows for the unique customization of the entire game world at the pixel level, delivering virtually unlimited visual fidelity. Combined with a powerful new suite of tools designed to specifically facilitate and accelerate this content creation process, id Tech 5™ will power games that contain vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments with unprecedented artistic detail.

While shown for the very first time running in real time on a Mac, id Tech 5 additionally supports the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 console platforms as well as the PC, and will be available for licensing to developers and publishers interested in working with a truly next generation rendering and game development solution. id Software will be showing id Tech 5™ to interested developers and publishers by appointment only at the E3 Media & Business Summit from July 11 – 13, 2007 in Santa Monica, Calif. Companies interested in id Tech licensing information can visit www.idsoftware.com or email licensing@idsoftware.com with an E3 appointment request.

From idsoftware.com

Yeah, this is pretty cool stuff. Just think about having everything you see have a unique texture. No need to have tiling or reusing textures everywhere. A room full of crates where each one can have unique wood textures and packing labels.

[sirean_syan]

That's actually a bit different from what I understood originally then. Still sounds pretty nifty though.

[MysterD]

Regardless of what you think of Id's games....

...When it comes to making Engines, Id just nails it every damn time.

Id paves the way for Engines -- and the way they are going, they will continue to do so.

[Jedi]

Regardless of what you think of Id's games....

...When it comes to making Engines, Id just nails it every damn time.

Id paves the way for Engines -- and the way they are going, they will continue to do so.

Sorry D but you sound like an ass kissing idiot... 

Visualy it's not blowing my socks off but those are small screens. But reading it, it does sound like its got a lot of potential in so many other areas so this could mean another step up for games in the next year or two.
20GB of textures... dam!

[MysterD]

Sorry D but you sound like an ass kissing idiot... 

Just about every game Id has made off their own Engine, the Engine ran quite well. And, of course, their game looked fantastic.

Visualy it's not blowing my socks off but those are small screens. But reading it, it does sound like its got a lot of potential in so many other areas so this could mean another step up for games in the next year or two.

Yes, the engine sounds like it has a lot of potential. Especially w/ every texture being unique. That sounds very interesting, if you ask me.

Plus, Id's Engines usually seem to be the one Developers keep coming back to, anyways. Just look at the numerous games made on the Quake Engines over the years, for example.

The only other engines people seem to use a lot are The Unreal Engines and The Source Engine.

20GB of textures... dam!

With HD-DVD and Blu-Ray here now, I'm betting 20 GB sized game will eventually become standard.
But, yeah, currently --- that's huge! hehe!

Well, hell -- STALKER takes up 10 GB of HD space!

[idolminds]

D...thats 20GB of textures for that one tech demo level. Of course thats raw uncompressed source texture. The megatexture stuff goes through and chops it up, compresses it, etc for the game to actually run it. I mean...no one has 20GB of RAM to even store all that for the level.

Hopefully this works out for id. Doom 3 tech wasnt licensed nearly as much at the Q3 engine, with people opting for Unreal and a few games on Source. I think this next round Source will fall by the wayside (sure Valve updates it, but its already pretty far behind), Unreal will continue to dominate, and id Tech 5 will regain some lost ground for id.

[Jedi]

Sorry D your voice was muffled by Carmack's ass. 

And yeah you're think of 10 or 20GB for install size not just the textures.

Edit: I agree with Idol too, Q3 was used everywhere it even got to the point where you could just tell by looking at the game that it used the Q3 engine and fair enough it was a good engine. But not many developers have used the Doom 3 engine (of course Q4 did that was a given) there's been a number of other engines not to mention the Unreal one.

If I’m really honest I’ve never been thrilled by the amount of accolades Carmack gets, yeah Q3 was a great engine and Doom 3 looked great and the lighting was outstanding but come on, he’s not the only programmer in the world doing this sort of work. His work is great but I just feel people give him far too much credit or something and over look others in the field.

[MysterD]

And yeah you're think of 10 or 20GB for install size not just the textures.

HOLY SHIT!!!

Edit: I agree with Idol too, Q3 was used everywhere it even got to the point where you could just tell by looking at the game that it used the Q3 engine and fair enough it was a good engine. But not many developers have used the Doom 3 engine (of course Q4 did that was a given) there's been a number of other engines not to mention the Unreal one.

Yes, this is true -- but namely, The Q3 Engine and Unreal Engines were everywhere.

Yeah, Doom 3 Engine really didn't take off, w/ developers and all -- namely, Quake 4, Doom 3 + Expansion, ET: Quake Wars and Prey are the really only ones using it.

These days, there's so many different Engines out there and the dominations Of The Unreal And Source Engines, Doom 3 Engine ain't really took off w/ dev's.

If I’m really honest I’ve never been thrilled by the amount of accolades Carmack gets, yeah Q3 was a great engine and Doom 3 looked great and the lighting was outstanding but come on, he’s not the only programmer in the world doing this sort of work. His work is great but I just feel people give him far too much credit or something and over look other in the field.

I'm surprised more games have NOT used these engines, myself:
--The Serious Sam Engines
--The Painkiller Engines
--LithTech's FEAR Engine

[idolminds]

Youtube

Its crappy cam footage, but still shows the thing in motion. Plus you can heat Teh Carmack talk about it a bit. Hopefully we see some direct feed stuff soonish.

[TheOtherBelmont]

So it's a continuation of the mega-texture stuff that Quake Wars is using.

You know, a couple years back I was wondering why someone doesn't try to come up with a way to just convert everything you see in a game into a large texture. That way you'd just have to deal more or less with memory and not geometry allowing more computers to do nicer looking things. With a base amount of processing power and then a decent sized memory bank you could get some nice results. It'd be a little more elegant than simply brute forcing more geometry out of more and more powerful graphics cards. Looks like I wasn't the only one thinking this way.

Normal mapping and edge mapping do that to an extent, there are people who are looking into that kind of stuff though, the Unreal 3 engine seems to be making the most progress towards it though.

[MysterD]

Steve Nix of Id talks to GameSpot on Id Tech 5

GameSpot sits down with id's Steve Nix to find out about how the company is handling the business side for its new engine.
By James Yu, GameSpot
Posted Jul 13, 2007 3:29 pm PT

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--At this year's E3 Media and Business Summit, the id suite at the Casa del Mar hotel is bustling with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars activity. While a good deal of attention is being given to id's latest creation, many from the gaming press are more interested in id's Tech 5 engine, revealed by John Carmack at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in June.

The company isn't ready to reveal its internally developed game or talk tech with the press, but we were able to sit down with Steve Nix, id's director of business development, to see what kind of reception id Tech 5 has been getting at E3 2007. id is currently only showing the Tech 5 engine to potential licensees at E3.

GameSpot: John Carmack had the big id Tech 5 demo at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in June. Has your E3 been full of developer meetings who are interested in licensing your tech?

Steve Nix: What's funny is that there aren't a lot of developers at E3 this year. I mean, there are a number of developers, but not the normal number that you would have at an E3 with 60,000 people. I think we have about 5,000 people this E3. All the major publishers are here, and we've been talking to them about the technology licensing, and the response has been well above my expectations. Very happy people have been extremely impressed by the visual fidelity of the technology, but the tools and the cross-platform [support] have been the huge thing. Walking in and seeing the technology running just as well on the Mac, the PC, the 360, and the PS3 at a high frame rate--people weren't expecting it. It's not difficult. It's just that our approach to technology allows us to do it very efficiently. I think overall we've more than accomplished our goals for this E3. People have been really impressed and we expect that we'll have a number of tech licenses. We're starting those conversations today because E3 was the first time we've shown anyone the technology directly other that what we showed at the World Wide Developers Conference.

We didn't see a heck of a lot of games come from the Doom 3 Engine, but I really think we might see a heck of a lot more come from Id Tech 5.

GS: When do you expect the first id Tech 5 licensed games to hit retail?

SN: It's hard to say. We expect the first licenses to happen later this year, but expect the normal two- to three-year [development] timelines beyond that. It's a next-next generation solution, but content creation is not any more difficult. Content creation, in many ways, is going to be easier, so I don't expect expanded timelines beyond what people have been seeing for AAA games, but I do expect that it will still take two to three years. I don't know whether you'd want to make a 12-month movie-license game with this technology. You could, but we generally try to steer our partners away from those 12-month cycles, because we want high-quality games to be made using our technology.

I wonder what those first licenses coming later this year on IT5 Might be....

GS: Who do you see as your main competitors in the game-engine space? Is it mainly Epic Games and Unreal Engine 3?

SN: Yeah, there just really isn't a lot of competition in the engine-licensing business right now. There are a couple of smaller companies that offer basic rendering solutions and really aren't full engine suites, and then of course for RenderWare, I don't know of any new licensees there outside of EA. There really has just been one player right now, and I think, with our new solution, we have a very good option for developers and publishers who want to do next-next-gen technology and have a high-quality solution for the four platforms.

Yeah, when I think of Engines, I usually think of two companies as the leaders in Game Engine Tech -- that would be Id and Epic.

Though, I can scratch my head sometimes and wonder why some Engines never were licensed off as much as I thought they'd be, such as PK's Pain Engine (great graphics, great framerates, all w/ enemies galore on-screen), Serious Sam's Engines (same stuff PK had going on w/ their Engine), LithTech's Engine on FEAR, and CryTek's CryEngine.
 

GS:id's known for specializing in a specific game genre. Will the engine work well for games that aren't shooters?

SN: Yeah, absolutely. Our code is the most elegant, best-structured base code in the world. When we started out with id Tech 5, we didn't hack onto an old engine and then sort of replace parts as we went along. It's an entirely new engine. The structure is super-fundamentally sound. If you look at Quake 3, which was a multiplayer engine, but again, fundamentally sound, the licensees who took that went on to create some of the best single-player games ever in history in Medal of Honor, Call of Duty--even James Bond: Agent Under Fire, a console title, used the technology. It's the same approach with id Tech 5. The way the rendering works, there are no more texture limitations. Any game can take advantage of that. In a massively multiplayer game, texture constraints are a big problem. Even a fighting game where you're trying to get the ultimate detail in a smaller arena, texture limitations tend to be one of your number one limitations. Not only do we think people can make games outside the action-shooter space with our technology, we encourage it. We'd actually like to see those games made.

I'd like to see a RPG made off Id Tech 5, myself.
That'd be interesting.

GS: What are these developers, who are all presumably familiar with Unreal Engine 3, most impressed by when they see your engine?

SN: I'm not that aware of what our competitors are doing and what they're promising with their road map, but when people walk into our booth, they see that we have four platforms running at 60Hz with the exact same assets. We probably have artists in the company that aren't aware we have our new technology running on the PS3 because you need to do absolutely zero changes, no packaging, no extra baking, no extra steps, to get to the PS3. It really is a seamless, multiplatform, no-hassle solution. That's what people are telling us is extremely attractive. There's also the power of the rendering. No one has this rendering solution that we have with the unlimited texture. People are shocked by that. They weren't expecting it. It's a totally different path than where everyone else is going with their technology right now. It's Carmack again coming up with something that no one else in the market is thinking about. People are surprised by that. I mean, you expect John [Carmack] to come up with massive technological leaps in rendering, but at the same time people are really shocked to see it running on all the platforms.

Leave it to Carmack, hehe....

GS: As we understand it, MegaTexturing on the PC streams data off the hard disk and on the 360, it streams off the DVD. On the PS3, will it stream off the hard disk because now all the systems have hard disks, or will it stream off the Blu-ray disc?

SN: I'm probably getting over my pay grade by speaking directly, but I understand that it's going to be either streaming off the Blu-ray disc or a combination because you are now guaranteed a hard drive with the PS3.

That's interesting.

GS: How have licensing deals changed for next-gen gaming?

SN: It's a little complicated. Back in the Quake 3 era, you were licensing one platform: the PC. If people wanted to go and create console versions, we wouldn't charge them more than that because we were essentially just delivering a PC engine. The amount of time it has taken us to develop technology has increased over the years with next-generation stuff, and you also have the multiplatform. You have questions like do you price support separately? It's a more complicated pricing model for sure. We're not even talking to people about pricing models yet; we'll be getting to that in the coming months.

GS: Thanks, Steve.

[idolminds]

Wow, thats pretty cool.

[MysterD]

Carmack says that there is NO DX10 support for Id Tech 5...

...Oh, and Carmack says there will be eventually a Doom 4 and Quake: Arena Sequel -- just, not right now...

Carmack: No DX10 Support in id Tech 5
August 06, 2007 - Game Informer wrangled up an interview with John Carmack where the id engine guru revealed its new Engine 5 tech will not support DirectX 10. It looks like Mr. C is staying true to OpenGL.

    GI: Will this engine support any DX10 features?

    Carmack: No, not currently. We're not expecting to. We're not sure if we're going to be a Vista title or not. There will be some support benefits by being Vista only. It depends when we get the game done what the adoption has been. But it's a OpenGL title on the PC and Mac right now, obviously D3D on the 360, and the PS3 it's kind of an in between where it's Open GLES but we do a lot of direct command buffer writing there. If necessary we can move the PC version over to DX10, but there's not much strong pull for us to do that. All of the toolset is in OpenGL, I wouldn't want to convert everything over.

Wow, looks like Carmack is writing DX10 off here....ouch....

GI: You didn't seem to hot on DX10 or Vista at CES.

    Carmack: Microsoft has done a great job with all this stuff. I mean, I honestly think that DX9 with how it's implemented on the 360 is a clearer and more open API than OpenGL is. It doesn't hide the state.

    That's sort of the Microsoft way. They start off with a piece of crap, and then over a number of versions taking a lot of people with them over the painful route they eventually get to something that's better than what they are competing against. It's a valid strategic direction. I think they've come out at the end with a good platform and a good product. Some of the DX10 stuff I don't think there's going to be huge draws for the features there, but a lot of what they've done with the structuring of the API I think are still positive things to do there. I think they have a good team with solid engineering there.

I wonder if he can do the same stuff in OpenGL? We shall see!
-- Robert 'Apache' Howarth

Yeah, I'm wondering if he can do a lot of that stuff in Open GL, which is why he's not too keen on DX10.

And I'm betting the whole "unique textures"/"megatextures" thing is really what's driving them to not need DX10, since it'll probably cut down on loading times and stuff.

Carmack: Then you’ve got the run and gun internal shooter stuff, id’s always done well, and we’re going to do a good job on that. Then you have the sort of RPG-ish elements, pimping out your ride, getting money to buy accessories and building it up. It is a different style of game which is risky especially when you’re talking a $20 million budget, and the safe this for us to do would be to run right into Doom 4. But we made the conscious decision that we want to broaden id a little bit. We’ve got Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. We’re trying to bring Orcs and Elves up from the low end, and we’re going to try to bring Rage in from the high end to broaden our whole portfolio here. There’s no doubt it’s a gamble. It’s a big deal. There’s an element of stress there that we don’t have all of the advantages that we previously had going into a title, there. But we think it’s going to be pretty cool.

There will be a Doom 4, we don’t have it scheduled or a team assigned to it, but there will be a Doom 4. There’s going to be a Quake Arena sequel. There’s a Wolfenstein thing in production. We’re following along with all those. This game doesn’t have to be Doom. It’s going to be something different.

Cool. So there will be another Quake: Arena and a Doom 4. Sweet.

[Xessive]

Sweetness! Hopefully I'll have a superb machine by then and that I'll still retain my appetite for gaming!