I am not impressed...

basically from what I've understood numbers of textures and their scale won't have any impact on the performances
that's a revolution

You should be, maybe try doing some mapping with the current techniques and compare the result and time consumption. This is huge.

the terrain editor tool doesnt differ much from that one in ut2004, thought i dont know about the impact on fps

Shattering news for John Carmack.

IGN also has some media about id Tech 5.

- IGN id Tech 5 Media

The more I read about id and how they care about games and technology the more I like them.

I don't wanna sound like a fanboy but id really is doing great as a dev-team.

Except there more games we see from them the worse they get. Like a good politician, talking well, but not putting much action behind the words.

I think that the ue3 era is soon over :)

/me hyperventilates and drools

i thought the release date (of rage) is somewhat like 2009? :/

That doesn't stop id from selling licenses.

and with a little luck the guys from Robo Blitz can give us a version of the engine sooner :)

After the last controversies with Silicon Knights and console ports I think the end of UE3 era already began. And, sincerly, it's not something that I'm happy about. Although Epic deserved some punishment for dissing Id engines to promote their stuff... Also, finding a job for those with an 'Id engines background' could be easier from now on... So, maybe I'm a little bit happy that after all :D

This feels like id is back on track. It's technically huge and looks great, I'm feeling much less meh about this than I did initially.

it looks great but.. you can never tell the 'feel' of an engine till you're in it. the q3 engine just felt right, the d3 engine felt clumsy and even with new iterations in q4 and etqw it still feels.. clumsy.

What joe average fails to understand is that what id did with the Doom 3 engine was quite simply amazing at the time.

Everyone whines about the framerate/sluggish feel and all that, but you know they redefined everything with that game engine wise. Bump mapped/specular, self shadowed environments were non-outside of a pre-rendered movies. It was the next big thing and they did it first in a ral-time situation, now everyone is doing it.

So it'll take a few years for the avg users hardware to get to the point where they can comfortably run this type of stuff, but it's still a huge achievement.

Yes the games suffered because of it from a gameplay POV (to mr hardcore), but at the same time it was a change that had to happen or you would still be playing your shitty vertex lit, pixelated shadow mapped games.

With the way pc hardware is going, we now seem to be going at an exponential rate which is when stuff is going to get really fucking scarily good, as in pixar studios quality but in real-time.
3-4 years and it'll be there.

Then you'll get another cycle where games run like shit as they put in the next big thing, which will be fluids and fully destructable scenary in my opinion and you'll get the same whine then as you get with the Quake 4 engine now.

It's just how it works.

So your saying that the next quake will look and more impotantly feel good? quake3 good?

With the way pc hardware is going, we now seem to be going at an exponential rate which is when stuff is going to get really fucking scarily good, as in pixar studios quality but in real-time.
3-4 years and it'll be there.

if the time it took to render scenes as said on there website is true, then I very much doubt it will be anything like it.

In the end it will probably merge with the film industry and it will probably slow down a lot from there.

"as in pixar studios quality but in real-time. 3-4 years and it'll be there."

That's more or less the exact opposite of what Carmack said. I also think it's very unlikely, in 3-4 years time Rage will come out and that doesn't look Pixar qualitry to me.

http://blog.vehiclevoice.com/Pixar%20Sheriff%20Blog.jpg

Look at that pictue, I don't think it's too far off. Especially now with megatexture.

There are a few major things which make up a high quality render similiar to Pixars "cars".

1) The quality of the mesh/model. (not really a problem)
2) The size/quality of the textures, this includes shit like dispalcement mapping. (Megatexture?)
3) The way the lighting behaves. (amount of passes)
4) The materials/shaders that are on the model which dictate how light behaves.
5) The skill of the artist
6) Resolution of the image.

Games are finally getting to a stage (especially with megatexture) where limits are soon going to be non existent.

You're also missing out one important thing.

Game dev artists have been constrained for years in what they can really do, as a result people who work for pixar etc have a free reign and are no doubt better at creating high end assets (for now) because they've never had to work with any real restrictions.

Now you'll probably never get the sort of resolutions that pixar render to, but I'm pretty sure if you took a section of gemotry/textures from "cars" and run it on a real-time basis in 4-5 years time on the best engine configured to show the type of claim I am making, you'll be surprised how close it'll be, all things considered.

My only worry is with people like Carmack now developing on consoles it might slow down, because on the PC the level of hardware would have opened up a shit more possibilities for him.
But seeing as console will be his main priority, that will no doubt hold his imagination back.

So my claim will largely depend on if things get pushed in the PC department, because it will be a pc that does it before a console.

I think we'll have something approximating that for people who don't know what they're looking at but the nuts and bolts - light quality, things like that will be way off. Given the current pace of development (very slow) I'm surprised you see it moving so far ahead. Also a frame might look Pixar-ish but I think the motion would look much worse, there's something about games that makes things look less good when you see them in game as compared to the screenshots you saw when you thought about buying it.

Slow?

Megatexture and the exponential rate cpu's are now forced to develop at (thanks to Intel) will ensure the next five years will be NOTHING like the last 5 in terms of progress.

If you look at some of the nvidia gfx demos and compare to what they were showing 5 years ago + with the knowledge that hardware will be much more powerful this time around I think you're going to be surprised at how things will change.

Crysis will probably be the next most advanced game engine, the stuff you talk about lighting, has been basic for years, this is one of the first games to include many passes which are closer to the # you would expect to see in a high end renderer.

In 5 years time god knows how mad things will be.
That's my opinion anyway.

Well all I know is the Q3 realtime raytrace demo looks awful and required 36 gigahertz of processing power so I'm not going to hold my breath.

so 2004 ;)

The guy who did that is writing his diploma now and say that the algorith is being optimized, as in he now did it with Q4 with 98 light sources and got 17 fps in a 256x256 resolution.
Of course that's unplayable but in 3 years time we should be there.

also he mentions that there are cards for raytracing being developed most likely for movie makers but who knows.
Anyway a prototype with 90 Mhz managed the same output as a virtueal P4 with 10 Ghz.

So I think 4 years might not be that far off.

You need to be loking at Intel/AMD/Nvidia/id/Crytek and Epic for the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Not some student messing around with a game engine that's pushing on 10 years old.

Except that student is now an intel employee ( http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=38688 ), and they've been showing off his work ( http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39101 ) ;)

Haha, quite ironic he went to Intel:)

I didn't mean that Quake could not be used as a platform for people to hone their skills and land jobs. it's been a big help for years.

I just mean that the standard of stuff I'm talking about is going to be done by a team of highly skilled people at one of the top places.
Artists + Coders because they're both equally important.

I totally slate ray tracing for real-time use anyway (at least for next few years). You don't need it's accuracy and there are other techniques that can fake it and are 100 times faster to render.

Crysis will probably be the next most advanced game engine

I'm not really impressed of this Tech5 vs Crysis engine.
Crysis engine imho, it's a mind-blowing engine.

I was very impressed with a Crysis engine until I saw the latest gameplay videos... Yeah, it's cool, it has some nice things, but it looks like most of this eye-candies are just a post-proccesing shader shit, which can be done within' 24h in virtually any current engine out there. All in all I think both Id Tech 5 and Crysis will offer similar solutions in many areas, yet Id's one is more revolutionary because of it's cross-platform abilities, tools and MegaTexture.


God, I love MegaTexture ;)

Well, some time ago I claimed that the games will offer "Lord Of The Rings" quality of graphics very soon. I think it was even before Carmack said it is his ultimate goal... Anyway, after a few years I think I've got to revaluate my opinions about it - now I doubt the games will come closer to the movies anytime soon.

There are two bottle necks. One is the game's budget versus the size of the market. Making AAA assets is very expensive and there are only few games that would make a profits with it. Like "Gears Of War" - that game made a millions of dollars. But imagine ~25 other games with such good visuals coming to Xbox360 at the same time - probably no one of these would make enough money to make the whole deal profitable.
Ok, the things look not that bad for now but the fact is that in the nearest future the games just can not reach the blockbuster movies budgets. Unless the number of games will be drastically reduced (there's only 5-10 Pixar alike movies per year).

The second bottle neck are... the consoles. Xbox360 and PS3 are very young. It seems like UE3, CryEngine and Id Tech 5 already reached hardware limits of these system, yet it doesn't change a fact that this hardware is going to stay in a circuit for a while. Also, after all the problems that both Microsoft and Sony had with the current gen of consoles I doubt that the next Xbox and/or PS4 will bring a lot of revolutionary solutions. They'll probably stick to some older methods of doing things just to make sure everything will be working fine.

IMO, some of the upcoming methods of content creation are starting to become more interesting than the advancement in graphics engines. Hellgate: London will be the first game (afaik) to feature automated 3D level generation - kinda like what D2 had....except in 3D. Spore is another revolutionary game coming out soon with some mindblowing content generation features which you have to check out (if you haven't already).

didnt oblivion have that?

the hell world place anyway, wasn't that automatically generated (after you did all the gates)

I've never played Oblivion, but I've never heard anything about it using this. Wiki says they used procedural generation methods during content developement for some of the outside landscapes, which is kinda one step behind what Hellgate will be doing.

Well with regards to asset's that is why I said using pixar's assets.

But also remember it can be harder to make things look good using less detail at times, which is something the best coders and game artists do very well.

Secondly, It won't be on a consle, if it happens it will be on some Nvidia demo or something running at GDC.

Have you seen some of the demos on the 8800 cards, stuff like the lambo and the heads, they look really amazing and are not pre-rendered.

<insert Steve Jobs "In real time!!" quote here>

Everyone whines about the framerate/sluggish feel and all that, but you know they redefined everything with that game engine wise. Bump mapped/specular, self shadowed environments were non-outside of a pre-rendered movies. It was the next big thing and they did it first in a ral-time situation, now everyone is doing it.

Right, except the fact that actually 'real-time' turned out to be some kind of a failure and no one is doing it anymore. Maybe Crytek, but UE3 "sucks at everything which is real-time" (quote from some licensee) - and it still manages to look great... Look at "Q4" - where is this real-time shading and lighting needed? Glowing jumppads?

The right way to do things is an off-line rendering, and I'm glad that Id Tech 5 offers it (hurray for radiosity!), plus it has some "real-time" magic for characters' shadows, bump-maps, etc.

One thing I wonder about is how this whole MegaTexture thing works with brushes and meshes? I can't see myself doing only outdoor levels, but having an option to make every wall and every monster on the map uniquely textured give me a chills... So, anyone knows anything about it?

From what I saw in the video it seems as you can still use "radiant" for the normal brush work. I assume that the texturing bit hasen't changed much when you're working with brushes.

I think the mega texture is just applied to a normal uv-map and every face you create will get the basic textures according to the uv-map. q4radiant is already using "uv-maps" for its textures and thats why I don't think they changed that stuff that much. Now the beauty of this is that you actually change the texture instead of the uv-map when you're doing things. Only thing that should be needed is some kind of uv scale tool to make everything fit inside a single uv-map

The same thing goes for meshes: get the mesh uv-maped and then you can probably just apply the materials inside the idstudio editor. I don't think this stuff is something that mappers will have to care much about.

Well, yes, but let's say I want to throw in a few unique monsters - to make a MegaTexture work on them I have to somehow coordinate their UV-maps with the UV-map of a terrain. Or maybe I can use more than a one megatexture per level? I'm quite sure it will be possible, actually I just wonder how much of the UV-mapping process has to be done in Maya and how much of it can be made/adjusted in/by Id Studio.

The idea of making multiple megatextures kinda goes agenst the idea of megatextures in the first place :) I think you would have to fit it in together with terrain brushes and all that sort, but I assume id has developed some tools for it. It would be quite a mess otherwise.

That's the whole point though, that's why I'm saying we're not quite there yet, but id needed to raise the bar to push things along or we would still be playing vertex shaded, jagged lighmap crap.

With regards to creation for id's new game, I have not seen these videos, I have dialup:( but I heard something about them writing new tools.

I imagine it will be heavily tied in with an external package like Maya.
Simply becasue of the control you have over UV's and surfaces.

I think they days of using simplitic brushes are long gone because they look so angular and dated. Plus all those editors like Worldcraft/unrealed/doomedit are long out of date and not very nice for level creation, even though they are amazing as an overall package. I was spoilt by having been brought up on the best. Maya.

As for texturing, there will probably be some kind of automatic procedural texture generation for the initial environments.
Call it a base colour if you want, from there artists will be able to add more detail and layers.

Expect outdoor terrain to play a huge part becasue it's much easier to generate automatic content this way and auto content will play a huge part in game like crytek no matter how much the devs protest otherwise.

oo found it

"each frame represents 1/24 of a second screen time and takes about six hours to render, though some frames have taken as many of ninety hours"

and you think rendering that in real time, (granted not in that resolution) is a short time away? doubt it very much.

and even then, what we see there is not even half of the quality they can conjure up.

That's mainly because they used ray-tracing, which IS NOT a practical solution for rendering real-time 3d graphics, at least for a long time.

There are lot's fake effects which can and WOULD be used to give the impression of ray-tracing in a real-time situation.

you can't go into this situation thinking if it takes pixar this long it will take developer X-long.
Games will never be as accurate as renders, not for decades, but atl they need to do is simulate these effects they get damn close.
I think the best technology demos will be damn close in 5 years time.

Luxor Jr, Pixar, took ~75 hours per second rendered on a cray. 15 years later, the GeForce 3 could render it in realtime (according to Steve Jobs anyway - http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dsz3VngsP9s ).

IMO games will never be up with the current generation of movies because they can always use the extra processing power for more, but they can probably catch up the 15 year lag a bit. Toy Story is now 12 years old btw.

The big difference is that the rendering methods are not designed with time as a factor and so they are extremely inefficient compared to real time rendering engines.

In 3 year there is again something new.
And you can buy a new pc then again.

this isn't the way to go.

I prefer "uglyer" games, that run perfectly on pc of 5 years old

Would like to choke everyone who cought at the demonstration. :)

would be interesting to know on what pc system this ran.

lemme help you with that..

Would be interesting to know which pc system this was run on.

yvw what i say? it was RUN , ou fuckin noob. injnit

thx alot.

Run.

If these files were hosted on quakeunity it would have been alot better.

Any other host that didn't require registration to download would have been better :/
*edit, ah nevermind, altho something faster than 150 would be better as well :)

John Carmack never stops to amaze me how good of a speaker he is. His language is far beyond smart-tech or just book mall levels. I mean ..."war on entropy"? How does he come up with this.

Same here. I was just thinking to myself that I could sit here all night jabbering about graphics and not once get bored with it. =P He's a fucking God I tell you.

...

Wonka factory mayhem, always worth a +

Augustus and Veruca were big role models for me.

You don't say ; )

I want the new quake game on id tech 5!

The "- id Tech 5 Demonstration Streaming Media" link should be deleted, cause the site says "Due to the Digg hit on this news item we had to pull the streaming version. We decided we didnt want to spend $7,000 extra on bandwidth this month. Hope you dont mind."

id has come a long way... :)

...

simply awesome.

What part of Quake 4 makes everyone in a rush for Quake 5 in a new engine? Was it the 1.5 year wait for the game to mature with updates after everyone stopped playing?

Or is it the fact their old engine was capped at 60fps and seemed perfect for consoles and that was BEFORE they started aiming for consoles in the rest of their work.

"Quake 4" is a great game, but because of it's fucked up early state it has a small community. Now the best way to bring more players to the deathmatch is:
1. "Quake Zero" . I guess some "ET:QW" solutions will be adapted for it (rankings, vehicles) which would be a great 'trap' for newbs :) Plus it will be free and web-based - a lot of people will try it, a lot of them will like it. Remember the days when Wall Street guys played "Doom" against each other instead of working - "Q0" has a chance to be the next "Doom" for such type of gamers.
2. "Quake 5" ("Quake Arena", "Quake 5: Arena"?) - a follow up to "Quake Zero" but with the shaaazzzaaaaammmm visuals (which "Q0" community will desperately look for). Sure hit, like a "UE3" is now. Or even bigger.

"What part of Quake 4 makes everyone in a rush for Quake 5 in a new engine?"

the whole game, not only some parts ;/

they are doing it in-house this time, with their second team after they have completed quake zero.

rtcw2 ? :(

i would appreciate a download directlink to the gametrailers videos

Oh, I fucking knew it.

"I hope to be able to do the same thing in id Tech 6 with geometry"

Oh shit, guys. That'd be so nuts. : D

Was Carmack talkin about remotecontrolling his rockets with wifi?, that guy is crazy :D.. Gotta love im.

carmack is a one-man army

Anyone got any updates on this stuff.

Like the tools they use for the environments.
Video interviews since the original post regarding tech/editors etc.

New footage etc?
I not heard much since ,and man does time fly :(