id Tech 5... What a shame...

[lost_soul]

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/id-tech-5-will-not-be-licenced

 

Apparently they won't let third-party game developers make games on the engine unless it is published by their parent company now. This is the sort of thing that really disappoints me. In the past, id has made great engines, but the quality of games has been somewhat controversial. Sure, Doom 1, Quake 2, and Doom 3 are great. Q3a was kind of shallow though. The modding community fixed that. I miss the days when lots of games used the id engines. The third-party devs came to the table with a much better single-player experience. I'm talking about SiN, Soldier of Fortune, RTCW, and countless others. These were all based on the id engines. I had so much fun with these games.

 

As a consumer, I don't want to see the Unreal engine completely take over. I think id should stay competitive and provide engines for third-party games. Competition is always good. Sure, id tech 4 wasn't so successful. I was expecting them to come back and reclaim a position with this new engine though. These are the sorts of tactics that will only drive production-costs up.

[New Horizon]

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/id-tech-5-will-not-be-licenced

 

Apparently they won't let third-party game developers make games on the engine unless it is published by their parent company now. This is the sort of thing that really disappoints me. In the past, id has made great engines, but the quality of games has been somewhat controversial. Sure, Doom 1, Quake 2, and Doom 3 are great. Q3a was kind of shallow though. The modding community fixed that. I miss the days when lots of games used the id engines. The third-party devs came to the table with a much better single-player experience. I'm talking about SiN, Soldier of Fortune, RTCW, and countless others. These were all based on the id engines. I had so much fun with these games.

 

As a consumer, I don't want to see the Unreal engine completely take over. I think id should stay competitive and provide engines for third-party games. Competition is always good. Sure, id tech 4 wasn't so successful. I was expecting them to come back and reclaim a position with this new engine though. These are the sorts of tactics that will only drive production-costs up.

 

Still, they will have a larger body of potential dev-houses under the umbrella they've been brought into. The parent company has quite a few developers under it I guess.

[nbohr1more]

The biggest question is whether John Carmack will be afforded the chance to continue looking for "pure solutions" for fundamental graphic engine issues, or if he will be forced to help Bethesda (et al) fix-up their more conventional "hacked together" style engines.

 

I still feel that the approach JC started with Doom 3 has merit and some of the high-resolution texture mods show how much better Doom 3 could have looked if more (and better) textures and normal maps were applied. I think that Megatexture was his solution to that requirement but he has only now gotten a chance to show a finished version of that because of how small his team has been.

 

What if Megatexture had debuted with the release of Doom 3 in 2004?

 

Would production chain for textures, normal maps, specular maps (etc) have been completely revised throughout the industry?

 

Is that paradigm change still possible, even now?

 

Will JC make a comeback when he has solved a similar data-set conundrum for vertex data ala Sparse Voxel Octree (if allowed to continue these types of investigations)?

 

Many questions about the effect of this acquisition...

[Unstoppable]

It's their loss because the less people that get to create with the engine the less the engine will evolve and be well known. I like how Epic Games handle their engines from Wikipedia.

 

Unreal Development Kit (UDK)

While the Unreal Engine 3 has been quite open for modders to tinker around with, the ability to publish and sell games made using UE3 was restricted to licensees of the engine. However, on November 2009, Epic released a free version of their engine, called the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) that is available to the general public. According to the current EULA, game makers can sell their games by paying Epic the cost of $99 USD at the outset, and 25% of all revenue above $5000 USD.[11]

 

 

This is really a step backward for the entire industry having a great Engine developed by Carmack being restricted this way.

Edited October 5, 2010 by Unstoppable

[Baddcog]

true, look at any modelling forum and UDK is everywhere.

[jdude]

Think of it this way. ID Tech 5 is probably so good that making it exclusive to Bestheda likely views it as a huge competitive advantage over competition using worse engines/harder to use engines. It's a new move but makes total sense. I bet Fallout 4 will use it or something similar

[nbohr1more]

I like that optimism...

 

...but what I've heard is that the vast diversity of textures came at the expense of a non-trivial amount of GPU power. Meaning that he had to cut way back on dynamic lighting. Essentially JC is making the GPU perform a task that it wasn't really designed to do. He's been arguing to ATI and nVidia to natively include this ability in dedicated hardware but they haven't listened so far. He's (again) trying to prove a point (just like he tried to prove that GPU's should have dedicated Z-Stencil hardware for shadows).

 

Megatexture works, but Bethesda has been remarking that they can't use the tech because it's "not dynamic enough".

 

(can't win either way, can he?)

 

It's another big gamble from id about the future direction for hardware except this time they are doing a little scoping for the industry's reaction.

 

If the GPU makers try to optimize for Rage, then Doom 4 can be really dynamic (just like Doom 3) on newer hardware and the engine may catch on. If the hardware vendors don't bother much and the game doesn't do so well, then they will have to regroup for the next try (and be more conservative with Doom 4).

 

I think Zenimax is hedging their bets and letting id take this gamble on the condition that if it fails then id properties like Doom and Wolfenstein would be produced on other engines. I can just see JC taking that kind of bet, he seems to have utter faith in the superiority of his radical designs.

 

That's the way I see it in my over-sensational story-book POV.

[rich_is_bored]

I doubt any games are going to suffer because they didn't get to use idTech 5. There are so many players in the game engine business now that what id has to offer isn't that big of a deal.

[lost_soul]

The reason I see this as a big deal is because Carmack's engines have always used cross-platform APIs. Any game that uses his engine will work great in Linux, even through Wine. This was a big blow to cross-platform gaming... Linux in particular. Maybe Frictional Games can step up to the plate and fill the chair id is apparently leaving behind.

[demagogue]

I just remember that lovely video where JC goes on and on about how wonderful id5 & its editor are most especially for developers, it was built especially to better realize their artistic visions, and we watch them hand painting the environment. Who wouldn't want to build with it? The irony of these two narratives coming together makes the whole thing stink -- Introducing id5, The game-maker's dream tool! ZeniMax dev's only, please...

[jdude]

I like that optimism...

 

And I like your negativism

[Tels]

I just remember that lovely video where JC goes on and on about how wonderful id5 & its editor are most especially for developers, it was built especially to better realize their artistic visions, and we watch them hand painting the environment. Who wouldn't want to build with it? The irony of these two narratives coming together makes the whole thing stink -- Introducing id5, The game-maker's dream tool! ZeniMax dev's only, please...

 

I though the first irony was "where JC goes on and on about how wonderful id5 & its editor are most especially for developers, it was built especially to better realize their artistic visions, and we watch them hand painting the environment". (Bold from me). Still generating everything manually! They have learned nothing the past 20 years it seems *sigh*

 

I looked at a few megatexture tutorials, and while the results *can* be stunning if a lot of work from an experienced texture artist with the right tools is put into it, it is, at the end of the day, still an entirely handpainted static work. No deformable terrain, not blast-away-rocks, and if you don't like your map layout, you start completely from scratch again...

 

Hopefully we can up them one up at least on some aspects

[rebb]

The first idStudio videos looked really interesting - they seem to care about good tools a lot more now, finally, hopefully.

 

Still generating everything manually! They have learned nothing the past 20 years it seems *sigh*

 

The way i understood it, they start from some procedurally generated base, and then artists go in and add unique details.

I guess the question is how much more time-consuming this makes the whole process, one could probably spend ages adding little special details to the environment.

 

My personal gripes with the technology are the low-resolution look compared to other assets in some of the screenshots, and the way shadows of dynamic objects are drawn on top of the baked lighting.

 

I'll still drool all over it when it's released tho.

[nbohr1more]

Now that I think of it, maybe that "painting" work-flow is something akin to recording procedural actions from the artists as was done in the 96kb .kkrieger demo.

 

(If you can't come up with a better image compression scheme, why not crowd-source the "compression" from the artists right ... Not that anything out there has been shown to be more effective than the theprodukkt's method of squeezing down file size, ...DDS eat your heart out... just seems like a pretty extreme measure to solve the storage issues for non-tiled unique textures...)

 

I guess the closest to this I could imagine for TDM would be having DR collect the sequence of where you place repetitive grime decals in a scene in relation to some point of origin. Then compress all the vectors, then use a particle effect or script to playback the vectors and paint the decals in the scene at run-time. It would reduce the map size and memory foot-print in exchange for some amount of processing to decode the placement sequence... Probably not worth the trade-off though...

 

Unless collecting the model "placement sequence" could be beneficial for a similar reason...

 

I think we'll see artists being hands-on for asset creation for awhile still. I just don't think those Mandelbrot\Fractal engineers can design equations to cover all the possible aesthetic requirements for the majority of scenes right now. Things are advancing quickly though...

Edited October 17, 2010 by nbohr1more

[nbohr1more]

Spooky...

 

The death of Mandelbrot:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11560101

[LEGION]

Hey, a couple of weeks ago I just saw a TV-docu about Fractals, was very interesting...

[Tels]

The first idStudio videos looked really interesting - they seem to care about good tools a lot more now, finally, hopefully.

 

 

 

The way i understood it, they start from some procedurally generated base, and then artists go in and add unique details.

I guess the question is how much more time-consuming this makes the whole process, one could probably spend ages adding little special details to the environment.

 

Here is a tutorial that details the process quite good:

 

http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/A_Simple_First_Megatexture

 

Seems the textures are specified in a top-down order and you only tell it the wanted patterns, it bakes the texture for you then. However, looking at the advanced tutorial, you see that there are still tons of manual steps.

 

I'll still drool all over it when it's released tho.

 

True Hopefully D3 goes open source, so we can show that we can produce similiar results

[Unstoppable]

Pfft seems to me ID is getting cocky. I say eff you ID your loss, who gives a crap about Rage. I bet it will bomb, trying to be like Borderlands. Watch the hardware makers not even want to go through the process and just stick with stuff that's easier to make. GO GO unreal editor.

 

Then again Epic said eff you to PC by making Gears of War 2 exclusive to 360 and part 3 as well. Due to the "pirates". Yet they make Bulletstorm for PC.

 

Oh well.

[7upMan]

News update on the release date of Rage: According to the new trailer on YouTube, the game will be released on September 13. This means no idtech 4 source code release before that date. However, I guess we can get our hopes up for some time during 2012. If the world hasn't ended until then...

[lost_soul]

I just tried to get zdoom working on my new Arch Linux machine to play Action Doom 2 (great game BTW). Problem is, Zdoom uses a proprietary sound library that doesn't even have a stable ****ing ABI. That means if the game wants version 4.24 and you've got 4.32, you're out of luck. This is why I'm glad id releases their stuff under the GPL and not the BSD license, so someone can't link it to libraries like this.

[snobel]

Potentially surprisingly good news about id Tech 5:

 

http://www.phoronix...._item&px=OTA3MA

 

Probably 'open source' here means 'open source if you pay $ and sign an NDA.'

 

I hope he's right about Tech 4 going open this summer and not after Rage is launched.

 

Edit: They apparently corrected it already

Edited February 3, 2011 by snobel

[lost_soul]

Well, this would be a good idea. The modding community could use the engine for free, cross-platform and all. Then if someone wants to go commercial, they can pay for a license. If they do this, it could help them reclaim market share from Epic, seeing as Epic is not on Linux and the tech isn't as open.

[demagogue]

Even if there are strings attached or it's delayed, the mere fact they're still using the term "open source" is very encouraging in light of the Zeni Max policy.

 

I was half convinced id4 would be the last engine they opened, and I wasn't even 100% sure about that. But this is a good sign.

 

And seeing id5 being opened someday makes me dream about what could be done with it. I just hope someone finds a way for modders to handle crunching the megatextures. (Maybe something like distributed computing a la seti@home, if they could get enough users.)

[Serpentine]

Problem is, Zdoom uses a proprietary sound library that doesn't even have a stable ****ing ABI. That means if the game wants version 4.24 and you've got 4.32, you're out of luck. This is why I'm glad id releases their stuff under the GPL and not the BSD license, so someone can't link it to libraries like this.

 

Heh, it doesnt stop you from using proprietary libs, depending on permission and interfacing you're more than entitled to use them, however you might not be able to include them directly or in package form.

[stumpy]

according to a zeni max page (i found it by back tracing fallout 3 to owners then job pages) who own id they've signed a two year deal with microsoft to make exclusive idtech 5 engine games for the xbox360 a version of doom 3 and quake 4, which is probably why its not currently open source.