Carmack demos new iD engine at WWDC keynote

[Titanio]

I wasn't really sure where to put this, but since it's coming to two consoles I figured it would fit as well here as anywhere else. Haven't seen it posted, but if it did make it up somewhere here, my apologies. Here's the details so far:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/steve-jobs-live-from-wwdc-2007/

"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."

"We're going to be showing on a Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox at E3, we'll have another Mac announcement at E3." That was it? It was neat, but not really an "announcement."

20GB of textures on one track? A racing game of sorts?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Megatexturing makes its appearance. And this does raise questions about storage!

 

[Inane_Dork]

Looks a lot like MotorStorm and Heavenly Sword, IMO.

And yeah, this does bring up lots of questions about disc storage for Mac, PC and 360. Heck, with a 20 GB level, it brings up questions about disc storage for PS3 as well.

 

[almighty]

Looks like its a job for Dual layer Blu-Ray.

 

[Titanio]

This might be useful in debates about storage:

Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars features a tool suite for creating MegaTextures called MegaGen. Once the Artist or Level Designer has completed the artwork, MegaGen outputs two entirely unique 4GB textures - a diffuse map containing colour data, and a normal map - and then combines them into a single 5GB data file. This data file is then split into unique tiles suitable for streaming, and then compressed to reduce disk space usage.

The resulting unique MegaTexture is around 500MB in size. This represents a reasonable tradeoff between ETQW’s visual quality and disk space usage (maintaining a shippable size for the game).

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/interviews/11/

Assuming a similar compression ratio - 10:1 - you'd be talking about 2GB of disc storage required for a 20GB texture/texture-set. I'm guessing compression ratios wouldn't be much different now since 10:1 seems quite strong as is. However, if that's assuming HDD storage it might be a bit different/worse for optical media.

On PCs and Macs, we should remember that they'll be installing everything to HDDs, so they can go to the absolute limit with compression on the DVD there (without worrying about decompression time), and use multiple DVDs even since it'd be one-time hassle at install-time. All of that could expand onto the HDD well beyond capacity the capacity of the DVD(s) the game ships on.

 

[AntShaw]

Megatexturing makes its appearance. And this does raise questions about storage!

Indeed for megatexturing.

I think its far to early to tell what/if any questions will be raised in regards to storage from what we have been shown.

 

[one]

Looks a lot like MotorStorm

Exactly what I thought when I opened this thread :smile:

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

I think it looks more like that pod race from star wars.

 

[AlNom]

Hey, it's the great great great great grandfather of the Doom 3 scientist.


Looks nice. Just need some direct feed.

 

[Kaotik]

What I find curious, is that apparently EA is going to support Apple big time, according to another forum, they're bringing C&C 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed, Harry Potter, Madden, Tiger Woods and possibly others for the Mac, which means they need to make OGL renderers for each game too, as they're all (AFAIK all, anyway) using D3D renderers at the moment.

Either way, EA supporting Apple is a big, bold move, and is no doubt the first sign of making Macs a sensible gaming platform, too.

edit: The pic above, quoted by AlStrong from Titanio's post, isn't looking too good though, it just screams "I'm made from plastic!"

 

[AlNom]

edit: The pic above, quoted by AlStrong from Titanio's post, isn't looking too good though, it just screams "I'm made from plastic!"

Yea, it does have that look to it, though I'd rather wait for direct screenshots instead of a photo taken in the dark to look at specific detail.

edit: btw, I meant that overall what they're showing is nice. Especially in that screenshot with the snow-capped mountain in the far background, I would think that if they're touting MegaTexture, it should be reachable in-game. And there's a nice atmospheric haze going on that I like.

 

[Skrying]

Those look like utter crap. I'm sorry, but they simply scream "Carmack" to me. What does that mean? They look like plastic, have a huge lack of details and I hate it. Even for "early" tech shots they're horrible.

 

[DieH@rd]

Definatley some kind of a racing game, or at least game with some vehicle parts... I wonder what kind of GPU card will it require

 

[StefanS]

Does anyone else feel like ID has missed the timing sweet spot? This comes 1,5 yrs too late for use in console gaming. UE3 has already stolen all the buzz. Or 3 yrs. too early

 

[pakotlar]

Those look like utter crap. I'm sorry, but they simply scream "Carmack" to me. What does that mean? They look like plastic, have a huge lack of details and I hate it. Even for "early" tech shots they're horrible.

Damn people for always being negative. Is that "in" these days?

 

[Titanio]

Does anyone else feel like ID has missed the timing sweet spot? This comes 1,5 yrs too late for use in console gaming. UE3 has already stolen all the buzz. Or 3 yrs. too early

Well, I don't think their aim is to attain some UE3-style of ubiquity. As far as their concerned at this stage, they're just making an engine for their own game right now. That's the way Carmack claims to always do it. I don't think anyone expected them to suddenly stop making their own engines because UE3 achieved high popularity.

 

[Blazkowicz]

those are crappy screenshots, crappy screenshots always look crappy just like 10 year old games look fantastic on thumbnails.
That and tech improvements are more and more incremental, it's all about content now. We need a high quality video of the walkthrough to appreciate the use of unique texturing. And it's all about data storage and RAM too. The same engine will display better metal vietnamese hats thanks to higher res textures when we'll afford them.

 

[Gabrobot]

Those look like utter crap. I'm sorry, but they simply scream "Carmack" to me. What does that mean? They look like plastic, have a huge lack of details and I hate it. Even for "early" tech shots they're horrible.

Plastic...you mean as opposed to this?


Geez people, let's remember that tiny photos of projected footage aren't going to show a whole lot of detail.

 

[Squeak]

20 Gb?! That's a lot! Finally we found out what to use all that space on BR-Discs for.
How is 360 going to handle this?

 

[Kaotik]

Just curious, could it be procedural textures, and just what they would take as conventional textures?