Quakecon 2008 keynote notes

[Akumajou]

Just a couple of corrections.



You do know that Call of Duty 4 still has on the box (paraphrasing) "includes id Software technology", right? Despite what the IW guys say on interviews and so on, their games are based completely on the Q3 engine. The renderer is all new: they switched to D3D with CoD2 even though you could still find OpenGL error messages in there. People often confuse "engine" with "renderer".

Before CoD2 was released IW also said the engine was proprietary but after the game was released people found a lot of "Quake 3" strings inside the exe and configuration files. They cleaned out these for CoD4 but if you take a look at the level editor it's pretty much the same as CoD2's which was based on Q3's. And of course, the aforementioned copyright statement.



Last year's Rage trailer does include "in game, gameplay". So does this year's QuakeCon trailer, now that I think about it.

I was kind of weary of including Infinity Ward in there but you have to forgive me as I was working off of mental notes from years ago, I wonder without changing the subject, was there any legal action by Id Soft against IW? because what you are saying sounds to me like they basically reverse engineered the QIII engine into Direct X plus shaders (I was aware that the game CoD2 looked rather suspect in so called Dx7 mode) Then again a question like that could open a whole can of worms of doom wouldn't it?

Also I have seen some of the seconds long gameplay footage of Rage in the trailers so far revealed and basically other than looking like and playing like Doom 3, Quake III, etc as per my observations, the trailers have not really taken the form of a in game gameplay in the tradition of Halo 2 E3 2003, KillZone 2 E3 2007, Resistance 2 E3 08 and Gears of War 2 E3 08. I mean I do understand that Quakecon is Carmack's personal event as its really about his company's games but all I see is he is just relying on graphics and his word of mouth to carry the whole event and since no one, specially his core followers in the PC gamer sites would ever question the man...

He invented FPS games, that's already enough for anyone.

That can be debated, although that is far too much credit even for JC, I will admit that he at least made it popular in the PC space thanks mostly in part to the technology of the time, however that can be a whole different thread.

Yeah, it won't help them to sell more games, they seem to be aware of this. While hardcore gamers roasted Doom3 and they seem to be hurt about it, they've still sold more of that game than any other id title. More than KZ1 or Resistance, too.

Hardcore gamers roasted Doom 3 because the game was late by a year, Half Life 2 appeared and because it became apparent that despite gameplay evolutions in other games, the so called "retro gameplay" of Doom 3 was severely flawed because the game really did not feel or play like the older Doom games in the sense that you did not go into a room where 15 to 20 demons welcomed you with bloodthirsty screams of joy. As well as the "retro" idea seemed to many as a way to ignore the revolutions/evolutions that N64 GoldenEye 007 up to halo 1 had established in the realm of gameplay.

Personally I purchased both Doom 3 and D3 Resurrection of Evil when both titles hit $19.99 a few years back so for me the pain was lessened because I knew too many details, and most importantly I had downloaded the leaked E3 2002 Doom 3 demo and played it in my PIII 1Ghz, 512MB, ATI R200 GPU based rig and damnit I lost the cd due to hell scratches but it was clear that by the time the game was finally released Id Software had taken far too long with that game.

That said, the other major critical error in Doom 3 was that in the leaked 2002 E3 gameplay demo, the game was depicting cut scenes where a pinky demon was biting a piece of a zombie's stomach, a Baron of Hell or Hell knight could decapitate you in first person and then the last thing you would see is the demon's mouth opening (basically eaten death animation) and cut scenes where undead soldiers "smelled your fear" and all of these things were missing from the final retail game, not to mention how Half Life 1 like the game had become in the way that the game's story starts out as well as that the Nvidia Geforce 6800 had been released by then and many were able to access the high quality mode that was reserved for "512MB next gen graphic cards" even though initial cards only had 256MB!!

Also as far as D3 sales, I hope you remember the years of hype and anticipation in waiting for the game and the many PC game mags, sites, etc that kept on mentioning the game prior to release by two+ years of screenshots as well as that the whole torrent sharing thing was still not widely spread while games like Resistance 1 or Killzone 1 were being hyped or promoted in a different space as games that came out of nowhere.

Dammit, he's a technology programmer, why the hell should he study game designs??? Go bash Tim Willits for that part.

My point is not that he should study game design, is that his ego seems too far inflated to accept that someone else made something that works great and he just seems to devalue it because he did not think of it first.

Carmack stated it numerous times, he prefers a simple gaming experience like Quake3, and he's perfectly right that a lot of people still play it after nine years. It's still a crazy cool deathmatch experience.

Ok, Quake 3 was a fine PC game that is still being played, thanks specially because of mods, player models, skins, etc as most PC games benefit from this. That said we are in the console forums and we are supposed to be console gamers. The last time anyone heard of Quake III was on Dreamcast and Playstation 2 so why did John Carmack ignore the XBox with its "ease of game development" similar to a PC since it uses Microsoft software upon the release of Xbox Live in 2003? And please don't use an excuse like "he was working on doom 3" because both console ports of D3 were farmed out to Vicarious Visions for release in 2005 so JC could have hired them or someone to port QIII and build a Id games presence much earlier instead of giving the game for free in a desperate attempt to get younger and newer fans on XBox 360.

Also why if Quake 4's multiplayer was basically just like Quake III and was ported to XBox 360, is there no real interest as of now other than the hype being generated for Quake Live as console gamers on XBL are much more keen to play CoD4, Halo 3, GoW, and yes even Halo 2 still to this day.

Let's see, can any of them do simultaneous cross platform development to the level that Rage does?
Does anyone have anything even remotely similar to compeltely virtualized texturing?

Questions like those should be reserved for AFTER the Rage game is release and recieved by gamers and game reviewers and it passes any surprise or standard comparisons to currently established FPS games, in the case of gameplay as a factor and graphics.

I'll give COD4 points for running at 60fps on both main platforms and looking reasonably similar, that's a great technical achievment that seems to be beyond the capabilities of most of the industry

It depends of your point of view, I see CoD4 as nothing more than CoD2 with helicopters and modern weapons, plus being able to claim more experience in working with the console since launch in the case of both PS360 does not hurt either so its no dramatic surprise

I think he coded the jaguar edition of doom himself.
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Atari_Jaguar
Pretty nice don´t you think?

I wonder what you are really asking me with this, but, lets see if I was an ub3r 3litist console fanboy I would only really be impressed with John Carmack's programming skills if he had actually programmed Doom on the Sega Saturn

There's noticably a bit of Quake in the Source engine, I remember seeing the Q word a lot, here's a quote from JC to back that up (regarding releasing the Q3 source into the public domain):

Now this one is rather interesting, Half Life 1 was Quake II engine based and all of the years after that when Valve came back they claimed that their Source engine was in house so your comment makes them liars and subject to legal action then right? however you mention it as if Valve once again took Quake III elements and code, I just hope it does not turn out that Bungie took Quake III code too...

I also have a hard time understanding a petty complaint like his not knowing other personalities, rather than just professionally appraising the technology they implement. He has other hobbies that might preempt any time for industry watching.

In the past couple of years, specially in the console FPS space it seems not a single programmer or lead programmer took all the credit or became a personality and since this is the console forums and this is John Carmack making his engine to work accross all platforms from the begining "this time". Then again maybe not all console gamers are as stupid or poorly informed as some make them out to be and long time console gamers are fully aware that its a unified team effort that has made the best and most memorable of console first person shooters... or did I miss something, did some one become entirely responsible for implementing designs in N64 GoldenEye 007 at RARE back then and other than "former RARE employees" who left the company to make console FPSs. Then how about Bungie, was it a one man show with Halo?, can the same be said of Gears of War and so on?

Sorry for the long post but I don't believe I am being disrespectfull or hate full to John Carmack, however I feel disappointed, even as a long time fan that he fails to recognize that other FPS games and FPS game devs are and have been making waves and settings high watermarks.

I do credit him what he has actually done however recently he makes me feel like he is out of touch with the times... I still know he is trying to sell his 3d engine but he sounds too much a car sales man to me.

 

[catisfit]

Now this one is rather interesting, Half Life 1 was Quake II engine based and all of the years after that when Valve came back they claimed that their Source engine was in house so your comment makes them liars and subject to legal action then right? however you mention it as if Valve once again took Quake III elements and code, I just hope it does not turn out that Bungie took Quake III code too...

HL was Quake engined, not Quake 2. They modified the engine quite a bit for HL, but it was still noticably Quake engined. As HL went gold they forked the engine into what became Source, and there are some Quake hangovers in the HL2 source. Source:

When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life 1 (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both $/Goldsrc and /$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck.

It's not about calling them liars. It's probably not legally actionable either as my earlier quote showed John Carmack knew about it years ago and nothing has happened on the legal front. Valve did legitimately license the Quake engine so it's probably not that much of a big deal to id.

I'm not exactly sure what you're fighting for here.

 

[Richard]

Would you care to explain how unique texture streaming solves geometry and dynamic lighting/pixel shading, or LoD issues?

I think I'm one of those people who don't get the benefits as much as you do, though the things (I think) I get, are still awesome techwise.
For example, I can see how it can enable realistic environments with prebaked lighting.

Well, you already know about the secondary major thing MT enables. But starting from the top. In current games streaming is simply a means to get lower (video) memory usage. With MT the end is unique texturing. By using virtual memory pages (inherently streamed) you also get much lower texture memory utilisation but that's a byproduct. So the major thing is that MT allows completely unique surface detail and lowers texture usage that it's practically a non-issue now.

Another hidden benefit that comes from virtualised texturing is constant memory usage. In ETQW, for instance, the 20mb of video memory for the MT is constant throughout the map and is the same for all the other maps too. The main ram texture usage (on PC) is also fairly constant though there are a small variance because of how the compression works. Anyway, a constant texture usage means this turns into overhead and you can confidently use other effects that require more framebuffer because you don't have the issue where it's not clear if at any given time or place you'll have enough memory to spend on this off-screen buffer because it'd put you over the memory budget.

Another benefit is that by turning texture usage into overhead is that you close the gap between your worst and best case scenarios. This is always more important than doing some technique that increases your avg FPS because you optimised your best case.

On the consoles, and especially with the XBOX because of the shared memory, anything you do that lowers texture usage so considerably (and is constant) means you also have more memory for non-renderer related things like bigger datasets for your colision or A.I.. All of this whilst you get rid of texture repetition.

MT does have another major new benefit that you pointed out: prebaking lighting/shadows. A decade ago people used lightmaps because they were faster than real-time lighting/shadowing but it was always a problem because memory was in short supply and you did have an extra blend to do. With MT prebaking lighting AND shadows is completely performance-hit free at run-time: there is no extra storage to make room for and there's no blend. Not only that, but because it's baked into your "textures" it has the same resolution and bit depth so you completely avoid two of the standard artefacts that are associated with lightmaps: stepping and banding because usually lightmaps use a much smaller resolution and lower bit depth to save on texture memory. So with MT you get better lighting & shadows (better than real-time -- precompressing can always achieve better quality for the speed) but you have an absolutely zero performance hit if you decide to use it.

Those are the major new benefits but there are a couple of small ones as well: MT reduces your batch/draw count considerably. JC has already mentioned that you could draw any given Rage scene with just 3 draws. They have more draws because it's more efficient so they split the surfaces to allow frustrum culling and they portal indoor areas and so on. Again taking ETQW as an example, although the terrain could be batched in one go the engine breaks the 32k^2 terrains in 12 batches. Since in Rage everything can use MT I wouldn't be surprised if the worst case scenario in Rage requires less than say.... 500 draws. Compare that to today's games that use between 1000-2000 while still not having the world diversity Rage has. Batches are much more important on the PC than on the consoles but they are still invisible performance sinks where at first glance you don't get your money's worth so reducing this is very important. On the PC saving so many batches means you have more CPU cycles to devote to A.I. or physics or whatever.

Since unique texturing is inherent you don't have to waste extra polys on texture splits because you have continuous UV space and you don't have to put in a dirt decal on your 1000 feet wall to break the monotony. Now a couple of polys on a decal or a few polys on a character or a few dozen on a vehicle and a couple of hundred on a building is not something to get excited about however add them all up and you might find yourself with enough extra polys to throw in an extra character or two on screen. And nowadays polys aren't just used once, whether you're doing shadow volumes or maps that geometry has to be processed again. While you can (rather, you have to) use dedicated shadow hulls in current games to offset this it's more work for your art team.

Finally, all those "unecessary" blends that your decals use all add up and by not having those you don't have to deal with z-depth precision issues at a distance where most games just remove the decals anyway.

Btw, the LoD issues you mentioned are not just how to hide high poly geometry. Many times, especially when you have a huge landscape with many little different pieces of geometry at a distance, it's not that your poly cruncher can't handle it but often that they are increasing your batch count because they use different textures or are being lit differently or whatever. With MT you don't have this LoD problem and can concentrate on LoDing based strictly on poly-complexity.

Obviously there are problems with MT and on our MT article we did outline the higher pressure on storage medium and specifically mentioned the xbox 360 as a bottleneck (though not for the per-disc fees) so it's not a silver bullet. You couldn't do it with Oblivion and target the xbox for instance.

 

[Richard]

I was kind of weary of including Infinity Ward in there but you have to forgive me as I was working off of mental notes from years ago, I wonder without changing the subject, was there any legal action by Id Soft against IW? because what you are saying sounds to me like they basically reverse engineered the QIII engine into Direct X plus shaders (I was aware that the game CoD2 looked rather suspect in so called Dx7 mode) Then again a question like that could open a whole can of worms of doom wouldn't it?

Not really, while not explicitely confirmed (that I know of) JC's mention of a late "large technology licensing deal" is widely assumed to have been IW/Activision for CoD2. Also, IW wouldn't need to reverse engineer the Q3 engine because they already had a license for CoD1. Here's the full quote from JC's blog:

Quake 3 Source
I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn’t the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I’m pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.

Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won’t be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won’t wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

Sorry for the long post but I don't believe I am being disrespectfull or hate full to John Carmack, however I feel disappointed, even as a long time fan that he fails to recognize that other FPS games and FPS game devs are and have been making waves and settings high watermarks.

In an interview sometime in last year he did say he believed Gears of War to be the best looking game engine out there. When fellow id man, Todd Hollenshead, pointed out that Crysis was even better looking he said something to the effect "yeah but that's not released yet". So I think you're reading too much into his words that he doesn't know names. He knows companies and during the keynote he admits analysing what the competitors are doing.

Which reminds me: Gamespot have posted an audio feed of the keynote. There's a few tidbits that the live bloggers skiped over and gamespot censored the F word (wtf?). The major problem is that the audio feed ends just as he's start to discuss id Tech 6 so hopefully another website will post a complete keynote with the Q&A session.

Direct link to the audio feed here (63 MB).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

..

Okay, you're on ignore from now on.

 

[betan]

...

Great post, thanks.

Well, you already know about the secondary major thing MT enables. But starting from the top. In current games streaming is simply a means to get lower (video) memory usage.

Yes, but since I fail to see how unique texture streaming can have lower memory usage than any other efficient streaming engine, I'm not sure I would count it as an advantage of MT.

 

[almighty]

He's so quick to point out that 360 has the GPU advantage but he ignores that PS3 has the CPU advantage.

As much as i respect carmack i just cant help that he moans about things to much, so what if PS3 is harder to developer for then 360, he's not the only developer working with both and why keep bringing it up? I dont think anyone would argue that 360 is the easier platform and we have known for months that PS3 is the harder of the two.

I just hope for his sake that after all this complaining that his game actually looks half decent on PS3 and holds up to other games on the system or carmack is in for a bashing.

 

[Gabrobot]

why keep bringing it up?

Why did you bring it up? As far as I can tell, Carmack didn't really talk about developing on the consoles in this keynote.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As much as i respect carmack i just cant help that he moans about things to much, so what if PS3 is harder to developer for then 360, he's not the only developer working with both and why keep bringing it up?

Because that's his opinion and he's allowed to express it, especially when asked? Also 'moaning' about things helps get them changed. Carmack isn't in charge of developing the next console hardwares. How can he try to influence the console-designer decision making process then? By coming out with his reservations.

It's surprising how a discussion board can entertain folk with little interest in hearing people's opinions

 

[Richard]

Yes, but since I fail to see how unique texture streaming can have lower memory usage than any other efficient streaming engine, I'm not sure I would count it as an advantage of MT.

There are two advantages to virtualising texture resources that MT uses versus simply devising a cleverer algorithm for swaping textures between video and main memories. The first is that it's always better for the code and the user-experience when you're managing homogeneous blocks that are predictable and easily replaced which is what you have with MT where you're managing fixed-size pages rather than the heterogeneous blocks that are discrete textures. You have your 512 x 512 grass texture and then your 1024 x 2048 monster skin and then you have textures with alphachannel and then you have another that uses DXT5 with the swizzled component. With MT you just manage pages that are always the same area size and using the same compression (same memory size).

The most important difference however is that with MT you don't have to load the entire mip-map pyramid of each texture, you don't even have to load an entire mip-map level if only a quarter is visible on a given frame. That's why MT can reach much lower (and constant) texture usage compared to regular streaming.

If you want to know more, this is a good insight to the reasoning behind MT. Scroll down to the "3/7/00" entry.

 

[NRP]

Richard,
Thanks for your excellent posts regarding MT technology. It is very useful to have technology like this explained in layman's terms.

 

[Pete]

Which reminds me: Gamespot have posted an audio feed of the keynote. There's a few tidbits that the live bloggers skiped over and gamespot censored the F word (wtf?). The major problem is that the audio feed ends just as he's start to discuss id Tech 6 so hopefully another website will post a complete keynote with the Q&A session.

Direct link to the audio feed here (63 MB).

The most complete (read: longest*) feed I could find is this one (from here, which also includes video feeds if you feel the need to see Carmack talk). Skip to about 1:11 to pick up where GameSpot's left off (it's about 4m behind b/c they included the Rage trailer--which, BTW, he notes during the Q&A is basically but not exactly in-game, b/c IIRC he says something about them hacking together two Mega Textures that they haven't decided whether they'll keep separate or combine).

*It's 2h 37m to Gamespot's 1h 7m, though it includes the odd skip. Unfortunately, it's a completely unnecessary 300MB (D=) which can be shrunk down to an 80MB 'podcast' quality AAC (or an equivalent MP3, I imagine), and the quality's worse b/c it's from an off-stage mic.