The next game from ID: What are the technology challenges?

[Brimstone]

ID Software has always choosen to keep the company small in size, but as the complexity of content creation is still increasing, will ID Software have to increase its staff size signifigantly to stay competitive? EPIC and Valve by comparison seems to have slowly grown their staff sizes over the years, so should be more prepared for an increased workload a higher quality 3d game enviroment engine based around a 200 million plus transistor GPU can produce.

Will ID Software have to restructure itself to deliver a bleeding edge game? The programming side of things ID is probably ok, but when it comes to animators, level designers, modelers, and texture artists the company looks really thin.

Or maybe ID will just decide to make the best game it can with its small staff size and ignore exploting technology to the max?

 

[Diplo]

Re: The next game from ID: What are the technology challenge

EPIC and Valve by comparison seems to have slowly grown their staff sizes over the years, so should be more prepared for an increased workload a higher quality 3d game enviroment engine based around a 200 million plus transistor GPU can produce.

Epic also collaborate with other companies, such as they did with Digital Extemes on the Unreal series. Epic tend to concentrate on the tech and the overall vision whereas DE made a lot of the maps and resources. Epic have also taken on people from the mod community, too. I'm sure iD could do something similar if they so wished (they already have close relations with developers like Raven). Hell, I bet there are loads of modders out there would develop resources (textures, maps, art) for free if given a chance to work on an iD game....

 

[KimB]

They hired on a number of new artists and whatnot for DOOM3. The main difference between id software and other companies is that they only work on one game at a time.

 

[rashly]

id sticking to a small development team is what has hellped them make great games, IMO. The "vision" tends to get lost in large teams and there will be more "people problems". Remember Daikatana?

 

[Tim Murray]

id sticking to a small development team is what has hellped them make great games, IMO. The "vision" tends to get lost in large teams and there will be more "people problems". Remember Daikatana?

WHY MUST YOU REMIND ME!

I do know one thing about Next Id Game--it will have soft shadows.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

id sticking to a small development team is what has hellped them make great games, IMO. The "vision" tends to get lost in large teams and there will be more "people problems". Remember Daikatana?

I thought it was a great game.

 

[Reverend]

I'm sure one of the priorities for most publishers (especially) and development houses is development period (i.e. how long from start to going gold). The question to ask is whether id places this as high priority. How long has DOOM3 taken? Have id been worried? Has Activision been worried?

 

[oddfellow]

Industry board anyone?
















/me runs

 

[Infinisearch]

They hired on a number of new artists and whatnot for DOOM3. The main difference between id software and other companies is that they only work on one game at a time.

When you say it like that you make it sound like they are like 3drealms except with the respect of people, and a game that is actually about to ship.

 

[Brimstone]

They hired on a number of new artists and whatnot for DOOM3. The main difference between id software and other companies is that they only work on one game at a time.

They lost artist Paul Jaquays in the middle of the Doom 3 project and a little later programmer Graem Divine. Just before they started working on Doom 3 they canned Paul Steed (John Carmack didn't want him to go). Jim Dose got hired to replace ex-3dfx guru (he wrote glide) Brian Hook. They hired some new talented artists/animators with Kenneth Scott and Fred Nileson.

I'm not sure who else they've hired, but to me it seems they really only hire to replace people or they come out slightly larger. If no one would have left ID over the last 4 years they would be a lot bigger, but so many end up leaving. That type of turmoil will cause tremendous problems with a game way more complex and demanding than Doom 3.


As far as Doom 3's multiplayer goes, they hired Splashdamage to work on that. So there is an indication of the strain by having to turn to an outside developer to assist.

 

[Diplo]

id sticking to a small development team is what has hellped them make great games, IMO.

I think the point Brimstone is making, though, is that next-generation games will be even more demanding to make in terms of actual content eg. textures, normal maps, 3d models, sounds, music etc. Look at UT2004, for example, which has around 5GB of resources. I'd wager the next Epic game will tripple this. A small developer cannot do this easily without help or a lot of time.

Personally I'd prefer to see id sticking to making engines, which is what they do best. You say they make "great games" but, apart from Doom, I'm not convinced. Doom is my all time favourite game and genuinely amazing and groundbreaking, but the Quake series was pretty dull to my mind. We'll see, I guess...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

They hired some new talented artists/animators with Kenneth Scott and Fred Nileson.

Kenneth worked at id since Quake3 at least. But they've hired Seneca Menard (I think) during Q3Arena.

 

[Saem]

Carmack saw this a long time comming, but that's not me trying to make him look smart, I'm sure this is the norm for anyone in the industry aware of costs and time.

That's kinda his point with Doom 3, they did a lot such that it would reduce the load on content creators. Getting away from specialty shaders for a variety of materials, simplifies things.

Looking back, Carmack's big focus is on intelligent, dynamically generated procedural stuff. This reduces artist load, dramatically.

 

[Megadrive1988]

when are we likely to see Id's next game...4-5 years from now? I do not follow Id whatsoever, though I've been interested in Doom 3 since it's first showing in 2001 at Macworld where GeForce 3 was launched.

Doom 3 is actually the first game from Id that really *really* impressed me. the only other one that had my attention was Quake 2 because i was seeing 60 frames per second framerates thanks to Voodoo2 and/or Voodoo2 SLI, iirc.

I never got into Doom when it came out. I played it on my friends 486 DX 66 Mhz in 1993 but to me it wasnt a huge thing because I was into Ridge Racer arcade at that time., thus spoiling any chance of being impressed by Doom.. ok sorry for rambling....

Id's last game was Quake 3 in 1999, correct, so that's about 5 years to Doom 3... oh I think I recall that Id or Carmack saying that the next game would come out sooner than what it took for Doom 3....and that what NV30 GeForce FX can do will be the basis for the next game....which will obviously be running on NV60s, NV70s and R600s and R700s (or beyond)...

I would imagine that Id might go for raytracing and/or full global illumination, not in their next game, but the one after that..... maybe?

 

[rashly]

id sticking to a small development team is what has hellped them make great games, IMO.

I think the point Brimstone is making, though, is that next-generation games will be even more demanding to make in terms of actual content eg. textures, normal maps, 3d models, sounds, music etc. Look at UT2004, for example, which has around 5GB of resources. I'd wager the next Epic game will tripple this. A small developer cannot do this easily without help or a lot of time.

Personally I'd prefer to see id sticking to making engines, which is what they do best. You say they make "great games" but, apart from Doom, I'm not convinced. Doom is my all time favourite game and genuinely amazing and groundbreaking, but the Quake series was pretty dull to my mind. We'll see, I guess...

i agree that new games will take mroe resources. when i meant small, i meant small compared to other development teams out there. obviously they will have to increase staff because games are starting to become like movies to produce.

i personally loved the quake series (and their sales figures show something). that's entirely subjective, though.

 

[Fodder]

when are we likely to see Id's next game...4-5 years from now?

They're anticipating a much shorter development period than Doom 3 this time round, mostly because they won't be developing a whole new engine and then learning how to work with it.

IGNPC: We've heard that John Carmack is either working on a new engine or improving the DOOM 3 engine, is that going to be used for the new game?

Todd: He's not really working on a new engine, he's just updating the DOOM 3 technology. I think his comments about that were just mis-conveyed or misunderstood.

IGNPC: I assume it's an update for this next game or in general?

Todd: Exactly, the DOOM 3 technology is brand spanking new. It hasn't even been seen yet. John will probably be work on a whole new rendering engine the game after this one that we'll be working on next.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/532/532505p4.html