By Jim Rossignol on August 7th, 2009 at 9:14 am.
Via Shacknews, we see some new shots of Rage from SIGGRAPH 2009, where a talk given by id Software senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren included a whole bunch of stuff about the “virtual texturing” in the new engine. There’s a handful of environment shots on there, and they look incredimentary. This could well be the next game you build a new PC for. The full PDF is here.
Oh, and in case you’ve not seen it, there’s a big old Rage teaser site here.
07/08/2009 at 09:36 Howard says:
I’m guessing that PDF made more sense when some chap from Id was giving a presentation over it =)
Cannot seem to find a document talking about what virtual texturing actually is (with explanation I mean, not just bullet points like the PDF)
What I did garner from the PDF was that most of this was done in order to allow Tech 5 to run on 360/PS3 as their hardware was limiting them. Interesting. Still the shots do look good…
07/08/2009 at 09:44 Jim Rossignol says:
Yeah, it’s got to scale down to DirectX 9 era tech. That said, the interesting bit will be to see how far it scales up on high end PCs.
07/08/2009 at 09:47 Schmung says:
I *think* virtual texturing is just a term for the abstraction of the games texture usage. In most games you’ve got an object and it has a texture – thus you load gazillions of textures per scene. If you abstract this process so that you’ve got a texture already sitting there on cache and just pump all the textures you want to see in the scene into the texture sitting on the cache then you can do all sorts of clever things.
That’s roughly my understanding of it, but I could be wrong. University was a long time ago. I dare say some of the more technical people here can provide a better explanation. PDF was a very interesting read actaully. Those id folks are clever bastards and no mistake.
07/08/2009 at 09:47 Howard says:
Exactly – I should imagine with this being Carmac’s new baby the answer will be that it scales VERY far.
Actually, that said, has Id ever done the Crysis type thing and released a game that is WELL beyond the remit of current gen PCs? I don;t think they have actually…
07/08/2009 at 09:54 espy says:
This looks fantastic, not just technically, but also conceptually, world- and art-wise. Very exciting.
07/08/2009 at 09:54 Babs says:
This is how I interpreted it (though I’m sure there are others whole will come along more skilled than I):
Virtual Texturing is system by which every texture in the scene is/can be unique. The textures for various bits if the scene are in pages that are streamed as required to the GPU. There is also an LOD system (this is what the quad-tree was about) that uses lower quality textures at distance.
To manage the latency (time to load and transfer textures to the CPU) the system upscales the low-quality textures and then blends in the high-quality ones when available.
Basically this means that open-worlds can be much more detailed and with less repetition of ‘stuff’, at the expense of more content creation of course. It would be my guess that this will also scale well on less powerful hardware since you can just employ lower LOD textures, although it’s fairly CPU heavy.
The last bit is about their parallel processing structure. I think this comes down to them having broken the processing down into small stateless ‘Jobs’ (like a single function) with well defined input/output and little syncronisation as opposed to a few large threads doing lots of things. This works better for the Cell where the execution units are small (?). One interesting thing is that (if my understaning is correct) some of this processing is designed to finish 1 frame after it was started, which must have required some clever programming the manage.
I am not a game developer though, so I may have got some of this wrong.
07/08/2009 at 10:23 Stense says:
All that techno gunk went well over my head, but those pictures: oooo spanking great.
07/08/2009 at 10:30 oceanclub says:
It would be nice if iD ever talked about their games _as a game_ and not a tech demo. I’m incredibly dubious that, other than technology, there’s anything to be excited about here. (Story is for porn, right?)
P.
07/08/2009 at 10:33 Jim Rossignol says:
Oceanclub: they do talk about their games as games, but this is a Siggraph presentation, and hence not about games.
Rage seems to be a kind of Fallout-meets-Highway-bit-of-HL2, plus Deathcars. I think there’s something to be excited about, if just because this is Id trying to break their downward spiral in terms of creativity.
07/08/2009 at 10:57 oceanclub says:
“they do talk about their games as games”
If they have I – honestly – have rarely seen it. iD-related articles tend to be 90% technology focused – Carmack talking about megatexturing or, um, whatever. Normally I think it is terrible when a publisher interferes with a developer, but with the Bethesda acquisition, that could be a good thing, if only to get them away from their usual sophomoric macho emotionless B-movie settings/plots.
Or maybe I’m just getting old.
P.
07/08/2009 at 11:05 Howard says:
Not sure about getting old, but you seem to be coming a bit unplugged. iD always have talked about their games, but their games tend to be in very shiny new engines that do things we have not seen before. To have them NOT talk about what its capabilities are would be foolish
07/08/2009 at 11:06 Babs says:
I’d forgotten they’d been bought by ZeniMax/Bethesda. I’d bet that a very large part of that was getting control of this engine tech, it really suits the style of games they make. Fallout 4/5 with this tech maybe?
07/08/2009 at 11:30 oceanclub says:
“iD always have talked about their games, but their games tend to be in very shiny new engines that do things we have not seen before.”
Yes, but that’s kinda my point; they get excited about the tech, the actual _game_ – that is, setting/plot – seem to come across as an afterthought. I’m old enough to remember the huge excitement about Doom 3, and then playing it; it was like the Beatles reforming and coming out with a album of kazoo covers of Jim Reeves songs. In this case, it was an artfully-rendered cupboard simulator. Hence my dubiousity about Rage, which seems to be a couple of other games cobbled together (“Fuel-out 3″).
Bah, humbug, when I were young ’twere all fields, etc,
P.
07/08/2009 at 11:34 Howard says:
LOL. Well I agree that Doom was all talk and no trousers but I think, in general, iD do good work. Their engines are solid and they have made some good games. I admit I’d rather see more about what the hell Rage is a game, but as Jim says, this is just an article by a third party about iD’s tech. We’ll just have to see what they present us with I guess…
07/08/2009 at 11:44 CMaster says:
iD have indeed always been a technology led company. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. IF you haven’t read Masters of Doom, I’d reccomend it.
Basically, the place where games like Doom and Keen came from was by creating new tech, then seeing what the best game they could make around it was. Doom and Wolfenstein’s frentic pacing and scares came from the fact that the engine ran fast and looked best like that. Quake in many ways failed because their designs were too ambitious, never to be realised – so it became a real mess of a game in design terms, but had staggering tech that the multiplayer element of made good use of.
Rage looks like it could be exciting. It certainly has me interested in a way none of their conventional shooters ever have.
07/08/2009 at 11:54 The Colonel says:
Oh my God please don’t let Bethesda make another Fallout.
07/08/2009 at 12:01 oceanclub says:
“iD have indeed always been a technology led company.”
And that’s both a plus but also a problem. I imagine the reason that Doom 3 has no memorable people in it is because , unlike the Source engine, while the Doom 3 engine is capable of displaying pumping steel pistons in almost pornographic detail, it renders people’s face as bloated white pudding. (Imagine Alyx in the Doom 3 engine *shudder*)
But you get the feeling that no-one in iD would have the balls to tell John “Um, can we get an engine where we can display at least a _smidgeon_ of empathy kthxbye”. So they make do with what they get.
P.
07/08/2009 at 12:20 Maykael says:
@oceanclub: I think the problem that you has a source in the fact the Carmack doesn’t really like story-games. He has repeatedly stated the Quake III is his favorite thing to do. Even when talking about Rage he said that they’re trying to put some kind of a good story in there because today’s gamers kinda demand to have a narrative to accompany their videogame antics. It seemed to me back then that he would settle for something simpler in another case, and he’s just doing it do increase the sales of the game.
07/08/2009 at 12:27 The Sombrero Kid says:
virtual texturing is pretty simple and obvious when you think about it really, for years we’ve been using tile based textures for reasons of compression (fitting it into vram), now with virtual graphics memory and gfx cards supporting compressed texture formats tile based texturing is redundant, we can load in textures as big as the world that are compressed with traditional compression techniques as opposed to tile maps, it means the artists can paint on the world like they would a picture without worrying about joins & shit and programmers world rendering code is less complex and more efficient in a lot of different ways.
thats the theory anyway, in practice it’s quite difficult.
07/08/2009 at 12:27 CMaster says:
@oceanclub – seeing as empathy is something Carmack is reportedly rather short on, one could imagine that is a problem.
07/08/2009 at 12:41 The Sombrero Kid says:
the most interesting thing about that pdf is page 25 onwards were it talks about rages parallel job based architecture, which has been touted as an essential step for game engines for some time but no ones actually came out & done it till now.
07/08/2009 at 12:48 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
Was thinking about doing something like this a few times this year, and again while on my bike yesterday. Its good ID does this, it would have taken me my entire life to make it.
07/08/2009 at 13:10 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
I was wrong, what I was thinking about, was just the LOD stuff.
07/08/2009 at 13:13 jon_hill987 says:
ID tech5 water looks a bit shite from those images.
07/08/2009 at 14:08 MrFake says:
This virtual texturing will be some feat. Being able to adjust the LOD in real time like this without the player being aware of it is definitely a critical step in game production. I don’t doubt that id can pull it off.
Also, tech is really all id has, or ever had. Their games have been almost universally shallow. Why should we expect more from game engine specialists?
07/08/2009 at 14:09 ToadSmokingDuckMonkey says:
Being set in a desert wasteland, I sorta doubt that they’re going to spend as many man-hours on water as the Bioshock team did.
07/08/2009 at 14:11 Lars Westergren says:
You know, I started writing a bitter post where I whined that I thought “PC gaming was FINALLY moving away from fawning over every ID hint at hawt graphics and their ‘games don’t need plot anymore than porn flicks do’ attitude”.
But then I actually read the PDF. Pretty nice stuff. Interesting stuff, even if most of the tech went over my head (even though I AM a programmer). Interesting hint of approaching functional programming with “well-defined input/output” and stateless jobs (immutable data?) for increased parallelization.
07/08/2009 at 14:13 Meat Circus says:
OMG, it’s Yet Another Id FPS. BUT WITH CARS.
Yeah. That’ll have me forking out 2K for a new gaming PC and no mistake.
07/08/2009 at 14:23 Jim Rossignol says:
Spending £2000 on a PC would be awesome.
07/08/2009 at 14:38 jsutcliffe says:
You’re shattering my vision of games journalists expensing gigantic gaming rigs, Jim!
07/08/2009 at 14:50 Gap Gen says:
Yeah, that PDF was mostly about implementing level-of-detail loading of textures, so you have one honkin’ huge texture on your hard drive and the game uses clever pixie-magic to pull out the parts of the texture you’re seeing at any one time without causing your RAM to burst and leak bits all over your motherboard.
07/08/2009 at 15:03 Lars Westergren says:
@Meat circus
Ok, their own games aren’t good. But the technology will eventually be used by others. Which will raise the bar for what gamers think is acceptable graphics. Which will raise production costs, which will push publishers towards safe bets, which means lowest common denominator, which means more tits and blood action titles for consoles
….wait, I was right to bitter, wasn’t I?
07/08/2009 at 15:08 aoanla says:
The really clever iD Siggraph paper was last year, when they were talking about the feasibility of realtime voxel rendering (which in principle means that you don’t need to do all this messing around with textures and bumpmaps and etc etc etc). Unfortunately, it also doesn’t work well on non-cutting edge GPUs, so we get this almost-as-clever paper about what id5 does (which looks like an extension of the megatexture stuff? – the job based architecture seems more interesting from a revolutionary standpoint) which actually does work on affordable GPUs.
07/08/2009 at 15:20 Jim Rossignol says:
Lars: I think the point of this stuff is that it reduces, or at least mediates, costs, as the art process is quicker and easier using these giant textures. Most of the guff for this engine has been about developer experience, rather than gamer-end visuals.
As for Id’s games being bad… *Doom 3* was bad, and even then not exactly terrible in the grand spectrum of shit.
Doom was Doom, Quake was brilliant, Quake 2 was okay, Quake III was sensationally good. All their other titles have been outsourced to other studios.
07/08/2009 at 15:21 Tei says:
it also contains lots of info about changes to make it run well on the ps3. this engine seems multiplatform. somewhere is also say virtual texto plus artist. you need good artist to make something with this.
07/08/2009 at 15:25 Lars Westergren says:
Jim, Yes, you are right on all points. I’m just a bit cranky today, is all. ;)
07/08/2009 at 15:48 Senethro says:
Doom3 sold 2.5 million across all platforms. Think about that.
07/08/2009 at 15:56 wien says:
You know, I kinda miss the days where we were allowed to drool over cool tech without being made feel guilty by the “zomg it’s about gameplay and story”-brigade. This is cool. It renders beautiful graphics in an innovative way. Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
If you want articles about story and gameplay, I’m sure one will appear on RPS shortly.
07/08/2009 at 16:01 oceanclub says:
“Doom3 sold 2.5 million across all platforms. Think about that.”
Do you think that was too many or too few?
P.
07/08/2009 at 16:09 Jim Rossignol says:
I’m happy to drool over tech. Games *are* tech. Without the graphics there are no games.
While I’ve argued against the trend towards *realism* in graphics, I don’t think we can argue against technological progress, which games are a manifestation of, and which Id are one of the primarchs of.
07/08/2009 at 16:20 Howard says:
I could hug you for that post, Jim. =)
This trend (and I mean that in the most insulting way, like when 8 year old girls *have* to have a certain type of bracelet or “their life is just OVER!!!”) for hating graphics is staggeringly tedious. Anyone who actually claims that graphics are not (one of the most) important (parts) in games needs to sell their consoles, give away their PC, buy a Spectrum 128 and stop bothering the rest of us.
07/08/2009 at 16:28 aoanla says:
@Howard:
I think you’re leaning towards a strawman argument here. What people actually tend to claim is that having a mighty cutting-edge graphics engine is not the most important thing in a game. One can have very impressive graphics in a game without pushing the tech limit, especially if one avoids trying to do “realistic” graphics.
The other thing that people claim is that *too much importance* is placed on having awesome graphics. This is almost certainly an out of date reaction (since it really appeared strongly some time around Quake 3 era), but it isn’t an invalid one – there are still games which are marketed purely on the high-endness of their graphics engines.
(And, indeed, in response to Howard’s question: iD have never released a game which couldn’t run on normal computers, but Quake 3 supported an “ultra high” graphics mode which was out of the capability of any GPU available at release.)
07/08/2009 at 16:32 Lars Westergren says:
I don’t hate graphics Howard, I hate it when focus on graphics reduces overall game quality
But obviously, ymmv.
07/08/2009 at 16:40 roryok says:
@The Colonel
Why is everyone seemingly on a big bethesda bash lately? Fallout 3 was bloody brilliant, as was oblivion.
Yes, I said it.
It might not have lived up to the hype, but nothing ever does!
07/08/2009 at 16:44 pkt-zer0 says:
“I hate it when focus on graphics reduces overall game quality”
With id tech 5 being aimed at making the development process easier, that’s kind of irrelevant.
“Fallout 3 was bloody brilliant, as was oblivion.”
[Intelligence] So you’re saying Fallout 3 was bloody brilliant?
I found both games insultingly moronic for the most part, but hey. I’m not too fond of marketing-driven game-design in the first place, either.
07/08/2009 at 16:46 wien says:
aoanla: While you may be right that graphics gets too much attention at times, why is that important to bring up in a blurb about a presentation held at SIGGRAPH? :) It’s about the graphics. That’s the whole point, which makes it a little silly when people rush in to exclaim “the graphics aren’t everything and id only talks about tech!!!” Let’s just drool at the pretty pictures instead.
(Oh, and it was Doom 3 which had that “OMG my GPU is burning” mode. ;))
07/08/2009 at 16:46 oceanclub says:
Umm.
Howard, I think it’s a huge leap to say that those of us who, based on iD’s past performance, are wary of hyping up Rage until they know more about it then _just_ the tech, “hate graphics”. Any more than those wary of unrestrained capitalism “hate freedom”.
I speak as someone who grinned at the shallow marvellousness of Crysis, which looked lovely, had forgettable plot/characters, but allowed you to invisibly leap over a high wall and knock someone down with a chicken – far more fun than Doom 3 ever gave you.
Graphics are absolutely important, but a graphically amazing game that is no fun is a screensaver.
P.
07/08/2009 at 16:50 oceanclub says:
(And yes, Oblivion was bloody brilliant. Fallout 3 very good, though its scope it did pale by comparison – despite having a better levelling system.)
07/08/2009 at 16:50 Howard says:
I wasn’t criticising *every* post in this thread with that last post of mine. I understand that some of the iD doubters are also into their shiny graphics. I just hate this basic assumption that is overly prevalent on RPS threads that making a game LOOK good automatically reduces its worth and quality as an actual game. People who espouse such sentiment just make me cringe as they clearly have no single clue what they are talking about.
Beyond that iD’s record is much better than most people think as Jim pointed out in an earlier post. The only game they have done which I would label as less than good was Quake 2. People just assume, for some reason, that everything in iD tech engines is iD’s fault. Weird…
07/08/2009 at 16:55 Howard says:
@aoanla
Actually it was Quake 4 that had the Ultra High textures setting that could not be run at time of release. Quake 3 could definitely be run flat out when it was released.
07/08/2009 at 17:00 Paul S. says:
When did this Games=Story attitude appear? Since when has story been a crucial part of the gaming landscape? Sure, games can do story magnificently and many of my favourite games are very story heavy – but that doesn’t mean that games must all have a compelling story, or even should. Let’s let id do what they want to do, and see what they come up with.
07/08/2009 at 17:03 Jad says:
“Doom 3 was bad … Doom was Doom, Quake was brilliant, Quake 2 was okay, Quake III was sensationally good”
Agreed. And to note:
Doom 1 & 2 = virtually no story
Quake = no story
Quake 2 = some story
Quake 3 = no story
Doom 3 = some story
I like games with story and empathy, the Half-Lives and Grim Fandangos and Fallouts. But I like even more when developers know what they do best, and focus on making a great game their own way. ID caters to a very specific niche, and to expect them to do differently is naive.
I only played the opening section of Doom 3, but it’s Half-Life/System Shock 2 style of starting with no fighting but lots of ominous dialog and audio recordings bored me silly. Why wasn’t I shooting monsters within seconds of booting up the game? Because of all you “story and empathy not graphics and gameplay” people.
07/08/2009 at 17:06 Psychopomp says:
@Paul
The problem isn’t when a game has little to no story, it’s when it tries to force a shitty story down out throats.
YES, YES, I GET IT. MR. SPACE MARINE IS VERY UPSET ABOUT THE DEMONS.
07/08/2009 at 17:10 Jad says:
Hmmm … wish we still had the edit function, that last sentence of mine reads more antagonistic than I intended. It also was less focused on any specific person in this thread, and more at the ” today’s gamers” that Maykael noted Carmack needs to placate.
07/08/2009 at 17:13 Zyrusticae says:
This article was fascinating.
So fascinating, in fact, that I am quite mortified by the iD-bashing antics within this thread.
It makes me sad.
07/08/2009 at 17:19 Lucas says:
RPS should probably not post things like this. Its not their strong point, and they don’t have the background to evaluate it. In this case, there’s really nothing new presented here. Wikipedia suggests id Tech 5 has fully dynamic world content, rendering improvements, and better tools, but these aren’t discussed in this PDF.
Apologies for the rant. I didn’t sleep much last night.
I’ve skimmed through the presentation, and while it’s all technically sound as usual per id Software, it’s also terribly boringly predictable. I’m afraid that since rocketry has overtaken games as Carmack’s primary interest, that’s where his brainpower is focused and all his best ideas will be. Van Waveren & co are clearly up to the task of executing this, but there is no technological vision here, only just keeping up with hardware trends and development costs.
Virtual texture management is a great technology, but I think using pre-authored fully unique texturing everywhere was a bad decision. ETQW maps were very big (3.15 GB for the original set of 12), and while community made maps eventually came around, it was too little too late, and too much to download when you just want to jump into a game. I’m sure it is great for artist productivity and keeping down the cost of high fidelity content, but it really hurts when your multiplayer community is locked into a 12-map base set for so long.
The worst part of it was that the unique texturing didn’t really stand out at all in ETQW (I didn’t play Quake 4). It might as well have been repeating or run-time blended textures for all the difference it made to the game look. The consistently bland color palette didn’t help either. The size tradeoff is just too extreme for the art quality, and it ultimately made little difference. I hope id can top Splash Damage and overcome this trend with RAGE, but I’m not optimistic.
To make a pure numbers comparison, how many games used id Tech 4? Wikipedia lists Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, ETQW, and the upcoming Wolfenstein and Brink, and there may well be others unannounced. To contrast, Epic’s Unreal Engine 3+ has a gazillion licensees. id is no longer a lead technology driver, mainstream license leader, top game seller, or even an independent now. I definitely appreciate that they want to focus on their own games, but it saddens me to see such a fundamental favorite fall by the wayside.
Procedural content with authored details or hand picked generation functions are a much better direction for the industry to go in. Spore (gameplay aside) aptly demonstrates that this can succeed. This will be even more important as downloads replace physical distribution: will anyone want to download a 100GB or 1TB game soon? Indie devs especially can not afford to follow such a trend, neither for download sizes nor the cost of content creation. Generative content is still the future (and when we’re lucky, sometimes it succeeds in the present).
The top of my content technology wishlist is physically modeled processes where the shapes and textures are all really just side effects of how the models are created (their engineering, materials, history of interactions, etc). This ultimately requires a move towards worlds modeled as working systems rather than “man behind the curtain” facades and trickery. Physics in games does not replace game design, but it will significantly augment development when it matures (which is another huge topic).
07/08/2009 at 17:24 Lucas says:
Oops: Quake 4 predates the Megatexture tech anyway, so I guess it did first appear in Quake Wars. I just presumed it was there since I didn’t play Q4.
07/08/2009 at 17:24 Alec Meer says:
We can post whatever we darn well like, mister man. If it’s something we’re interested in, we do.
07/08/2009 at 17:34 PeopleLikeFrank says:
Doom3 was in fact a game where they hyped the “game” part of it considerably. There was plenty of talk about the “professional” writer they had hired for the story, how they were concentrating so much on building atmosphere, etc. I bought it because the first demo way back at that MacWorld keynote blew my mind, and I had to see how it all turned out. The tech delivered on its promises, the rest did not. (Didn’t help that HL2 was right there waiting to blow it away either.)
Howard is right, incidentally, in that it was the Doom3 engine that had the “Ultra” settings that couldn’t be played on the hardware at time of release.
This past winter I played through Quake 2 and Quake 4 again. I have to say that 2 was way more fun. Though the story/characters/setting were way more developed in 4, none of those elements were all that good, and they certainly weren’t compelling enough (IMO) to make up for gameplay that had become much more plodding compared to its predecessor (again, IMO, your mileage, etc.). I know that Q4 wasn’t id’s doing, but given Doom3 as another example, I would much rather see them sticking to what they do best – glorious tech-demo action-fests with little to no brains. Valve and others will be around to deliver the brilliant atmosphere, I’m happy with id providing eye-candy and rocket launchers.
07/08/2009 at 17:34 Jim Rossignol says:
Lucas: Besides, if I hadn’t posted it, you wouldn’t have been able to share your own analysis with us.
So, uh, duh.
07/08/2009 at 17:39 Yeahda says:
Yeah, it’s sad when a company like id Software (which name most here don’t even write correctly) gets bashed, a company that’s done more for modern PC gaming than any other, pushed so many boundaries, and practically made PC gaming what it is today. And all the way till now staying independent, now they’ve too succumbed to the financial state of the gaming industry.
Most people who’s on the too-much-focus-on-graphics train don’t know how a game is built and no nothing of technology, the major reason for pushing gaming technology isn’t just to make it look pretty or realistic, the point is creating a believeable gaming environment. And don’t just think shiny textures, think physics, and then think interactivity.
As for story, I don’t know how you kids today play your games, but if it was anything like when I was a kid, it wasn’t anything like reading a book, and it sure as shit wasn’t anything like watching (that’s right, not playing) a game like Metal Gear Solid. Playing a game, I want to immersed, and to be that I need to actually play, if I want to read, I’ll pick up a book, if I want to just watch, I’ll put on a movie.
There’s all types of games, and the games I’ve personally had the most fun with is the kinds id Software has made, where you need to be involed and focused all the time while playing, you need to be in the zone, and the last thing you’re thinking about then is story.
Oh, and car games. 100% focus mode, can’t make even one bad corner or you’ll loose the race.
07/08/2009 at 17:52 l1ddl3monkey says:
@ Jim “lollo” Rossignol: “Spending £2000 on a PC would be awesome”
It’s not because then a month later NEW COMPUTER THING X comes out and you just think “If only I’d waited a month”. And then you keep spending because you think “Well I built it to be a cutting edge gaming PC so I need to keep it that way” and then it becomes a bottomless money sink and no matter how good the performance is you’ll never be happy with it.
Or maybe that’s just me…
07/08/2009 at 17:55 Paul Moloney says:
“the point is creating a believeable gaming environment.”
And that’s why I criticised Doom 3 pudding faces.
“And don’t just think shiny textures, think physics, and then think interactivity.”
Doom 3 originally did absolutely with its physics. There weren’t even any Max Payne 2 style cool explosions. They slapped on a gravity gun in a later expansion only after seeing HL2′s coolness.
“need to actually play, if I want to read, I’ll pick up a book”
Oh right, since it’s impossible to tell a story or convey emotion without getting the player to read pages of text.
I give up.
P.
07/08/2009 at 17:59 Nick says:
“which name most here don’t even write correctly”
probably due to not really caring enough to bother than anything else.
07/08/2009 at 17:59 Yeahda says:
Mr. P, it looks like you think my comments regarding graphics/story were about Doom 3, they were not, they were in fact comments about games in general.
BTW: Physics in a game goes beyond the mere throwing, stacking and movement of crates as you speak so highly of in regards to HL2.
07/08/2009 at 18:00 Jim Rossignol says:
l1ddl3monkey: I was being sarcastic. Spending £2000 on a PC would be ludicrous.
Also: the PC tech market has slowed enormously, so the “new thing each month” factor is no longer true. We’ve barely had any significant shift in tech for two years.
(Although I guess that could change with DX11 incoming, or if games like Rage take advantage of enormo-gfx cards.)
07/08/2009 at 18:00 Howard says:
My PC cost about £600 over 2 years ago and it is, with the addition of another 2 gig of ram, still able to run EVERY single game out now at maximum details (well, bar ARMA2 but hey).
This myth, this fantasy that a good gaming rig is a continuous technology race is WRONG.
07/08/2009 at 18:02 Yeahda says:
“Oh right, since it’s impossible to tell a story or convey emotion without getting the player to read pages of text.”
Do you mean like Metal Gear Solid then, where they have you sit through hours of subtitled radio chatter, or watch 10 hours of cut-scenes? Oh yeah, that’s much better.
07/08/2009 at 18:09 Paul Moloney says:
“Do you mean like Metal Gear Solid then, where they have you sit through hours of subtitled radio chatter, or watch 10 hours of cut-scenes? Oh yeah, that’s much better”#
Never played MGS so can’t comment specifically, but lengthy cutscenes are just as bad in my mind.
P.
07/08/2009 at 18:15 Yeahda says:
So which games do you have in mind that’s real good at telling a story then? Without interfering with the actual, you know, playing.
07/08/2009 at 18:43 Sagan says:
The idea behind virtual texturing is, that you only load in the parts of the texture you need, at the detail level you need. So if something is very far in the distance, or very small on screen, you only load a low resolution version of the texture, so that it doesn’t take up much memory.
With this, they can put as much detail as they want on their textures, and it won’t fill up the memory, because they only actually load that detail when it is needed. And since you only have so many pixels on screen, you can calculate that you will never need more than X texture memory, no matter how large the textures actually are.
Another amazing thing is, that they also want to use a similar for geometry. Here is a video demonstating the tech. This currently only works for static geometry, which isn’t animated or moving. But this means, that you can have as complex geometry as you want. Here is a video showing infinite rows of statues running in real time. The graphics card only renders all of those statues at the level of detail that is needed, so you could make them as complex as you want, and it simply wouldn’t matter.
Once this tech is introduced (id tech 6 probably) the race for better graphics cards is almost over. The only unsolved problem after that will probably be real-time global illumination, to get realistic lighting. But that isn’t too far in the future, either. And then you will buy your last graphics card ever, because at that point you can render anything you want, with lighting that is indistinguishable from real life. (Obviously you won’t really buy your last graphics card ever. Once you can render realistically in real time, they will need more power to compute fluid physics and hair physics and stuff. It will never end.)
07/08/2009 at 19:06 Tei says:
Here is my opinion, all is true:
Games are 90% about technology and 10% art.
Games are 10% about technology and 90% art. [2]
A good game is 90% eyecandy, 10% braincandy.
A good game is 10% eyecandy, 90% braincandy.[2]
Unreal Engine is the best engine out here.
Unreal Engine is the worst engine out here[1]
id Software is the lead of the technologies on gamming Engines.
Epic Games (unreal) are the lead of technologies on gamming Engines. [3]
A game is not about technology.
A videogame is video game.
Without technology, theres no videogames.
Technology is a habilitator. It define what is possible.[4]
Art is a habilitator. It define what is posisible.
Technology made dreams possible.
Art made dreams.
[1] I don’t like it. I want technology to move forward. Because technology define what is possible.
[2] It may varie from game to game. But saying 50% is probably the wrong image, is not usefull.
[3] id Software is still respected, but most people seems to chose Unreal for his games.
[4] Everyone that think graphics advances are not important is wrong. Better graphics able things where imposible before.
[*] I don’t know if the right english word is “habilitator”, if that word exist in english. It seems “facilitator” exist, but is just “facilite” it. A habilitator “make things possible what where imposible before”. Graphics are habilitators.
07/08/2009 at 19:23 aoanla says:
@wien:
I think your comment is a bit misaimed ;) If you look above the comment of mine you replied to, my first comment was squeeing about iD’s SIGGRAPH talk from 2008. Which, as Sagan expanded on, is a genuinely very interesting talk, since “gigavoxel” rendering might be The Future of graphics.
07/08/2009 at 19:27 Ben says:
Just thought I’d come to id’s defence a tad and and paste the following from Wikipedia:
“Although Half-Life 2 was the first game released to feature a gravity gun, id Software had previously conceived a similar idea during the development of the earlier title Doom 3. id Software designer Matt Hooper noted that “we actually used it as a tool throughout development where we’d grab physics objects and place them around the world”. The tool was used to create “damaged” rooms in Doom 3; instead of constructing a ruined room, the designers would code a pristine room and use the device to “damage” it realistically. “
07/08/2009 at 19:30 aoanla says:
Also, @tei:
The word you want is “enabler”.
07/08/2009 at 19:34 Sunjammer says:
I don’t think it’s about “hating graphics”. That’s a ludicrous concept. What i lament is the emphasis on graphics.
When an ancient beardy game like Thief still stands out for doing more interesting things with audio in the gameplay space than modern titles, something is very wrong.
Frankly, graphics are such artifacts of time. Whatever tech5 does now will be meh in 5 years. Shodan’s (and others) voice effects in Shock 2 are still fantastic and will continue to be so.
Hell, go play Undying again. That game has an absolutely stellar presentation and 90% of it is sound. Dead Space too will stand out for its sound work. Bioshock as well.
It seems ridiculous to talk about sound in an IDtech related post, but on the topic of graphics whoring, they are at the vanguard, and i would love to hear something about engines that offer new and exciting things to DO rather than potentially prettier assets to look at.
07/08/2009 at 19:38 Nalano says:
Yes, but is the game fun?
07/08/2009 at 19:56 Supraliminal says:
They certainly look stunning
07/08/2009 at 20:45 Tom says:
Tech5 does look awesome, but I’m still in awe of Project Offset: http://www.projectoffset.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=12
07/08/2009 at 21:37 Robin says:
@oceanclub
“they get excited about the tech, the actual _game_ – that is, setting/plot – seem to come across as an afterthought.”
If you think the setting/plot is the ‘point’ of computer games you’re doing it horribly wrong. id’s games are about providing experiences. Doom3 is what it was intended to be – a spooky ghost train, not a two-fisted version of System Shock.
Half-Life and its sequels really made it clear that a lot of PC gamers just want a passive story with a win button. No strategic thought, no challenge, no replayability. I assume there’s a lot of overlap with the people who are astonished each time Nintendo bring out a new Zelda game and it’s still not an Elder Scrolls clone.
I get tired of the cliched id-bashing. The company has taken some astonishing risks over the years. They could’ve just ‘done a Capcom’ and kept pumping out Doom level packs, but instead they basically laid out the blueprint for modern PC games with Quake. Even ETQW, which was mired in various problems and Carmack seems to view as a damp squib, is a really fun game which wouldn’t have been possible without the technical backing and the willingness to experiment with such a risky and ambitious design.
07/08/2009 at 21:56 aoanla says:
@Robin:
I sort-of-agree, with the caveat that their initial plan for Quake was much more risky (and much more interesting), and that whilst Doom 3 was “what it was intended to be”, that thing wasn’t actually a) what people wanted, b) as good as it could have been at what it was trying to do (partly because the human models were horrible, and partly because it got too predictable).
07/08/2009 at 22:20 thezeus18 says:
Commander Keen was awesome. Definitely good gameplay and engaging story there.
08/08/2009 at 00:02 Jonny B says:
Quake 3 – still the best online fps ever!
08/08/2009 at 01:08 Radiant says:
You see the sand dunes piled up to that building.
I want to take my car over that dune and have the sand slip down the dune and change it’s profile.
Like real sand.
As pretty as it looks standing still that sand dune is probably still a static boxy obstacle as opposed to..you know… sand.
08/08/2009 at 01:10 Radiant says:
And I’m ALREADY bored about Rage.
I race, I shoot and what else? Interact? Id and story interaction; great pedigree. [sarcasm]
08/08/2009 at 01:16 Andy`` says:
You shoot and race at the same time?
And build devices. And mind control people with crossbows. Or so says this: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1167
08/08/2009 at 01:52 Skalpadda says:
I like to look at beautiful images and marvel at technology as much as the next man, but speaking of graphics fidelity as the most important part of gaming seems absurd.
If you get so disturbed that it detracts from your gaming experience by how the pixel shaders on a nearby rhododendron don’t reflect light in a natural way or that water physics don’t match those in the real world then maybe you should take up a hobby that facilitates those needs, like film making or photography.
Surely the important thing in gaming is that the game part of it is fun, whether that’s brain gymnastics, exploring an environment, a story or blowing shit up. Rendering improvements are only valuable in terms of game play when they let you do and experience new and exciting things, obviously marvelling at the gorgeous scenery counts as such, but claiming it’s the most fundamental part of gaming as a whole is pure silly.
08/08/2009 at 03:25 no says:
After twenty years, I’m done building a new PC just for a game and there are not enough quality PC games any longer to really focus on it. I feel awful for saying that. It eats my soul to say it… but the fact is, PC gaming is pretty much dead. Less variety, poor ports from console-first products… I probably wouldn’t even build a new box for a Civilization game if it required it. I’ve simply given up and faced the facts.
08/08/2009 at 04:23 Radiant says:
@no I feel exactly the same way.
My pc is in need of an upgrade but I can buy 2 ps3s and games or 3 360s for the same cost.
And the thing with the consoles is that any game I buy I KNOW will look like the screenshots when I stick it in the machine.
Unless the game comes free with a new gfx card I don’t see the point.
08/08/2009 at 04:51 thezeus18 says:
The point is that games on the PC have never been about graphics. They’ve been about the fact that everyone can make and play them, about the fact that games STARTED here, and about the fact that you learn useful stuff while playing. Console users like trash, and with the rise of consoles we’ve seen a rise in trash. The way out isn’t to play the same trash console games but on the PC, it’s to play good games, and these are only available on the PC.
08/08/2009 at 08:34 Nalano says:
@No
While I’ve diligently upgraded my computers over the years, I’ve never did a major overhaul just for one game. Whatever game that would be just screams “tech demo,” and considering we’re talking an id software game, the klaxons: they are a-ringing.
Indeed, it sounds like you’re burned out to gaming. You’ve progressed, games stayed (largely) the same. Proof that, eventually, one can outgrow the industry.
I have to concur that it seems gaming evolution has stagnated in key areas. We’re seeing better physics in gameplay, but where’s the better AI? Better writing? Better characterization? I’d certainly like to see better thinking from NPCs other than hiding behind the nearest low wall/barrel. I long for better people to interact with than Moira Brown.
Then again, are Minsc or Manny Calavera more compelling characters because they were better written or because they came first, before we became jaded?
08/08/2009 at 09:11 Jim Rossignol says:
PC-specific games have diminished, true, but I’m far from giving up on PC gaming because of a few shoddy ports. Partly it’s the way I play games: adding my own soundtracks, taking screenshots or Fraps movies, alt-tabbing out to talk to people on IM, or browse the web. Games are just another desktop information feed – so many of which are cut off from me at a console.
I’m in the slightly advantageous position of having a high end gaming PC and the current-gen consoles, and there’s a few games I sit down at the 360 to play, but on the whole I play games on a PC, where the image fidelity is better, where I have access to more options, and where there’s always some patch, mod, app, or extra to make the experience a little more entertaining.
Not to mention RTS games.
And yes, I do take great pleasure in high end visuals. The current gen consoles can’t produce something like Stalker: Clear Sky at maximal settings, and I expect they’ll look pretty shonky next to a high end PC running Rage, too. HD is, after all, low-res on a PC.
Just look at Pitchford on Borderlands: it’ll look better, and mouse-keyboard is the way to play an FPS. I know where I’ll be playing it. And given the money I’ve saved on cheap PC games over the years, next to console price-gouging, well, a £100 3D card is okay.
08/08/2009 at 10:37 ToadSmokingDuckMonkey says:
I have a rule: I won’t buy hardware to play just one game. I wait for three that need it, and then I don’t spend more on each component than 100 1996 dollars (inflation adjust).
This goes for consoles- every once in a while, my PC falls a bit behind and I’m waiting for new releases. So then I spent ~$150 on a console, buy a bunch of new-to-me games for $10 each, and enjoy myself.
08/08/2009 at 11:41 CMaster says:
You really needn’t spend that much money on a gaming PC these days – and as Jim points out, you save a lot in cheaper games. Of course, games that are desigend around a controller don’t feel quite right on PC. BUt then I can’t imagine many statergy games, turn based or RTS that feel right on most consoles.
On the other subject, I’m in the (unusal) position of not having liked any id games other than the second Commander Keen trilogy (and to a lesser extent Keen Dreams). All their shooters left me pretty cold. However I do still admire Carmack’s ability and found Masters of Doom a fascinating book. I really hope there’s someone on Rage with a real vision and that id have the motivation and money to push it through to completion. It may again not be a game for me – but I’m sure it will be perfect for somebody.
08/08/2009 at 13:10 Andy`` says:
Maybe someone knows, whatever happened to the more positive attitude toward peripheral buying (or at least, it seemed that way) that used to be around in the early 90′s? It was harder back then, since your pad or joystick wasn’t always compatible, or wasn’t always quite as good as another one, and you needed to install drivers and stuff. But now you can get an Xbox 360 controller, or an equivalent (Saitek do compatible ones, for instance), that’ll mean easier compatibility (don’t need drivers unless there are problems afaik, most games focus on X360 controller compat even if they’re not ports from consoles), and a controller that can be reused on a 360 if you have one. But it still seems as if many don’t realise if you get a controller for your PC, you’re still playing a PC game. There’s no shame in it.
What would be nice, of course, if connecting your PC to your TV could be done with a minimum of fuss, or even wirelessly. Then the “relaxing on the couch while gaming” faff can go away.
As for hardware, the problem is similar. It’s not that expensive, but half the battle is knowing what to buy. So that needs improving. The other half is knowing what to do with it afterwards if you’re not getting it built by someone else – it’s not that hard to build a PC yourself, but the first time is scary. So if component swapping, or even just the simple act of buying a PC pre-built and getting upgrades done for you, was easier if not cheaper then, you know…
It’ll never happen :(
08/08/2009 at 13:33 Novotny says:
Andy”, last night me and my mate played PES2009 with two xbox controllers on my pc. I say played, I just pressed buttons randomly and he went about scoring, but it was damn good fun.
It’s a piece of piss connecting his downstairs pc to his big mad TV, so we’ll do that maybe tonight. BTW, rFactor on a 40 inch TV is something to behold.
For now, I’m going to settle down to some ‘Highway to the Reich’ for the afternoon.
With PCs finally having an almost-standard joypad and easily connecting to big Tellies, you can take your consoles and shove them up your arse. PC’s can whip them at every turn.
08/08/2009 at 14:12 Radiant says:
@Rossignol that’s a great point.
I love the things that are routine whilst playing games on a pc that consoles aren’t even close to realising.
Where PC games shine for me is when they take advantage of the fact that games on the pc are so personal.
It’s one guy on one machine that’s tailored to him.
A console sits in the living room and tries to be all things to everyone in the house where even pausing the game ruins the enjoyment for anyone else in the room.
Talking about ports have you played Street Fighter 4 on the pc yet?
Capcom have really grasped what makes pc games special by allowing you to pretty much infinitely mod the game from movesets to clothes and soundtracks.
Whereas the core game is still fantastic on the console even tapping something as simple as a quick “gg” and giving out some playing tips is a chore.
Not to mention it runs awesomely on a laptop so I have sf4 pretty much ANYWHERE as everyone I know has a couple of usb gamepads lying around.
08/08/2009 at 14:18 Radiant says:
Back to this game; [Rage] seems to offer very little that isn’t done and done better in other older games.
/Another/ shooty huge world rpg?
Even without the rpg-ness is the shooty and drivey going to be as fun and varied as say…Far Cry 2?
Outside of the tech what else is innovating enough for me to be into this game?
08/08/2009 at 15:03 CMaster says:
@Andy – you know, I really should just go out and get a 360 controller.
Or maybe just a 360 with a duo of controllers actually, and drag the controller up to my PC when there’s a game that suits it. I still have my Gravis Gamepad after all, it’s just that PC gaming seemed to go through a phase (started round about 95 I guess) where controllers as peripherals didn’t seem important. But I guess quite a few of the indie games linked on here at least would really benefit from one.
08/08/2009 at 18:26 Nalano says:
@CMaster
“Of course, games that are desigend around a controller don’t feel quite right on PC.”
I can understand that for SF4, but a lot of the bestsellers on consoles are FPSs, which the PC does better without even trying.
@Rossignol
I certainly appreciate the fidelity, but the art direction leaves much to be desired.
08/08/2009 at 19:19 joeblo says:
that picture reminds me of the game full throttle, when you go down into the cave… off the highway
08/08/2009 at 20:18 Biz says:
game should be fun as long as they try to make it like their own games instead of like games that a different audience likes (half life 2, fallout 3, call of duty 4, etc.)
those other studios are much better at making games with bad shooting elements that cater to a huge mass of gamers. id should let id do shooting. they are the kings there.
09/08/2009 at 03:04 Robin says:
@Radiant
“/Another/ shooty huge world rpg?”
It’s not an RPG.
“Even without the rpg-ness is the shooty and drivey going to be as fun and varied as say…Far Cry 2?”
Nearly every id game has shown technical advances allow for the implementation of new gameplay ideas, and unless Rage’s environment is a non-interactive skybox to a ratio that even Epic would blush at, it’s going to be considerably better realised than Far Cry 2′s. Not meaning that it’ll just look prettier (although atmosphere and variety will no doubt be greatly enhanced over games that use repeating textures*), but also allowing a more seamless, organic, richer sandbox. We’ve seen nothing to inform either way of the game structure, shooting or driving. However it works, rest assured a vocal minority will complain that it’s not enough like HL2 or Halo, or both. If it has a Doom-grade shotgun and lets you blast mutants to chunky bits, that will be a good start at least.
*With the possible exception of Stalker, which used sheer brute force.
09/08/2009 at 03:12 Vinraith says:
I’m a complete sucker for open world games, so this looks intriguing. Here’s hoping it’s at least as entertaining as Far Cry 2.
09/08/2009 at 08:18 Bobby says:
Regarding howard’s initial question: search for a document by hugh hoppe (I think) about clipmaps, it’s another virtual texture variant very close to carmack’s megatexture.
But basically it’s really an abstraction for texture addressing. Instead of the engine considering all the textures and materials as being in various files or produced by various algorithms it considers it all as a gigantic texture, and meshes simply store coordinates to this texture, and file loaders and texture generators are instructed to write to this texture.
The trick is, you never need to have a gigantic texture in memory, you’ll never see it whole because your resolution never is as high as the texture’s. when you’re far from it you’ll only see the coarser mipmaps, when you’re close you’ll only see tiny bits of the gigantically detailed mipmaps. So for each level of detail you only keep what you need in memory, and it turns out it’s more reasonably-sized.
09/08/2009 at 18:07 Kakksakkamaddafakka says:
Oblivion was awesome? Are you people on acid?
About PC gaming being dead. Good riddance, I say. The part dying right now is the part I couldn’t care less about. Who cares if we stop getting the GoW-ports or whatever other shoddy games-for-kids that are out there. I’m not interested. If I want to play something while not using my brain I’ll fire up a 2D fighter, on my console; or I’ll play a racing game — yes, on my console. But gaming can be so much more, and it continues to be, in other forms. Let the braindead kids have the consoles, and let the rest of us revel in the new golden age of adventures. In the increasingly awesome indie movement. Generally, in games worth playing.
Fuck consoles, I say. Fuck them right in the ass. PC gaming is dead, long live PC gaming!