id Tech 5 Demo

In a surprise demonstration during Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference today, John Carmack unveiled id's latest revolution in game engine technology with the very first showing of id Tech 5 running live on the Mac with OS X.

The ground breaking technology unveiled today will power id's new internally developed game and will be available for licensing to third parties. The new id rendering technology practically eliminates the texture memory constraints typically placed on artists and designers and allows for the unique customization of the entire game world at the pixel level, delivering virtually unlimited visual fidelity. Combined with a powerful new suite of tools designed to specifically facilitate and accelerate this content creation process, id Tech 5 will power games that contain vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments with unprecedented artistic detail.

Better quality video- id Software - id Tech 5 John Carmack Demonstration (http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=20463&type=wmv&pl=game)

This stuff isn't really new. It seems like it's just Megatexture running on the mac platform. There's still alot of work that needs to be done by ID to work it's way towards parity with the Crytek and Unreal engines, especially in the field of lighting. Still though, I think it's great that it's being developed on the Mac platform. With all the parallels and VMware stuff shaping up OSX could start some competition with Microsoft.

I remember when they previewed the Doom 3 engine on a Mac with a Geforce 3. It completely revolutionized Mac gaming!

20 gigs of textures and yet people still think DVDs are just fine for gaming.

They still make people look like they're made out of wet clay though.

This engine will breathe some life into gaming. 20GB of textures wow the only downfall I see is for the 360 it will take a bunch of DVD's to install to the harddrive and only so many games will fit but I am sure most people will be upgrading their HDD's on their 360 in the coming future anyways.

Actually thinking about it further how would the Wii utilize this technology?

This new tech is based off of the MegaTexture technology used in Quake Wars. Check out this interview:


Q: MegaTexture is probably the most well known improvement that ETQW will have over DOOM 3. The 32,000 by 32,000 6GB source texture you mentioned in previous interviews suggests you're not using any procedural textures at run-time but considering the multiple DVDs implication, are the .MEGA files compressed, and if so, are you compressing by tile or as a whole (single file)?

A: 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).

- Source (http://www.beyond3d.com/content/interviews/11/)

I think its fair to assume that the textures are going to be significantly compressed.

of course they're going to be compress, they have to be.

This new tech is based off of the MegaTexture technology used in Quake Wars. Check out this interview:



I think its fair to assume that the textures are going to be significantly compressed.

Yea I am sure they most def will compress for certain systems so if they compress them to 6GB or 4 GB like that quote says you think on standard DVD's they will have enough room for everything else? If so then this should mean smooth sailing for all systems except the Wii basically.

500 MB for just the terrain of one map? wtfs

20 gigs of textures and yet people still think DVDs are just fine for gaming.THANK YOU

megatexture is nothing new, just a fancy name

They still make people look like they're made out of wet clay though.

Agreed.

Can we get out of this phase were stuck in of character models with super shiny skin please?

I was sad to see crysis has the same bs plastic looking people.

I thought crysis was set to change this, maybe only under DX10 lighting though.

It doesnt look like anything new minus the ability to change aspects like carmack was saying.