id founders

[wuliheron]

Baking light info into textures (lightmaps) isn't anything new it's been done since the original quake engine, all the major engines support this. Engines like Unreal also run on mobile devices, so what? Again Megatexture is being used here to make the most out of limited hardware, it's taking crap hardware and allowing it to run average graphics.

For the PC which already has significantly more hardware resources the technology doesn't offer any benefits when used like this, all the visuals in Rage have been achieved in other games, and better, for years now. The driving reason for this kind of technology isn't to provide cinematic quality to PC gamers it's to allow id to take their games to the console space just like every other major engine developer has done in recent years.

Whether or not the technology actually scales to streaming in high definition textures rather than soupy low quality ones has yet to be seen. The simple fact is that hard drives are incredibly slow and a bad place to be streaming large amounts of texture data from, this is why we have dedicated video memory in the first place, I don't see this technology leading the way for actually improving the amount of texture data we see on screen at once, even with SSDs.

I suspect a better system would be to create large texture caches in system RAM and use a similar technology to megatexture to stream textures from there to vRAM, right now 16Gb of RAM is dirt cheap about £80 and could fit almost the entire Rage install into memory causing no need to stress the hard drive and no real upper limit on texture quality on screen. But of course...consoles don't have those kind of resources so it isn't going to happen.

Again, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Intel's new hybrid memory cubes are capable of 1Tb/s transfer speeds and the id tech 5 merely anticipates the simple fact that while processors are not getting much faster memory speeds and densities are exploding. The latest rumors/leaks concerning the xbox 720 are that it has 12gb of memory making it possible to increase the resolution of the textures in id tech 5 games dramatically. With the id tech 6 engine even ray casting the environment becomes possible.

Nor is id alone in this and there are other games that also leverage the power of partially resident textures. As wonderful as rasterization and repeated textures have been for gamers their days are numbered. They have always been nothing more than a radical compromise developers have had to resort to because the technology did not exist to be bigger and better things. That's starting to seriously change and within a few years it will become more apparent to every PC gamer on the planet.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

John Carmack is one of the smartest people on the planet when it comes to computer graphics, 3d rendering, etc.

Id's problem was that their development focus shifted to consoles.

the first three quake games were miles ahead of anything else in the field, graphically and multi-player.

This almost sounds like the story of Epic Games. Epic produced the greatest online multiplayer FPS of all time--Unreal Tournament (aka UT-1999 or UT99). Then they succumbed to consolization and ruined their franchise with 2007's stillborn UT3.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

The average gamer is 32, while the average PC gamer is 42. I couldn't care any more what a 29 year console gamer thinks than I do about little kids.

If this is true, then the market for PC games is dying and doomed because it suggests that all of the newer gamers who are entering the consumer market are console players. It does make some sense--back when the over 40 crowd was growing up, the most interesting games were on the PC (strategy, RPG, etc.).

 

[wuliheron]

If this is true, then the market for PC games is dying and doomed because it suggests that all of the newer gamers who are entering the consumer market are console players. It does make some sense--back when the over 40 crowd was growing up, the most interesting games were on the PC (strategy, RPG, etc.).

What you think it suggests is irrelevant. The number of gamers has exploded in the last decade, PCs have become more capable of gaming, and games like WoW and the Sims are now the huge sellers on PC. That doesn't mean PC gaming is dying but, instead as many have commented on, it is changing dramatically. With cheap portable PC gaming becoming more popular I'm sure it will change yet again.

 

[Gordon Freemen]

Quake, Wolfenstien 3D, RTTCW, Hexen, Doom, Commander Keen, Spear of Destiny, and Rage. Even John Carmacks one fail game "Rage" is better than 90% of the crap out there now in days LOL Carmack is the man and what a laundry list of classics that forever changed gaming for the better and shaped it into how we understand it as of today. Thanx John Carmack for all you have done "tips hat"