John Carmack has left ID

[Wreckem]

Yeah, how exactly did ID lose out so badly to Unreal Engine for licensing? Like, they really ruled the roost, and to be honest, I prefer games that are deep-down ID engine games compared to Unreal games. Like, you can subtly feel how the Call of Duty games are ID tech games.

Except they are not. After CoD 1 IW made their own engine in house. It was originally based off id tech 3 but is 100% rewritten and now on its 6th version and is no way related to id tech. Basically the market for licensing shrunk with major publishers having their own engine. Ie: EA has frostbite, activision has IW, etc. that and id could no longer license id tech to companies outside those owned by zenimax after zenimax bought them.

 

[blastingcap]

He used to be good but for years now iD has been resting on its laurels.

 

[werepossum]

He drove game engine tech forward from the early days up through Doom 3. Since then his engines have been paired with weak game design from the rest of iD while Unreal and Unity have won the licensing wars.

Seeing the colored lighting in quake 2 after a graphics card upgrade was amazing at the time. Hopefully he can have an impact on VR technology too.

No doubt that's the best place for him. He got heavy into phone engines, but that's not exactly a market where cutting edge rules. Now he can focus on cutting edge technology as opposed to creating engines used solely by Zenimax companies' "me too" games.

 

[EDUSAN]

There are soooooooooooooooo many Unreal engine games out there.

Mass Effect franchise
Gears of War franchise
Bioshock franchise
Batman Arkham Franchise
Borderlands franchise
Dishonored
DMC
Injustice
Remember Me
XCOM

the more games i think , the more i see how many games have used the engine, almost every AAA game in the current almost finishing generation has used Unreal Engine

 

[SPBHM]

I love to watch him talk, his work with wolf3d, doom and quake speaks for itself, it really changed gaming... lately id have failed to deliver... it's a shame, but not a surprise... still, it makes me feel a little sad, to see these kind of changes... I would expect that without him, id (zenimax?) have even more reasons to just release generic games with the famous names using "unreal 3 engine" style stuff?

 

[SMOGZINN]

John is more invested into Occulus development/project. It's not hard for a designer/coder/game guru to see occulus Rift is going to become the next large thing in gaming. The only downside is the few people who get motion sickness using it, and honestly with game support picking up and the price of the hardware I see it becoming pretty big.

I really hope this is true, but historically VR googles have been all hype and little real technology. I would love to have a pair of glasses I can put on and play a game or watch a show with. But I just don't see how they are going to solve the power consumption and weight problems.

 

[desura]

Except they are not. After CoD 1 IW made their own engine in house. It was originally based off id tech 3 but is 100% rewritten and now on its 6th version and is no way related to id tech. Basically the market for licensing shrunk with major publishers having their own engine. Ie: EA has frostbite, activision has IW, etc. that and id could no longer license id tech to companies outside those owned by zenimax after zenimax bought them.

Well, the base of the COD engine is the quake engine, like how they set up the polygons and some fundamental ways that stuff is rendered, and you can feel in the games how some of the movement is quake-esque, in the way that like the camera accelerates and some of the movement, as well as some of the textures.

Unreal...I dunno, doesn't seem as immersive for some reason. It can output pretty graphics, but some of the fundamental are different.

 

[smackababy]

This is a good move for Carmack. id is a sinking ship and has been taking on water for years. Carmack deserves to put his genius to work in ways that will change gaming (again).

With him fulltime on the Rift, I am looking forward to seeing what it can do.

 

[exdeath]

Id never really innovated anything except for hacks and efficient cheats that made real time 3D feasible before GPUs matured by simply faking or approximating it. With modern CPUs and GPUs we no longer need precomputed lightmaps for acceptable lighting or precompiled potential visible set lists for culling for acceptable performance.

Now days you can use real mathematically accurate straight academic text book general 3D techniques that were once too expensive to do real time and just brute force throw it at the GPU.

The advance of the GPU made Id irrelevant. Anyone can just throw a million polygons at a GPU now and not care about over draw or counting clock cycles or voodoo programming skills.

Not trying to discredit Id, just saying they didn't innovate 3D, 3D was well known just not feasible in real time on a consumer PC for video games. Every innovation was just finding ways to mimic the desired effect cheaply until the hardware came out and it could be done the normal way.

I worshipped John Carmack and Michael Abrash back in my childhood programming days.

But none of those culling and 0 overdraw span rendering techniques are useful today. Now you just send a billion triangles to the GPU and let the Z buffer take care of it and budget some percentage of GPU for overdraw other than EXTREMELY crude macro culling (eg rooms and buildings and all objects within). GPUs are so powerful now that you'll actually slow them down trying to cull individual surfaces. Even Unreal Engine 3+ last I looked just brute forces terrain with efficiently packed indexed triangle lists and doesn't bother with LOD or culling.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Superior Graphics(especially with early Unreal Engines), superior Tools. better Community support, superior coverage of diverse APIs, better Modability, and probably more.

That's why Unreal won out.

UDK catered to developers of all kinds. Made it more accessible.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Except they are not. After CoD 1 IW made their own engine in house. It was originally based off id tech 3 but is 100% rewritten and now on its 6th version and is no way related to id tech. Basically the market for licensing shrunk with major publishers having their own engine. Ie: EA has frostbite, activision has IW, etc. that and id could no longer license id tech to companies outside those owned by zenimax after zenimax bought them.

Um, Modern Warfare was based on ID Tech 4. They (infinity ward) may have taken an old version of IDT back in the day and modded it, but they started over with a new version of IDT4 for Modern Warfare. They've since forked it off in their own direction, but the core engine is still a much more modern version of ID Tech. Both MW1 and MW2 stated in opening credits that the engine was licensed from ID.

 

[werepossum]

Id never really innovated anything except for hacks and efficient cheats that made real time 3D feasible before GPUs matured by simply faking or approximating it. With modern CPUs and GPUs we no longer need precomputed lightmaps for acceptable lighting or precompiled potential visible set lists for culling for acceptable performance.

Now days you can use real mathematically accurate straight academic text book general 3D techniques that were once too expensive to do real time and just brute force throw it at the GPU.

The advance of the GPU made Id irrelevant. Anyone can just throw a million polygons at a GPU now and not care about over draw or counting clock cycles or voodoo programming skills.

Not trying to discredit Id, just saying they didn't innovate 3D, 3D was well known just not feasible in real time on a consumer PC for video games. Every innovation was just finding ways to mimic the desired effect cheaply until the hardware came out and it could be done the normal way.

I worshipped John Carmack and Michael Abrash back in my childhood programming days.

But none of those culling and 0 overdraw span rendering techniques are useful today. Now you just send a billion triangles to the GPU and let the Z buffer take care of it and budget some percentage of GPU for overdraw other than EXTREMELY crude macro culling (eg rooms and buildings and all objects within). GPUs are so powerful now that you'll actually slow them down trying to cull individual surfaces. Even Unreal Engine 3+ last I looked just brute forces terrain with efficiently packed indexed triangle lists and doesn't bother with LOD or culling.

I suspect those factors are why Carmack got so interested in phone game programming, thinking he could leverage his knowledge base in using very limited hardware to perform 3D gaming. Still, there are certainly still high level game engine programming requirements in PCs and consoles, just of a different nature. It's all well and good to just throw a billion triangles at the GPU if your game uses simplistic models and cell shading, but that rapidly brings a PC or console to its knees at higher resolutions and detail as witnessed by Crysis. Available hardware is still not nearly powerful enough to model reality at high details.