New John Carmack engine shown a WWDC 2007

[Capel]

neato. ....no link?

[RobertoOrtiz]

Post the link, and Ill move it to news...
Great find!
:)

-R

[Signal2Noise]

Oh? Interesting. What's Steve Job's connection to Sony?

And wasn't Motorstorm revealed at last year's E3? If I recall correctly, the big controversy was that Sony was passing it off as an in-game demo when in fact it was pre-rendered.

And I believe Motorstorm has been already released.

One linky of many: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/motorstorm.ars

[Capel]

Oh? Interesting. What's Steve Job's connection to Sony?

And wasn't Motorstorm revealed at last year's E3? If I recall correctly, the big controversy was that Sony was passing it off as an in-game demo when in fact it was pre-rendered.

And I believe Motorstorm has been already released.

One linky of many: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/motorstorm.ars

geez man, maybe you should read posts twice before responding. he was saying it LOOKS like motor storm's. but thanks for going to all that trouble.

[heavyness]

geez man, maybe you should read posts twice before responding. he was saying it LOOKS like motor storm's. but thanks for going to all that trouble.

it's all good, he misread it, no harm... nothing to see here. move along.




anyways...

here are some camera phone snap shots of what Carmack was showing off..

[warning; not responsible for comments or language on this forum]
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=162723


also, EA announced they will start bringing some games to OSX. so apple finally getting into the game side of things [most people get bootcamp to play their pc games, so it only makes sense]. and since apple went intel based, getting pc games on OSX shouldn't be that big of a dev hit.

lets see just how many apple users are gamers.

[erilaz]

Quick info on the event... nothing all that revealing:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=25708

Hopefully we'll get something more clear over the next few days.

A few screenshots:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/steve-jobs-live-from-wwdc-2007/

[Kabab]

"So the last couple of years at iD we've been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it... this is the first time we're showing anything we've done on it publicly." iD Tech 5... "What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game."

<3 ID

Wow just read this quote

"id Software's previous engines, created for games (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=25708#) such as Doom and Quake, have powered games worth more than USD 1 billion in worldwide retail sales"

That is amazing that a small team can generate that much revenue!!!

[aesir]

Check out the video of the engine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuTtrkVtns

[daart]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuTtrkVtns at WWDC 2007 on an Apple :eek:

[csven]

Read about this not more than an hour ago, but only pics. This is so much better. Many thanks.

[erilaz]

A thread merge perhaps? :)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=505988

[Oddgit]

here is a link to the keynote stream, the id stuff is about 10 minutes in...
http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/d7625zs/event/
pretty good quality video, but you need quicktime....

[Kabab]

This is the best quaility video i have seen

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=20463&type=wmv&pl=game

[JoshBowman]

The environments look cool but as usual for iD the characters look extremely waxy and unbelievable.

[Bonedaddy]

Anyone want to take a crack at translating his marketing-speak? The 20GB figure seems like complete hogwash.

I'm gathering he's talking mostly about separating the art tasks from the developer stuff, so the developers can work on the base functionality and the artists can go in and add all manner of walkcycles, models, textures, etc, with no problems? With the possibility of dynamically generated textures and whatnot?

[ghZaaaRK]

Carmack for Apple?
Does it mean John keeps working with OpenGL?

That's great!

[heavyness]

Anyone want to take a crack at translating his marketing-speak? The 20GB figure seems like complete hogwash.

i'm guessing since Leopard [new Apple OS] is 64-bit from the ground up, they want to show it can handle large files. they also showed during the keynote a 4 gig Photoshop file and someone using a filter on it and how fast it applied the filter.

and since most Apple people don't play games, 20 gig of textures = good game


[just kidding apple guys]

[erilaz]

Anyone want to take a crack at translating his marketing-speak? The 20GB figure seems like complete hogwash.


I would assume he's referring to a further evolution of the MegaTexture technology he coded for Quake Wars. You don't get 20GB of texture all at once; you get streaming textures based on camera postion and mesh lods.

They've just updated their site with a snatch of info:
http://www.idsoftware.com/

[Signal2Noise]

geez man, maybe you should read posts twice before responding. he was saying it LOOKS like motor storm's. but thanks for going to all that trouble.

Oops! The way it was written could have been taken either way. Thanks for going to all that trouble in straightening me out. I'll be sure to catch a Dreamworks picture in the theater one of these days.

And yes, those id screencaps look pretty darn good! :thumbsup:

[JeroenDStout]

I would assume he's referring to a further evolution of the MegaTexture technology he coded for Quake Wars. You don't get 20GB of texture all at once; you get streaming textures based on camera postion and mesh lods.

They've just updated their site with a snatch of info:
http://www.idsoftware.com/
MegaTexture is one of the very few things in this CG field that really make me go... "but how?", seeing as all I've read about it so far denies using subsections and just doing 'GPU magick'.

[erilaz]

MegaTexture is one of the very few things in this CG field that really make me go... "but how?", seeing as all I've read about it so far denies using subsections and just doing 'GPU magick'.

From what I can gather, the general concept behind megatexturing is based on the idea of looking at tiled surfaces like a form of compression. So instead of tiling one smaller texture over a large surface, you use fragmentation to stream a large texture through the GPU. This way you don't need to preload textures and just update the texture on the fly. It also means you can dynamically change the texture without a performance hit.

I guess he doesn't want to explain how it all works just yet until they've released an engine. Carmack is well known for sharing his code with the public. He's already moved on from the orginal code that was used in Quake Wars, so I can only imagine the Tech 5 engine is the result.

[Syndicate]

Actually I think the technology is more to do with advanced Wavelet implementation.
This is already available with "rendering" however the process wasnt fast enough for realtime, until now :)

I heard this is John Carmacks last project before he retires... let me emphasise "heard".

[el_diablo]

I would say its streaming LOD implementation with 20gb beeing top res uncompressed textures. Regardless of the reconsturction and sampling as well as compression algorithm used...

[salmonmoose]

I've always loved seeing the next big thing from Id -

However I couldn't help but notice that (at least in this demo) like many of Id's games it suffers from a walled universe, you don't see the horizon.

I'd have hoped they'd taken lessons from the Cry-Tech engine in that regard.

But hey, the games industry owes this man so much, and MegaTexture is certainly very cool.

And yes, Carmack will use OpenGL till the day he dies, and remain a thorn in Microsoft's side.

[schuubars]

That's not a problem anymore, even in the modified D3 Engine, or do you missed to look at some screenshots of ET:QW ?

I've always loved seeing the next big thing from Id -

However I couldn't help but notice that (at least in this demo) like many of Id's games it suffers from a walled universe, you don't see the horizon.

I'd have hoped they'd taken lessons from the Cry-Tech engine in that regard.

But hey, the games industry owes this man so much, and MegaTexture is certainly very cool.

And yes, Carmack will use OpenGL till the day he dies, and remain a thorn in Microsoft's side.

[kissb]

this technology is pretty old, if you want to know more about it run a search for geomorphing, there is also a paper about it on the recent siggraph dvds..
some interesting info from the abstract :
"Results are presented for both highly tesselated models (372 million triangles), and for models which also contain large quantities of texture (200 million triangles + 20 GB of compressed texture)"
And these models were handled real time, with pretty high frame rate on a desktop amd machine a few years ago...
the only problem is the size of those textures...but wait, here is the solution :
http://kepfeltoltes.hu/070612/doom4_www.kepfeltoltes.hu_.jpg

[Boone]

I'm a complete fan-boy of John Carmack and Masters Of Doom is my programming bible, but this seems more like a refined Doom3 engine - not a great leap to be honest. But for me thats the way forward - take what you got and make it solid.:)

[DrBalthar]

Boooooooring! That's all I can say would it not be J.C. no one would care!

[leuey]

I think he was saying that the advances were more about the usability of the engine from an artists standpoint than the actual tech. in the engine (aside from the megatexturing which he explicitly mentioned). It was more about how fast/easy it will be to develope with it.


-G

[Arne]

Boooooooring! That's all I can say would it not be J.C. no one would care!

I think "nearly unlimited" texture space is a big deal for anyone working in games.

For example walls/floors/doors/whatever in games do look the same, wherever you go. Just like pacman.

When I have to make textures/shaders for games I always have to watch out to not make the texture too interesting so that the player doesn't recognize the tiling too easily.

I really think it's a big deal! (as long as I get a lot more coworkers or faster tools)

It's interesting that JC says something like "the artists can go in and bla as much as time and budget and bla allows" He seems to be getting the point and concentrates on the problems we had from day one of game graphics. Tiling.

[shuggie]

Maybe from a game dev point of view this may be impressive but on a graphical level I have to say it didn't really excite me at all.

[JoshBowman]

I'm prepared to be wrong but it seems that graphically there isn't too much left to push. I think iD have taken a good step in making the engine easier to use for artists as opposed to "looks mind blowing but is a bitch to work with". Ease of use means it's easier to try different things to figure out the best way to do something rather than it being set in stone and not working as well as the artists would have liked.

[Kabab]

Maybe from a game dev point of view this may be impressive but on a graphical level I have to say it didn't really excite me at all.
Your judging this from a video grab of a presentation put on YouTube....

Also according to what he said is they spent just 10 days making the content for that demo and this is just the first sneak preview of the engine...

Did you look closely at the amount of detail in just thoes cliffs alone?

I don't know if you have done any game dev work before but texture memory and tilling is always a very painfull thing to have to work around.

[beaker]

Carmack for Apple?
Does it mean John keeps working with OpenGL?Carmak first started developing on OpenStep, which Apple bought and morphed into OSX. I believe Wolfenstein, Doom 1&2 were all done mostly on NeXT(Carmacks engine development, not the graphics side).

[DrBalthar]

I really think it's a big deal! (as long as I get a lot more coworkers or faster tools)


It's interesting that JC says something like "the artists can go in and bla as much as time and budget and bla allows" He seems to be getting the point and concentrates on the problems we had from day one of game graphics. Tiling.

One question: Have you seen the CryTools? They are superb. I doubt that anything coming out of JC is that much superior. It's just his name that holds his fame nowadays.

[Boone]

It's just his name that holds his fame nowadays.

Actually, John is quite a remarkable man but I think he is now focusing his energies on building rockets. Even as a rabid fanboy of John, I must say that visually there was little to be excited about in that demo, and perhaps this change of focus is now starting to affect his work on 3D rendering.

[shuggie]

No mate I'm not just assessing it on a still grabbed from the youtube video, but from watching the less compressed vid on gametrailer.

From that it appeared to me that it still suffers from the stark lighting and strong black shadowing seen in the d3 engine, it just looks unatural/unattractive in outdoor scenarios. Also as for the detail in the cliff faces when the flythrough finishes towards the end of the video the camera gets pretty close to the cliff face and it didnt look nearly as impressive.

I think as a cg artists (and gamers too) we all appreciate the work that Carmack has been behind but it just seems to me that they have lost their edge, in the last generation of games it seemed only a few titles came out using the d3 engine and they were id offshoots/sister studios.

This just doesnt appear to to be the next killer engine, dont get me wrong it looks pretty respectable right now but isnt it intended for games a few years away?

[Arne]

One question: Have you seen the CryTools? They are superb. I doubt that anything coming out of JC is that much superior. It's just his name that holds his fame nowadays.


Cryengine2 is pushing boundaries too. Especially in physics. but my guess is that cryengine3 will have some kind of megatexturing implemented as well. (Will id tech 5 have volumetric clouds and breakable trees? who knows)

But I have to admit that it's pretty hard to judge anything from this videos. My assumptions are mostly based on what JC says about it. Maybe E3 will show more.


Here's a pretty interesting interview from may 2006 about mt:
http://www.gamerwithin.com/?view=article&article=1319&cat=2



Q4: How is the MegaTexture a major step forward for game graphics?

Answer: My core comment here is that any repeating use of a texture is just very specialized data compression. Any time you have one set of texture data, and it’s present in more than one place on the screen, it’s really an approximation to what an ideal infinite resource video game would provide. Because in the real world, there aren’t any repeats—even things that look like they repeat, like bricks or dry wall, are uniquely different. The subtle differences that you get are the things that distinguish a rendering, especially a game rendering, from something that’s very realistic.

[Matt]

One question: Have you seen the CryTools? They are superb. I doubt that anything coming out of JC is that much superior. It's just his name that holds his fame nowadays.

Cryengine seems to have a fierce amount of popup. From what we saw of id tech 5, it'll be pretty much horizon to horizon detail, with minimal LOD changes.

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