What will define id tech 666?

[Koko Ricky]

Well, rendering is something literally every 3D engine ever has done, and particles have been a part of 3D gaming for two decades...so what do you mean?

[MrHofmann]

Quasar said:

Yeah that's horribly out of date. The idea for a voxel engine as id Tech 6 was Carmack's pipe dream which will probably never see the light of day now (certainly not at id anyway).

I thought Carmack left id after finishing the engine, but according to this, guess I was wrong. He left the engine half finished when that guy from Crytek joined the engine team, so I hope he still implemented some of the stuff he was talking about. Here's some more potentially useful info about the engine:

http://www.inquisitr.com/1358919/doom-4-for-ps4-and-xbox-one-will-use-id-tech-6-at-1080p-60fps-what-does-the-new-game-engine-mean-video/

[TMD]

Push Forward gameplay [TM]

[Dav_NW]

The downgraded PC port will feature encrypted game data to prevent any hardcore modding

[Avoozl]

Winged_Warrior said:

The downgraded PC port will feature encrypted game data to prevent any hardcore modding

Well that's fucking bullshit. Doesn't Bethesda even realize that ID games had great modding in the past?

[kelliegator]

Winged_Warrior said:

The downgraded PC port will feature encrypted game data to prevent any hardcore modding

Any sources for this?

If it's indeed true I find it kinda baffling, how is modding Fallout and Skyrim okay with Bethesda but not id's games? I mean, I look forward to snapmap but these limitations are weird and inconsistent.

[Avoozl]

kelliegator said:

If it's indeed true I find it kinda baffling, how is modding Fallout and Skyrim okay with Bethesda but not id's games?

It was already the same for TNO even when RTCW had mod capabilities.

[Dav_NW]

kelliegator said:

Any sources for this?

If it's indeed true I find it kinda baffling, how is modding Fallout and Skyrim okay with Bethesda but not id's games? I mean, I look forward to snapmap but these limitations are weird and inconsistent.

Well, i said that as 50% joke 50% seriously. But at this point they are totally capable of doing it.

[raymoohawk]

what will define id tech 6 will be its quick retirement after the release of doom, followed by the dissollution of the id software brand. bethesda will then proceed to create slow, linear shooters

[PsychoGoatee]

raymoohawk said:

what will define id tech 6 will be its quick retirement after the release of doom, followed by the dissollution of the id software brand. bethesda will then proceed to create slow, linear shooters

Bethesda's bread and butter are their open world RPGs, and I'm sure id will be fine.

[Quasar]

Winged_Warrior said:

The downgraded PC port will feature encrypted game data to prevent any hardcore modding

Unless the Bethesda.net system will be a required 24/7 internet connection for single-player thing, which will cause an absolute outrage, then the key(s) would have to be inside the game EXE somewhere, making the whole scheme fairly useless aside from enabling them to abuse the DMCA to take down any and all information about how to find and then use those keys, or any knowledge derived from them.

Which of course will instantly alienate THIS entire community, which was founded on the concept of sticking it straight to "the man" by reverse engineering the shit out of all his data formats ("the man" was id though, and they were basically waiting/wanting it to happen anyway, in that case).

[Shaviro]

I think what will define this engine is that it's much less of a gimmick and more of a wholesome modern engine.

I just watched the good old Doom 3 alpha presentation and then the Doom(4) E3 presentation. The increase in quality is breathtaking. The D3 alpha was definitely an amazing feat at the time and arguably the most impressive game presentation ever made, relatively speaking.

In contrast, the Doom(4) presentation is much less visually revolutionary, but that is natural. I sincerely doubt there will ever be another jump in visuals like that of Quake 3 to Doom 3. All that said, I probably do *think* that the new Doom game is the best looking game I have seen. Technically they're most likely going for the same things that everybody else is. For the time being that is a good thing. What really sells the image is the material rendering (physically based like all other modern engines) and how well all the little light sources integrate in the scene. Now if only they could get the gui screens to dynamically project light as well ;)

As for the shadows, well, they're shadowmaptastic. If you start paying attention to the shadows, you'll notice just how flawed they are. The resolution is often poor, I believe I saw some shadow acne, the chainsaw shadow disappears once you pick it up. Prior to that it's a pixelated, then blurred , mess. But all in all they're good enough. With stencil shadows we had these pixel perfect, yet sharp edged shadows that were really impressive back then, but they are also incredibly difficult to integrate in your scene. They betray you at every turn, revealing poor light placement, missing shadows, etc. With shadow maps you still have to be careful with how many shadow casting lights you have and how much geometry they reach, but the result is often much more pleasing to the eye.

I've recently tried writing crude implementations for both techniques. I can definitely understand what lured Carmack to stencil shadows back then. It's so clean and straight forward. I wrote a geometry shader that extracted the silhouette of some ingame geometry and extruded it towards infinity. There, done (after the z-pass or z-fail test. This is where Carmack's reverse came into play). The problems of course arise with alpha textures (like a chain linked fence) and hard shadows, but you _could_ hack those away. If you do, though, you might as well just start looking into shadowhacks, I mean shadowmaps.

The basic technique here is to render the scene depth from the point (and perspective) of the light into a texture map and then project that back onto the scene from the camera point of view. From there on it's a lot of hacks and tricks to make it soft, not jagged or pixelated etc. If you really want to make it look good you'll have to do all sorts of management beforehand though. The approach they used at Crytek (and now probably for Doom as well) is to divide the world into different LODs based on the camera frustum and the distance from the camera position. These (overlapping) LODs would then result in different resolution texture maps that go from near (high-res) to far (low-res). Special high-res maps are used for nearby things like the on-screen weapon. To make it really perform there is some (shadow map) texture atlas action going on.

Judging from the presentation, the shadow aspect probably isn't as close to being done as the surface rendering for instance. It seems to be lagging behind a bit.

All in all I think it looks pretty damn amazing. Yes, there may not be some (gimmicky or not) main feature that's supposed to blow everything else out of the water, but that strategy has had decreasingly amounts of success for id, so I definitely welcome the change.

[Dav_NW]

[kelliegator]

Here's id/Bethesda themselves having a say in the matter.

So, dynamic lighting and smooth frame rates. I... expected more so this is a bit underwhelming but at least it's something, I found it a bit odd that Fallout 4 looks nowhere close to this (I'm no expert on RPGs so whatever). Different engines for different kinds of games, I guess?

[snapshot]

Ragdolls , lights, shadows, all those look great, But i haven't seen any Realisiic water effects .

[Koko Ricky]

Shaviro, bra-fucking-vo. Very interesting and informative read. I'm a bi non-plussed about how little id has to say about the engine in that interview, but now I want to check out Fallout 4 and some other games in development, to see how they compare to Doom.

[Orchid87]

Shaviro said:

With shadow maps you still have to be careful with how many shadow casting lights you have

Doesn't deferred shadowing solve this problem? IMO this is a way to go for the current generation engine. Killzone Shadow Fall uses it, and it has tons of shadow casting light sources in a scene.

[Koko Ricky]

The main problem with real-time CG right now (besides animation, clipping and pop-up, which has been an issue since day one) is that it's still too taxing to render every last shadow and every last shader. We still have to compromise heavily and as a result, games can sometimes look a touch flat in subtle environments such as being outdoors at night.

[Shaviro]

Orchid87 said:

Doesn't deferred shadowing solve this problem? IMO this is a way to go for the current generation engine. Killzone Shadow Fall uses it, and it has tons of shadow casting light sources in a scene.

Not exactly. The thing with shadowcasters and shadowmaps is that you'll have to render the scene (or at least whatever the light touches) from the viewpoint of the light and store the depth information in a texture. This is pretty straight forward for directional lights (the sun) or spotlights (a flashlight), but for omnidirectional pointlights you'll have to render 6 different angles into a cubemap which is a bit more expensive. All in all it's still a relatively cheap process, but you can't go nuts with them. All the afflicted geometry will have to go through the shader :)

[DooM_RO]

They mentioned a few times that they completely rewrote the renderer in 9 months and said it was quite an achievement. Why is it such a big deal and why aren't we seeing a radical increase in quality? People who went to QC last year said what they showed at E3 was more or less the same.

[Quasar]

DooM_RO said:

They mentioned a few times that they completely rewrote the renderer in 9 months and said it was quite an achievement. Why is it such a big deal and why aren't we seeing a radical increase in quality? People who went to QC last year said what they showed at E3 was more or less the same.

Cuz that's the difference between technical reality and marketing hype. id Tech, to Bethesda, is a marketing strategy. It's why they bumped the version number to begin with - up until Carmack left, the game was still being referred to as an id Tech 5 game. I don't think in the couple months between hiring Tiago Sousa and the id Tech 6 announcement that he rewrote millions of lines of code (yes, id Tech is that large now).

The main reason to do this from a marketing POV, besides the "wow" factor of "new" engine, is to distance it from Rage, which was a PR disaster.

[NoirSuede]

DooM_RO said:

They mentioned a few times that they completely rewrote the renderer in 9 months and said it was quite an achievement. Why is it such a big deal and why aren't we seeing a radical increase in quality? People who went to QC last year said what they showed at E3 was more or less the same.

Maybe they rewrote the renderer so that consoles can have 60 FPS ? Because the QC demo was played with KB+M while the E3 demo was played with a gamepad.

[SirKicksalot]

raymoohawk said:

what will define id tech 6 will be its quick retirement after the release of doom, followed by the dissollution of the id software brand. bethesda will then proceed to create slow, linear shooters

They just opened a second id studio in Frankfurt, no doubt aiming to lure Crytek employees. The brand ain't going anywhere.

[Jaxxoon R]

Not to mention the fact that the newest Call of Duty is going completely apeshit and letting you jump 20 feet in the air, wallrun, and force-puke people. Still pretty linear, but not quite as slow. I'd expect a small resurgence of more fantastical action FPS games even if Doom fell through.

But I'm guessing Doom 4 will do pretty well, all but the most anal people were pretty much won over by Snapmap and the Hell Quarry Demo, everyone I've talked to personally about it likes it. So yeah, seems like a pretty done deal.