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Koko Ricky

Can idtech 5 really compete with its contemporaries?

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I don't play many modern games. So I don't really know how stable or realistic the Frostbite, CryEngine and Unreal 4 engines are. But the tech demos I've seen are damn impressive. In comparison, the new Wolfenstein game (which of courses uses idtech 5) looks plenty competent, but not as slick as the examples I gave. So how will Doom 4/Beta be able to visually compare to other games? Will it have to rely more on unique art direction?

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Well, I was impressed by the graphics in the latest Wolfenstein trailer. However, graphics are getting less and less important nowadays. I think John Carmack said that there won't be anymore large jumps in graphics like there has been in the past. Last time graphics truly blew me away was the first time I saw a screen shot of Doom 3 which was more than 10 years ago. My hope is that since graphics are less important that id will focus on making good gameplay.

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If DOOM 4 ends up being a fully current-gen (PC, XO, PS4) title (like the recently updated Beta FAQ suggests), then yes, it'll probably look very competetive. But if the final game is being developed for 360 and PS3 as well, then it won't look better. The game can only go as far as the weakest target platform allows. Even with current-gen support, a 360/PS3 based game will not take full advantage of the new generation of consoles, not even close.

So it all depeneds on whether DOOM 4 is cross-gen or current-gen. I don't know what are the odds that the game will support platforms on which the Beta is not available. I'd say the chances are small but we won't know until the game is properly announced.

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Hopefully they've put some more contemporary engine developers in charge of the engine after Carmack left. Modern game engines are more about materials, shaders and most importantly dynamic solutions. Carmack was very gung-ho on trying to come up with a brilliant algorithm for the CPU to work with. I really like the stencil shadows in Doom3 for what they are. Precise and dramatic. Excellent for cramped hallways. The problem is that they're useless for pretty much anything else on the hardware of that day. Every game using idtech4 after Doom3 did everything in its power to diminish the effects of this. The version of idtech4 used for Quake Wars was basically a completely different engine.

Then there's idtech5 with its megatextures. Basically it set out to solve the non-problem of tiling textures and set free texture memory. Some good ideas, but it brought with it far more problems than it solved. Apparently they never did some proof of concept for this to see what kind of scale and scope they had. We ended up with a 98% static prebaked gameworld with characters that were high-res and environments that were low-low-low-res. The brilliant artists working at id saved the company a little face by making gorgeus backdrops and nice interiors here and there, but for the most part it's completely unsuitable for a first person shooter. I could see the engine being put to good use in an oldschool adventure game that doesn't change perspective, but has amazing backdrops.

Anyway, the point being that with idtech5, id software went the completely opposite direction of everyone else, relying on a render farm to process their visuals while crytek and epic worked towards WYSIWYG and dynamic environments. I'm all for different directions and it's not like epic and crytek should dictate what needs to be done, but it's not just them. Check out frostbyte and snowdrop. They're so far ahead of idtech5 in most areas that I have a hard time imagining idtech5 in its Rage version being able to compete in the least.

Wolfenstein looks decent and I bet they have made a loooong list of changes to the engine. So can idtech5 really compete? I doubt it unless they have switched strategy. As for artistically? Traditionally I would say that Id has the best artists out there, but it's hard to say if they still do. They're constantly bleeding talent it seems.

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In the demo I played of Wolf, there were some more modern features than Rage had (deformable geometry, plenty of dynamic lighting and shadows from what I could see, much higher-res textures than Rage featured). Carmack's engines have traditionally been flexible enough to be used with a lot of different games, but they've definitely done some revamping on id tech 5 in order to bring what they want out in Wolfenstein. It definitely has more shaders than Rage did, though it's certainly not as shader-happy as Crysis. If the history of id engines is any indication, id tech 5 will still be of use on future hardware.

Now, as to whether it can compete with the likes of Frostbyte, CryEngine 3, UE4... in some areas, yes (deformable geometry, the amount of geometry it's able to process at any given time, the animation system), in other areas, no (no global lighting that I'm aware of, lower-res textures, fewer usage of shaders all around, probably other things I'm not aware of.) Over all, id tech 5 has it's uses, and most of what I've seen in Wolf holds up today... but in the end, other engines really do top it in terms of sheer visuals. Perhaps id tech 5 can be used in a way that it CAN compete visually with other contemporary engines, but I haven't seen it.

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I'm looking forward to playing Wolf just to see how it really looks because ALL the footage that Bethesda has released looks pretty bad to me. If I was to compare the two right now, RAGE looks way better on my PC than Wolf looks on YouTube, so I don't know if compression screws it up so badly or maybe the PC/current-gen versions will have a more polished look. On screenshots it looks pretty damn good, in videos it's hideous.

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Caffeine Freak mentioned global lighting and I'd like to riff on that for a minute. The new Wolf is actually extremely impressive, visually, but humans are very sensitive to the realistic depiction of lighting, even if they have no artistic or cinematic knowledge. They know a video game doesn't look as good as it could when there are numerous missing shadows, and Wolf is full of them; it's precisely those missing shadows that make the game look kinda crummy, even though the art direction and the remaining lighting effects look great. This worries me a bit, because most surfaces in Doom 3 had shadows--albeit extremely dramatic, not entirely realistic ones--and it's partly because of those shadows that the game still looks so good a decade later. Doom 4 will be taking a step backward if there aren't more shadows being projected than we've seen in the Wolf video clips.

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Shaviro summed it up very well.

I personally don't think it's competitive, it's an insatiable hog in every aspect. It demands so, so much out of both the producers and consumers.

When it comes time to ship, distribution is a bigger hassle than typical. With physical medium, you might have to split your game into more discs, which costs more to manufacture. You have to pay to use a custom case, and for additional dedicated master presses. If download, you put a strain on the player's bandwidth, demanding that they dedicate a significant portion of their storage space for a pathetically tiny, simple game with much content reuse and butt-ugly textures.

Don't kid yourselves, idTech5's a bloated fucking mess, and is a strain on all parties involved. It takes far more man-hours and entire renderfarms to make an unflexible, static world with visuals slightly crummier than the competition, made even worse with the very necessary compression. I'm sure the core is efficient, but they'd better drop the megatextures fast.

id Software is doomed, the incompetent management is just buying time until their inevitable crash.

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Sodaholic said:

If download, you put a strain on the player's bandwidth, demanding that they dedicate a significant portion of their storage space for a pathetically tiny, simple game with much content reuse and butt-ugly textures.


Content reuse is what megatextures avoid, actually. As Shaviro said, it's arguable whether it's really a feature worth having (depends on the type of game you're making I suppose), but a uniquely detailed world without content reuse is what megatextures provide.

an unflexible, static world


Except it isn't, and that's already been established. Deformable geometry != a static world.

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I think work on the engine started right after Doom 3, a time when texture repetition was still noticeable. Nowadays I simply don't see textures repeating in games, especially the ones with great graphics like Battlefield 4 which makes Id Tech 5 largely redundant in my eyes.

We'll see how Wolfenstein turns out to be.

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Caffeine Freak said:

Content reuse is what megatextures avoid, actually.

On a texture tiling basis, sure. But what I was referring to was multiple retreads of the same maps because it takes far too many resources to make a single level, thus they'd rather reuse the map with switched up gameplay than to spend those same high resources again to make a new level.

Caffeine Freak said:

Except it isn't, and that's already been established. Deformable geometry != a static world.

Eh. So you can fiddle with terrain heightmaps and maybe use a decal system, doesn't sound too fantastic. I'm certain that Unreal and Crytek support quite the same thing, and can run laps around it.

Besides, I was mostly bitching about Rage. If that game is in any way indicative of how future idTech5 games will be as far as the amount of playable content for the pricetag and file size, count me out. I was so looking forward to that game (naively), what a huge disappointment and waste of money.

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At least the guns were good. It was far more fun to shoot stuff in RAGE than it was in other games.

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At least the guns were good. It was far more fun to shoot stuff in RAGE than it was in other games.

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id Software aren't too bad at learning from their mistakes. Doom 3's guns sucked and Rage's didn't. Rage's static, visually underwhelming world sucked, so logically they'll take care of that with Doom 4. Hopefully.

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Until you look at how they "solved" the lack of checkpoints in Rage with Doom 3 BFG Edition. Their "fix" was to completely stop the game every 5 minutes - destroying the atmosphere and tension.

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I honestly care more about how the game will run and play than about the graphics. I would rather have decent graphics running at decent fps with lots of enemies on screen rather than taking the Doom 3 route of having super good graphics but at the expense of little going at the screen at once.

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Shaviro said:

We ended up with a 98% static prebaked gameworld with characters that were high-res and environments that were low-low-low-res.

Well, I can see some advantages in prebaked stuff.

I don't know much about modern technologies, but I highly doubt that real-time lighting is any close to being truly realistic today. Correct me if I'm wrong. With prebaked world it's possible to go apeshit with lighting's complexity, as long as your hardware is able to compile everything in reasonable time.

Increasing complexity of the scene lighting-wise (or material-wise) won't have a drastic effect on performance during playing, which should give developers some additional artistic freedom, at least in theory. I'd say, it was an interesting experiment, even though I never really believed in its "mainstream" success.

GoatLord said:

Rage's static, visually underwhelming world sucked

Only for those who count pixels in every texture.

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idtech 5 is last gen right? Eh I worry. Sure you can make a good game with old tech, but the last game they made wasn't all that accepted. That's kind of a foreshadowing.

Lots of other games are going to straight line linear shooters, multiplayer exclusive or open world. Doom 4 probably won't be any of them.

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I'm also not confident about idtech 5, yes it is a last-gen engine, and newer engines like Snowdrop and Unreal Engine 4 look impressive.

To be able to make Doom 4 a jaw-dropping game when it comes to graphics-physics using an old engine will require a lot of work, the team will have to put their souls in the game. I really want D4 to be a jaw-dropping game graphically.

Naughty Dog will use the same engine they worked for PS3(Uncharted 1-2-3, The last of us) in their future PS4 games, and insiders said Uncharted 4 looks amazing, if ND can be competent at making leaps-upgrades in their old engine for their next-gen titles.

I hope ID do the same in D4. I really expect much, much better graphics when compared to Wolfenstein(also an id tech 5 game, but it looks more a PS3-X360 game than an actual next-gen(like Infamous Second Son or Killzone Shadow Fall).

It is sad, but even the first screenshot of the new CoD looks more beautiful than Wolfenstein TNO, and it still is the same engine they used during all the last gen CoDs since CoD4: MW:

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Wolfenstein may look last gen, but this can be resolved by amplifying the complexity of the lighting. Polygon counts, environmental details and general movement looks fine; it just needs the polish of modern shaders. In either case, it looks way better than Rage, so we should expect Doom 4 to look better than Wolf.

However, there's much to be said about effects such as fluid dynamics, general physics, chemical changes, destructible materials, weather changes and complex particle systems, which idtech5 has demonstrated very little of. Why is this?

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And what exactly are they doing in Photoshop? It looks more like they just used better rendering techniques (and thus much slower ones, much too slow for real time) than what is done in the game.

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First trailer of the new cod, it was captured on XBOX ONE, it seems more cool than Wolfen when it comes to graphics, the PC version will be awesome at maximum settings.

http://youtu.be/sFu5qXMuaJU

The are working with the same engine since CoD4, but there are plans to make the future CoDs with Unreal Engine 4.

OBS: In classic Dooms, doomguy has a super speed with no justification, in a new Doom 4, a good justification would be wearing some exoskeleton that amplifies his strength and speed like those ones seen in this CoD, or some kind of nanotech suit like in Crysis that makes you stronger and faster for some period of time.

Because running fast like that in a modern game being human would be pretty awkward without any justification.

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DooM_RO said:

Wolfenstein looks a lot more interesting than COD.


Everything looks more interesting than the new CoD games...

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Coming back to the main subject, if I were ID president or somebody has power in the company, I'd sign a contract with Epic in order to develop the final version of D4 using Unreal Engine 4. Epic is very competent with their engines, UE4 is an amazing next gen engine, companies like Square Enix already signed contract to use UE4 in their future AAA games. NCSoft a Korean MMO company will also use UE4 to develop a MMO-FPS and their future next-gen MMOs.

ID currently is a hurt-bleeding company that lost they brightness years ago, Quake 1 was my last favorite game of theirs, Q2-3-4 weren't that great, I didn't like the strogg theme, Doom 3 was an ok game, Rage lacks soul...

I mean, it is time for ID to focus on the creative part of their games, building a new and efficient engine today requires time and money, and for the current ID, they can't spend time and money with this. It is much cheaper today hiring a commercial engine like UE4 than developing theirs.

So, outsourcing the technical issues regarding engine would be the best option for them now, leaving this to Epic which is a very good company technically with their commercial engines. And so ID can focus their men-hour on the creative part of their games, bringing back the soul they had lost last years, without spending any time developing - upgrading an engine.

http://youtu.be/y_7awHM-pr0

http://youtu.be/w5NuyFQ_RDQ

http://youtu.be/-bLOi3mo9NE

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I think we'll learn the answers to this question after the release of Wolfenstein: The New Order & The Evil Within. And probably, beta-test of Doom 4 will show us, if id tech 5 has any more potential in that engine.

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Touchdown said:

Tech demos. Pre-release screenshots. All of this is full of shit.


After seeing what Epic did to Gears of War 3, it will not be a surprise their first Gears on XBONE to have similar graphics to those UE4 demos.

Another game that made people crazy was The Division, with a playable demo running on PS4 during the last E3, its engine called Snowdrop(The division, Watch Dogs), is a new in-house engine made for the next AAA Ubisoft games(Hideo Kojima played this demo on E3 and got jaw-dropped, he twitted about it and said his Next MGS must impress people like this game):

http://youtu.be/njfj6KwEAfg

http://youtu.be/NviN5ZiL5bs

You can clearly see the difference of the visual of a new engine properly made for the next gen like Snowdrop and an old-last gen upgraded engine like the CoD engine.

As matter of fact, CoD engine is a modified version of id tech 3(used in quake 3), they got it from id, made some modifications and released cod3, after that, they simply used this same engine until now, modifying it each new cod.

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