id Tech 5

Has anyone seen the Tech 5 vids from QuakeCon? It's a little sad because the tech looks years behind Crysis. I felt sorry for the presenter ... one of the big features he kept mentioning was the A.I. of some simple buggies driving around the track, as if that was impressive. Was almost laughable how antiquated it all seemed considering what Unreal, Crysis, and even some cheap indie tools are offering (as in the demo looked like a glorified build of the original Torque buggie demo).

I'm sure it'll shape up to be better than what it looks like currently, and the megatexture is still interesting but currently it looks like Carmack's being outpaced by some of the newcomers, especially Crysis.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6176202.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=multimodule&tag=multimodule;picks;title;7

I think they were just showing off the ability to stream in massive textures without killing the frame rate.

Still, he has the second best game-tech in the Universum... or maybe the third best (Unreal 3) - but in any case, still way ahead of me. For now.

Well, Unreal 3, Crysis and Rage aren't out. How can you really tell? Just from some camera footage? Nah.

Different engine for different needs, if it works on all platforms it's kickass!

Well, I don't mean to be too critical. By all means they are still among the best in the world. However, the Crysis tools appear to be more impressive at first glance. I'm going to track down some more videos of the id tech though since I didn't actually see the tools in action, just the result which while impressive did seem behind the curve.

Watching Carmack use the tools is much better. The results look good (though it still doesn't have the wow factor that Doom 3 first had or Crysis has now).

http://gametrailers.com/player/23275.html?type=flv

I think at some point, the more you lean towards cinematic graphics, the less you'll get to notice the difference between engines. Only their games will be artfully unique witrh their use of various effects, but the engines will be so advanced that it will be hard to tell at some point. I think we're getting into that era.

If Carmack's engine really runs fine on all the platforms and if it's just like hitting the publish button then this is a killer feature! Much more than just an engine which runs fine on one system like Crysis, no matter how good the editor is in my opinion. Not to mention U3 which is said to have problems on PS3. Most people don't understand this until they went through such a porting process on their own or started working on their own engine.

I almost never had issues with all the iD-engine driven games but i had enough crashes and glitches with epic's engines. I favor a crossplatform and rocksolid engine over a feature rich and unstable limited one.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=71651

Those guys are geniuses :)
This is the technology I used to dream of before I realized I suck at computer graphics.

It's interesting that they have very little worry about geometry detail. They did the same with Doom 3, where the actual meshes were pretty basic but all the fancy (and then-new) effects made them seem enormously detailed - way more so than is often achieved even today.
At first I thought it was a bit foolish to have the focus almost entirely on materials, but with Doom 3 in mind I expect this will be very surprisingly nice.

I guess the focus on materials means less physical interaction, but interacting with puny objects like newspapers is pretty pointless anyway... and it would be very expensive to have something like a newspaper moving at all properly.
Their demos definitely do not showcase as much fluid interaction with the world as we see with Crysis, but for pretty art done quickly, there is a place for this.
I think it is premature to be putting this engine against those others since its direction is really quite unique.

Well from another interview, I heard that Tech 5 and the game Rage is 18 months in the making. Yet the game isn't really finished, nor is the coding completed for driving the vehicles and using weapons on them. So I don't think that the final product will suck in any way. When we will get Rage, I think it's going to look totally different than what we are seing from the video reviews and even the trailer today, just as much as the original Doom 3 alpha didn't look quite like the final game, in a positive way. You'll get a lot more polish, probably some fancy bushes rolling around, and dust, and some creatures like snakes and what not crawling around the place. Not to mention possible vessels with fancy fire effects comming out of those turbines and who knows what.

Yeah, I didn't mean to come off so negative. I'm a big id fan and was blown away by the Doom 3 tech when they first unveiled it 6 years ago. The last thing I was that impressed by was Crysis which is still looking superior but Tech 5 is earlier so we'll see where it ends up.

Look how wow looks, nice artwork. Do yer need a fancy engine for a good game?