Id Tech 5
Encyclopedia
id Tech 5 is the latest proprietary game engine
being developed by id Software
, currently still being actively upgraded, and follows its predecessors, id Tech 1
, 2, 3 and 4. It is a major advancement over id Tech 4. The engine was first demonstrated at the WWDC 2007 by John D. Carmack on an eight-core computer; however, the demo only used a single core with single-threaded OpenGL
implementation running on a 512 MB 7000 class Quadro
video card. id Tech 5 was first used in a game in Rage
, and the upcoming Doom 4
has also been announced to make use of it.
The initial demonstration of the engine featured 20 GB of texture data (using a more advanced MegaTexture
approach called Virtual Texturing, which supports textures with resolutions up to 128,000 x 128,000 pixels), and a completely dynamic and changeable world. This technique allows the engine to automatically stream textures into memory as needed, meaning that the developer need not concern themselves with memory restraints or texture limits. This has the advantage of simplifying the creation of content, by eliminating the need to adapt content for different platforms. The engine automatically optimizes resources for cross-platform development, making it possible to render the same models on different platforms, while only creating them for one platform, further simplifying cross-platform development.
One of the visually evident features the renderer will include is a penumbra in the shadowing (soft edges), by using shadow maps. In contrast, id Tech 4, which featured volume-based shadows, had very sharply defined shadows. The engine will likely feature numerous other advanced graphical effects such as various materials for lighting, high dynamic range rendering
-centric effects, bloom, crepuscular rays
(volumetric lighting), radiosity, soft particles, pixel shader effects, alpha to coverage
, post processing, dynamic water surfaces, procedural animation, cloth simulation, depth of field
, and motion blur
. The engine will also support multi-threaded processing on the CPU for many of its tasks, including rendering, game logic, AI, physics, and sound processing.
The engine comes with a new content-creation tools package called id Studio, which is supposed to be much more user-friendly and polished than in earlier versions. Previously, content creation required artists to run various command line tools beyond the level editor's own tools, while id Tech 5 allows for all work to be done 'in-engine'.
While id Software will be using the engine solely for creating shooter games, the engine also has the capability to operate outside of this genre. Steve Nix from id Software stated that "Not only do we think people can make games outside the action-shooter space with our technology, we encourage it. We'd actually like to see those games made."
in the same year during the annual keynote held by John Carmack. The game engine is being used in id's current games, Rage
and upcoming Doom 4
.
An interview with John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, indicated that like its predecessors, id Tech 5 will eventually be released as open source
. The move to open source will likely come many years after id Tech 5's release as a proprietary engine. At QuakeCon
2007, Carmack told LinuxGames
that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release."
At QuakeCon
2010, id CEO Todd Hollenshead
announced that while id Tech 5 could be shared with internal Zenimax
developers, the engine will not be available for external licensing.
Game engine
A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...
being developed by id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
, currently still being actively upgraded, and follows its predecessors, id Tech 1
Id Tech 1
- See also :*List of game engines*First person shooter engine*id Tech*Doom engine*Doom *Quake engine*Quake *List of first-person shooter engines...
, 2, 3 and 4. It is a major advancement over id Tech 4. The engine was first demonstrated at the WWDC 2007 by John D. Carmack on an eight-core computer; however, the demo only used a single core with single-threaded OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
implementation running on a 512 MB 7000 class Quadro
NVIDIA Quadro
The Nvidia Quadro series of AGP, PCI, and PCI Express graphics cards comes from the NVIDIA Corporation. Their designers aimed to accelerate CAD and DCC , and the cards are usually featured in workstations....
video card. id Tech 5 was first used in a game in Rage
Rage (video game)
Rage is a first-person shooter video game by id Software which was released on October 4, 2011 in North America. It uses the company's new OpenGL based id Tech 5 engine. The game was first shown as a tech demo on June 11, 2007, at Apple's WWDC, and was officially announced on August 2, 2007, at...
, and the upcoming Doom 4
Doom 4
Doom 4 is the upcoming multi-platform installment of the Doom series by id Software. The game will use the company's new id Tech 5 engine and is slated for simultaneous release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360...
has also been announced to make use of it.
Features
The development of id Tech 5 has centered predominantly on making the engine easier to use for developers. Demonstrations of id Tech 5 have so far focused more on the advantages to developers rather than players, which is directly opposite to past releases of id Tech, which focused more on players than developers.The initial demonstration of the engine featured 20 GB of texture data (using a more advanced MegaTexture
MegaTexture
MegaTexture refers to a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of a single extremely large texture rather than repeating multiple smaller textures. It is featured in Splash Damage's game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and was developed by id Software technical director John...
approach called Virtual Texturing, which supports textures with resolutions up to 128,000 x 128,000 pixels), and a completely dynamic and changeable world. This technique allows the engine to automatically stream textures into memory as needed, meaning that the developer need not concern themselves with memory restraints or texture limits. This has the advantage of simplifying the creation of content, by eliminating the need to adapt content for different platforms. The engine automatically optimizes resources for cross-platform development, making it possible to render the same models on different platforms, while only creating them for one platform, further simplifying cross-platform development.
One of the visually evident features the renderer will include is a penumbra in the shadowing (soft edges), by using shadow maps. In contrast, id Tech 4, which featured volume-based shadows, had very sharply defined shadows. The engine will likely feature numerous other advanced graphical effects such as various materials for lighting, high dynamic range rendering
High dynamic range rendering
In 3D computer graphics, high dynamic range rendering , also known as high dynamic range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in a larger dynamic range. This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios...
-centric effects, bloom, crepuscular rays
Crepuscular rays
Crepuscular rays , in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions...
(volumetric lighting), radiosity, soft particles, pixel shader effects, alpha to coverage
Alpha to coverage
Alpha to coverage is a multisampling computer graphics technique useful for situations where dense foliage or grass must be rendered in a video game.This technique uses the alpha channel of textures as a coverage mask for anti-aliasing....
, post processing, dynamic water surfaces, procedural animation, cloth simulation, depth of field
Depth of field
In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image...
, and motion blur
Motion blur
Motion blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in a still image or a sequence of images such as a movie or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single frame, either due to rapid movement or long exposure.- Photography :When a camera...
. The engine will also support multi-threaded processing on the CPU for many of its tasks, including rendering, game logic, AI, physics, and sound processing.
The engine comes with a new content-creation tools package called id Studio, which is supposed to be much more user-friendly and polished than in earlier versions. Previously, content creation required artists to run various command line tools beyond the level editor's own tools, while id Tech 5 allows for all work to be done 'in-engine'.
While id Software will be using the engine solely for creating shooter games, the engine also has the capability to operate outside of this genre. Steve Nix from id Software stated that "Not only do we think people can make games outside the action-shooter space with our technology, we encourage it. We'd actually like to see those games made."
Marketing and licensing
The engine was first publicly shown during the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address, then was later shown privately to an audience of potential licensees at E3 2007. The first public demonstration focusing exclusively on the engine took place at QuakeConQuakeCon
QuakeCon is a bring-your-own-computer computer gaming event with a competitive tournament held every year in Dallas, Texas, USA. The event, which is named after id Software's game Quake, sees thousands of gamers from all over the world attend every year to celebrate the company's gaming dynasty...
in the same year during the annual keynote held by John Carmack. The game engine is being used in id's current games, Rage
Rage (video game)
Rage is a first-person shooter video game by id Software which was released on October 4, 2011 in North America. It uses the company's new OpenGL based id Tech 5 engine. The game was first shown as a tech demo on June 11, 2007, at Apple's WWDC, and was officially announced on August 2, 2007, at...
and upcoming Doom 4
Doom 4
Doom 4 is the upcoming multi-platform installment of the Doom series by id Software. The game will use the company's new id Tech 5 engine and is slated for simultaneous release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360...
.
An interview with John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, indicated that like its predecessors, id Tech 5 will eventually be released as open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
. The move to open source will likely come many years after id Tech 5's release as a proprietary engine. At QuakeCon
QuakeCon
QuakeCon is a bring-your-own-computer computer gaming event with a competitive tournament held every year in Dallas, Texas, USA. The event, which is named after id Software's game Quake, sees thousands of gamers from all over the world attend every year to celebrate the company's gaming dynasty...
2007, Carmack told LinuxGames
LinuxGames
LinuxGames is a website that provides news about Linux gaming. It mostly announces information on new game products and release dates, although it also covers some important events such as QuakeCon and occasionally interviews important figures in Linux gaming such as Ryan C...
that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release."
At QuakeCon
QuakeCon
QuakeCon is a bring-your-own-computer computer gaming event with a competitive tournament held every year in Dallas, Texas, USA. The event, which is named after id Software's game Quake, sees thousands of gamers from all over the world attend every year to celebrate the company's gaming dynasty...
2010, id CEO Todd Hollenshead
Todd Hollenshead
Todd Hollenshead is the co-owner and CEO of id Software. He formerly worked as a tax consultant at Arthur Andersen.- References :* Kushner, David . Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50524-5.- External links :* ...
announced that while id Tech 5 could be shared with internal Zenimax
ZeniMax Media
ZeniMax Media Inc. is an American media company that develops and publishes computer and video games through its subsidiaries. ZeniMax is known as the owner of id Software , Bethesda Softworks , Arkane Studios , Tango Gameworks and...
developers, the engine will not be available for external licensing.
Games using id Tech 5
- RageRage (video game)Rage is a first-person shooter video game by id Software which was released on October 4, 2011 in North America. It uses the company's new OpenGL based id Tech 5 engine. The game was first shown as a tech demo on June 11, 2007, at Apple's WWDC, and was officially announced on August 2, 2007, at...
(2011) – id SoftwareId SoftwareId Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack... - Doom 4Doom 4Doom 4 is the upcoming multi-platform installment of the Doom series by id Software. The game will use the company's new id Tech 5 engine and is slated for simultaneous release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360...
(TBA) – id SoftwareId SoftwareId Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
See also
- List of game engines
- First-person shooter engineFirst-person shooter engineA first-person shooter engine is a video game engine specialized for simulating 3D environments for use in a first-person shooter video game. First-person refers to the view where the players see the world from the eyes of their characters...
- Quake engineQuake engineThe Quake engine is the game engine that was written to power 1996's Quake, written by id Software. It featured true 3D real-time rendering and is now licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License ....
- Quake (series)Quake (series)The Quake series is a line of first-person shooter video games produced by id Software.-Overview:The Quake series is somewhat unusual in that its focus changes frequently; the story of Quake II has nothing to do with Quake, and Quake III Arena has little to do with either of its predecessors...
- id Tech 4
- id Tech 6Id Tech 6id Tech 6 is an upcoming OpenGL based game engine under preliminary development by id Software, which will tentatively follow id Tech 5 for id Software games following Rage, and Doom 4....
External links
- id Software
- id Software Technology Licensing site for id Tech 5
- id Tech 5 press release
- From Texture Virtualization to Massive Parallelization (SIGGRAPHSIGGRAPHSIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...
2009) - Timothee Besset's Blog post on possible porting to Linux