id Software’s latest technological feat impresses onlookers
id Software co-founder John Carmack wowed attendees at Quakecon last night by unveiling an iPhone version of upcoming FPS Rage.
The audience cheered upon sight of the game, which was said to be running at 60 frames per second.
The video can be found below.
Carmack said he envisioned how the game was possible over a year ago, when the id Software considering building a game on the Wii. He also insisted the game was possible to run on a first-generation iPhone – though the demo used iPhone 4.
The demo showed how the low-poly interior applied with Carmack’s latest personal feat – the megatexture.
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Megatexture technology is the process of designing a gigantic, multi-gigabyte, highly-detailed texture and spreading it across the entirety of a game’s geometry.
The most popular aspect of megatexturing, however, is that relatively low video memory and is neded to display it.
Combined with radiosity illumination algorithms, the Rage demo managed to frequently entice screams and cheers from the excited audience looking on.
Two versions of Rage on iPhone will be released. The first, due this year, will be more of a tech demo. The second, due for release next year alongside the PC and console versions of Rage, will be a fully-featured edition.
Was that it? A few rooms of what looked like pre-baked lighting using very close point (or directional) light sources (lighting and shadow perspectives through the windows was all over the place) and some very obvious tiled-texturing (go to 1:11 when he's at the top of the stairs and check the textures in front and to the left side of the short walls around the top of the stairs). I thought the whole idea of mega-textures was a non-tiled appearance.
Call me a sceptic, but I saw nothing there to make me cheer.
"Call me a sceptic, but I saw nothing there to make me cheer."
You are right! :(
Same here, and was a bit surprised he said this wasn't possible in the last generation on PS2/Xbox, does the concept of megatextures not match those architectures for processing reasons?
Where Shadows of the Colossus really show something special; even with small frame rate issues on PS2 and Xbox devs/gamers could equally sight a good exclusive with indoor/outdoor visuals. I'm really struggling to see or appreciate the significance of this game?tech demo? on iPhone.
Having read about megatextures in the id tech 5 doc some months ago, I did wonder at the time whether this is truly a game genre independent technology.
One (mega)texture stretching the whole world doesn't seem consistent with the idea of : mutually exclusive game models/elements combining to make genre independent games.
I worried that multi-texturing would require too much system resources to render the beautiful & largely static environment and consistently outshine the visuals of the dynamic game elements; resulting in non-fps genre games feeling underpopulated and slightly static, or that a beautiful game world wasn't the biggest problem, like in a 1v1 fighting game.
The video did sort of look that way to me, but I guess the success of the technology will better assessed in the released games.
Hmm.. look at 1:38. See the sunlight on the left hand window and the sunlight in the far distance? They both enter the room at 2 different angles. Also the characters waving to not receive light or cast shadows. They have a simple blob shadow directly underneath...
So, what does this mean? It means there are no real time pixel lights or pixel shaders rendered in the scene. All the lighting, diffuse, normal maps are baked onto one mega texture.
As for radiosity.. who are you trying to fool John? (notice how he didn't say radiosity in "real-time".. hmm)
Yeah ok, I'll give kudos on implementing mega textures on the iPhone's limited texture space. But, there is no new technology here guys, neither the technical art techniques used to create this scene are new. Hello PS2?
Whats more is, the 2G iPhone could render 7,000 static on screen polygons @ 30fps. This entire scene I dare say exceeds 10,000 polygons, so yeah the more powerful iphone 4 will render it at 60fps, especially when the geometry is nicely regioned off down stairs and around corners...
I'll be fair, the art work looked nice, and it's attractive to see on the iPhone. But don't listen to the hype, and as for the guys in the crowd whooping.. do you understand the difference between pre-baked and real-time?
Thanks.
a.skeptic
Guys, do better than Carmack and post the links to the videos on this thread.
My game Zombies The Last Stand, has parallax bump, realtime shadows (characters + world), baked ray, traced lightmaps, detail textures, full control over movement, gyro support...
