From what I've read Carmack intends the id tech 6 to incorporate ray cast geometry, but not for characters which he believes are already pretty decent looking using rasterization. We're talking real geometry here rather then faking everything with triangles and rectangles. That means real curves or whatever shape you want repeated as many times as you like in full 3D and covered with megatextures so they don't all look identical. Imagine playing Half Life 2, punching holes in walls wherever you like, having realistic looking boards and bricks fly out, walking through the holes, then using the boards and bricks as ammo for your gravity gun, and you get some idea of what this kind of technology portends. A completely new level of interactive realism that makes minecraft look like pong and most current games seem more like interactive movies then video games.

The newest AMD video cards incorporate hardware support for partially resident textures such as the megatextures in Rage so it seems reasonable to assume they consider this sort of ad hoc piecemeal approach to supporting streaming large textures and geometry to be the immediate future of the technology. I also assume they eventually want to incorporate gpu compute functions onto an APU to allow it to take the load off the gpu and deal with all the routine physics and AI such an interactive environment would demand. That approach would also insure the graphics cards are free to deal with the textures and geometry which demand so much more memory and bandwidth and unpredictable architectural improvements. A kind of reversal of fortunes as the cpu takes on more of the repetitive tasks and the gpu becomes innovative.

Anyway, its fun to think about such things. All the possibilities of ray cast geometry and heterogeneous architecture and I thought people might like to share their own hopes and dreams and wild speculations for the immediate future of the technology.

Well, megatextures sounded good when Carmack mentioned those too... Didn't turn out that great with RAGE.

I think id needs to perfect the abysmal tech that they already came up with before even attempting anything new.

The megatexture technology is here to stay, it was just poorly implemented in the RAGE engine.

Regardless of what your opinion on Carmack is, the man is a genius and he literally invented the modern 3d engine. The problem is that he's sometimes too far ahead of himself, the megatexture technology is amazing on its own but it wasn't ready for mainstream release when they used it in rage.

Megatexture isn't actually a bad technology; it just uses a different set of tradeoffs to those which you are used to (just like the jump from 2.5D to 3D used a different set of tradeoffs and got bad comparisons back in the day).

Really? I think megatexture works near flawless. Looks gorgeous, fresh, and runs fine on my machine here. A little more touchup, and I can see it pretty much replacing standard tiling textures in games nowadays.

Probably a terrible console engine with subpar lighting and an abundance of texture / mesh pop-in from a streaming system "feature" like idTech 5.

John Carmack is no longer a credible authority on 3D. Just read his early journals about RAGE. He has sold all of his credibility as an expert on modern tech to MS and Sony.

"Uhhh, okay guys! We just cut like half of the features from idTech 5 because it wasn't working at good fps on 360 ... Don't worry though! It's still groundbreaking work!"

"Uhhh, guys, we had to split RAGE apart instead of having it open world. Too much RAM usage, didn't work on consoles. Also it wouldn't fit on a single DVD and MS won't let us require install, so some content needs to go too. We also cut out a bunch of game mechanics because they either relied on what RAGE was like or didn't work well on controller. Don't worry though, it's still going to be a great PC fps and idTech 5 will blow your mind!"

John Carmack is a joke.

He [censored] RAGE for outdated technology. Anybody that does what he did is not an authority on graphics technology. He's might've been once, but he's outdated.

Did a console kill your grandmother or something?

<----- The RAGE dev journals are that way.

Be warned though, people who read them never view the industry the same again.

Frankly I'm surprised MS didn't tell him to take them down. They're extremely honest about how much they had to strip down the game and engine and the reasons.

I guess Carmack gets honesty points.

But if there was ever a game that was "ruined for/by consoles" it's RAGE (possibly DA II too).

The fact is that RAGE is wildly different from its original vision solely because of the consoles' technical and control limitations.

That's the stated reason straight from id.

Then Carmack stopped being so honest and said the engine just wouldn't do open world, despite the fact that RAGE was open world early in its development.

MS probably got upset and gave him a warning.

http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2009/07/22/rage-game-details-revealed-to-span-three-dvds-on-360-and-pc/

Unfortunately this one misses a lot of the quotes that are less MS/Sony-friendly. I'm having issues finding others because of all the reviews, forum threads, etc cluttering Google .

Link please.

Well frankly I don't believe a word of what you're saying about Carmack's motivations. id Software ain't a charity; they need to eat and have roofs over their heads too. JC may well be able to afford to play with rockets, but that doesn't mean that all of their employees can; even the lowliest code grunt or tester needs to be paid.

So deduction number 1 from that is that they need to make money.

Now, id games have never been big sellers. Doom 3 - their highest selling title - scraqed the 4 million mark. That pales into insignificance compared to the Haloes or MoH's of this world. So they need to target their games at the market where they will stand the best chance of making the most.

Deduction number 2 from that is that Rage was always going to be primarily a console game.

Your claims that MS are pulling JC's strings are just nuts. Rage is still an OpenGL title on PC; that on it's own is sufficient to blow anything you say in that regard out of the water.

"Rage development journals"? Sorry, but a Google for them revealed nothing. Put up a link or shut up.

I can't seem to find them because of all the bloat from reviews, threads, later interviews, etc. I'll ask on RPGCodex or something, but that might take a bit of time.

I doubt MS cares about OGL. It's not like they released a Linux/Mac version.

Anyway, I think he learned his lesson with this failure of a console port: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/08/get-with-the-programmer-carmack-speaks/

Talos bless BF3 sales figures? Talos bless BF3 sales figures.

Well I can't wait for idTech6 then... a decade or so from now. Since Doom4 and Rage2 will use idTech5, who knows when idTech6 will release.

Megatextures + Raycasting = Why Carmack makes the #1 engines.

But idTech 5 is a bad engine.

Its only (first party flagship title) game looks worse than Crysis (2007) and has more technical issues than a hoker has STDs.

There is no reason to say it's a good engine. It has many of the traits of a terrible one though.

How on earth does that link you posted support what you're claiming?

I do believe you're trying to start a "game X is better than game Y" war, and/or stir up more hating crap.

One could just as easily hate on BF3 because it has repeating textures and low polycount. So what point are you trying to make, exactly?

Because right now you're like a monkey in a cage, jumping up and down, screeching incoherently, and flinging your crap about. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Done, and done.

http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/4254/18025743.png

BF3 has low polycount? The models seem pretty darn high poly to me. To the point that I drop from 60fps locked on High to 30s on Ultra. What settings you playing on?

idTech 5 is a bad engine. It has massive pop-in, mediocre lighting and color grading, and looks worse than a game engine from 2007.

But I guess it's so scalable it can work on the iPhone right guys?

It does nothing to advance the industry.

Macbeth seems a bit out of place here.... a tad over dramatic.

Baws does have a point, as RAGE is one buggy piece of a game.

I, myself, just spent an hour dredging through various threads scattered all around the internet trying (and succeeding) to get the game to work.

The simple fact that I have to spend an hour reading through various threads and having to DL and delete things to get the game to work is a statement to how bad of a PC game RAGE is. Compared to say... Skyrim, where all I had to do was purchase, install and hit Play. No problems what so ever.

Rage looks worse than Crysis? Seems you think Rage is supposed to look like reall life, which it's not. The technical issues have nothing to do with the engine itself, but the horrible way the game was produced on the PC side. On that note, Rage ran just fine for me as soon as I installed it, turned Catalyst AI on and that's all it took.

It is a great engine. It runs amazing geometry, textures and AI without needing a monster computer, which Crysis requires/required (unless you want it to look like [censored]).

Please provide some actuall feedback on why idTech5 is a bad engine.
We're not talking Rage here, we're talking idTech5, and the problems you've mentioned are all related to Rage's development and production. The whole reason Rage was "dumbed" down from what we saw in the tech demos was so that it would run on consoles, at 60fps. STUPIDEST mistake ever, and they WON'T be doing that again (except for Rage2 maybe).

And I just installed Rage, hit play, and it worked. Which, by the way, proves nothing more than different people having different experiences on different hardware. Same as it ever was.

Compared to Rage BF3 is low polycount (and I'm not just talking about models, I mean the entire game world). And Rage's textures seem fine to me (plus they don't repeat) Do you see where this is going?

Not looking like real life !/= not looking better. RAGE's lighting, shading, post processing, anti-aliasing, and streaming systems are just lower quality than the ones in Cryengine 2 and friends.

RAGE looks worse than Crysis, and it's the flagship title for a new engine. It's also mired by technical issues that make HL2: Lost Coast's launch look pristine. Technical issues are usually engine fault. Look at all the issues shared by early Unreal 3 games or Beth games.

Face it, idTech 5 is a bomb. All hype zero substance, inferior to Cryengine 2. There is no evidence at all that says idTech looks better than UE 3.5 or Cryengine 2/3. Both of those engines have far better looking games and tech demos. I understand Carmack is an "industry hero" but I also recognize a bomb when I see one.

I would equate idTech 5 to Frostbite 2.5 (Bad Company 2).

RED Engine (Witcher 2), Frostbite 3 (BF3), and Cryengine 2/3 (Crysis & friends) are all larger accomplishments than the failure known as idTech 5.

Oh, and RED Engine is the first engine from a small Polish dev studio. Used for their second game. Truly shameful for id to get schooled that hard by industry newcomers.

But I guess none of those will run on an iPhone huh?

idTech 5 is not any kind of new technology. It's just an engine built to run games on outdated home hardware, tablets, and cell phones.

See there, everything you mentioned right there is your own opinion, and AGAIN, stuff on RAGE.

EDIT:
Well here's the bottom line, idTech5 brought virtuall texturing. It is a big deal when you know what it is, and how much you can benefit from it. Because Rage is so blurry, it failed to impress anyone on the texturing side, and that's not the engine's fault.
The texture popping in Rage also gives megatextures a bad name, but you can have megatextures without any texture popping, you simply adjust how it is done. Rage did it wrong.

There's a million things wrong with Rage on the PC, but that has to do with how they made it, for the consoles. It wasn't supposed to look amazing on the PC, it was supposed to look "just as good" accross all platforms, so why would they bother to make it any better for the PC?

You want to see idTech5 looking nice? Watch the tech demos. They look far better than the game they delivered, and it's a real shame. Even their first "wallpapers" to show it off look far better than the game looks... it's sad really.

OpenGL is fun stuff isn't it?

Perfectly right!