Now, I know it can do outdoors. But how big are we talking about here? Can it create an -let's say- Oblivion?

Second question, does it support dynamic time of day lighting and weather systems?

If it doesn't support time of day, will it be using pre-calculated global lighting approaches or full-dynamic real-time lighting? Or something else?

I know its powers as
it can do outdoors,
it supports vehicles,
megatexture,
multi-platform: from a MAC to a PC,
low hardware requirements...

Essentially, what else can it do?

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/tech-5-id-software/23179

Well this is a slow forum.

I know. I want to give it a kick start at the right direction.

Still my questions are a little more specific, that video didn't help.

Engine is capable of dynamic shadows and I'm pretty sure static shadows are not baked.



Unknown. I would assume so whether they happen in Rage or not. I'm sensing you're probing to see how the tech could be applied to 'other' games. Looks like the engine is not fuly implemented though.

There are two approaches,

real-time lighting
pre-baked lighting

Most action games' level design is set to a fix time. That enables the option for pre-baked lighting calculations to create more convincing lighting than real-time solutions. But that advantage is realized recently.

http://www.illuminatelabs.com/

This is good way of doing things. I do respect Crysis developers for pursuing real-time a lot, but for any other fix timed leveled game, pre-baked lighting solutions should become a standard.

Spherical harmonics, HDR lighting is on the way as well as real-time global illumination solutions. Right now there is a power, and software for that power. But I can see no games around utilizing those. It has been 2 years after Crysis. I really want to see something tops that. Being the next big engine/game, I expect these or more from id tech 5/Rage.

So it is not necessarily about 'other games', but it would be cool to know if a TES game would be possible. But what I saw from the video, it is a small level with canyons where you can't go over the hills because there is nothing to show there. With Megatexture, first thing I want to see is how it applies to outdoors like in TES games. If game world will still be that closed, the tech seems to be wasted, IMO. But I think it is not, and that level is small because they want to show how fast they can do things, the emphasis is at the fast. I'm asking this, because this is a game not a movie: Players want to go explore every inch of your map. And boundaries are not welcome as well as discovering a non-textured area.

More questions about Megatexture:
So is it working on statics too? Can a level designer stamp a building with it that easy?
The virtual world is showing hundreds of GBs of texture. But it is virtual. Is there a limit for original texture package? Or is it essentially, how much can you store on one DVD or 2?
Adding more custom textures on the way, is it possible and easy? Modders can do that?
Will there be a market for texture artist for id tech 5? Separation of bucket texturer and level painter? Because it truly industrializes the progress for texture artists, even inventing new jobs.

Baked lighting has less overhead for processing but there are disadvantages:

Shadows are typically rendered with the diffuse map thats a big clean shadow means a big clean diffuse map. Layering the lighting solves that problem and I assume thats 'an' approach

Baked lighting means shadows aren't cast on realtime moving objects. PC steps into a shadow and doesn't receive a shadow. I know from the demo that moving objects are casting shadows so realtime lighting is in affect for those things.

id learned from DooM 3 that real time lighting is very intense, and I don't think Rage could be the same game if they tried to use it exclusively.

Regardless I think shadows can be handled by the consoles and newer PCs with the right coding. Not sure about Rage but 'some' games allow the PC/NPCs to carry light sources and dynamic shadows are flat out necassary (IMO).

Id has a very large established community and there are a lot of large fan run forums for id games - in the mean time that's where more of the RAGE discussions will probably be. As we near release we'll see more activity here.

PM John Cormack.

I don't think he's registered yet

Yet being the operative word. He is the type of man to jump into the community every now and then.

Why John carmack don't register on the official rage forum ?

All the lights in Morrowind and Oblivion are real-time. It wouldn't work otherwise due how the plug-in system works. Not the lights too, but everything in TES are realtime.

FPS engines are a "special purpose" engine. The areas are all pre-calculated and optimized, nothing ever changes in them, etc. Whereas TES is coded for the general case. Basically, MW & OB are sort of like Microsoft Word, and the master file is a document. The program has to handle the general case for everything -- terrain, buildings, statics, items, NPC's, etc. But a shooter can have specific code to handle specific areas, they can pre-calculate lighting (even with weather & time of day changes), they can optimize paths and collision, etc.

This is also why both Morrowind and Oblivion have a lower framerate compared to many games of a similiar graphical quality.

Basically, TES been going for better and easier to develop content over render speed, which I think is a perfectly valid trade-off considering the type of games they are.

I have no idea how hard it would be to give Id Tech 5 some kind of plug-in system too, if it doesn't have one already.

I know! That's why I adore TES games, (even more than Crysis(Crysis is a linear game in disguise, engine is real-time though)) as I adored DOOM 3 back then.

Other FPS games with fixed environments still don't look quite good(like better than Oblivion). Pre-baked lighting is a new thing that is considered in games. I absolutely loved how Mirror's Edge looks. That's an advantage for for linear FPS games, they should use it more.

PS. Morrowind's performance is still bad. It doesn't scale well with newer hardware.

I think the question that needs to be asked: What can't it do?

Uh, what? Pre-baked lighting has been used extensively since the days of Quake 2. In fact, pre-baked lighting has been used far more than dynamic lighting. What we need is an efficient way to calculate radiosity in real time, without forcing objects and/or light sources to be static. That's kinda a pipe dream at this point, though, but it is now possible to get something of a crude approximation using dynamic lighting with the deferred rendering technique. A company called Geomerics is developing a product that looks promising, too, but it's still got some limitations I believe; a step in the right direction nonetheless.

When I said pre-baked ligthing, I meant baking full Global Illumination. Like this:
http://www.illuminatelabs.com/gallery

Combined with IBL for characters and models, it works and looks magnificent. This quality should be standard in quake 1 light maps.

Wow, that gallery sure extended since the last time I checked.

Real-time radiosity is what I need, and you want it too. We want this. But not every game needs it. For performance reasons or design, most games just don't need it because of static environments. If you want real time radiosity in your game, your game should provide extensive dynamic environments and game play or it would be a waste. Crysis can use it, TES(most dynamic game in industry) must use it. I don't think many other games need it though.

It is more close than you think, it is those damn consoles keeping us from full glory PC gaming evolution:
http://www.geomerics.com/products.htm
http://dee.cz/lightsmark/

At least we have Crytek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPQ3BbuYVh8

It can run RAGE on the 360 at 60 fps. What else is there to say?

That John Carmack is a coding god?