Next-Generation talks to id Software’s CEO about the famed developer’s new IP, publishers, partners and the Engine Wars...
Quote:
So the new technology is the answer to Unreal 3? Oh, that’s not what John’s working—that’s not the way we conceive of it from a technology standpoint, at all. We look at it as a platform that we’re developing our game on. In all frankness, we’ll have to see. The technology’s not done, and John knows where he’s going with it. But it still is in the R&D phase. John was at QuakeCon to be at QuakeCon. But also he took a week out of the office, and was in a hotel room doing programming work, on one of his ‘get away and think’ type trips.
why are they acting like they have no confidence anymore? why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
btw i can probably guess what Id's new IP will be. it will be called BLAM and it will involve cyborg demon aliens trying to destroy all humans and you must defeat them single handedly with a chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, plasma gun, and some lava acid depleted-uranium quantum singularity paradox nuclear implosion gun.
BNA!@Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 10:20 pm :
ViPr wrote:
why are they acting like they have no confidence anymore? why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
Unreal 3 comes as a middleware package.
It's not a matter of confidence, it's a matter of a different design decision.
tabre@Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 10:56 pm :
ViPr wrote:
why are they acting like they have no confidence anymore? why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
btw i can probably guess what Id's new IP will be. it will be called BLAM and it will involve cyborg demon aliens trying to destroy all humans and you must defeat them single handedly with a chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, plasma gun, and some lava acid depleted-uranium quantum singularity paradox nuclear implosion gun.
Actually, going by everything I've heard, it sounds nothing like that at all.
Although, that is a style of gameplay I never get tired of.
They're trying something very new and different according to John Carmack.
abbaon@Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:29 am :
Todd Hollenshead wrote:
Vitaliy
I googled that, and... good grief. Either id's developed the greatest content creation toolchain the world has ever seen, or they've hired God's own art department. How does a company working on a next-gen game employ more than half as many programmers as artists and designers? The ratio of content creators to coders is at least 3:1 at other shops.
kat@Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 2:34 am :
I tell you why... becasue they don't use middleware or 3rd party code (excluding the recently kick in the balls they got from Creative), they code their own renderer, AI, physics, terrain code, sound, GFX... everything, when put into context like that you can see why they have so many programmers.
Phobos@Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:10 am :
This internal project looks to be some serious stuff here.
But they're saying that .. there's an unsaid but 'cancel' competition between their technology and the half dozen plus companies that have already licensed UE3 even before it's release?
When personally, UT2k7 doesn't look all that great, and excluding the amazing texture work on some of the UE3 models, I don't think the engine is going to be what it's cut out to be.
doom 3 engine ftw...
Jehar@Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 5:14 am :
abbaon wrote:
Todd Hollenshead wrote:
Vitaliy
I googled that, and... good grief. Either id's developed the greatest content creation toolchain the world has ever seen, or they've hired God's own art department. How does a company working on a next-gen game employ more than half as many programmers as artists and designers? The ratio of content creators to coders is at least 3:1 at other shops.
I'm a big supporter of small art teams. When everybody has their input on product x, the final result tends to be unstylized and... blah. I prefer a small team, or even one person (Adrian Carmack ftw) to lead the art direction... makes for a much more satisfying and unique work.
Next-Gen goes over their QuakeCon 2006 notes, and using quotes from id Software, primarily John Carmack, they put together an article on id's new direction. Several references pertain to their next big title, which they expect to go blockbuster and do things that people have never seen from id before. Not only will the game branch in a different direction, but so will the company itself.
Regulator@Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 5:40 pm :
Nobody believes in them anymore after Doom3 they are outdated.
BNA!@Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 5:50 pm :
Regulator wrote:
Nobody believes in them anymore after Doom3 they are outdated.
Stop the trolling or go elsewhere.
pbmax@Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 5:51 pm :
ViPr wrote:
why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
because carmack does not want to build an empire, he just wants to build good programs.
seriously, they have no interest in whoring their engines to any two-bit developer that thinks they can make a game. plus, the more you liscence, the more support you will have to do. they don't want that type of business model.
they have a small team and i hope it stays that way.
BNA!@Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 6:02 pm :
pbmax wrote:
ViPr wrote:
why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
because carmack does not want to build an empire, he just wants to build good programs.
seriously, they have no interest in whoring their engines to any two-bit developer that thinks they can make a game. plus, the more you liscence, the more support you will have to do. they don't want that type of business model.
they have a small team and i hope it stays that way.
In the meantime they have a big team and they've lost a lot of potential licencees to Unreal3 due to the superior production pipeline and toolkit it offers as middleware. Raw engine power pays only half the rent, if any.
Shelling out a million for a licence is cheap compared to the additional 9 or 19 million a development company has to invest in manpower to get a title done.
I suppose the "romantic" days of game development are long over.
Carmack wants to build spaceships and a family, additionally he works at id software as a lead programmer.
People grow up and the focus shifts. id software is a company now and seems to be in it's final stages to mature.
Thanks you very much for that link - pretty interesting!
I had a few chats with publishers / production directors a year or so ago.
They went into great detail why the U3 engine was so much preferred over the D3 engine and everybody very much substantiated each others views without knowing each other.
If the posts on the other boards are more or less correct (which imho is horrendously unprofessional as a dev to post such info to the public) then it looks like Epic is a bit trapped between middleware and game development.
I'm convinced one cannot maintain the same focus on programming when trying to achieve two things at once. id software was going the route to tailormake the D3 engine around D3 (which was one of the biggest complaints of the people I talked to) and they, according to sources, did not provide a state of the art production pipeline one might expect when licencing middleware.
It was supposed to believe the adaption of the D3 engine would brought everything to a hold for ~ months to integrate all inhouse production pipeline tools into the D3 engine.
Epic was always believed to be far superior in that regards, but eventually the ran into some roadblocks themselves.
As far as I'm personally concerned I don't like any Unreal engine game (aside of Unreal 1 which at the time was looking marvellous and offered an interesting new world to play in).
Yet I was always wondering how people get along with the D3 engine in a pro development environment, acknowledging my lack of first hand knowledge of pro development environments. My guesses anyhow got always confirmed by a lot of people, this excludes studios like human head or splash damage for example.
Furthermore I never understood the hype around U3 (gloss map support aside) as to me it looked like D3 * 4 (in terms of poly count and image map resolution). Heck, I toyed around with equally impressive things years back during the alpha days , 10k polies and multiple 2048* image maps - looked always better than real life yet very resoure demanding.
While I'm straying away from the original topic - I don't think the typical showcase scenarios of most developers match the released game by more than 50%. Look at all the released media screenshots of U3 powered games, they look not even 50% of the original Epic engine demonstrations.
If there's anything about id software I really admire, then it's their "what you show in public demonstrations is the real thing" approach.
I think with a bit of help from the people here I could create a very isolated demo scene with countless never-seen-before effects with shamelessly high resolution everythingstuff and announce it as a mod or addon seeking for a publisher or whatnot. This woul steal the thunder from most other announcements, but would it be real?
No, but the majority of people would be substantially misled and judge everything real they see against this vaporware.
Rayne@Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 7:45 am :
BNA! wrote:
Furthermore I never understood the hype around U3 (gloss map support aside) as to me it looked like D3 * 4 (in terms of poly count and image map resolution). Heck, I toyed around with equally impressive things years back during the alpha days , 10k polies and multiple 2048* image maps - looked always better than real life yet very resoure demanding.
Bah, so we can just stop every new technology stuff because DooM3 is enough...
It's really not a matter of texture resolution and polycount. Let's say I build a simple room, with a 10k model inside using a 2048 texture... using DooM3 renderer features you have a beautiful scene, then you switch to a next gen engine so you are able to add to your room specular power, realtime softshadow, full screen motion blur, depth of field, high dynamic range lighting, a clever radiosity solution... it's really another world, it's like compare a scene rendered with doom3 and another one rendered with a full featured 3D rendering app like mental ray or brazil.
BNA!@Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 8:17 am :
Rayne wrote:
Bah, so we can just stop every new technology stuff because DooM3 is enough...
C'mon - how can you extract such a statement from my post above?
Never said future technology is worth skipping because D3 renders nifty images.
BTW - most features you've listed is essentially one single feature: pixel post processing. So it's mostly matter of more render passes, right?
Quote:
it's really another world, it's like compare a scene rendered with doom3 and another one rendered with a full featured 3D rendering app like mental ray or brazil.
An offline renderer basically renders the same pixel over and over again, applying a new shader everytime and never has to worry about anything realtime.
And don't tell me Unreal comes with real time radiosity
Extracting such a statement from my post is like saying:
I don't feel well today == I will never feel well again.
Rayne@Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 9:44 am :
Doom 3 world • View topic - Id's Todd Hollenshead Talks New IP
Next-Generation talks to id Software’s CEO about the famed developer’s new IP, publishers, partners and the Engine Wars...
Quote:
So the new technology is the answer to Unreal 3? Oh, that’s not what John’s working—that’s not the way we conceive of it from a technology standpoint, at all. We look at it as a platform that we’re developing our game on. In all frankness, we’ll have to see. The technology’s not done, and John knows where he’s going with it. But it still is in the R&D phase. John was at QuakeCon to be at QuakeCon. But also he took a week out of the office, and was in a hotel room doing programming work, on one of his ‘get away and think’ type trips.
I'm an annoying git and I hate you, I hate your dog, I hate everything you have ever done in your life, and I definitely hate all the people in the world that are wrong.
Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 6:51 pm Posts: 944
why are they acting like they have no confidence anymore? why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
btw i can probably guess what Id's new IP will be. it will be called BLAM and it will involve cyborg demon aliens trying to destroy all humans and you must defeat them single handedly with a chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, plasma gun, and some lava acid depleted-uranium quantum singularity paradox nuclear implosion gun.
why are they acting like they have no confidence anymore? why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
btw i can probably guess what Id's new IP will be. it will be called BLAM and it will involve cyborg demon aliens trying to destroy all humans and you must defeat them single handedly with a chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, chaingun, plasma gun, and some lava acid depleted-uranium quantum singularity paradox nuclear implosion gun.
Actually, going by everything I've heard, it sounds nothing like that at all.
Although, that is a style of gameplay I never get tired of.
They're trying something very new and different according to John Carmack.
Post subject: Re: Id's Todd Hollenshead Talks New IP
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:29 am
picked up the chaingun
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2002 4:12 am Posts: 194
Todd Hollenshead wrote:
Vitaliy
I googled that, and... good grief. Either id's developed the greatest content creation toolchain the world has ever seen, or they've hired God's own art department. How does a company working on a next-gen game employ more than half as many programmers as artists and designers? The ratio of content creators to coders is at least 3:1 at other shops.
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2001 11:00 pm Posts: 4936 Location: UK, York
I tell you why... becasue they don't use middleware or 3rd party code (excluding the recently kick in the balls they got from Creative), they code their own renderer, AI, physics, terrain code, sound, GFX... everything, when put into context like that you can see why they have so many programmers.
This internal project looks to be some serious stuff here.
But they're saying that .. there's an unsaid but 'cancel' competition between their technology and the half dozen plus companies that have already licensed UE3 even before it's release?
When personally, UT2k7 doesn't look all that great, and excluding the amazing texture work on some of the UE3 models, I don't think the engine is going to be what it's cut out to be.
doom 3 engine ftw...
_________________ .Mods.C++.Animation.Graphics.id tech.WebDesign.VideoFx. Simple Grafix for free sigs and banners (I'm a moderator; I'll ensure you're satisfied ;) ) Reca|| to He|| TC mod for Doom 3 United States Army - US Army Soldier
Post subject: Re: Id's Todd Hollenshead Talks New IP
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 5:14 am
picked up 200 ammo
Joined: Tue Feb 22, 2005 7:50 pm Posts: 215
abbaon wrote:
Todd Hollenshead wrote:
Vitaliy
I googled that, and... good grief. Either id's developed the greatest content creation toolchain the world has ever seen, or they've hired God's own art department. How does a company working on a next-gen game employ more than half as many programmers as artists and designers? The ratio of content creators to coders is at least 3:1 at other shops.
I'm a big supporter of small art teams. When everybody has their input on product x, the final result tends to be unstylized and... blah. I prefer a small team, or even one person (Adrian Carmack ftw) to lead the art direction... makes for a much more satisfying and unique work.
Next-Gen goes over their QuakeCon 2006 notes, and using quotes from id Software, primarily John Carmack, they put together an article on id's new direction. Several references pertain to their next big title, which they expect to go blockbuster and do things that people have never seen from id before. Not only will the game branch in a different direction, but so will the company itself.
Joined: Tue Jun 22, 2004 5:57 pm Posts: 3738 Location: Green Bay, WI
ViPr wrote:
why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
because carmack does not want to build an empire, he just wants to build good programs.
seriously, they have no interest in whoring their engines to any two-bit developer that thinks they can make a game. plus, the more you liscence, the more support you will have to do. they don't want that type of business model.
they have a small team and i hope it stays that way.
why did they let basically everyone license Unreal Engine 3 while they said nothing?
because carmack does not want to build an empire, he just wants to build good programs.
seriously, they have no interest in whoring their engines to any two-bit developer that thinks they can make a game. plus, the more you liscence, the more support you will have to do. they don't want that type of business model.
they have a small team and i hope it stays that way.
In the meantime they have a big team and they've lost a lot of potential licencees to Unreal3 due to the superior production pipeline and toolkit it offers as middleware. Raw engine power pays only half the rent, if any.
Shelling out a million for a licence is cheap compared to the additional 9 or 19 million a development company has to invest in manpower to get a title done.
I suppose the "romantic" days of game development are long over.
Carmack wants to build spaceships and a family, additionally he works at id software as a lead programmer.
People grow up and the focus shifts. id software is a company now and seems to be in it's final stages to mature.
Thanks you very much for that link - pretty interesting!
I had a few chats with publishers / production directors a year or so ago.
They went into great detail why the U3 engine was so much preferred over the D3 engine and everybody very much substantiated each others views without knowing each other.
If the posts on the other boards are more or less correct (which imho is horrendously unprofessional as a dev to post such info to the public) then it looks like Epic is a bit trapped between middleware and game development.
I'm convinced one cannot maintain the same focus on programming when trying to achieve two things at once. id software was going the route to tailormake the D3 engine around D3 (which was one of the biggest complaints of the people I talked to) and they, according to sources, did not provide a state of the art production pipeline one might expect when licencing middleware.
It was supposed to believe the adaption of the D3 engine would brought everything to a hold for ~ months to integrate all inhouse production pipeline tools into the D3 engine.
Epic was always believed to be far superior in that regards, but eventually the ran into some roadblocks themselves.
As far as I'm personally concerned I don't like any Unreal engine game (aside of Unreal 1 which at the time was looking marvellous and offered an interesting new world to play in).
Yet I was always wondering how people get along with the D3 engine in a pro development environment, acknowledging my lack of first hand knowledge of pro development environments. My guesses anyhow got always confirmed by a lot of people, this excludes studios like human head or splash damage for example.
Furthermore I never understood the hype around U3 (gloss map support aside) as to me it looked like D3 * 4 (in terms of poly count and image map resolution). Heck, I toyed around with equally impressive things years back during the alpha days , 10k polies and multiple 2048* image maps - looked always better than real life yet very resoure demanding.
While I'm straying away from the original topic - I don't think the typical showcase scenarios of most developers match the released game by more than 50%. Look at all the released media screenshots of U3 powered games, they look not even 50% of the original Epic engine demonstrations.
If there's anything about id software I really admire, then it's their "what you show in public demonstrations is the real thing" approach.
I think with a bit of help from the people here I could create a very isolated demo scene with countless never-seen-before effects with shamelessly high resolution everythingstuff and announce it as a mod or addon seeking for a publisher or whatnot. This woul steal the thunder from most other announcements, but would it be real?
No, but the majority of people would be substantially misled and judge everything real they see against this vaporware.
Furthermore I never understood the hype around U3 (gloss map support aside) as to me it looked like D3 * 4 (in terms of poly count and image map resolution). Heck, I toyed around with equally impressive things years back during the alpha days , 10k polies and multiple 2048* image maps - looked always better than real life yet very resoure demanding.
Bah, so we can just stop every new technology stuff because DooM3 is enough...
It's really not a matter of texture resolution and polycount. Let's say I build a simple room, with a 10k model inside using a 2048 texture... using DooM3 renderer features you have a beautiful scene, then you switch to a next gen engine so you are able to add to your room specular power, realtime softshadow, full screen motion blur, depth of field, high dynamic range lighting, a clever radiosity solution... it's really another world, it's like compare a scene rendered with doom3 and another one rendered with a full featured 3D rendering app like mental ray or brazil.
Bah, so we can just stop every new technology stuff because DooM3 is enough...
C'mon - how can you extract such a statement from my post above?
Never said future technology is worth skipping because D3 renders nifty images.
BTW - most features you've listed is essentially one single feature: pixel post processing. So it's mostly matter of more render passes, right?
Quote:
it's really another world, it's like compare a scene rendered with doom3 and another one rendered with a full featured 3D rendering app like mental ray or brazil.
An offline renderer basically renders the same pixel over and over again, applying a new shader everytime and never has to worry about anything realtime.
And don't tell me Unreal comes with real time radiosity
Extracting such a statement from my post is like saying:
I don't feel well today == I will never feel well again.
after Doom3 they are outdated.
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