To be honest I understood about 10% of that pdf, and my old degree is in computer science, I even have some programming experience behind be... but this is too advanced stuff for me.
On the other hand there's enough material on some game developer forum about how virtual texturing on current hardware works if someone wans to understand it...
These latest shots actually have me feeling a little less impressed than I was when watchin the HD trailer way back when. It looks like they've had to go crazy with polygon optimization and in some areas it's kinda painful to see.
Really looking forward to what they show at quakecon though.
So I don't get it . Why not just give everything unique texture space (=more unique detail), but put it in different textures so that it doesn't have to load the entire texture in one go, but can just load the ones you see? Might be too technical for me to understand though .
Looks nice
Looks like halfway finished matte paintings (not a bad thing)
Main problem with these shots so far is the hard line between the sky and the game assets. If they found a way to make the assets dynamically affect the skybox so the line wasn't so hard it'd be totally mind blowing.
Japhir, the reason for reusing textures is to increase overall detail. Any way you slice it, reusing textures = higher detail since you're able to load less, but higher quality textures. And this is double in the sense that when you reuse textures, you can spend more time on 'em in photoshop and have to tweak less textures when doing revisions. Overall just a win win. But you can reuse textures in clever ways that make 'em not appear to be repeats using adjustments in material editors and in the UV map.
blackulaDZ, allow me to explain. you know how normally, you'd use many textures for a level? well, they just use one. this allows them to paint on every pixel using this texture, uniquely. at least, that's the general idea. and it's mega texture, unless you're being silly and knew all this, which you should have. /lashings
which lead me to believe that they use one massive texture with everything uniquely mapped to it, for the entire environment. (which doesn't make sense to me )
So I don't get it . Why not just give everything unique texture space (=more unique detail), but put it in different textures so that it doesn't have to load the entire texture in one go, but can just load the ones you see?
As far as I know it works like this...
1. render the scene to an offscreen buffer where the pixels don't contain color or depth info, but rather UV coordinates
2. based on this render grab the appropriate small blocks from the MegaTexture on the background storage (blocks seem to be 128x128)
3. manually perform up to 4x aniso filtering in the pixel shader for the textures
4. render the final scene as usual
You DON'T have to work on a big texture though. There's a level editor that's even multi-user so several people can work on the same map and have it update in real time. It even seems to maintain construction history of texture stamps.
And you can unwrap objects and characters as usual but are free to use as much texture space as you want. So the whole thing is pretty transparent to the artist.
They map the whole thing into several 128k x 128k textures (so probably more then one as I got it) for technical reasons, it probably works better like this instead of lots of small textures. Mind you, it has to load everything from the X360 arcade's DVD drive in real time!
The pdf has some shots of the resulting megatexture, obvoiusly not the whole thing though.
Carmack's speech at Quakecon is probably going to contain more info but if you're as much of a coder as I am, then you're certainly going to need someone to explain it to you
heh, i thought the trailer looked better too. though maybe because it was moving. these screens still look pretty damn good. the water, however....i dont know. that green water seems too green for something that shallow. and there is no hard edge, it just feathers out way too much making it look like some kind of really weird dense fog.
I can assure you that there are lakes messy and green like that, not everything is as clean and blue as in the mountains of Austria... All it takes is some enviromental contamination, which is kinda reasonable in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
that interactive site runs fine on my mac mini, which is why I'm very much excited for the mac version being released with all the other flavors. Nice one Id!
This game looks great but Ive notice that some of the characters tend to look blocky, and some areas especially around the crouch area the texture stretches to much. Almost like ID put Doom 3 characters in this engine. Hopefully they will fix all that up in the final version.
looks mucho sexy to me.. Im constantly amazed at how frequently the bar is raised in the games industry. Visually speaking that is.. gameplay wise I feel that the consoles have caused an oversimplification in games.. but thats antoehr story..
These new shots from the PDF are not as good looking as the ones from the first trailer by far If you look at the scene with the town, the fan looks really funky, in the first trailer they released everything looks alot nicer. Better shading, higher rez characters, better post-processing. In the same scene, that is. I mean, if you compare these two:
This is completely out of my ass but they could have turned the post off due to the paper being about texture sharpness so that you can see them clearly.
Yeah, they probably didn't realise that as soon as they post anything, anywhere, the internet will be like "OMG RAGE SCREENS LOOK AT THEM!" The environments look like they are the same rez. Could bethat these are console-screens awell, and dont have as high rez/AA etc. But still. I wants it now!
Yeah, I spotted that fan blade too. I'm not even sure what would make it look like that. It looks like it was badly photoshopped in.
Game in general is looking beautiful, though. Seems like a nice twist on post-apocalyptic settings too; as much as I love destroyed cities, it was getting oversaturated.
This is completely out of my ass but they could have turned the post off due to the paper being about texture sharpness so that you can see them clearly.
+1
I recon they have turned off post affects as well, as you can clearly see that there is no depth of field or fog effects in the latest shot. And i think the fan blade doesn't looks right because it seems not to have ambient or normals.
Can't wait to see this in action, my minds making r2d2 style beeps and bops at what it could show...
I'm still a little pissed at the "no blood" decision though, yeah its more bucks, but look at how much it sucks in Quake Live
Also, I bet we see a LOT of leaked media, videos and maybe more at QuakeCon... Every major id software release has been leaked in beta form, why stop now lol
So, this mega texturing thing in ID Tech 5. Does it apply only to terrain or could you apply the same methodology of overlaying maps to any game object that is placed in the world? Could you for instance make every concrete barrier or wall unique after applying various levels of decals that are then baked into one errr..... megatexture?
A megatexture is just a huge texture atlas. Every triangle is potentially uniquely textured. You don't have to do the stamping- it's just convenient to use their stamping tools to decal everything. From an artists perspective, it just means you can use as many textures, as high res, as you want. Lightmapping doesn't need to be lower res, nor does it need its own UV set, because everything has non-tiling/overlapping UV's.
FPS parts looks cool. Nice art and tech, but I am not sure about the racing-- looks kind of floaty. Auto-tracking guns seem kind of lame. Could be fun all the same
It looks pretty good, but the first Rage trailer looks a bit more different. The characters there looked less blocky to me.
Probably had to cut down to get the 60fps down on the consoles, one reason why I hate cross console platform games..you just know the PC version's gonna suffer
Totally underwhelmed by new trailer. I was like, what happened? Really sparse and clean, chunky lopoly models, bad effects. Very Doom 3. Liked the first demo videos a whole lot better.
New trailer is awesome. I love the look of the guns, the enemies, and the little sentry turret/robot pal.
Agree with Ninjas that the racing stuff looks quite "floaty" - the physics just doesn't appear to have much weight - maybe because the cars are going so fast?
Also I don't understand why that "guy smoking a cigarette" scene was put in. It doesn't add anything to the trailer, and actually shows some pretty terrible animation, poor lighting and an uninspired character. That half-second scene should just have been left out IMO, it just damages the quality shown by the rest of the trailer.
I love how that bar scene looks - the hubcaps on the wall, the mutant moose head and other trophies, and the oil barrel drink cans in the background all add a great touch of feeling that a lot of games lack. The lighting is great in there too. I assume so much detail is lavished on that area since it's a central gameplay hub of some sort - eg. the place you always go to get missions or ammo or something.
Yeah I meant the new stuff... And wow! I can't wait to get my hands on the engine, i just hope the tools run on a mac! Though I'll likely have to upgrade - so thats not that important.
I agree with Mop about the Cigarette Guy - I wasn't too Impressed with that.
I love the sets/levels - looks like that concept art was used well my the artists - they look less 'blocky' than most games... I think most of the Polycount is going into these massive scenes. The buildings and props look easily as detailed as the characters.
Replies
On the other hand there's enough material on some game developer forum about how virtual texturing on current hardware works if someone wans to understand it...
I love iD, for my money, they haven't gone wrong.
Really looking forward to what they show at quakecon though.
Looks nice
Main problem with these shots so far is the hard line between the sky and the game assets. If they found a way to make the assets dynamically affect the skybox so the line wasn't so hard it'd be totally mind blowing.
Japhir, the reason for reusing textures is to increase overall detail. Any way you slice it, reusing textures = higher detail since you're able to load less, but higher quality textures. And this is double in the sense that when you reuse textures, you can spend more time on 'em in photoshop and have to tweak less textures when doing revisions. Overall just a win win. But you can reuse textures in clever ways that make 'em not appear to be repeats using adjustments in material editors and in the UV map.
Would certainly explain how they got some of those environment scenes though.
As far as I know it works like this...
1. render the scene to an offscreen buffer where the pixels don't contain color or depth info, but rather UV coordinates
2. based on this render grab the appropriate small blocks from the MegaTexture on the background storage (blocks seem to be 128x128)
3. manually perform up to 4x aniso filtering in the pixel shader for the textures
4. render the final scene as usual
You DON'T have to work on a big texture though. There's a level editor that's even multi-user so several people can work on the same map and have it update in real time. It even seems to maintain construction history of texture stamps.
And you can unwrap objects and characters as usual but are free to use as much texture space as you want. So the whole thing is pretty transparent to the artist.
They map the whole thing into several 128k x 128k textures (so probably more then one as I got it) for technical reasons, it probably works better like this instead of lots of small textures. Mind you, it has to load everything from the X360 arcade's DVD drive in real time!
The pdf has some shots of the resulting megatexture, obvoiusly not the whole thing though.
Carmack's speech at Quakecon is probably going to contain more info but if you're as much of a coder as I am, then you're certainly going to need someone to explain it to you
http://i29.tinypic.com/14eawkx.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/2i1zi8j.jpg
Game in general is looking beautiful, though. Seems like a nice twist on post-apocalyptic settings too; as much as I love destroyed cities, it was getting oversaturated.
+1
I recon they have turned off post affects as well, as you can clearly see that there is no depth of field or fog effects in the latest shot. And i think the fan blade doesn't looks right because it seems not to have ambient or normals.
This is some SiC Tech! Really amazing looking!
I'm still a little pissed at the "no blood" decision though, yeah its more bucks, but look at how much it sucks in Quake Live
Also, I bet we see a LOT of leaked media, videos and maybe more at QuakeCon... Every major id software release has been leaked in beta form, why stop now lol
now as you say it, i recognize the absence of blood in QL, havent noticed / missed that at all ... might not be such a big move after all....
I dunno, I guess after having so many years of the "splat/gibs" effect, it kinda sucks to see a "pzzt/electric particles" effect
Not exactly sure how id's implementation differs.
Do a google search for rage hd trailer.
http://kotaku.com/5336902/an-apocalyptic-look-at-ids-rage
I really wanna see mega texturing in action.
Probably had to cut down to get the 60fps down on the consoles, one reason why I hate cross console platform games..you just know the PC version's gonna suffer
Agree with Ninjas that the racing stuff looks quite "floaty" - the physics just doesn't appear to have much weight - maybe because the cars are going so fast?
Also I don't understand why that "guy smoking a cigarette" scene was put in. It doesn't add anything to the trailer, and actually shows some pretty terrible animation, poor lighting and an uninspired character. That half-second scene should just have been left out IMO, it just damages the quality shown by the rest of the trailer.
I love how that bar scene looks - the hubcaps on the wall, the mutant moose head and other trophies, and the oil barrel drink cans in the background all add a great touch of feeling that a lot of games lack. The lighting is great in there too. I assume so much detail is lavished on that area since it's a central gameplay hub of some sort - eg. the place you always go to get missions or ammo or something.
I'm looking forward to it.
I agree with Mop about the Cigarette Guy - I wasn't too Impressed with that.
I love the sets/levels - looks like that concept art was used well my the artists - they look less 'blocky' than most games... I think most of the Polycount is going into these massive scenes. The buildings and props look easily as detailed as the characters.
Can't wait!