Id Tech 5

Carmack has hinted in the past a few things that are of interest and these are prevelant in yesterday's engine demo. Among them are:

Multiplatform Development: Carmack has always opted for OpenGL over DirectX for several reasons, among them the ability to easily port over to Mac and Linux PCs. Carmack confirmed multiplatform development for Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360 and PS3. He previously mentioned Wii support as "interesting" but didn't comment further.

Soft Shadows: Carmack suggested in the past that while working on the Doom3 engine (henceforth renamed as Id Tech 4) shadow buffers weren't mature enough that he felt comfortable working with them so he stuck with stencil shadows instead. I think he made the choice he had to, given what was available at the time. Since then, shadow buffers are now pretty robust and from the looks of the demo, there are indeed soft shadows (as I was pointing out to Kat earlier today).

Megatextures: As expected, it looks like the megatexture technology has been expanded beyond just terrain geometry and is now versatile enough to be applied to normal brushwork (models?). In his speech, Carmack mentions that there are some 20GB worth of texture (source) data used in the demo that is compressed by the megatexture.

Creative Freedom: Development cycles these days are pretty ridiculous and since that doesn't usually get any better, Carmack hinted that new developer tools will probably help streamline things a bit. He has mentioned that large development budgets really hampers your from experimenting too much since you are obligated to minimize risk. Shaping terrain should be pretty easy and I wonder if there will be similar tools to that of some 3D sculpting software packages like zBrush or MudBox. Carmack mentioned (and verified by "SyncError", Id Software's community PR guy) that the demo map was created in about 10 days (not counting certain assets and programming). What this means is faster development times, more gameplay testing/experimentation, and shorter learning curves for the mod community.

All in all, I'm both impressed and excited by what John Carmack and Id Software demoed yesterday.

Note: I wrote this blog entry on Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows. (Why isn't there a URL link button on Vox's compose screen? *cough* ydnar *cough* Link person button is there but doesn't seem to work. Have to edit in Firefox.)