31–40 of 74 posts
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The orignal UT was so fun. The later ones tried to be Halo and suffered for it.
I liked UT in its day, but isn't TF2 the current gold-standard?
I don't :(
Actually I was a little disappointed by all the upselling when they made it free to play on Steam.
UT was "buy CD for 20 quid" and then waste 4 years of my life (and many vodka and dominos soaked attendances as Multiplay i-series events in the UK).
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Let us not forget Unreal which was arguably better than quake at the time from a technology standpoint... However, I find that the gaming experience peaked with Unreal Tournament. Its been about appearance over substance since (apart from tribes 2). Stop whinging about the tech and make something fun again!
The orignal UT was so fun. The later ones tried to be Halo and suffered for it.
I knew someone working in VR about 20 years ago, and the big problem then was latency - if there's too much delay between when your head moves and the scene is rendered at the new orientation, it just doesn't work. IIRC the eyes are sensitive, in this respect, to delays of less than a movie frame's 1/24 sec. Carmack is both very concerned and very knowledgeable about latency in rendering, so it seems likely that he's…
He's talked about this exact issue and is addressing it. http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-v...
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Rage was a huge shame (tech wise). They needed to be able to ship more data to make the tech really shine. The game was 3 DVDs as it was but it needed to something more like 8 or 9 DVDs. It just feels like such a shame for the graphics to look bad for want of the ability to ship data to the customer.
I don't know how they did texture compression for Rage, but the pc version was 24gb. Skyrim came out a month later and was 7gb. They had "some" reasonable texture quality on character meshes and such, but a lot of the world textures were pixelated garbage - I have no idea where they had the game become so bloated it was 24gb like that. Reminds me of the Force Unleashed, which was another game that took up 25gb for no…
Their raw data set is much, much larger than what they shipped. Carmack has given out figures like 300gb per level.
In order to cull that down to a game that can fit in 24gb, they had to drop a huge amount of detail. The way they did it was quite interesting as well.
They get telemetry on clients playing the game, and then they build a weighted set of textures at each mip that were actually loaded by real clients. Then they take the highest weighted 24GB of them, and that is what they ship.
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Rage was a huge shame (tech wise). They needed to be able to ship more data to make the tech really shine. The game was 3 DVDs as it was but it needed to something more like 8 or 9 DVDs. It just feels like such a shame for the graphics to look bad for want of the ability to ship data to the customer.
I don't know how they did texture compression for Rage, but the pc version was 24gb. Skyrim came out a month later and was 7gb. They had "some" reasonable texture quality on character meshes and such, but a lot of the world textures were pixelated garbage - I have no idea where they had the game become so bloated it was 24gb like that. Reminds me of the Force Unleashed, which was another game that took up 25gb for no…
In most modern games, smaller textures are tiled over larger areas, allowing for lots of detail for less memory at the expense of variation. Most do something to mix it up (mixtures of textures, adding random variations), but it ultimately constrains what can be done.
MegaTexture seems to solve the problem of using a single large texture by streaming only the parts needed, but requires much more data on the disk to match the detail level of tiling.
I love how Carmack is constantly pushing the industry forward. He made raycasting engines when everyone else was still doing 2D stuff. He made fully 3D games when everyone else was still using raycasting. He built a game engine with completely dynamic lighting, when everyone else was still relying on lightmaps and some cheap hacks. Arguably Duke Nukem 3D looked better than Quake, but polygonal was the future. Half-Li…
Maybe so but almost 10 years later and half-life 2 is still more enjoyable than doom3. Quake1 and quake3 are the only id games that are remembered not only for their tech advancements (and of course, commander keen).
Now if we had had source engine facial and body animations combined with doom3 engine from the beginning (and of course the much better story-writing of hl2): http://www.nofrag.com/2004/nov/24/15016/
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I liked UT in its day, but isn't TF2 the current gold-standard?
Depends if you like hats :) I don't :( Actually I was a little disappointed by all the upselling when they made it free to play on Steam. UT was "buy CD for 20 quid" and then waste 4 years of my life (and many vodka and dominos soaked attendances as Multiplay i-series events in the UK).
TF2 is a weird one. I think it's undoubtedly a 10/10 game, but all the evolution since release has made the experience a bit "bloated", to use a normal software term. It's almost as if the game has had too much support for its own good.
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Rage was a huge shame (tech wise). They needed to be able to ship more data to make the tech really shine. The game was 3 DVDs as it was but it needed to something more like 8 or 9 DVDs. It just feels like such a shame for the graphics to look bad for want of the ability to ship data to the customer.
I don't know how they did texture compression for Rage, but the pc version was 24gb. Skyrim came out a month later and was 7gb. They had "some" reasonable texture quality on character meshes and such, but a lot of the world textures were pixelated garbage - I have no idea where they had the game become so bloated it was 24gb like that. Reminds me of the Force Unleashed, which was another game that took up 25gb for no…
You can't really compare it to skyrim though. Skyrim doesn't use mega texturing (or virtual texturing). It repeats textures all over the place. In rage, there is a huge texture for everything. IIRC, the uncompressed textures performed a total of 1.5TB or something like that, so I would say that they did an awesome job with the compression.
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I don't know how they did texture compression for Rage, but the pc version was 24gb. Skyrim came out a month later and was 7gb. They had "some" reasonable texture quality on character meshes and such, but a lot of the world textures were pixelated garbage - I have no idea where they had the game become so bloated it was 24gb like that. Reminds me of the Force Unleashed, which was another game that took up 25gb for no…
Rage uses a new rendering approach in which every surface has a unique texture. In a normal game, textures are reused all over the place. The texture compression Rage uses is actually very good, it's just that the data set is massive. Their raw data set is much, much larger than what they shipped. Carmack has given out figures like 300gb per level. In order to cull that down to a game that can fit in 24gb, they had t…
Dude, Carmack was never a consoles guy, he didn't like the Genesis nor the SNES, he didn't like the Playstation, Saturn and N64, etc... If he was excited by nextgen consoles, now THAT would be news...
And yet he did like the Xbox 360.