I'm probably not alone but I didn't buy any of the doom or quake games for the storytelling or IP, I bought it for the engine. They were foremost a game engine company. Switching to UE5 now makes it compete on the same level as other UE5 games, and there's a lot of those already. Kiss of death for the company if you ask me.
Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
421–430 of 628 posts
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
They still get usage stats.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#423Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up. The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.
Most major studios are using custom engines, Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Take2, Blizzard ect...
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#424They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
Do you have a source for this ?
It’s not “moving to India” so much as Western studios are now forming smaller core teams locally and farming out much of the content to outsourcing studios in India, Malaysia & Eastern Europe rather than doing it all in-house.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#425All those devs need to get together and form their own studio, and then sell it back to Microsoft for $83 billion.
Oh wait...
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look. To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your…
Yeah but afair UE5 Nanite + Lumen + Megalights + whatever is meant to work together, you can't just replace or turn off one of them without it affecting the others. So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)
You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite.
There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.
You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how it works, first of all IdTech is not a general engine, it's only made to build specific games: fps. Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be…
Your first statement is wrong. The new Indiana jones game is not an FPS and it uses the same engine
I'm not wrong they forked the engine and it's the same studio that worked with the same engine before, id tech is made for fps it's clear.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one. Doom runs like butter on the switch. Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.
The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable. But for what its worth, the graphi…
I can't believe a developer would make a mistake like this. That's just unreal.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work. Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs in…
How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Among other things, unions have been commonly anti-immigrant, seeing them as taking jobs that are "rightfully" theirs. Even on supposedly cosmopolitan Hacker News, you'll see users saying they support unions pushing for harsh restrictions on H1-B and other visas.
If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board. Germany has very strong labor protecting laws. Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult. Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less. The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking t…
Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.
Neither of the two are The tipping points.
The biggest VW market is china.
Just to point out, in 2020 one every 20 vehicles sold globally was a VW in China. VW sold more than twice of Tesla at its peak in China alone.
And VW has US plants so it's not that impactful, not different than us automakers woes.