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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#451

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #440
mortenjorck wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix. A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.

What does this matrix mean?

I guess it's Cheap-Expensive and efficient-resource hog?

Godot and Unity can be dealt with by a small studio (or even 1 person), Godot and Id get much better performance than Unity and Unreal

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#452

Post by slopinthebag »

munificent wrote: post #224
ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of…

Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#453

Post by slopinthebag »

wisty wrote: post #445
maxsilver wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes yes absolutely. Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup - https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s... --- Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar g…

I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.

Non-realtime use cases for UE5 have much more generous performance constraints, and so the giveaways of UE5 are less apparent. Eg. raytracing instead of lumen.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#454

Post by kranke155 »

RajT88 wrote: post #342
superxpro12 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.

Can you pick it out of films and TV shows? (Not being snarky - legit question)

A24 enforces a list of cinematographers you have to work with I believe.

Netflix enforces time-budget-nr of episodes per season and HDR tech spec requirements that seems to have lead to the single most recognisable “house style” in modern studios (a mix of tech specs and limited budgets I think).

So yes it’s possible.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#455

Post by hypercube33 »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

Thing is the idtech (Quake) engines power basically everything, so having them on the same branch of your company that does games that use this engine is something powerful. That said I think idtech was anti-microsoft in that it was based on non-DirectX tech from the get-go. Either way, big loss here, was hoping to see a new cutting-edge Doom or Quake game come out in 2026/7

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#456

Post by rapind »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

Sure, but then you need to worry about other things, like Unity a few years ago with their "Runtime Fee" debacle.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#457

Post by ikiris »

grg0 wrote: post #398
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduc…

> and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations. This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fund…

No one is as sure of their negotiating position as the software dev / temporarily embarrassed founder who thinks they’re special and the bestest and better than everyone else exactly like them.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#458

Post by [deleted] »

kibwen wrote: post #399
BikiniPrince wrote: post #359

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#459

Post by formerly_proven »

teamonkey wrote: post #435
Sleaker wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games. If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues…

Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case. There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime pla…

Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have shader stutters from those which do not.

https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shad... https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-a... https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#460

Post by ntSean »

legitster wrote: post #194

I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly: - Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist. - The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless…

15 years here of game development. Hoping to add some nuance to your viewpoint.

1. Yes. Every studio is optimizing for a different set of problems.

2. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There is a lot of value to the consumer in good engineering, and value to the designers. Adding content isn’t free.

3. The median “developer” is good at what they do and will meet the technical proficiency needed. If you’re a writer, or a 3D artist, I’m not going to expect you to be coding - but they all use Version Control, are in Engine, and are familiar with tooling.

4. AAA relies on content to reduce risk, but it is an active conversation on gameplay innovation. It’s hard to take a risk when you are on the hook for repaying millions of dollars to investors.

5. Nintendo sell hardware based on their “exclusives”. Sony know this and invest heavily, they are no longer supporting PC releases (see: GoW).

6. If this was true, every team would be a startup flipping assets. This isn’t the case, not just because new studios don’t have pipelines or internal/external infrastructure.

The business of games is in part the game product. But it’s much more than this- it’s relationships with vendors, platforms, other studios too.

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