Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

Post by jdnfmfmfm » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #447

Cpoll wrote: post #283

Earlier 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…

> usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look that's exactly the argument? you can do anything if you put enough effort in - but effort is finite, so in aggregate the distribution will cluster around the defaults

Post by hunterpayne » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

0xWTF wrote: post #198

mjr00 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times. For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournam…

Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing? Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won. C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra…

Post by tadfisher » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #453

wisty wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by tadfisher » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #414

LarsDu88 wrote: post #63

Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time. If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.

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…

Post by inigyou » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

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?