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MPC – How much do you think the tools for artists are kind of holding back gaming in general?
JC – On the traditional modeling side we’re basically all using the movie industry tools so you can’t really say that that’s holding them back because you can build movies with the same sets of tools. I do think that the stamping stuff that we’ve gotten – that is a pretty fundamental new advancement for what we could do with gaming and it lets us bring a look to our games that you don’t see in others. Like after you’ve looked at Rage stuff for a while you start looking at other game trailers and you’ll notice they’re mostly these big flat areas of repeated textures. Those look more like a game than like the lived-in world that we’ve got in Rage.
But when you think about the core code development that runs this stuff, it’s a page of code to do the megatexture lookup. And even the management of it all is two files of code or something. But here it is three years of work later and now our challenge is all about making everything work in production and getting the production processes together. So we’re at least preparing ourselves to go through that same set of challenges as we extend the stuff to geometry hopefully in the next generation.
TW – But as far as tools go, the challenges that the mod community have faced, even in the Doom 3 generation, have gotten much more difficult.
JC – And that’s unfortunate, but it’s one of those courses of history. I’d say that the golden age of the mods passed on the PC because it used to be anybody could make something that at least resembled the commercial product, and a talented person could make something that could even stand in for a commercial product. And that’s just not the case anymore. I do have hopes that there may be other kind of platforms that it migrates to like the mobile platforms where you may have a similar kind of modability.
MPC – There are user-generated Team Fortress 2 maps that may not have the level of polish and the props and all that stuff that you guys or Valve or anyone might add, but they are fundamentally very playable maps that Valve is picking up and bringing into their game. What do you guys think about that?
JC – It’s great. [I’ve] always been a big supporter of that type of thing. We’re going to have a lot of that with Quake Live. While we will eventually support some other completely different mod game types, early on the plans are that we’re going to be advocating development of fresh new levels.
It’s really suitable on Quake Live because given the distribution method, hopefully the large number of users that are going to be playing there it gives people a big stage to play on. Lots of people will get to see the content. It’ll be trivial for people to download it and rank it. Just making the whole user-content experience isn’t something that you have to kind of know the quirky lore to know how to access.
MPC – And it’s an option if one of your friends is playing, you hit the button and join?
JC – It just goes and gets you in the game automatically.
TW- I was actually talking to a reporter last night. We’re talking about the history of modding and I thought “wow, that’s really interesting. When Doom came out John allowed the game to be modded and changed and that has affected id [as a company]. Because myself, our lead designer, our art director, and our programmer director, all came from the mod community. Modding has actually shaped what id is today based on our modding games in the beginning.
JC – And it’s the best way to do it. I remember being a teenager and sending a letter to EA saying “here’s the game that I want to create in pascal record structures” and obviously they blew me off because they had no reason to think any other way about me. But mods are just the best way to do it because it’s a way for people that are outside the industry to put something together to show why they should be in the industry and it lets the people on the other side to actually judge new talent fairly.
MPC – Would you say that id Tech 5 is a more general purpose kind of game engine? Up to this point you’ve been kind of well known for making awesome first-person shooter engines. Are you trying to make id tech 5 more general purpose?
JC – Well because we knew that we were doing outdoor stuff in Rage it shaped all the internal decisions about the engine where there’re really no optimizations for interiors like portals. Everything is done in a way that will work for the outside stuff so the indoor stuff, which is the easier case, just falls out of it. But there’re difference between id Tech 5 vs. id Tech 4.
It’s an interesting thing where I was so happy with id Tech 4 where everything became completely universal in general. What I mean is all the lighting on all the surfaces, and it seemed like we were moving towards this general purpose thing and away from all the special case hacks. But Rage forced us to do at least a 90 degree turn and say “ok, we’re leaning on the pre-generated, pre-rendered stuff for the megatexture and we’re doing a lot of the game-ism classic design type things not unifying the lighting and shadowing but dimming things down with shadowmaps and brightening things up for lightmaps rather than doing true proper lighting.
The game actually runs in 2 modes. There’s a development mode which is very similar to a Doom 3 type renderer that gets slower the more lights you have on. But then we go into the production mode with what we call combo maps where it takes everything and digests everything down, cuts it all up, analyzes everything. And at that point it’s running in this much more specialized mode which is several times faster and that’s how we have a chance to get up to 60Hz.
And it wasn’t the direction that I thought id Tech would be going toward at the end of Doom 3. The direction we had started with the [cancelled] Darkness project was still doing these more general purpose things, in some ways, adding more ambient volumes and stuff we could do in different ways. But we made a real strategic change in the kind of implementation in Rage to just say we’re not about being pure or being correct or being mathematically elegant in some way.
We’re going to do the things that make the game good – that cater to the things that we made possible [with the technology]. The big play was the megatexture stuff which is how we think that we can differentiate ourselves from all the other games out there. We’ve spent a lot of effort to go do this. I’m sure there are lots of people working on copying it right now but there’s a lot of work for them to catch up and it’s something that just so different.
There were a whole set of techniques that I looked at post Doom 3, for example things that shaped area lights, special shadowing, different ways to do specular highlights, displacement bump mapping, and a whole raft of things. And the real takeaway that I came away with was most of these are things that you have to point out to people. You have to be able to say “isn’t it cool that that highlight there is square instead of circular?” Things like that that really don’t make that much of a difference.
The difference that you want to make is somebody walking by outside your office looking in and seeing something on the screen from there that looks cooler than what they’re use to seeing. Some people are of the opinion that you could put together a thousand of these little things and make something that becomes “next gen” that looks like a new technology. While the megatexture technology would allow us to look different than what people are used to seeing and will have a qualitatively different perspective.
TW – One of the great things that it does is allow us to have true unique areas and that help enrich the story and the setting and it makes you feel like you’re more inside the world. When you walk through some of the towns and places that we’ve already made and finished you may not consciously realize “ok everything is unique” but it feels different. It really does and that really helps the story in-game.
Check back later for the second part of our exclusive interview with John Carmack, in which he gives his thoughts on Nvidia's Cuda, Intel's Larrabee, and ATI's rumored Fusion!
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