Id Tech 5 is proprietary game engine developed by id Software, and follows its predecessors, id Tech 1, 2, 3 and 4. It is a major advancement over id Tech 4. The engine was first demonstrated at the WWDC 2007 by John D. Carmack on an eight-core computer; however, the demo only used a single core with single-threaded OpenGL implementation running on a 512 MB 7000 class Quadro video card. id Tech 5 was first used in RAGE, and in Machinegames' Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. While id Software will be using the engine solely for creating shooter games, it also has the capability to operate outside of this genre.
The initial demonstration of the engine featured 20 GB of texture data (using a more advanced MegaTexture approach called Virtual Texturing, which supports textures with resolutions up to 128,000 × 128,000 pixels), and a completely dynamic and changeable world. This technique allows the engine to automatically stream textures into memory as needed, meaning that the developer need not concern themselves with memory restraints or texture limits. This has the advantage of simplifying the creation of content, by eliminating the need to adapt content for different platforms. The engine automatically optimizes resources for cross-platform development, making it possible to render the same models on different platforms, while only creating them for one platform, further simplifying cross-platform development.
The engine comes with a new content-creation tools package called id Studio, which is supposed to be much more user-friendly and polished than in earlier versions. Previously, content creation required artists to run various command line tools beyond the level editor's own tools, while id Tech 5 allows for all work to be done "in-engine".
The engine was first publicly shown during the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address, then was later shown privately to an audience of potential licensees at E3 2007. The first public demonstration focusing exclusively on the engine took place at QuakeCon in the same year during the annual keynote held by John Carmack.
An interview with John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, indicated that like its predecessors, id Tech 5 will eventually be released as open source. The move to open source will likely come many years after id Tech 5's release as a proprietary engine. At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack told LinuxGames that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release."[1]
At QuakeCon 2010, id CEO Todd Hollenshead announced that while id Tech 5 could be shared with internal Zenimax developers, the engine will not be available for external licensing.[2]
It was replaced by Id Tech 6 with release of DOOM in 2016.
References[]
- ↑ "QuakeCon Wrapup". LinuxGames
- ↑ "id Tech 5 Rage Engine No Longer Up For External Licensing". Gamasutra