In a strange but ultimately attention-grabbing move, John Carmack chose the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to officially reveal Id's new games engine, 'Id Tech 5', which promises an end to texture memory constraints and "virtually unlimited visual fidelity" - you can read more of this posturing at the official Id site.
Id is developing its own title to premiere the technology, which will support Mac, PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Tech 5 will also be available to third-party developers. Onstage with Steve Jobs, Carmack had this to say:
"So the last couple of years at id we've been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it ... this is the first time we're showing anything we've done on it publicly. What we've got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game."
While programmers across the globe are no doubt rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of unrestricted texture abuse, the rise of Nintendo's Wii has rather shifted mainstream gamer focus away from graphical advances and towards... erm... shaking a stick at the screen.
Anyway, the engine demo resembled MotorStorm - a sort of canyon-based area with shanty town-esque habitations. That's bound to excite people.
More info everywhere.
