Id Tech 5 - Features

Features

The development of id Tech 5 has centered predominantly on making the engine easier to use for developers. Demonstrations of id Tech 5 have so far focused more on the advantages to developers rather than players, which is directly opposite to past releases of id Tech, which focused more on players than developers.

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 developers 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 creating them for only one platform, further simplifying cross-platform development.

One of the visually evident features the renderer will include is a penumbra in the shadowing (soft edges), by using shadow maps. In contrast, id Tech 4, which featured volume-based shadows, had very sharply defined shadows. The engine will likely feature numerous other advanced graphical effects such as various materials for lighting, high dynamic range rendering-centric effects, bloom, crepuscular rays (volumetric lighting), radiosity, soft particles, pixel shader effects, alpha to coverage, post processing, dynamic water surfaces, procedural animation, cloth simulation, depth of field, and motion blur. The engine will also support multi-threaded processing on the CPU for many of its tasks, including rendering, game logic, AI, physics, and sound processing.

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'.

While id Software will be using the engine solely for creating shooter games, the engine also has the capability to operate outside of this genre. Steve Nix from id Software stated that "Not only do we think people can make games outside the action-shooter space with our technology, we encourage it. We'd actually like to see those games made."