John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

Wow, simply wow. This is a huge development.

Carmack has demoed the mega-textured Rage on the iPhone4 with visuals that match Playstation 2/XBox game consoles. Check it out below:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....rageiphone.jpg
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/12/c...g-on-iphone-a/

I remember reading about mega-texturing when the idea was first announced. I was convinced that it could produce amazing results with lower geometries, thanks to increased detail and decreased repetition of the textures. The demo confirms this as the graphics are incredible.

Gamespot notes that Android is up next, though indicates that Carmack is worried about the amount of money Android users spend in the market.
http://www.gamespot.com/events/quake...ml?sid=6273388

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

For those interested in reading more about mega texturing, the wikipedia article has a nice, concise overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture#cite_note-1

Here's a nice PDF on the subject with shiny pictures!:
http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/05...Challenges.pdf

As the Mega Texture technique was demoed on the iPhone4 (notice I didn't say iOS), they likely mainly use Open GL ES 2.0 API, and arm cortex A8 optimizations and OMAP optimizations (PVR SGX 535). As such, I suspect porting this 'engine' would not be terribly difficult to other OSs (ie. Linux == Android), though a full game port is another matter entirely.

While I suspect that game will likely remain iOS only for some time, if android continues to grow, and the device portfolio continues to expand, Android development will likely follow shortly. Hopefully the team is considering cross-OS development as the underlying architecture across devices is largely identical.

Sadly, as Carmack's development is known as monetarily motivated, I can't foresee Nokia or RIM taking advantage of iD's push into the mobile space. Of course, this is just *one* title, so it's not a huge loss. Still to have such magnificent technical work on a platform is something to be desired and generally spawns competitive pressure for further development.

As an aside:
The wikipedia also mentions something to look out for in future Carmack developments as well. This is namely Sparse Voxel Octrees. This technique is basically similar to Mega Textures (or Virtual Textures) in that a very large and detailed geometry structure is streamed as necessary into the scene, and based on the rendering target, the geometry is determined using ray casting to minimize overdraw. This offers the possibility of automatic Level-Of-Detail, lower memory requirements, and geometry complexity that is more coupled to disk storage limits than memory/GPU limits! Wow. Coupled with Virtual Textures, this would result in quite the boost in a scenes complexity without a huge impact on performance approaching a polygon to texel ratio of 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_Voxel_Octree

It's remarkable watching it all happen. That we now have PS2s/XBoxes in our pockets was predicted years ago as we understand technological advancement. Still it's interesting to see how this vision unfolds. It's only a matter of time before we have quality like Avatar running in real-time on our hand-held devices as well, in 3D no less.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

One more note:
Coupled with shaders, mega texturing would be dynamite. Even with simple geometry, finely-detailed textures with baked radiosity, sub-surface-scattering, and processed effects like normal-mapping, displacement-mapping, reflections, procedural effects (eg. plasma), would yield incredible results. To think that this is actually at a computational savings is remarkable.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I couldn't help myself. Here's some images showcasing Virtual Textures:

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1249630521.jpg

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1249630519.jpg

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1249630522.jpg

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1249630517.jpg

http://ic.tweakimg.net/ext/i/1249630518.jpg

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

Sure, when he showcases this on iphone i'm going to get one. So far it all looks like quake 2/3 to me.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

Bah. It's not about iPhone vs. whatever. It's about a wonderful contribution to gaming graphics. This could have been done on any computing platform, and certainly any modern mobile device. It just happened to be developed on an iPhone. If the bits were aligned correctly, N900 would display similar results.

Interestingly, despite the pretty graphics in the pictures I posted, the geometry seems modest at best.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

It's about the platform that gets such an engine first. I'm patiently waiting because iPhone is obvious an excellent gaming device because of the "unified" hardware.
Designing such an engine for anything else (eg android) is questionable but showing a closed building isn't very promising either.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I've been quietly following this, Cap'n and I have to admit that I'm geeked at the progress Carmack has pulled out of his graphical engines and texturing. Nice to know that other folks are equally, if not more, geeked about it as I am.

Can't wait to see where this leads.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

It's *is* nice to know, isn't it? :)

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I think it is promising, even if it is a 'closed building'. The idea behind this technique should easy enough to re-implement with little to no more information. That there's precedent (a working demo), makes the pursuit that much more predictable and attainable.

To add to that, ID licences it's game engines for other developers, and as the paper suggests, is actually targeting different CPU architectures.

While not currently open source, I doubt this progress will stay within the realms of ID.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I think it's possible that you would see this on a platform with required minimum. Similar to how Gingerbread (Android 3.0) seems to have minimum required specs to use it.That and things like the PSP Phone running Android are going be pushing gaming. :D

And don't forget you also have Microsoft working on some kind of game playing XBOX LIVE Arcade for their Windows Phone 7 (again by specifying a minimum hardware spec).

But anyway it makes sense to target the iPhone first. Standard hardware with a sizable userbase.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

It's on an iPhone first, because John loves iPhones. As for the visuals, they are pretty impressive and mind-blowing for a mobile game. To say it looks like Quake2 or Quake3 is an insult or you have bad eyes. Just the lighting itself is far more advanced than the Q3E could ever do. First the Unreal 3 Engine, now this. The iPhone has did it again. I hate Apple, but I gotta leave some credit.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I don't really care as long as I don't see an open environment, shall we say gta3 type or like we have in fallout 3.

A closed room with detail textures doesn't mean much to me.

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

I think the lighting is baked, but due to the technique (virtual textures) the texture detail is much higher than normal. This gives the wonderful illusion of radiosity/GI in a scene even though the actual computed lighting effects may be on par with the original Quake. Thanks to the technique, textures are loaded as needed, placing less burden on GPU memory.

I give Carmack credit. It has surprisingly little to do with the iPhone specifically. ;)

Sometimes I wish I was a real-time graphics researcher. It's so exciting to me! I may have missed my calling. Maybe.... :)

Re: John Carmacks 'RAGE' on the iPhone4
 

Haha.. You'll have to forgive me. When you mentioned 'closed building' before I thought you were being metaphorical as to the state of the code not being open, thus my last reply was out of context.

I agree that sometimes closed rooms demonstrate lower geometry based on visibility distance, but with even rudimentary LOD, this can be rendered moot. For example, given the pictures in my past post, you can trace the edges of the hills and notice that the scene would not actually require terribly high geometry. In this case, the graphical quality is in the textures, not the geometry!