Why Doesn't id Software License idTech If Unreal Has So Many Issues?

[@Fafhrd42]

Here's a wild idea: id could go back to open sourcing the older versions of idTech like they did when Carmack was in charge.

[@sokarash]

Thats almost impossible these days. The old id engines used no third-party-code, expect for id tech 4 with EAX because of the patent-deal with Creative surrounding whats now know as "Carmacks" reverse. And that was only one of the audio backends, which could be removed without much hassle. Doom Eternal uses a variety of third party software, including wwise for sound, Rad Game Tools for video and Microsofts Azure Playfab. Depending on how deeply their are integrated into the engine, they are hard to extract and build a version without it. I highly doubt any of the third parties want their source in the open, and an engine without critical third party code is basically useless. Plus todays engines are massive systems these days, not for amateurs. UE5 is technically open source, but I never heard anybody activly working with that, as it would take way to much time and effort to understand the engine to make any significant contribution, let alone a fork or similar (if that would be even allowed by their legal agreements). Compared to that, id tech 4 was simplistic.

[@5persondude]

The thought of going back to Mega Textures scares me But otherwise I understand what you’re saying: Indiana Jones is a technical marvel and it would be nice if an actually competent engine like idTech was used as frequently as Unreal is

[@virionspiral]

​@sokarash in regards to UE being open source and not seeing anyone doing anything with it. That's mostly because devs that do anything just extend their own projects with the tools they build or release them as plugins.

[@GegoXaren]

​@virionspiral UE5 is _not_ open source. It does not have an OSI or Free Software compliant licence.

[@virionspiral]

@GegoXaren i know. I was responding to the person that was talking about it being technically open source, and was just quickly messaging from my phone and didn't at the moment have the time to do as in depth

[@maartenstriepe6893]

I think the public understanding of what an engine really is, kinda shifted due to unreal engine being so omnipresent nowadays. Unreal packs in a lot of ready made solutions for various stuff. But in the end the engine is more just a collection of toolkits to ultimately spit out a binary of a game. So for each game solutions are still developed individually, which I’d think still holds up true for a lot of in-house tech/engines

[@lau6438]

Precisely. And i dont know of any commercial engine that hasn't ended up like that. A digital frankensteins monster.

[@JustSomeGuy009]

I think it's becoming increasingly less that dev studios are developing core systems and instead relying on what comes out of the box with UE5. Makes it easier to implement things and brings standardization at the cost of tailor made solutions for what you actually need. Ultimately I believe this leads to ballooning system requirements, worse performance, and in many cases worse visuals. Far worse IMO is that it leads to a dumbing down of the overall workforce in a dev studio. Fundamentally sound solutions that have stood the test of time get lost in the process and the knowledge necessary to actually accomplish those types of tasks slowly disappears. Just 2 basic analogies. Cobblers and tailors. The art of quality bespoke boot and dress shoe construction, as well as bespoke suit construction, used to be far more common decades ago. Now you'll struggle to find someone that REALLY knows the craft. Mostly at best you find people that can replace a sole or hem some pants. And the difference in results are incredibly obvious when you actual see it in person. But cheap and low skill eventually won out. Like so many things.

[@lohiths5302]

It changed with unity3d. You will not believe how different unreal engine and unity3d was back in the day. Unreal shifted to the current form with unreal sdk and later unreal 4.

[@Cenot4ph]

Its packaging audio, network and graphics rendering. Its not just a collection, it is cohesive. Including dev tools

[@b3at2]

Im one of the few people who neeeeever liked unreal engine . Never likes it… for a decade… i never liked it. When everyone was cheering on CDPR switching to unreal i was pissed… because at the time no unreal engine game looked as good as cyber punk … smh. Unreal will be a step backwards in terms of looks and performance.

[@sokarash]

I think people underestimate how much effort it takes to support an engine. It not just "Here is the source, go cracking" or maybe "here is John Carmacks phone number if you got problems". Epic and Unity have massive teams doing nothing but support customers of the engine. Plus you need to make it more universally applicable than you might want. id tech is great because its tailormade to what it should - and nothing else. And we all now bad example of an engine made for a different type of game forced onto a dev, with Dragon Age Inquistion and Frostbite. Dev complaied for years and had to do massive rework to make an open world RPG work with an engine made for a team-based shooter.

[@termitreter6545]

Thats true, but theres apparently also a very big market for engines. Considering how popular the UE is, and how bad recent interations could be in some areas, its only natural to ask why there isnt more competition.

[@phattjohnson]

Devs are getting too complacent and we need more nerdy engineers in studios actually making their games perform properly.

[@andrewcarter9649]

@@termitreter6545 Unity shows why there isn't more competition, because despite how ubiquitous that engine is, far more than UE, it doesn't make any money.

[@termitreter6545]

@@andrewcarter9649 That might be one reason, but IIRC Unities leadership is also utterly incompetent. They wasted a ton of money on other projects and failed to introduce reasonable monetization.

[@OryxAU]

Mass Effect Andromeda too. That game must have been a technical nightmare, I feel so bad that they had to release in that state and then still got shut down after doing all that work.

[@cavetendobiggles1841]

Old enough to remember ID tech being everywhere, quake 1, 2 and the quake 3 engine seemed everywhere at one point. Interesting regardless, Unreal could do with competition and does get a bit bland every game using it. Albeit (again) remember when in the 90s one could come across many a custom engine from a developer. Pros and cons etc.

[@Manganization]

I miss when Crytek was a legitimate competitor. Their engine always had better lighting and shaders.

[@Clutch4IceCream]

Everything in the 90s and early 2000s ran on renderware

[@sapphyrus]

And all we had were corridor shooters with it. Unreal engine took off as open world games got popular. Unreal has been handling open spaces better for quarter of a century by now. Corridor shooters died off as open world games got popular.

[@cavetendobiggles1841]

​@@sapphyrusTrue - quake engine wasn't the best outdoors. I always remember seeing the original Unreal game on my 3dfx using glide. Mind blown ha.

[@RealJeffTidwell]

Newer Source Engine games (like Apex Legends) actually still contain code from Quake I so the influence never fully dissipated. Thank Carmack and Michael Abrash.

[@peterwolfe2328]

The moment a game studio starts licensing out its game engine, it becomes a game engine support studio. This happened to Crytek, Epic, and to some extent DICE. id Software simply doesn’t have enough capacity to help other studios adopt their engine. They’d much rather focus on developing their own games.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

That's something that a lot of people didn't understand about iD. I think that Doom 2 may have been the last game they released with the intention of releasing a fun game as the main motivating factor. Quake and on, they were still releasing fun games, but the games were more as much tech demos for other studios as they were intended to be fun games. They even opened things up a lot to people that might care to mod them, which was hugely useful when trying to sell their engine. IIRC, back then it was like a disc and permission for commercial use for $100k and that's it, no support included. (Although I assume they'd replace the disc if it stopped reading)

[@printicewhite]

Halo on ID tech would be glorious, and I reallly dont understand why they are leaning towards UE

[@Two49]

Probably because despite UE's numerous issues it's still the most widely supported and used engine for games.

[@ScyrousFX]

Because Halo largely relies on outsourcing, for which you really need a public and commonly used game engine. That's the whole reason Slipspace was dropped. It's unreasonable to have third-party studios come in who then have to learn how to use Slipspace. Id Tech, while a beautiful engine, would result in the same problems Xbox faced with Slipspace. Unreal Engine is much more open. You can hire third-party studios that are already familiar with it and who can bring in their own expertise. Financially and creatively, it's a no-brainer.

[@strikerE92]

Microsoft likes to farm out development to contractors, so it's easier to get them up to speed if they use Unreal since a lot of people in the industry have some experience with it as opposed to iDTech

[@Spr1ggan87]

UE is the lazy man's choice, it's a soulless conveyor belt engine which fits modern devs coming off College/University game dev course conveyor belts

[@pixels_per_minute]

Unreal has so many glaring issues, but Microsoft outsources Halo and goes through several dozen contractors every couple of months for tax reasons. So, using an "industry standard" engine, such as Unreal, is a way to cut costs on training and shovel on colleague/uni graduates.

[@MikeAmpaabeng]

Hey DF, have ya'll considered doing a crash course on all these different terms and just overall education about things like lighting (RTGI, Path Tracing, Non-RT, etc.), Reflections (cube maps, SSR, cube maps, etc.), Textures, Upscaling, frame pacing...I know it's a lot but I think a course for each would be cool and worth the money if it isn't free!

[@wh3resmycar]

like this comment so it goes up top guys.

[@djderekrock]

This channel is not for the newbies. You either get it or you gotta learn on your own buttercup 😂😂 Googles your friend 😂😂

[@MikeAmpaabeng]

@@djderekrock They just posted an Indiana Jones RT Deep Dive, that's what I'm talking about. Just going more in depth on one particular thing like RT (vs. a video going over everything) and taking the time to really unwrap it. I am not even close to a "newbie" lol

[@36iRealisedImOldToday]

It's a shame Id Tech became so closed off, mods sell games and Id turned their back on modders.

[@ChrisLT]

Love id Tech, and Doom: Eternal was sort of flawless technically. Never understood why it's not seen more.

[@sokarash]

Is there another game like Doom Eternal? Because that would be the only one fitting. id tech 7 is great because its laserfocused on one type of game. Unless you make that, you would have to make big compromises. Even Indy had enough changes that made them create a fork and rebrand it - and that also an FPS, also quite different.

[@ibrohiem]

I was floored when Doom eternal ran at 60 fps on the steamdeck with acceptable graphics fidelity. Never dropped below 60 for me.

[@ChrisLT]

@@ibrohiem Yeah, it ran well on my One X, but then I played with the Series X update and couldn't believe a game could look that good on a console.

[@vogonp4287]

@@ChrisLT Even Doom 2016 still looks absolutely beautiful. Better than a lot of modern games.

[@josieomgz]

They literally explain it in the video lol

[@MikeZablo]

I enjoyed Rage game on id Tech 5

[@Georgeirfx]

I enjoyed all other id Tech 5 games even more (also never having technical problems with The Evil Within)

[@AlexanTheMan]

I'd love for ID to go back to their open sourcing days once the game went past its prime. The problem is that IDTech has several floors of low level programming that even in the event that a modern SDK of the engine does go public, I'm not sure if hobbyist programmers will figure out WTF to do with it. At least not immediately.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

I think the big issue, apart from the possibility of 3rd party code being involved, is that the incremental improvements in more recent versions of idtech are just not as large as they used to be. During the first few versions, there was significant differences with each revision and people could clearly tell what they were dealing with just by playing the games.

[@johnsmith9205]

The best games back in the day were on the idTech engines. Even Half-Life and Call of Duty started out being on heavily modified idTech engines.

[@baronvonslambert]

They probably would, if only Raven Software wasn't slaving away in Activision's Call of Duty mines.

[@FLMKane]

Still using a quake 1 engine descendant 😂

[@baronvonslambert]

@@FLMKane To be fair basically every modern 3d engine both in games and productivity work is still using at least some OG Quake Engine code.

[@JoeMaranophotography]

I remember when RavenSoft were goats!

[@pdxholmes]

I think Unreal gets blamed for a lot of lazy, bad engineering on the part of developers. Unreal is a great piece or tech, but games are still games. They are still complex beasts and no engine is ever going to be some one size fits all problem solver out of the box. Most of the studios doing really good stuff with Unreal are still putting a ton of development time in to optimization and custom solutions for areas where Unreal doesn’t cut it.

[@swolfington]

yeah, this. Unlike Idtech, Unreal is customer-oriented; massively complex, and tries to solve many, many problems to suit many use cases. People get this misconception that its terrible because they run games where the developers turned on every bell and whistle just to have them, and of course it runs poorly. imagine if you took every spice in your cabinet and dumped them all into one meal - it would taste like concentrated awful. it's funny reading all these people talking about how terrible unreal is though. a serious case of tell me you know nothing about game dev without telling me you know nothing about game dev.

[@rocstarang5747]

"A good craftsman never blames his tools"

[@vegitoblue2187]

Epic has been doing a ton of tech demo BS for years instead of fixing decade long issues going all the way back to UE3 which have tried and tested solutions, some being pending pull requests in the thousands. Epic is more interested in catering to virtual production nowadays with lumen, nanite and megalights being given the most updates. Most virtual prosuction tools are production ready while 5.4 and 5.5 have been the worst updates so far breaking stuff which used to work just fine before. We are still stuck with a broken physics engine which they refuse to fix or bring back PhysX which has been far more reliable for decades now.

[@MarmaladeMaki]

@@vegitoblue2187 The BSP tools now cause a crash. Sure you can say don't use BSP, use the modelling tools, but the Modelling tools tend to be too complicated and annoying to use for just blocking out stuff. Welp it's broken and it's a depricated feature so good luck getting it fixed. (the modelling tools can do some cool stuff but don't replace a dedicated DDC).

[@gruntaxeman3740]

@@vegitoblue2187 What is wrong in Unreal Engine physics? Godot did also some stupid decision to make own physics engine in Godot 4.x series and as far as I know, they were unable to keep that developer so they need to replace it again. Bullet physics found from Godot 3.x and also can be used in Godot 4.x worked flawlessly. It was the very same physics engine that handle famous GTA IV physics. I wish they don't change something that works until they got better replacement. It is also valuable for users that things don't break so much when migrating newer engine version.

[@DallinBackstrom]

Id tech has been forked a couple of times, but those forks have gone on to become their own branches of the engine that are supported independently by the developers that licensed the code. Goldsource/source/source2, call of duty engine, both branches of id tech at different times, but those engines are now maintained fully separate from idtech. Even assuming that Id are still open to licensing their engine in this way, it would only be an option for studios that have the capacity to then fork and maintain the engine themselves.

[@jonnyso1]

To license is to have costumers that depend on it, pay for it and that you have to support. The engine is a means to an end. Open sourcing it could be a good idea though.

[@MikeScottAnimation]

In John Romero’s book ‘Doom Guy’ from what I remember, ID software had an early bad experience with a company they licensed their Commander Keen engine to, basically they got the source code and ran with it if memory serves me right

[@TechTusiast]

Disabling Nvidia app layer improved FPS in Indiana Jones greatly.

[@GegoXaren]

People could probobly use BRDOOM3-BFG as a base for a game. Just split out the game logic from the engine and Bish-bosh-done, they don't need to care about the GPL as much.

[@Megalomaniakaal]

No, outside of free, open source game projects, ain't nobody going to use a GPL licensed engine.

[@pallenda]

Yeah having to do support for other studios could be a big reason they don't want to license out the engine.

[@bes12000]

Vulkan renderer runs much better on most systems, ID Tech 7 uses it exclusively, higher FPS while looking amazing while being able to handle the same things a DX11/12 engine can. It would be one reason it would be nice for it to be open for everyone to use. Unreal Engine can do it also though, which im exploring with my game project.

[@Morimea]

Vulkan game - Indiana Jones - get 3200 reviews in steam. Every UE5 game - tens and hundred thousands reviews. Numbers - is what defining future of technology - if game with this engine dont hit numbers - not one will use it. Not even speaking about - Vulkan is not Microsoft technology and competition to DX12. And Bethesda is Microsoft company. Probably MS did not touch that game because it was close to release so no reason to rework entire engine to DX12. But new games for sure will use only DX12.

[@bes12000]

@@Morimea And almost every UE5 game is a stuttery mess due to DX11/12 shader compilation among other issues, which Vulkan doesn't have, I think more devs should use Vulkan it's why im trying it for my game.

[@sokarash]

@@bes12000 DX11/12 is not the reason for shader stutters, its when UE5 chooses to compile them. Vulkan shaders also need to be compiled, if you pick a bad timing, you would get the same mess.

[@bes12000]

@@sokarash Whatever, every single UE4/5 game stutters even AFTER I let it sit there and compile for ages, I still don't get any stutter with Vulkan, it compiles and just works. People defending DX11/12 like it's gospel make me mad. I will give you another example, I play game son Linux, on Linux it uses Proton which is a vulkan compatibility layer it converts DX11/12 games to Vulkan ..I never get any stuttering, I go to windows play those same games, it's a stuttery mess.. Star Citizen I get the same thing on windows only, I tewll it to use Vulkan instead of DX11 and it compiles and then runs without any stuttering, DX11 stuttery mess.

[@lau6438]

@@bes12000 So now the graphics API is the problem? For heavens sake, you people are ridiculous. You have no idea what makes a game. "Muhh, it's the UE!" "Muhh, it's DirectX!". Just stop embarrassing yourself for a second.

[@ThislsYusuf]

RenderWare walked for Unreal to fly.

[@jeremias_arroyo_art]

Unreal aint precisely flying. 💀

[@konfapooch]

unreal is limping bro

[@quantum5661]

unreal is jogging at most. watching the Threat Interactive videos really opened my eyes to how much modern games and engines suck.

[@SoulbentAnime]

​@quantum5661 didn't need that guy to know UE sucked but glad that more people are finally learning

[@fearingalma1550]

I wish we could get RenderWare back ngl

[@chemergency]

Considering Microsoft owns id it would make sense to retool it as a competitor to Unreal again, especially considering they own Activision too and CoD runs on a direct cousin of the id Tech engine.

[@Cryptic0013]

People have licensed iD Tech, but it's a nightmare to staff up for large-scale production. Kind of a chicken/egg problem, but basically everyone uses Unity and UE because everyone uses them. Anything niche, like an in-house or proprietary engjne is a massive drain on staffing and QA, compared to something where you have thousands of devs who already know how to use it *and* are out there already fixing bugs you haven't even written yet.

[@gruntaxeman3740]

When games were made in 80s, there was a lot of assembly tailored for each platform and games remade when ported. When games moved to higher level languages like C, it was one of the biggest improvement ever happened on game programming. When they moved to C++ and started to integrate more third party libraries and use some garbage APIs, things moved somewhat wrong direction. What I mean, why game developers don't make proper frameworks to extend language to fit game programming, like web developers have done?

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

I think that's part of why iD provided so many freely available tools for modding Doom. I haven't been following things in years, but it used to be that companies would often look to the community of modders as potential hires as they'd already know a bunch about how to work with the engine. Then again, they were also one of the few games in town as the mid-90s mostly had idtech and build as the options in common use for licensing of top tier 3d games.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@gruntaxeman3740 I think the main reason is that there's a much smaller number of companies doing these games than those that are doing web development. There's also more of a problem with perpetual crunch time with games development having to hit more arbitrary deadlines than web developers do. Releasing a game after the holiday season can pretty much destroy its potential sales.

[@MeCrazy516]

my guess is Unreal is developing around being easy to use, while the other better engines may be more complex and hard to learn without being part of that company

[@nintendude794]

Perfect example of why you should respond to Threat Interactive.

[@Spr1ggan87]

It's actually strange that they don't license it out because they used to license their engines out a lot, remember how many games were on the Quake 3 Engine *Edit* Oh wait i just remembered they're owned by one of shittiest companies going, Bethesda. They probably have the engine locked down for internal use only.

[@beardy666]

Half Life uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 2 engine.

[@HaraldQuake]

@@beardy666 Actually it's modified Quake 1 engine. Valve made the Half-Life 1 Beta on modified Q2 Engine and then changed back to modified Quake 1 engine for the full game.

[@Beavernator]

Call of Duty series is a modified Quake 3... 👍

[@no1DdC]

@@Beavernator Was. At this point, there's not much - if any - code of that engine left.

[@frapippo420]

​@@no1DdCyeah, a classic Theseus engine scenario

[@XBnPC]

This game looks legit remarkable on a 7950X3D and 7900 XTX. Native 4k maxed out around 100fps with RT is outstanding 👏

[@rmbl349]

Bring back Carmack like Apple did with Steve Jobs.

[@aravindpallippara1577]

Well Id software is doing better than ever unlike Apple without Jobs so, why?

[@Tuckerslam]

@@aravindpallippara1577 And it's doing best when outright robbing a composer responsible for at least 30% of their success with the only title they have left.

[@aravindpallippara1577]

@@Tuckerslam Complete agreement there, I love Mick Gordon's work and hate what Id did to him!

[@Megalomaniakaal]

@@aravindpallippara1577 It's not Id that did that to him, but the companies higher up the chain that actually own and run things. Think ZeniMax.

[@rogeriopenna9014]

Still remember when Quake had awed everyone, and i bought this PC Gamer magazine showing early screenshots of Unreal 1, including the story of the name of the game (it was still only a game, not an engine going to be licensed)

[@adamninezero]

I miss the RenderWare engine

[@EastyyBlogspot]

I am not a tech guy but one thing i was curious about lets say Unreal Tournament was ported from Unreal engine 1 to the most recent engine but it was kept as true to the original as possible as could be how would the performance fare ?, reason i ask is there are some games and its not just Unreal and there could be all the most technical stuff happening behind the scenes but based on the visuals in front of me the performance is just not there.

[@Praylv]

Same projects run much better on unreal engine 4 than 5

[@MartinDlabaja]

Depends on which features you will use or not.

[@krzysztofdeoniziak5618]

I have a better question, why bethesda has been using gamebryo for 20 years when I have idtech at my fingertips? This is ridiculous, in my opinion 3/4 of the problems of bethesda games are this engine, patched a million times, with at least a few times rewritten renderer, but deep inside it is still an archaic architecture that should have been buried deep long ago or released as open source, I'm sure the community would do interesting things with it, maybe even bring it to a state where bethesda games run stable

[@no1DdC]

Because it works for the games they are making, has mature tools, is tailor-made for RPGs instead of shooters. You can't easily turn an engine designed for first person shooters into one for RPGs - ask Bioware how that went with Dragon Age Inquisition.

[@krzysztofdeoniziak5618]

​@@no1DdC i know, I'm a game dev, but it's time. They have sources, some of this tools can be ported to new engine, some of them probably should be rewritten as well, for the same reason

[@polomarco7053]

That engine also can look really photorealistic & crisp and have parallax everywhere while running on a 980TI. The character model ( and clothings) are also divided in a bunch of different part allowing for really high polygon count. So it have it's flaw, but in term of visual to performance it's quite good. Modificators from the community are pushing far it, in term of graphic and animations, soon it (or it might already be i didn't keep up for a fews month), it will be possible to play skyrim without a single "flat" texture. Even on armors and clothes.

[@Lubieerror]

Imho that's just really what @no1Ddc said. Despite the flaws, even Obsidian at the time admitted that because of Gamebryo's tools they could make RPG elements so fast, and that it was pleasant to work with. Converting idTech could be hard, and it would face the same fate as Creation engine (with bugs not fixed). I have other question. Why despite having great engeneers who made modern idTech possible, they were not using them to part by part modernize and to slowly replace outdated and problematic elements. Only recently because of Skyfield they started doing something like that but you can still feel the "Gamebryo's rust" under the hood.

[@krzysztofdeoniziak5618]

​@@Lubieerror This is not a “gamebryo rust”, this is a gamebryo with an improved renderer. Let's establish the facts, because I see that the enemies of progress do not understand :P (joke) 1. gamebryo is an ancient technology that bethesda has been building games on for 20 years, slightly improving the renderer and internal toolset, but it's still the same crap under the hood 2. They have the money to go further, but for some reason they're not doing it. Every team that bethesda owned built its own technology on idtech, but bethesda itself, for some reason, did not 3. They have the time to do it, even assuming they've been making starfield for a decade, which I doubt, I'm pretty sure it's been in the concept stage for a long time, maybe too long 4. all the problems with starfield, especially with the limitation of the exploration zone to the landing zone are a direct result of the limitations of the engine and its old age 5. it's not a trip to mars, CDP RED has been rewriting the entire engine from scratch for practically every game until now, when they switched to UE5, but even now they have approached it ambitiously, and are actively working on improving it, not to mention that internally (probably based on tools from CP2077) they are working with RPG production tools In conclusion, I think if the next big bethesda game will be developed on gamebryo (probably elders scroll 6) it will be a disaster. This engine does not even offer good support for what bethesda games best known for, for mods. After the last Fallout 4 update, a lot of stuff blew up, and Fallout London requires a rollback of the update to make it work. The fact that Obsidian made a quick New Vegas 15 years ago is sadly often apparent, including the fact that this engine was already in agony by then.

[@oldsk00l]

Asset flippers wouldn’t have as much to work with using idTech. Objectively I think it’s a better toolkit, more parallelized renderer, and it seems better at handling RT and overall lighting than Epic’s approach with Lumen. There’s just not a massive asset library like what’s in the Unreal marketplace, so a truly fleshed out studio with a team of artists are needed, and then additional middleware or dedicated programmers for various gameplay functions depending on the genre of game using the engine. I really enjoyed seeing this question though, and it’s just my small opinion that we’ll see different projects emerge than what we have with UE5 as the demand for flipped assets falls off a cliff.

[@timogul]

If ID made their engine available, then they would need to hire on dozens of new engineers, or more who would be specifically tasked with converting the internal version to a consumer product, and maintaining that version of it. Not to mention direct customer service techs. They couldn't just do it using mostly existing staff without crippling their ability to keep moving forward on existing projects.

[@AninoNiKugi]

They raised good points. As bad as UE5 seems to be, they are making a product that is has far wider scope and flexibility which makes the work a lor more harder. It's kind of like macOs and iOS compared to Windows and Android. Apple develops them for their finite number of devices. Microsoft and Google develop their OSes for basically infinite number of devices and configurations. Software is hard, the wider the scope, it gets incrementally complicated. This is why Apple products seem better most of the time.

[@meWASHER]

I think the story of Human Head Studios is a pretty good argument as to why studios WOULDN’T license id Tech. Bethesda certainly hasn’t gotten any less shady since their acquisition by Microsoft. If the treatment of Tango Gameworks is anything to go by, you could argue their tactics have stayed the EXACT SAME.

[@Otuhh]

Didn't ID Yech get really into vulkan optimization over DX. Microsoft probably isn't a fan of that.

[@Megalomaniakaal]

I don't think the Microsoft of today really cares that much. So long as Id Software keeps making fat dough it can keep doing it however it sees fit.

[@hamzakhalil-gs7oc]

Need engines like s2 and idtech in the market 😢

[@WhatDaFaust]

Each AAA developer having their own engine would be ideal, but the industry does not foster long enough careers because of terrible managerial decisions that range from the hiring practices to the narrative pushes to the gameplay designs. A company such as Capcom that knows what gamers actually want is now an exception, and the RE Engine is accordingly serving them well. As such, most other large companies are incentivized to utilize tools that are standardized and quick to learn.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

There's issues with that, it's arguably better to just have like 3 or 4 engines, tops. Just look at the games that are released for consoles from the earliest games of the generations to the games towards the end that look like they came from different generations in some cases just because of how much more is known about wringing every possible bit of performance out of the console by the end.

[@excellentswordfight8215]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade We will have to wait and see, but looking at the past, its clear that in-house engines has dominated when it comes to technically impressive games. As the matter of fact, unreal engine up until very recently hasn't been in impressive games since to OG unreal games. Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studio, 4A Games (4A Engine), Remedy (Northlight Engine), Rockstar (Rage), CD Projekt (REDengine), Guerrilla Games (Decima), Dice (Frostbite, before they tried to expand the engine to other games) etc etc. Shows that its always been these inhouse engines that has brought the most exciting tech and polish. I think it absolutely sucks that so many of these are shifting to UE.

[@keflas3842]

here's the issue when you license out your software now everyone has access to your code and idea behind how your doing things and takes away the want to contract your company out for game sales based on the engines ability and scalability. In short its not always the most cost effective or best thing to do when you code your own stuff to give the rest of the industry the blueprint , you need to make them work for it and create job competition and innovation. Curious what ign would have you all say tho.

[@turbofroggy]

DF drying some laundry during the broadcast...

[@blehbleh9283]

Im so happy Valve got Quake's source code and made Source

[@madson-web]

They have the best motion blur implementation. Its the only engine I left it on

[@EyesOfByes]

My priority is for Doom to have a million enemies on screen without stuttering

[@marty0678]

As amazing as India and id Tech looks, it took me 4 hours to get some form of settings to work with a 32:9 monitor. It's extremely broken on UW monitors I don't want to deal with on other games haha.

[@urazoktay7940]

Amazing video, thank you Digital Foundry.

[@impactsuit9871]

Unreal is designed as a tool to make a varied spectrum of games while whatever Id uses is a very specialized software designed specifically for their purposes...

[@hauntedhotdog]

I believe Marty Stratton actually addressed this directly. It's a competitive advantage.

[@TheCgOrion]

Even Doom 2016 is still a good looking game, and it runs beautifully on modest hardware.

[@badmanPL]

Discussion about pathtracing without Alex, interesting

[@sparda9060]

I don't think id tech is a game engine that is jack of all trades for it to be used openly for everything like UE5 is. If they want to make it as open enough to be licensed out for every game genre then they would have to spend an enormous amount of time and money to develop the engine with enough different toolkit to support for every game genre. id tech is tooled specifically for Doom games right now. Indiana Jones game just took a branch of that engine and retooled it for their own game. It doesn't mean that id tech engine is suddenly fully customized to make any kind of games outside of FPS shooter.

[@urazoktay7940]

Rage looked and felt like Fallout games to a degree. Going by that the next Fallout game could be made using the latest version of Id Tech, branched by Bethesda to suit their needs, just like Machine Games did. A fallout game using Id Tech would be amazing, i'm sure. Just look at Rage to understand how good a Fallout game can be running on Id Tech.

[@v8matey]

I remember the first farcry engine using the torque engine. Same with Quake tenebrae. Was all the hype an then doom3 landed an it was no more.

[@Alcatraz760]

It all sounds fine and dandy until someone tries to make an open world RPG with idtech, then you will discover bugs and issues so massive, it makes early frostbite RPGs look like masterpieces.

[@mrwerder616]

Well, because they probably have super poor documentation and would be a MASSIVE work to get it on a good state that is good enough to open it to the public

[@Geoff900]

They kinda do, CoD uses ID tech. Heavily modified though.

[@anthonyrizzo9043]

First of all path tracing still sucks in terms of performance, and image quality gets blurry with path tracing, this technology is still garbage in terms of performance. Even on a 4080 its hard to run, and the only thing better is a 4090.

[@SotNist]

Evil Within was an amazing game made on Id Tech 5. The game itself was fantastic, but it seemed to be more of a struggle to use and run back then. Sadly, Evil Within 3 is never happening and 2 already switched to a more customized engine. Post Doom 2016, Id Tech seems top notch. Doom Dark Ages will show what it can really do, but if Indiana Jones is one of their best internal devs using Id Tech, and that's the best they can do? Maybe in terms of actually running and working without modern issues, it's great, but UE5 is clearly pushing visuals to a higher degree and already has the mindshare with dev familiarity across the industry. If you were going to skip UE, might as well go with Unity and have slightly more ownership.

[@mkinitcpio]

evil within used a heavily modified version of id tech 5 iirc, it has a completely rewritten renderer that ditched megatexture and to emphasize real time lighting and shadowing (which were extremely limited if not absent in rage)

[@Vynzent]

​​@@mkinitcpio It was a horrible engine choice for TEW1 for sure. The whole reason it ran great in Rage and Wolf:TNO was the whole fact that they primarily used top quality baked lighting. That was the major "optimization." Without that there was no reason to use it, especially if not taking advantage of megatexture. I have to wonder if Bethesda forced the engine on Tango at the time, with executives maybe not realizing that the engine was made for a specific type of game.

[@mkinitcpio]

@@Vynzent yeah i guess some exec assumed it would be cheaper to reuse and modify it rather than license UE ? At least they didnt force them to use the creation engine lol. Id tech 5 really was a curious case because it wasnt particularely well suited for Rage either, they tried to make an open world adventure game in an engine that could not even support a day-night cycle and i think some id exec even mentioned the technical limitation it imposed on them when they were hyping Rage 2. It really took the wolfenstein game to make it shine

[@jcchaconjr]

At this point, I don't know that iD/Xbox would want to sink the effort and cost associated with supporting an engine to other parties, never mind whether the engine is designed for specific types of games or not. Keep in mind that Epic has been doing this for many years, and we can probably guess that part of the bloat is because of that.

[@Raynhardx]

Pretty sure unreal engine isn't the problem. Companies need a handful of developers that deeply care about performance and the company must leave those dev breathing room to optimize, instead of overburden them with other tasks. And those devs must be good at enforcing standards and communicate alternatives when problems arise. Thats just a hard thing to cultivate, and impossible to forcefully create by people managers.

[@forcews]

Lot of pro level devs could commit good optimized code into Unreal and everyone would benefit from it. When world joins forces then there will be very good results after years.

[@SusloNick]

yeah its not just the engine its middleware with all the tools

[@sandman8920]

The RE engine would have been a good fit for Indiana jones.

[@SOHK7]

MS having idtech in house and switching Halo to unreal doesnt make sense to me.

[@V3ntilator]

I don't think ID wanna spend a lot of time, resources and support by letting non Microsoft studios using it. Lego Horizon were a game that could have ran on a PS3 console, and yet Sony chose UE 5 engine for a 2D/3D Game. Stupid move. Just because you can use UE 5, doesn't mean you should use it. UE 5 worked fine in Robocop at least.

[@Keiseru]

idTech = best engine in recent years. Though it's not only about the engine, it's about the time given to developers to do their "trickery" to optimize a game. UE5 does have some fundamental issues though, with stuttering and being very inefficient for the fidelity it offers. Really looking forward to the next Doom game.

[@shaheen3705]

It really is so smooth. And i dont have a high end pc. 7700k and 4060

[@deetsitmeisterjd]

I'm the betting ID engine isnt good for anything besides FPS games. The Decima engine on the otherhand...now that's an engine Sony need to utilise.

[@randomgamer19170]

anything to stop unreal engine , im all for it

[@MrAckers75]

Isn’t it just a first person shooter specific engine?

[@Taijifufu]

Sure but the same could be said for Unreal and that led to the completely fine launch of Arkham Knight. Totally fine launch.

[@DeadPixel1105]

It is, but just all game engines and software, a developer can add features, plug-ins, etc.

[@gruntaxeman3740]

Like Unreal Engine?

[@gruntaxeman3740]

@@Taijifufu And IdTech was also used in XCom style game.

[@lawnmanGman]

use cases are insanely low, 3rd party publishers making fps games? the newer iterations of the id tech engine are insanely complex but really good, the average modern day dev would struggle... one of the reasons bethesda aint gonna ever use for scrolls or fallout, cause it is the wrong use case and they are average devs

[@MarcioSilva-vf5wk]

They could license it, but i dont think they have a toolset so friendly as UE5

[@gstreetgames2530]

The world needs ID tech! Unreal is nice, but Epic has grown too overconfident and bloated to maintain the engine for game developers first. Their desire to feed fartnight and be a swiss army engine is ruining its direction.

[@raikoh05]

At least within Microsoft everyone should use it

[@no1DdC]

Do you want a repeat of the mess EA got themselves into when they tried to make the entire company use Frostbite? Because that's how you get a a repeat of that.

[@Barbaroossa]

Because the Id Tech 7 engine is specialized for First Person shooters only. There you go. Y'all can skip the rest of the video now.

[@ADMNtek]

It would probably be frostbite all over again.

[@SMorales851]

You'll never believe how Unreal Engine started out

[@themacintoshnerd]

So was idtech 3

[@Mundm28]

Actually it’s not that simple, id tech 4 (the last one where the public was able to get source code) was very modular and it’s not that much of a stretch to assume that I’d tech is still. What if tech themselves have said multiple times since id tech 4 is that they just do not want to expand to be able to provide tech support.

[@Taijifufu]

They also said developer support for the engine is a big endeavor they probably didn't want to get into. I dunno why you act like 7 minutes is a long video.

[@GamingProspector84]

I’d take either idTech6/7+ engine or the CryEngine over the EU5 any day.

[@DevGods]

Have you actually tried Cryengine? Sadly it’s a disaster

[@danstenger1]

Why? Because they don't want other devs mangling their engine and giving it a bad name - ANY engine will run like crap if a game isn't optimized and coded intelligently.

[@MonochromeWench]

The problem is simple, Idtech is made for id's games and unless you have a lot of experience using it like Machine games does it will be difficult to make it work for other sorts of games. id tech has always been like this. You never really saw licensees of older versions doing anything too different to id. Even once idtech 3 and 4 were made open source you didn't see anyone do anything particularly interesting with them. Unless id wants increased competition for their games, licensing out the engine doesn't make much sense. Xbox should consider using it for any of their FPS games *cough* Halo *cough*, but license to others, no.

[@Vynzent]

To be fair, we were going to see idTech4, albeit upgraded, used for an open world game with Prey2 before Bethesda tried to forcefully buy HumanHeadStudios and then cancelled the game.

[@TruthHurts1519]

They should gate keep 👍

[@vartaxe]

Remedy should also license the nice engine they have made

[@artun42]

this laggy POS engine? RedEngine is way better at CPU utilization and more optimized Path tracing

[@EpicFailer]

UE5 has been a disaster so far, very blurry, chock full of temporal effects, usually poorly optimized.

[@willloman812]

It’s not the engine it’s the API! The difference in performance is Vulkan vs. DX12

[@DeltaNovum]

This information is incorrect. I presume you lack understanding when it comes to these things. It definitely has to do with the engine, its render pipeline and third party solutions used (like Nvidias GI solutions). Vulkan and DirectX are api's that facilitate communication between the engine, operating system and GPU. Both have pros and cons. Vulkan gives developers more control and deeper acces when it comes to how the GPU will handle their drawcalls etc. But it takes more work and expertise. And it is up to the developer to get good use and performance out of it. P.s. Unreal Engine supports Vulkan, as do many games created with it.

[@willloman812]

@DeltaNovum Well, you’re not wrong about my ignorance in the subject for sure! Super condescending though, brother. I know what an interface is… and of course it’s not solely the API. *But there is an undeniable correlation between games that use an engine other than UE with the Vulkan API and perform “well” and games that use UE with Microsoft’s DX API and perform like “dogshit.”* Can you name a few games that run UE4 or 5 and use Vulkan API too? Genuine question. And I do love to be wrong because that means I learn, so someone take me tah school, please!

[@natan_amorim_moraes]

​@@willloman812 Well Correlation does not imply causation, and this could be just confirmation bias, Godot 4 uses Vulkan and still has problems, same with some emulators that support DX and Vulkan, Valve games perform worse on Vulkan but it seem they are just using something like DXVK somehow so that is not a good example there's games where Vulkan performs better (RIP Vulkan on R6) and there's game where Vulkan can perform worse (Valheim used to be a little worse in some areas).

[@willloman812]

@natan_amorim_moraes Good point, my initial comment is kinda a downright indictment, lol; it was intended to draw attention to the pattern we see but isn’t investigated all that much. To clarify, I just think it’s very suspect but I don’t know much about API processes to conclude anything (despite my initial claim). zWormZ commented on the superior performance of titles utilizing Vulkan in a recent video and did validate what I’ve perceived myself. But couple things: a) I think I’m referring to more recent titles, with RDR2+Vulkan of 2019 being one of the main titles that stands out to me b) UE seems to only use Vulkan with Fortnight etc. on mobile platforms, but apparently recently added “native Vulkan support in UE” c) I’m more curious, skeptical, and think it’s interesting it hasn’t been given more attention, worthy of more investigation d) I forgot my 4th point so I’ll end there Thanks for engaging in discussion, both of you folks

[@happygofishing]

Vulkan and directx12 are both very fast.

[@BigChiken44]

"Unreal has so many issues"? You mean - "developers don't know how to use it"? Unreal by far is the best choice for developers - but you actually need developers who know the engine. It's very convenient to with with, has tons of features, it's optimized and has amazing graphics. Unreal can do everything id's engine can. But if you're going to just slap Lumen, TSR, volumetric fog and other fancy stuff - no PC today can run your game at 4k 60fps, forget about it.

[@isarafan]

Because they don't want developers releasing poorly implemented / optimized versions of their engines, or just bad games using the engine. That will reflect poorly on ID tech despite it not being their fault, and tarnish the reputation.

[@devonmarr9872]

It also seems way more optimised

[@InnuendoXP]

A lot of that comes down to game design decisions from people who are experts in the nuances of the engine. Eg. Doom Eternal heavily leaning on decal effects to simulate a wider variery of texture variety so they have loads of visual variety in a scene without blowing out VRAM requirements.

[@devonmarr9872]

@InnuendoXP This is true but this engine does seem more optimized than Unreal 5. This game is using rt for its lighting and getting 1800p 60fps on consoles. That is impressive

[@raikoh05]

Halo should absolutely use Id tech

[@dra6o0n]

Because id software doesn't want to create anti-goodwill.

[@cargorunnerUK]

Indiana Jones has absolutely terrible pop-in. On the Sukhothai water boat level, you are getting plants and bushes pop in right next to the boat. This is massively jarring and distracting. The engine cannot cope with the speed of boat movement. This may be why walking is very slow in this game. This engine appears to be suited for a narrow set of use cases. It may have good performance but at the cost of flexibility. Making it badly suited for many games.

[@TheSurfheart]

Is there a game that uses UE5 other than fortnite that is a success?

[@nifftbatuff676]

Because you can't do pixel art games with id tech.

[@Fazeshyft]

YES. I've been saying this since the hubbub started around Starfield and the blatant shortcomings of Creation Engine.

[@Fazeshyft]

I don't know of anyone saying idTech could replace Unreal. It WOULD work nicely as a replacement for Creation Engine, especially for the types of games BGS makes.

[@sapphyrus]

@@Fazeshyft Same people would lose their minds when the games go from 100% moddability to 0% moddability. The outrage would be off the charts.

[@Fazeshyft]

And that's a fair rebuttal. I don't personally mod my games. Past attempts have led me down the rabbit hole of "just one more mod" at best and corrupted saves at worst. At the end of the day, I'd prefer a striking and well running game over one that is broken but moddable.

[@hookflash699]

Unreal is fine. People who think Unreal is the cause of the issues in modern games don't understand game development or game engines.

[@Lord_of_Dread]

The best thing about Unreal being ubiquitous, is that UEVR allows more games to be converted into the superior medium of VR without requiring devs to make a dedicated VR port or modders to undertake massive endeavours.

[@karlack2682]

CryEngine and ID tech both are so much sharper looking then UE these days. No TAA or TSR or up scaling in UE these days leaves just a dithered shimmering mess.

[@OwtDaftUK]

An engine that's good at certain things is surely better than one that's good at nothing.

[@JohnDoe-iv7yu]

Any engine is better than what Bethsoft is using. They have more than enough money to make a cutting edge engine and they are too dumb, too arrogant and too lazy to get on it.

[@ugu8963]

Because tools. UE is as flawed as a rendering engine as its workflows are streamlined. UE's user experience is great for content creation and management. ID tech isn't. You'll need an army of programmers ar every steps of the way.

[@GFClocked]

Taa is cancer and we want beautiful women. This is a grifter channel