John Carmack "not all that excited" by next-gen hardware

Their raw data set is much, much larger than what they shipped. Carmack has given out figures like 300gb per level.

In order to cull that down to a game that can fit in 24gb, they had to drop a huge amount of detail. The way they did it was quite interesting as well.

They get telemetry on clients playing the game, and then they build a weighted set of textures at each mip that were actually loaded by real clients. Then they take the highest weighted 24GB of them, and that is what they ship.

In most modern games, smaller textures are tiled over larger areas, allowing for lots of detail for less memory at the expense of variation. Most do something to mix it up (mixtures of textures, adding random variations), but it ultimately constrains what can be done.

MegaTexture seems to solve the problem of using a single large texture by streaming only the parts needed, but requires much more data on the disk to match the detail level of tiling.

You can't really compare it to skyrim though. Skyrim doesn't use mega texturing (or virtual texturing). It repeats textures all over the place. In rage, there is a huge texture for everything. IIRC, the uncompressed textures performed a total of 1.5TB or something like that, so I would say that they did an awesome job with the compression.

I don't :(

Actually I was a little disappointed by all the upselling when they made it free to play on Steam.

UT was "buy CD for 20 quid" and then waste 4 years of my life (and many vodka and dominos soaked attendances as Multiplay i-series events in the UK).

Thanks for keeping it going :)

I recently replayed Doom 2 with a couple of friends, and for us this is definitely a legendary game. I have lots of fond memories of Doom 1 as well. While I also spent a lot of time with Duke Nukem 3D, I never found it as enjoyable as Doom. I'd put Doom in the list before Quake.

Wolfenstein 3D should also be there.

Luckily for me, you are the one making the sweeping statement, so I only have to provide a counter-example: I remember Doom and Wolfenstein for the enjoyment they gave me. You are too quick to dismiss them :)

(And just as a matter of factual correction; Doom 1 and 2 both supported four players over IPX)

That game changed my life. It was the most immersive, scariest thing ever. It was 4 players (not 2), and we had endless LANs and modem games. We made maps, there were whole map-making communities, whole BBSes only talking about Doom and Doom 2 and Heretic and other games based on it.. It was the biggest thing ever, even bigger than Quake in many ways because there was a lot fewer similar games at the time. I played through the single player so many times that I can revisit most maps in my mind 15+ years later...

Even the book Masters of Doom is mostly about how that game was created, rather than Quake or other id games that came before or after because Doom truly was the game changer.