id Software Releases id Studio

[axbaby]

a lot of effort for something no one will play.

[Eraser]

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

It worries me somewhat to see id Software restricted like this. Especially now with the EULA that comes with the editor, which I'm 100% sure doesn't come from id Software but from Bethesda.

[AEon]

... and have a great rig...

Mind listing your hardware to give us a pointer how bad things are?
(I have a i7 920 2.54GHz, 6 GB, ATi HD 5850, and suspect that would not nearly be fast enough.)


Eraser,
yeah, the evermore resource hungry path of content creation is indeed a long-ongoing trend. But I did have the impression (wishful thinking probably), that id Tech 5 would not only allow for unprecedented texture detail, but also would show more efficiency at doing so. Meaning, if you used e.g. Unreal Engine 3, trying to get that or similar detail it would set you back time-wise *a lot more*. So that you would actually be saving time, manpower and money using id Tech 5. Again provided you wanted a certain "high" level of texture detail. But I may have misinterpreted all this. I recently played a few Unreal Engine 3 games, and they did look "outdated" after playing Rage. Oh well... just some speculation on my part.

Put differently, I am hoping for the industry's sake, that some level of efficiency can be attained by newer tech, to bring down the overall costs, or things will not bode well for the future. Or things will go the Hollywood way... mediocre games, excessively overproduced, but not much fun or creative, and really really expensive to create.

[Eraser]

id Tech 5 does offer advantages if you're working on a big title for multiple platforms, because the content pipeline is identical for each platform. The engine takes responsibility of memory management away from designers as well, because they can put as much detail in as they like because of the MegaTexture technology. So in that aspect, it takes away some limits for the creative people and because they work with one set of content for all platforms, there's no need in doing the same thing twice because of differences in platform specifications. I guess these are all huge time savers when developing a triple-A title for PC, XBox 360 and PS3. The entry level requirements have just exploded though, which makes it hard for amateur level designers to get into it.

Having said all that, I wouldn't at all be surprised if we do get one or two custom levels out of it. If there's one thing I learned from the Internet is that there's a lot of people with a lot of free time.

[sock]

Taken from the EULA

If You distribute or otherwise make available New Materials, You automatically grant to Bethesda Softworks the irrevocable, perpetual, royalty free, sublicensable right and license under all applicable copyrights and intellectual property rights laws to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, perform, display, distribute and otherwise exploit and/or dispose of the New Materials (or any part of the New Materials) in any way Bethesda Softworks, or its respective designee(s), sees fit.

I think this is the first time I have seen the EULA give away (creators) rights, anyone creating and releasing content will have no right over their creation. Besides the restrictive rights of use, I imagine this is a good tool for someone wanting to enhance their portfolio or show they can / understand new technology. The editor will certainly require a huge amount of time to learn but the end results can be spectacular compared to other engines.

[obsidian]

What is often the case is that some overzealous lawyer drafted/copy-pasted the EULA with limited oversight from id Software or Bethesda. I'm not entirely sure that's the case here, but just wanted to point out that that is a common issue with lawyers - they would rather cover all contingencies than to be practical. Hopefully id/Bethesda takes a closer look at the license and revises it.

[Eraser]

You often see licenses like this so they can use user created content in promotional material, so they xan show examples of what can be done with the tools

[GONNAFISTYA]

I've seen licenses that state they have the right to have user created content for promotions, but I've NEVER heard of a license that says they own whatever you make.

I honestly doubt this is an oversight by id/Bethesda, and for that reason I have no interest in trying their toolset. I mean seriously...who comes out of the gate like this?

[Kat]

Aye it's not an oversight... it's been specifically worded the way it has for the purpose it states. In other words, if they were doing it for the reason Eraser suggested, the language would be very different, it would be more akin to "you own, we ask".. right now it's "you publish, we own" (where 'own' means having the ability to do "whatever you want" with something).

For the Doom 3 and Quake 4 level design competitions for example, id had to seek our permission before our work could be distributed, it wasn't an automatic "grant of right", they had to specifically ask (not forgetting we couldn't use custom models because id couldn't be sure the they were original creations). So yeah.. whilst it might be 'nice', you'd be better off putting that time and effort into something that would benefit you more.

[Eraser]

That may be true, but I've seen similar things in EULA's from Nintendo and recently Instagram.

[cityy]

I just had a chat about this with the result that if you don't pur your EULA like this you end up with undefined rights user content.
A prime example is Valve now making dota 2 with the original dota being a Warcraft 3 mod. Blizzard went to court over the dota trademark apparently and lost although it was a mod for their game and they had a part of the rights to it. So Valve pretty much made their own sequel to the dota mod while saving quite a bit of monies.

[Kat]

That may be true, but I've seen similar things in EULA's from Nintendo and recently Instagram.

Well.. sort of.. The two, in terms of language, are similar yes, but the intent is wholly different... I can't speak to Nintendo without doing some research but Instagram was set up to specifically share User Generated Content (UGC) for both technical (network) and general service reasons, so they (naturally) have an inbuilt automatic 'grant of rights' to facilitate that. Without going into privacy issues over the *type* of UGC shared, even they (Instagram) goes above and beyond stripping users of what any reasonable person would regard as being .. reasonable, because it allows them unfettered usage for not just technical or service reasons (and that's not even getting into the 'requirements' of the Patriot Act, its ilk, and data retention).

Don't get me wrong.. I understand the need for companies to use creators UGC for promotional purposes, but I don't think writing unconscionable EULA's is the way to do it. And for myself, I'd encourage people spend their time learning tools that don't carry such harsh *legal* restrictions.

@ cityy: Blizzard went after Value for issues of trademark and copyright not the content they produced, i.e. it wasn't wither the *content* was ripped, pirated, 'illegal' etc. So that again is not quite the same thing. The EULA discussed here isn't about either of those but rather a gross limitation on your ability to exploit your labour in a fair and reasonable manner. As an example.. socks Quake mod posted in this very forum... sorry sock, that's now 'owned' by id and it'll be distributing as part of a commercial mod for which you'll receive no remuneration, except the kudos of course (and we all know how much food that puts on the table).

But... I'm starting to sound like a negative Nancy so I'll stop...

[Eraser]

I think you're wrong Kat. At least partially. I agree that EULA's like these are bad, but I'm sure it's not Bethesda's intent to steal people's work. I think the agreement is there to protect Bethesda and/or to allow them to use the content in promotional activities. The wording of the EULA is overzealous, but again, as naive as it may sound, I don't think the intent is to steal the work of others.

Still, having said that, the EULA would be reason enough for me not to use the tools.

[Kat]

I'm not suggesting their are "stealing" in a literal or traditional sense, but they are most certainly taking 'ownership' and 'control' from the author over the material submitted. So in terms of the license, once you submit something to them you cannot have it removed or taken down, even through DMCA because, and this is the key, a Creators submission to the license conditions is purely voluntary - voluntarily submitting to being subjugated (loaded words being used deliberately to make a point), largely invalidates arguments of unfairness or unreasonableness.

So the main thrust of the above was that an EULA belonging to a system or service where third party, non-associated creators, are encouraged to [paraphrasing]"create something cool"[/paraphrasing] aught not grant corporations unfettered use of a creators materials simply in return for their ability to "create something cool".

Lawyers are not naive with respect to wording, terminology or semantic meaning where agreements, contracts and licensing is concerned. Do they make mistakes?. Yes. Do they cover their asses in a such a way as to, de facto, strip a person of their 'rights'?. Hell yes.

But point/criticism taken nonetheless.

[BISTROMan]

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

Huh, why ?

[GONNAFISTYA]

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

Huh, why ?

id Software's John Carmack and Tim Willits are glad to be out of the engine licensing business

Last year id Software revealed that it would no longer license its engine out to game developers unless they resided under the Zenimax roof. The move wasn't all that surprising given that the studio really hasn't farmed out the id Tech engine over the last decade or so, eclipsed by Epic Games who has seemingly marketed its Unreal Engine technology to the point where it dominates the gaming sector like Intel dominates the PC sector.

"It's interesting when you look at our technology licensing -- it was never really a business that I wanted to be in," id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack admitted to Gamasutra. "In the very early days, people would pester us, and we'd just throw out some ridiculous terms, and we were surprised when people started taking us up on it."

"I didn't want to be in the process of supporting a lot of outside teams, because you feel beholden to not make radical changes when it's going to pull the rug out from lots of other people," he added. "When it's your own team, you can make the sensible decision that [a big change] is going to be worth it, that it's going to suck for a while, but we make our way through it. But you don't want to do that to other people."

[lightmill]

Discouraging license to say the least.

[kaustic]

Besides the apparrent license issue ,What sucks for me is ,I have a computer that that would run this editing software
Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400
EVGA 02G-P4-2678-KR GeForce GTX 670 FTW 2GB ,2 in SLI
and lack the knowledge required to use it. I'm still getting a grip on the Tech 3 Engine and havent messed with the tech 4 Engine
at all. I doubt very seriously its something I would be able to pic up by reading the user manual. I'de be in a wheelchair with a pocket
full of pacemaker batteries befor getting somewhere with this.

[D-Meat]

Well the licence sucks if you want to make something work outside of rage ... As far as I'm concerned, I really look forward giving it a try.

when I first loaded the editor, the wellspring default map was really a pain to manage, it took too many power. But starting from a blank space, it might be interresting to try out stuff.

as an artist, I think the megatexture is an incredible opportunity. I thought it also would be a great occasion to use procedurally genereted textures on a very large scale (I saw that all the textures were in traditional / tiled form in the library). For example, since one great big wall is only 1 big texture, why not havint it uniquely generated and thus avoiding any tiling artefacts ? The same could be said about geometry for generic / repetitive structure, but could be managed outside the editor. The "broken stairs" object is the first one where I noticed in the game that it was very often the same (cracks in the same place, etc).

Once I get the trick creating a map with all the built in tools, I'll have to test importing some outside assets to see how everything works. When I have time. Of course. This is the hard part.

[obsidian]

Megatextures aren't procedurally generated at all. The way the megatextures work is that they a bunch of traditional textures that you apply to geometry. Then you stamp and layer on additional textures and decals in the editor to remove any tiling and add high amounts of texture detail. Then you bake (flatten) the textures and decals down to a big compressed megatexture file which the game reads and streams to GPU memory as needed.

[Eraser]

Yeah that's his point. He says id Software still used tiling (base) textures for large surfaces and he was wondering if procedurally generated textures could remedy that problem.

[o'dium]

Megatextures aren't procedurally generated at all. The way the megatextures work is that they a bunch of traditional textures that you apply to geometry. Then you stamp and layer on additional textures and decals in the editor to remove any tiling and add high amounts of texture detail. Then you bake (flatten) the textures and decals down to a big compressed megatexture file which the game reads and streams to GPU memory as needed.

True... And false I *THINK*. The mega texture tech employed in past titles (Quake Wars) allowed you to use reference noise/mask textures to generate a tiled texture that was unique when viewed from far away. Again, I *THINK*, I haven't used it in a long time now.