id Tech 6 is a multiplatform

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs. The "engine" terminology is similar to the term "software engine" used in the software i ...

developed by

id Software id Software LLC () is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and ar ...

. It is the successor to

id Tech 5 id Tech 5 is a proprietary game engine developed by id Software. It followed its predecessors, id Tech 1, 2, 3 and 4, all of which had subsequently been published under the GNU General Public License. It was seen as a major advancement over ...

and was first used to create the 2016 video game ''

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher * ...

''. Internally, the development team also used the codename ''id Tech 666'' to refer to the engine. The PC version of the engine is based on

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

API and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

API.

John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games ''Commander Keen'', ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Doo ...

started talking about his vision regarding the engine that would succeed id Tech 5 years before the latter debuted in '' Rage'', but following his departure from id Software in 2014, Tiago Sousa was hired to replace him as the lead renderer programmer at the company. On June 24, 2009, id Software was acquired by

ZeniMax Media ZeniMax Media Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Rockville, Maryland, and founded in 1999. The company owns publisher Bethesda Softworks with its development unit Bethesda Game Studios (developer of ''The Elder Scrolls,'' ...

. It was later announced in 2010 that id Software's technology would be available only to other companies also belonging to ZeniMax Media.

Preliminary information

In 2008 and while id Tech 5 had yet to be fully formed, John Carmack said the next engine by id Software would be looking towards a direction where ray tracing and classic

raster graphics upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

would be mixed. The engine would work by raycasting the geometry represented by

voxel In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. Ins ...

s (instead of triangles) stored in an

octree An octree is a tree data structure in which each internal node has exactly eight children. Octrees are most often used to partition a three-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it into eight octants. Octrees are the three-dimensional ana ...

. Carmack claimed that this format would also be a more efficient way to store the 2D data as well as the 3D geometry data, because of not having packing and bordering issues. The goal of the engine would be to virtualize geometry the same way that id Tech 5 virtualized textures. This would be a change from past engines which for the most part use mesh-based systems. However, he also explained during QuakeCon 08, that the hardware that would be capable of id Tech 6 did not yet exist at the time. In July 2011, Carmack explained that id Software was beginning research for the development of id Tech 6. It's unknown if Carmack's vision of the engine at the time was still the same he described in 2008.

Technology

An early version of the fourth main ''Doom'' game was being built on id Tech 5 but id Software restarted development in late 2011 to early 2012, after Bethesda expressed concerns about its creative and technological direction. When development was restarted it was decided to begin with the id Tech 5-based ''Rage'' codebase but take "big leaps back in certain areas of tech" and " ergeDoom features to Rage". ''Doom'' was first shown to the public during

QuakeCon 2014 QuakeCon is a yearly convention held by ZeniMax Media to celebrate and promote the major franchises of id Software and other studios owned by ZeniMax. It includes a large, paid, bring-your-own-computer ( BYOC) LAN party event with a competitive ...

, where it was confirmed it was running on an early version of id Tech 6. The developers' goals when creating the engine were described as being able to drive good looking games running at 1080p on 60 fps but also reintroduce real-time dynamic lighting which was largely removed from id Tech 5. The engine still uses virtual textures (dubbed "MegaTextures" in id Tech 4 and 5) but they are of higher quality and no longer restrict the appearance of realtime lighting and shadows.

Physically based rendering Physically based rendering (PBR) is a computer graphics approach that seeks to render images in a way that models the flow of light in the real world. Many PBR pipelines aim to achieve photorealism. Feasible and quick approximations of the b ...

has also been confirmed. A technical analysis of ''Doom'' found that the engine supports

motion blur Motion blur is the apparent streaking of moving objects in a photograph or a sequence of frames, such as a film or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single exposure, due to rapid movement or lo ...

bokeh In photography, bokeh ( or ; ) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image. Bokeh has also been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". Differences in lens aberrations and ...

depth of field The depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image captured with a camera. Factors affecting depth of field For cameras that can only focus on one object dist ...

, HDR bloom,

shadow mapping Shadow mapping or shadowing projection is a process by which shadows are added to 3D computer graphics. This concept was introduced by Lance Williams in 1978, in a paper entitled "Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces." Since then, it has b ...

, lightmaps, irradiance volumes,

image-based lighting Image-based lighting (IBL) is a 3D rendering technique which involves capturing an omnidirectional representation of real-world light information as an image, typically using a 360° camera. This image is then projected onto a dome or sphere analog ...

FXAA Fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA) is a screen-space Spatial anti-aliasing, anti-aliasing algorithm created by Timothy Lottes at Nvidia. FXAA 3 is released under a public domain license. A later version, FXAA 3.11, is released under a 3-clause ...

volumetric lighting Volumetric lighting, also known as "God rays", is a technique used in 3D computer graphics to add lighting effects to a rendered scene. It allows the viewer to see beams of light shining across the environment. Examples of volumetric lighting ...

/smoke, destructible environments, Water Physics, Skin sub-surface scattering, SMAA and

TSSAA The Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA), along with the affiliated Tennessee Middle School Athletic Association (TMSAA), is an organization which administers junior and senior high school sporting events in Tennessee. The TSSAA ...

anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

, directional occlusion,

screen space This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics. For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms. 0–9 A B ...

reflections, normal maps, GPU accelerated

particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

which are correctly lit and shadowed, triple buffer v-sync which acts like fast sync, unified volumetric fog (every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering), tessellated water surface (on the fly without GPU

tessellation A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane (mathematics), plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to high-dimensional ...

. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface), and

chromatic aberration In optics, chromatic aberration (CA), also called chromatic distortion and spherochromatism, is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point. It is caused by dispersion: the refractive index of the lens elements varies with the wave ...

. On July 11, 2016, id Software released an update for the game that added support for Vulkan. Following Carmack's departure from id Software, Tiago Sousa, who had worked as the lead R&D graphics engineer of several versions of the

CryEngine CryEngine (stylized as CRYENGINE) is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in ''Far Cry'', and continues to be updated to support new consoles and ...

Crytek Crytek GmbH is a German video game developer and software developer based in Frankfurt. Founded by the Yerli brothers in Coburg in 1999 and moved to Frankfurt in 2006, Crytek also operates further studios in Kyiv, Ukraine and Istanbul, Turkey. ...

, was hired to lead development of the rendering. Bethesda's Pete Hines has commented that while id Tech 6 reuses code written by Carmack, most of the decisions made about the engine's direction were taken after he left.

Games using id Tech 6

*''

'' (2016) – by

*'' Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus'' (2017) – by

MachineGames MachineGames Sweden AB is a Swedish video game developer based in Uppsala. The studio was founded in 2009 by seven former employees of Starbreeze Studios, including founder Magnus Högdahl. After unsuccessfully pitching game ideas to several ...

*'' Doom VFR'' (2017) – by id Software *'' Wolfenstein: Youngblood'' (2019) – by MachineGames and Arkane Studios *'' Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot'' (2019) – by MachineGames and Arkane Studios

References

{{Video game engines 2016 software 3D graphics software Game engines that support Vulkan (API) Global illumination software Id Tech Video game engines

Preliminary information

Technology

Games using id Tech 6

See also

References