Nice. Maybe they just have a big exclusive.. hopefully that doesn't mean we won't see it in video form before hand.

It sounds like they have a "story" for this game of some sort to merit the odd theme mish mash and rampant killing. id is moving up in the world :P

Some of the id Tech 5 demos have been cool, but they seem very texture bound/oriented in design which is going to put a lot of weight on a quality lighting (esp. indirect) and shadowing to justify it as well as I am curious how they have designed their material system, especially for various bump mapping techniques. Painting and stamping unique content is nice, but the low geometry is begging for high density models being ported into normals and parallax techniques.

Likewise, the emphasis on streaming may have some great tradeoffs, but it does seem to put a huge burden on the mass storage. So it may be a win for streaming, but on the other hand your mass storage device has to be large enough to hold the raw data.

id has really smart people, but I am curious how their new tech is going to shape up. I am happy they are returning to their Quake Engine days and actively entering the middleware market. Getting 3 or 4 really good MW makers in the market with different techniques and focus is a good thing for everyone involved. It seems a natural path for id and will keep them relevant and at the forefront of technology where they really need to be. While a company, id has shown a long history of making decisions in the best interest of consumers and developers for the "common good" of the industry above personal and/or publisher benefit. They might not always have an opinion every industry person can agree with, but there is no mistaking they are independant in their thought.

They have royalty "per disk" to discourage developers from taking advantage of blu ray and either cutting back on content on the 360 or disk spanning (i.e. emphasizing a PS3 bulletpoint). How. Lame.

It is nearly 3 years since the console came out, no one CARES. Heck, you allow gamers to INSTALL games on the HDD now. Stop the non-sense and let the game be what the developer wants it to be and stop stupid stuff like per disk royalties. Sheesh.

Read up on megatextures--the concept it totally different. The game engine only makes a couple draw calls because the game is one huge texture; a single level is 500MBish and is streamed in. The benefits are fewer draw calls, all unique textures, less memory footprint for textures, etc. The downside is diskspace -- the tradeoff is that for the fewer draw calls and memory footprint you do more "work" in a finished format that needs to be stored as such.

Similar tradeoffs, in different ways of course, are seen with precomputed shadows versus realtime ones. You are just shifting your resource bottleneck.

Yep. It also saves memory because instead of many layers of textures and loading a ton of content you are not using (and may not use) as well as all the mip layers for redundant content, you are essentially able to stream what you have immediately accessible to you. This shrinks the footprint substantially for textures... at the cost of storage space.