Unlike the preceding and widely-used id Tech 3 (Quake III Arena engine) and id Tech 2 (Quake II engine), id Tech 4 has had less success in licensing to third parties. This is especially apparent in comparison to its closest competitor, Unreal Engine 2. The unexpected long development time going into id Tech 4 did not help, as between 2002–2004, id Software had no equivalent to Unreal Engine 2. Many who licensed Unreal Engine 2 were thus able to make the switch to Unreal Engine 3 more easily.
While id Tech 4 had taken a new direction with its dynamic per-pixel lighting, this unconventional feature had steeper hardware requirements and was initially only useful in "spooky games" (until the MegaTexture addition), whereas an increasing number of developers preferred conventional engines that could render large outdoor areas. Also notable was id Tech 4's relative lack of downward scalability compared to competing FPS engines which would have limited its potential audience; the Source engine could still run on the older widespread DirectX 7 GPUs, albeit without shaders being used.
While id Tech 4 had taken a new direction with its dynamic per-pixel lighting, this unconventional feature had steeper hardware requirements and was initially only useful in "spooky games" (until the MegaTexture addition), whereas an increasing number of developers preferred conventional engines that could render large outdoor areas. Also notable was id Tech 4's relative lack of downward scalability compared to competing FPS engines which would have limited its potential audience; the Source engine could still run on the older widespread DirectX 7 GPUs, albeit without shaders being used.
No comments:
Post a Comment