We hear from developers every other day that their new title will be the same on both consoles, they rarely do. There are usually small to huge differences, be it visual or in the actual running of the game. It is not every day you hear of a game using an entire new game engine, and the Rage developer revealed some interesting facts about using a brand new engine.
In a recent interview with 2404.org, Tim Willits Lead Designer at id Software, revealed that the id Tech 5 is a new engine built on brand new technology from the ground up and that, ”the cornerstone of this technology is that it allows us to paint everything.” Willits explained that when an engine is built from the ground, it allows the developer to take full advantage of the power across all systems. He said, “We feel that we’ve been able to overcome a lot of the struggles that most developers have with cross-platform games. The game plays at 60hz on each system and when you play a game at 60hz, versus 30hz like lots of other games, there’s a huge improvement with the precision, control, and sharpness.”
Willits confidently reported that at QuakeCon they had Rage demo running on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 at the same time on big 10ft screens, and that the live audience could see that they “looked exactly the same and they all ran at 60hz.” The developer confidently believes that the new engine will be a cross-platform engine and it is the texturing technology allows them to overcome tiling texture issues where others have struggled.
I truly hope that this new engine can cross the platforms successfully and give us identical (or close to) clones of titles. We don’t have to look further than two recent titles in Mafia II or Final Fantasy XIII to give examples of dramatic differences in platform performance. I would love to base my purchase of a title based on the platform of my choice, and not which one it performs better on.
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