John Carmack of id Software unveils new ultra high detail game engine

Yesterday, during the keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, John Carmack revealed some footage of a new game engine. The video above is the best quality you're going to get for a little while. At least until id release some footage themselves. Despite this, however, it still looks stunning.

Dubbed "id Tech 5," the new engine promises to almost completely remove any limitations on texture size, allowing "for the unique customization of the entire game world at the pixel level." Examples include changing material colours on the fly and etching fine detail, such as initials, into existing geometry. As the video says, the footage above uses over 20 gigabytes of texture files. Presumably, with their developments into new compression methods, we'll be seeing all this fit onto a 9 gigabyte DVD. It'll have to if they plan on releasing games that run on this engine onto the PC and Xbox 360. Games on the PS3, on the other hand, will be able to take advantage of the 50 gigabytes of storage on Blu-Ray discs, allowing for lower compression and, we assume, faster loading as a result.

This is all just speculation for now, however. Other than the above video and the blurb that has been posted on the id Software official website, there's no specific information. We'll have to wait until E3 for that.