Five years on from the release of Doom Eternal, Doom: The Dark Ages heralds the arrival of id Tech 8 and a (demonic) host of technological innovation for both consoles and PC. We spoke with id Software’s director of engine technology, Billy Khan, to find out how it was built. Along the way, we discussed ray tracing, shader compilation and traversal stutter and the engine’s new features, amongst other topics.
It’s rare for developers to share so much behind-the-scenes footage in a public forum, with id providing some fascinating insight into how they managed to balance the classic need for excellent performance with graphical fidelity, while also adding in the physics-based interactions and larger levels that set The Dark Ages apart from its predecessors. It’s clear that a fanatic attention to speed and optimisation is key to the whole endeavour, and it’s interesting to see some specific examples of that in this discussion.
Note that this is a comprehensive, even feature-length interview, only a portion of which is reproduced in text below. As always, small edits have been made to aid clarity and readability. To listen to the full interview, please see the video version embedded below.
What were the goals that you had in mind from the beginning when planning id Tech 8? What was that process like?
Billy Khan: It’s a long-standing process – you don’t finish a game and immediately say “what are we going to do next?” Some of these things you’re seeing now are things we thought about for many years – up to 10 years for myself. We put modular components into the engine that we can expound upon as time goes by. Some of the features you’re seeing in id Tech 8 started off in id Tech 6, thinking about how we need to be able to handle these types of workloads, these types of graphical fidelity, these sizes of maps, these types of complexity in our pixels and lighting etc.