Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Announced

id Software announced today Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (press release) developed by Splash Damage together with a screenshot

As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in either the EDF (Earth Defense Force – humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies, each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. Troops utilize over 40 conventional and futuristic vehicles, deployable structures, and defense systems like quad-bikes, tanks, and alien walkers for epic ground assaults; or helicopters and anti-gravity ships to lend firepower from the air. Throughout each battle, teams establish bases, deploy defense structures, artillery, radar, and advanced forward-command systems into enemy territory while constructing and demolishing obstacles to speed progress and gain a tactical advantage over the enemy.

With realistic dynamic lighting and shadowing from headlights, searchlights and even the moon, battles can be fought during the day or night; while accurate simulation of the atmosphere, weather, and vegetation combine to create an unparalleled degree of realism. Battlefields are perfectly rendered using MegaTexture, a totally new rendering technology developed by id Software that crunches millions of polygons and a gigabyte-scale texture into a single, seamless and un-tiled landscape with unique detail down to the square inch or the un-obscured distant horizon.

Sounds interesting, perhaps a worthy Battlefield 2 competitor? Wonder what's so special about their MegaTexture(tm) landscape rendering system tough, the landscape looked pretty standard in the screenshot at least, nothing special at all. But perhaps they've focused on long view distances and huge levels instead. Probably by using generated normalmaps which would be a huge win in both quality, memory and performance if you want really high geometric detail. That combined with geometry clipmaps (or similar GPU-centric solution) and some innovative texture compression scheme and/or procedural layer system might almost qualify it at as a "totally new rendering technique". But the sceptic in me says it's just PR as usual, but I hope I'll be positively suprised.