Visually the game hasn't lost anything in its escape from its technical origins. Enemy Territory began life as the Doom 3 engine. "As most people know, it's predominantly a linear, first-person, single-player, indoor shooter," Wedgwood says of the Doom engine, "and this is an outdoor multiplayer game with vehicles [laughs]." It's doing well - foliage is lush, human/Strogg and vehicle models are well animated, and it makes good use of its tech to simplify what it has to tell you in words. Seeking cover, for example, you judge how well hidden you are by whether any light falls on the arms and hands holding your gun in front of you.
The key technical change, of which much has been made in the game's early press, is the addition of the "megatexture", something John Carmack - who else? - came up with. It's basically the idea of covering the entire 32,000 pixels-square in one texture. Entirely unique landscape from start to end. Instead of painting textures onto polygons, designers specify what certain areas should be by proxy, so environmentally you can order the map to display weathered grey rock or churned mud near a river, moss below a certain height, and so on. "They start off about eight gigabytes," Wedgwood says, somewhat wince-inducingly, "but we scale that down until it takes up about 8MB of your video memory." Oh. When you zoom out, there's very little loss in texture quality; when you peer down a road, it looks different all the way along.
Network code has also been redesigned, with vehicle physics a key consideration. "Ordinarily in a multiplayer game the best that you can hope for is a straightforward rigid body model that moves across a very smooth landscape, which means you can't do jumps, you can't go offroading and all that. Because we actually have four-wheel-drive vehicles and proper suspension in multiplayer, we can model things like a limited split differential, the way the brakes work. ... Whatever I expect the vehicle to do, it's going to do." Wedgwood proceeds to donut a Humvee-style 'badger' vehicle around a GDF outpost.
