Case Study: id Software achieves faster AI precalculation compile times and shorter development turnaround with Incredibuild

id Software - Customer Case Study

id Software faced very long offline precalculation times for the Area Awareness System (AAS) used in Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars — most notably the expensive construction of a boundary representation (b‑rep) of configuration space from millions of triangles. To address slow iteration and lengthy compile turnaround, id Software turned to Incredibuild and its Xoreax Grid Engine (XGE) distributed build/grid computing technology to exploit massive parallelism.

Incredibuild’s XGE split the b‑rep work into many independent chunks, virtualized file/executable distribution, and dispatched tasks across a 14‑machine grid (27 cores, ~78.6 GHz), delivering near‑linear — and in some tests beyond‑linear — scaling versus single‑thread, multi‑thread and multi‑process approaches. The result for id Software was a significant reduction in precalculation and build turnaround, faster debugging and iteration for AI data, and a validated workflow for applying Incredibuild’s XGE to other offline, highly parallel tasks like texture and sound compression.

id Software