Doom III, a step in the right direction...or not?

[Dio]

Part of the problem that the 'good' global illumination models aren't practical for realtime use on PC's - and more fundamentally, a 'complete' lighting solution still hasn't been found even for the very top end (as far as I know).

There will definitely be more place for pro lighting guys, but at the moment their toolbox largely has ultra-bright floods and a complete light wash, and nothing much else. That toolbox needs to get bigger (and will).

 

[Nagorak]

Increasing the number of realtime lightsources won't bump up D3's quality very much. In dark rooms, you can get away with no real global ambient/diffuse calculation, and hard shadows. However, in a room with lots of lights, I expect correct diffuse illumination, I don't expect dark contrasty shadows except in corners. It just won't look like what your brain "expects" it to look like with that many lights, as a result, it will look plain phony.

So are you saying that Doom3's engine will have to be used in dark scenes to be effective? Because if a game has to be dark to show any real benefit from this new lighting engine, once again: What is the point? There are a lot of well-lit games out there, and I kind of doubt that it's just because of the limitations in rendering engines.

 

[BoddoZerg]

The original DOOM was dark and all indoors, and it looked marvelous for its time.

If you want to see id overcome the limitations of DOOM3, wait for DOOM4 - if it's anything like DOOM -> DOOM2, it'll have all the big outdoors stuff you want.

 

[Bentarr]

To the low-poly thing in correlation with lighting:
"Just because Doom3 has a better lighting engine, does not necessarily correlate with it being visually impressive"

I think that Carmack is on the right way. "Light can make or break your scene." In most cases, you can get away with a relaitvely low poly count(of course, a six sided cylinder closeup will destroy any illusion). But if someone uses bad textures or bad lighting, you will see it at the second you look at it. This is the case especially with lighting. The human eye is much more sensitive to incorrect light than to low poly geometry to a certain point.

"There are a lot of well-lit games out there, and I kind of doubt that it's just because of the limitations in rendering engines."
I do not know every engine which is available, so i will limit to one. For Q3 light setup you will have to wait until BSP calculated the lightmaps. Seen from a practical pov, one will get a headache to create a "photorealistic" or "more realistically" lit scene if you have to wait 15 or more minutes for rendering one single light source (complex map). With no Global Illumination available wich could be doing your job, it will be a very "funny" thing to light a scene more realistically as it is seen now without a fast machine to compensate the feedback lag. In this relation, D3 will give the map creator realtime feedback.
Maybe the technology is used too early, who knows now. But imho, it will be more difficult to get to the next step in ingame lighting with conventional shadow map calculation (which for itself is not that bad, only a bit slow to work with).

 

[Silent_One]

The first Unreal was visually impressive...Would it have been so if the whole thing had taken place inside the ISV-Kran? That's the question.

You seem to equate the expansiveness of outdoors with "visually impressive". While I can agree that tight claustrophobic dungeon crawls can be unimpressive (especially dark brown dungeons) there are many community made levels for Q3 that are very large and very visually impressive. Large indoor scenes can be very impressive

 

[BNA!]

Doom, as a rendering engine, is targeted for high quality surface rendering.

Dark environments show surface attributes better.
Just like NVIDIA said "If you can't make it good, make it shiny".
So far Doom is the only (customer level) real time rendering engine which is able to create some very very good looking surfaces.

Overbright environments, or fully lit rooms don't show off little details as good as darkended ones.

For the next few years we'll most likely see Carmacks new engine going throu various revisions. The other engines may look similar, not because they're copies, but because they use the same rendering hardware.

Now people obviously are getting a lot of fun out of it to critizise Carmack for his engine design decisions. Besides the fact that every engine of John Carmack always has been his "worst engine ever" and every game was "a disaster" (according to numerous fanboy posts collected over the years) we are still waiting for all these killer engines which hide just behind the corner to take over id software's marketshare.
So far we're still waiting.

So, from my point of view, Mr, Carmack must be doing someting better than all the killer engine developers.

The Doom engine is tailored to the needs of the game called "Doom" - not to a Total Conversion of Tribes2 or Unreal.

Based on that I think Carmack and the whole id software are on the very right track.

 

[Qroach]

Well said BNA, well said!

 

[Brimstone]

I'm curious to see how the new engine for Half-Life 2 is. Probably some fun discusions will be had comparing Doom 3's engine to Half-Life 2's.

 

[BNA!]

I'm curious to see how the new engine for Half-Life 2 is. Probably some fun discusions will be had comparing Doom 3's engine to Half-Life 2's.

This comparison wont contain the word "disappointment".
The rest is a matter of personal taste.

 

[BNA!]

Well said BNA, well said!

Thanks!

 

[ChrisK]

Well, I'm not much of a fan of the kind of (claustrophobic) game that Doom3 is supposed to be, but I hope, the next game in the Jedi Knight series, due out in 2004 will use the Doom 3 engine. I think they'll have (partially) outdoor levels.

Chris

 

[Dave B(TotalVR)]

Did anybody else notice that the doom3 screnie that was posted has incorrect shadows?

The side of the monster that faces outside is in shadow, you'd have thought that light would be coming in from the hole in the wall....

 

[BNA!]

Well, I'm not much of a fan of the kind of (claustrophobic) game that Doom3 is supposed to be, but I hope, the next game in the Jedi Knight series, due out in 2004 will use the Doom 3 engine. I think they'll have (partially) outdoor levels.

Chris,
can you point me to the press release of this Doom3 powered Jedi Knight game?
Seems like I've missed it's announcement.

 

[BNA!]

Did anybody else notice that the doom3 screnie that was posted has incorrect shadows?

The side of the monster that faces outside is in shadow, you'd have thought that light would be coming in from the hole in the wall....

There is no hole in the wall, there's a window and there are more than 1 lightsources active in this shot.

Nothing is incorrect.

 

[ChrisK]

Well, some days ago I've bought my first gaming magazin (the German mag Gamestar) in about 1.5 or 2 years (since I wanted to see the Unreal 2 movies on the DVD).

There is a news article that says that Activision had announced that there would be a Jedi Knight sequel in 2004 and that details like what the 3D engine will be used or whether Raven Software would again develop it would be unknown currently.

(final edit, hopefully: ) IGN says here that it was mentioned in Activision's quarterly conference call (/edit)

Chris

 

[Reverend]

The first Unreal was visually impressive...

Everybody says/said this. What, to you, was "visually impressive" about Unreal? It is an interesting question to ask simply because lots of folks focus on different graphics aspects. Personally, I found Unreal a "beautiful" game because of the extensive usage of colored lighting and texture art but nothing really much more than that. As technology progress, of course, things and expectations change...

 

[BNA!]

There have been two or three nice things about Unreal:
- The layered skies
- The waterfall at the beginning
- The reflective surfaces

Can't think of many more atm.

I never saw any advantage in using vast outdoors if there isn't anything that utilizes that much space.

Getting under attack from air to ground vehicles in Halo was fun, attacking from the sky (or better a couple of feet over the ground) was fun also.

Other than that I can't see too many things about outdoors which make a game better. Usually you just have to walk 10 times longer to pick up the red key...

However I agree that outdoors can look sweet (if that's the thing "to agree on" in this thread).

Next time a game forces me to walk throu endless bland hills I want to get chased by a huge dinosaur to make it more interesting.
I can accept a sniper mission also

 

[BNA!]

(final edit, hopefully: ) IGN says here that it was mentioned in Activision's quarterly conference call (/edit)

Thanks Chris!
This is good news I think.

I love the suspected title:

Star Wars -- Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Outcast 2: Return of the Empire 1.

 

[Rodéric]

I know DOOM II by heart, and I can tell you that there are many open areas.

Not sure about DOOM but I also think it had plenty of open spaces, since I still have them both on my hard drive (I think, it's on my BeOS disk), I'll check that.

 

[BoddoZerg]

DOOM's open spaces were pretty unimpressive compared to DOOM2... the only ones I can remember are Mt. Erebus (the annoying cacodemon level!) and Dis... they were rather small and featureless. (The last level)

Final DOOM had some insanely big areas, but that's because by the time of Final DOOM, computers were waaaaaaaaay too powerful to be wasted on DOOM.

Nowadays, running an OpenGL Final DOOM with a Radeon9700 and 6xFSAA/16xAF, thats kinda funny.