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

[tamattack]

But normal rooms have lots of light sources... Meanwhile, Carmack has said the average poly in DoomIII is lit by a grand total of 2 light sources. Perfect for the atmosphere they're trying to create, but not for simulating any place you'd actually want to be.

Errrrrmmmmm... you want to kill mutant monsters in your living room?

 

[tamattack]

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...

Well said!

 

[Gunhead]

About the "low poly count" "issue"...

I guess ID has a pretty good idea of the hardware out there when Doom 3 ships, so they have tuned the models (poly counts) accordingly. [Of course there will be all sorts of hardware, but they'll know what the high end and what the mainstream are bound to be.]

If later games based on the Doom 3 engine want to leverage later, more powerful hardware, they can simply up the poly count!

So blaming Carmack for Doom 3's "low" poly count would be kinda silly. If it is low, it's probably just tuned to the gear the prospective buyers have.

Actually this is so simple I wonder why I bothered to write and post it

 

[Johnny Rotten]

I sure would like to know where all these 'low poly counts' rumors come from. Doom's average poly's per frame is pretty much the same as UT2K3's.

 

[BNA!]

I sure would like to know where all these 'low poly counts' rumors come from. Doom's average poly's per frame is pretty much the same as UT2K3's.

It's because people did expect Doom to render character models at 20k+ polies minimum after seing the Tokio MacWorld presentation in Feb. 2001.

Then someone discovered that they only look very high poly.
Since gamers are very sensible when it comes to unannounced features for unconfirmed technologies they usually only believe what they want to believe (sort of crazy religion).

The competitive my-engine-is-better-than-yours "e-pissing" did immediately start among the fanboys, leaving the Doom party bleeding and scattered when Carmack one day confirmed that the player characters will only have as much polies as other games (while still looking ten times as good, but visual quality doesn't count in the world of numbers). So the Doom engine now is stigmatizised as a "incabeable low poly engine with bad looking shadows".

If you don't take it religiously and overlook the stigmatas it's just a plain great piece of software which will stay with us for years.

A typical Doom scene has 100k tris when rendered - that's not what I consider low poly.

 

[JD]

Doom3 engine was designed specifically for indoor environments. So you can't say if it's a good direction or not because the engine is made specifically for Doom3 environments. Not all games will have Doom3 like environments. As far as lighting/shadows go I'm confident Doom3 will have optimized shadow volumes which means not many lights will be dynamic nor the environment because that would cause shadows to be recalculated. Maybe in low poly areas players will be able to influence things around them with lights/shadows changing around them.

There is something else that is problematic and it has to do with vast outdoor spaces. It's very time consuming to fill these with geometry and IDsoftware being a small team I doubt they would concentrate on this. So you'll see smaller, labyrinth type levels where each inch of space is thought out. Doom games had outdoor spaces but they were not terrain like in nature. You couldn't hop into a jeep and travel the country side for miles on end. Stalker game from what I've seen has only one largish terrain/indoor level and that's it. They can't afford to recreate planet earth as we know it thus they probably just reuse the same map instead of creating unique areas like tundra, desert, underwater, etc.

 

[ninelven]

I haven't seen any movies that had convincing outdoor daytime CG scenes. Typically, they will be in space or at night or dusk. Global Illumination is a tought nut to crack.

I thought the last scenes of FF: TSW were pretty impressive... though that might just be my memory playing tricks on me.

 

[noko]

I would say DoomIII is in the right direction, better lighting even if limited to confine spaces is better then mediocre lighting everywhere. Start where it is possible with the highest quality and as hardware advances expand the technology to include outside areas. The DoomIII engine should be around for 3 years or so, probably with alot of modifications. Looking at possible hardware two years from now should make what is best today look like GF2's and Radeon's from our viewpoint in time at the moment. Three years, time for another engine.

 

[Sxotty]

The main problem with ID engines is their color palette, always dark greys and browns, very dreary and gloomy and as mentioned before 97 % inside.
I prefered the original UT engine over Quake 3 just for that, plus the ability to handle outdoor enviroments much better.
Quake 3 :Team Arena required a pretty good working of the engine to handle outdoor enviroments well, but what they did, they did well...team arena had some pretty good outdoor maps.
Overall ID Engines have spawned much better games than the original game that ID used the engine on:

I have no beef with you, but man look at your name lol, somewhat funny at least.


Hey NAgorak, basically from what you say, it seems that you think DOOM3 should be outside, and if it is not it is a bad game to you, that is fine, but I would not mind a bit just to see the beauty of a game engine. This might surprise you but I think Carmack has enough money, and he is doing it because he wants to, selling the engine is well and good. However I think he would rather do what he *wants* and then let other people deal with that. It looks stunning to me and I only hope it comes out soon.

I have friends who play console only pretty much and are planning to upgrade their crappy computer just to play Doom3, so you never know.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Whats my name got to do with anything ?? It has nothing to do with Doom :? Its my Clan name on all the forums from Unreal Tournament and Quake 2.

Get the facts straight.

 

[KimB]

Here's my two cents on the original topic:

1. Outdoor areas should be easier on stencil-based lighting, since only one light source is dominant.

2. Outdoor areas add a ton to any game with a story. It's just completely unrealistic to always be inside all the time. I don't like the disconnect that being magically moved to another place gives (usually), and an entire game taking place in a single building these days is just poor design. It's always going to be too boring of an atmosphere.

 

[overclocked]

JC has already stated that outdoor scenes and indoor scenes will use the same engine, that´s the point of D3 that everything uses the same lightning model... Look at the "intro" scene and you se what he means.

 

[overclocked]

Just for the record i don´t think doom 3 will be any of the top 3 AAA-titles on the pc or xbox because/let´s compare with Halo..
Halo the first fps i really liked, seperates itself from the rest of fps.

I will def buy Doom3 be it on Xbox or pc(maybe both) but i look way more forward to the games that license the engine and just have to give all their work to gameplay.

 

[BNA!]

I will def buy Doom3 be it on Xbox or pc(maybe both) but i look way more forward to the games that license the engine and just have to give all their work to gameplay.

That's what I call the archetypical biased opinion.

 

[Althornin]

its been ages since a game had the same creepy ambience that Doom had.
I am very much looking forward to it.

I was never a big fan of quake, but i loved Doom/Doom2 - and i cant wait for Doom3.

 

[Dave H]

2. Outdoor areas add a ton to any game with a story. It's just completely unrealistic to always be inside all the time. I don't like the disconnect that being magically moved to another place gives (usually), and an entire game taking place in a single building these days is just poor design. It's always going to be too boring of an atmosphere.

Uh, Half-Life? Still possibly the best integration of plot and environment, with absolutely no disconnect or magic movement (I'm purposely erasing the alien planet part from my memory), entirely within the most brilliantly designed single building in gaming history. Ok, there are some brief outdoor areas ("outdoor" in terms of bright ambiant lighting, but not in terms of draw distance, terrain, etc), but it's basically an indoor game.

So blaming Carmack for Doom 3's "low" poly count would be kinda silly. If it is low, it's probably just tuned to the gear the prospective buyers have.

Assuming this is directed at me (since I brought up the D3 poly count issue): I am absolutely in no way "blaming" Carmack for low poly count (if indeed it is low); obviously with a multipass rendering algorithm you need to lower scene geometry. I'm just trying to compare the scene poly counts to those in 3DMark03's GT2 and GT3 to see if poly count is responsible for some of the large performance discrepancy.

 

[Nagorak]

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

I'm not equating anything, I'm just asking. For the record, I haven't seen any large indoor screens in the D3 SSs either. Maybe I just missed them though?

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 <bleep> 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.

Back in the era of Doom id probably had 90% of the market for FPS games. Do you seriously believe they have 90% today (from your post you seem to?)? I'm not saying their engines are bad, but if you don't think there's been a lot more competition ever since the release of the Unreal engine, then you're simply mistaken...

But I'm sorry for suggesting any possible criticism of the programming god, John Carmack. Don't worry, I'll go flog myself with a wet noodle in order to repent.

If later games based on the Doom 3 engine want to leverage later, more powerful hardware, they can simply up the poly count!

So blaming Carmack for Doom 3's "low" poly count would be kinda silly. If it is low, it's probably just tuned to the gear the prospective buyers have.

Every game is limited by the lowest platform that has to run it. So, if the poly counts have to be low to make it so the engine runs well on low end cards, then, unfortunately, it's low for those of us with R9700 Pros too. Unless id chooses to include lower and higher poly models (which would really make sense, but it doesn't seem like they will?).

 

[BNA!]

Back in the era of Doom id probably had 90% of the market for FPS games. Do you seriously believe they have 90% today (from your post you seem to?)? I'm not saying their engines are bad, but if you don't think there's been a lot more competition ever since the release of the Unreal engine, then you're simply mistaken...

I seriously believe that id software still is the technology market leader in the high end segment. Since I never posted any of the thoughts you decided to extract (unasked) from my posts as existant because I didn't explicitly post the opposite I come to believe you just want to pick on me.

This discussion has been on a fairly good level till now.
Unfortunatley you decided to turn it into something different now.
The rest of your posts is proove enough for me to get out of it and fall back to silent mode for the next three months:

But I'm sorry for suggesting any possible criticism of the programming god, John Carmack. Don't worry, I'll go flog myself with a wet noodle in order to repent.

As a sideneote: This forum isn't the place where programmers are looked at as gods.

 

[Nagorak]

To summarize, I don't have a strong opinion on the Doom 3 engine either way. I'm just pointing out that based on what I've seen, the engine might be kind of limited in application. In contrast to earlier id engines, Doom 3 seems to move a lot farther away from "general use" towards specialization.

For instance, would it be a good idea to try to make Quake 4 based on the Doom 3 engine? Even if it's released half a year later those lighting effects will really bog down the competitive FPS. I seem to remember Carmack saying that for a multiplayer online FPS, the Quake 3 engine was all anyone would ever need. In a way that seems to be saying that in fact the Doom 3 engine is not designed to be used in such a game-- at least not without some modification?

I'm not saying id is going to go out of business, or even that they'll lose licensees over this. It's just in the past with Quake 2 vs Unreal, Quake 3 vs UT, (and other engines on the market, like Lithtech), all supported essentially the same features set. Now with Doom 3 and Unreal 2k3 we're seeing vast differences for the first time. And, depending on what the developer is trying to accomplish Doom 3 could either be a godsend, or completely unusable.

Maybe at this point it's too early to really judge...I'm just playing the Devil's Advocate.

 

[Nagorak]

I seriously believe that id software still is the technology market leader in the high end segment. Since I never posted any of the thoughts you decided to extract (unasked) from my posts as existant because I didn't explicitly post the opposite I come to believe you just want to pick on me.

This discussion has been on a fairly good level till now.
Unfortunatley you decided to turn it into something different now.
The rest of your posts is proove enough for me to get out of it and fall back to silent mode for the next three months:

I believe they are they are the market leader too. But just as an example there's a difference between total domination like 3DFX had for the first couple years, and the current situation with ATi and Nvidia.

Maybe I misunderstood your post, because it seemed like you were implying that my only purpose of starting this thread was to criticize John Carmack and that such naysaying was unacceptable (since he's never been wrong in the past)... Anyway, I'm sorry if I took in the wrong way and offended you.

The truth is, I haven't played a really great id game yet, but as far as engines go, I'm completely willing to admit they are good. Although, by the same token, I don't really care what engine a game uses, as long as it's fun.