Doom3 -- hopefully another Carmack interview with me
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1. Any plans to update with support for 3Dc? Seems fairly straight forward so if not: why?
2. The command "r_UseIndexBuffers"... doesn't seem to work, just a ditched experiment or work in progress for the next patch?
3. No disrespect but the games physics seems quite weak. Any special reason for not going with a proven sollutions such as Karma or Havoc.
4. And of course the mandatory questions: why oh why such low res textures and low polygon models?
5. Depth bound tests command/Ultra Shadow, same thing? Is it working yet? (Ie is all we need a new driver set?)
6. The game, now that it's out, does not seem to tax modern hardware as much as people thought it would. Even Ultra Quality with high res, AA and AF runs well (40-60 fps) on a modern rig (Athlon 64 3200+ and GeForce 6800 Ultra).
Is this due to the long development process perhaps?
Surely some higher res textures and more polygon could be thrown in there...
7. Why not go with really high res compressed textures. In most cases they would look much better than the current uncompressed textures anyways.
8. How about doing a standalone benchmarking tool? Just using console command gets teedious and the results are pretty hard to manage if you test lots of settings.
Oh well, just skip the stupid ones
2. The command "r_UseIndexBuffers"... doesn't seem to work, just a ditched experiment or work in progress for the next patch?
3. No disrespect but the games physics seems quite weak. Any special reason for not going with a proven sollutions such as Karma or Havoc.
4. And of course the mandatory questions: why oh why such low res textures and low polygon models?
5. Depth bound tests command/Ultra Shadow, same thing? Is it working yet? (Ie is all we need a new driver set?)
6. The game, now that it's out, does not seem to tax modern hardware as much as people thought it would. Even Ultra Quality with high res, AA and AF runs well (40-60 fps) on a modern rig (Athlon 64 3200+ and GeForce 6800 Ultra).
Is this due to the long development process perhaps?
Surely some higher res textures and more polygon could be thrown in there...
7. Why not go with really high res compressed textures. In most cases they would look much better than the current uncompressed textures anyways.
8. How about doing a standalone benchmarking tool? Just using console command gets teedious and the results are pretty hard to manage if you test lots of settings.
Oh well, just skip the stupid ones
You don't need to create the silhouette at all. You can use the degenerate quad extrusion method on any vs1.1+ hardware. And skinning can be done 100% on GPU aswell, obviously. You just skin the tangent and binormal vectors along with the rest.
3dmark03 uses this approach for example, and on systems like mine it is much faster than using the CPU, and obviously it scales better.
Which is why I wonder why Doom3 doesn't use this approach.
If you don't have experience with writing such shaders yourself, please stay out of this, and leave my question for John Carmack. This thread is not for discussion.
Ante P said:
Have to consider that you have Normal map, diffuse, specular etc. If you put in high res everything, the memory requirement goes through the roof.
As for polygons -> more polygons= more stencil shadow calculations + more per poly collision detection calculations = low low low frame rate.
Edit: Question:
You've mentioned before that the Doom 3 Engine was built to make Doom 3 the game, hence the emphasis on shadows and darkness. Will the next engine be made to cater to the next id Software game or will it be made to suit other types of games ala the Quake III engine?
Scali said:
Oh sure! The quad extrusion method is great: it only bloats the number of vertices, makes the zpass optimizations not usable, etc. For that, it is better of on the CPU.
Well, of course you can skin on the GPU, but it depends on the skinning you use. And since Doom3 finds silhuettes on the CPU, you have to skin in the CPU too. Anyway, it just seems obvious to me that the silhuette and therefore skinning belong (for now) on the CPU...
Alstrong said:
So no discussion but I disagree:
* The game doesn't tax modern hardware all that much even on the most extreme settings.
* They could've raised texture res while using compression.
* The low polygon counts and low texture resolutions are mostly seen in a few key areas. Adding more detail in these few areas shouldn't be a hard thing. (For an example characters heads, you never see the scientists in a hectic situation so adding a few more ploys to make them look less 199x-ish wouldn't be too hard.)
3dmark03 does the quad extrusion method and full GPU skinning and gets better performance than Doom3, while rendering scenes with significantly higher polycount, and that is without any kind of optimizations such as scissor on the shadowvolume (you can get 100 fps average with a 6800Ultra even if you stick it into a 1.5 GHz machine, while Doom3 only manages 100 fps average if the 6800Ultra is paired with the fastest Athlon64s).
So yes, the quad extrusion method is apparently great on modern GPUs, and the CPU approach seems to require quite fast CPUs even for Doom3's low-poly scenes, and doesn't seem to scale well for the future.
Which is why I ask my question.
Now stop discussing. You are not John Carmack, and the question was not directed at you.
If you want to discuss the methods, open your own thread. This thread is for questions, and that is my question.
PS: zpass optimizations are useless if they make the code CPU-limited instead of fillrate-limited and still get a lower framerate. And even with a GPU-based method, you can do these optimizations. You can create a bounding volume for the shadow from the bounding box or sphere of the model and the lightsource. Then you can check for near-plane intersections. By using an alternative indexbuffer, which only contains the degenerate quads itself, you can avoid rendering the caps.
At the least Carmack could have created a hybrid method. Do zpass on the CPU, and zfail on the GPU.
1) Is the future in 3D engines in more vertex processing or pixel processing?
2) Your previous engines have scaled well and have been widley licensed. How scalable is the Doom3 Engine and will it be capable of scaling to match the Unreal3 engine in 2yrs time or will you need a new engine? And what do you think of the HL2 engine and how well does D3 compare to the engine and game?
3) Do you think strategically, it would be better to design new 3d engines with a new console cycle every 5 years in order to maximise both PC and Console sales and 3d engine efficiency across these platforms?
4) Have you changed your mind about mult-theaded game design, especially with future PC and console architectures moving towards multi-core and stream processors? Would your next engine take this into consideration?
5) With your love for the OpenGL API, what are your thoughts on the rumours of PS3 using the OpenGL ES API and Collada and would you ever make use of them?
6) What are your thoughts on XNA and cross PC-Xenon development and would you ever make use of them?
7) What do you think Nintendo means by revolution in it's next console and what revolution would it take for you to develop for it?
8> Have you considered making a non-FPS game?
9) What is your most replayed game of all time?
10) What do you see game engines in 10 years time doing and will you still be involved?
2) Your previous engines have scaled well and have been widley licensed. How scalable is the Doom3 Engine and will it be capable of scaling to match the Unreal3 engine in 2yrs time or will you need a new engine? And what do you think of the HL2 engine and how well does D3 compare to the engine and game?
3) Do you think strategically, it would be better to design new 3d engines with a new console cycle every 5 years in order to maximise both PC and Console sales and 3d engine efficiency across these platforms?
4) Have you changed your mind about mult-theaded game design, especially with future PC and console architectures moving towards multi-core and stream processors? Would your next engine take this into consideration?
5) With your love for the OpenGL API, what are your thoughts on the rumours of PS3 using the OpenGL ES API and Collada and would you ever make use of them?
6) What are your thoughts on XNA and cross PC-Xenon development and would you ever make use of them?
7) What do you think Nintendo means by revolution in it's next console and what revolution would it take for you to develop for it?
8> Have you considered making a non-FPS game?
9) What is your most replayed game of all time?
10) What do you see game engines in 10 years time doing and will you still be involved?
This is probably available through Google or gd-algorithms, but:
How are you going to fix the mirrored texture seams, especially apparent on the player's head? (I'm assuming this is a tangent-space problem.) For some reason this greatly decreased my suspension of disbelief during cutscenes.
SMP: Do certain threads have CPU affinity assigned?
How are you going to fix the mirrored texture seams, especially apparent on the player's head? (I'm assuming this is a tangent-space problem.) For some reason this greatly decreased my suspension of disbelief during cutscenes.
SMP: Do certain threads have CPU affinity assigned?
Infinisearch
Veteran
1. How's the wife and baby doing?
2. How's the aerospace stuff going, how did you deal with the crash? Where are you headed with that stuff next? And exactly how much time does that stuff take away from your engine/game coding?
The following three questions are related
3. Do you miss working on software renderers? If so does it have to do with a lack of overcoming api limitations, the challenge... why?
4. Given that amd64 dual processing platforms share a similar architecture to the current cpu-gpu architecture (2 processors each with local ram (connected by a dedicated bus) connected to each other by another bus) and the intention of cpu vendors to push multiprocessor cores and motherboards to the consumer market do you see a resurgence in software rendering? Would you consider undertaking such a project?
5. Could you please comment on the ever rising top end price on top end video card releases? aka $200 for a high end video card upon release back then to the $600 one would shell out nowadays. Again do you see a comback in software rendering due to the fact and the fact that a cpu and extra ram for that cpu can be used for other things besides games?
6. Mr. Carmack I wrote a short story could you please give me your honest opinion on it?
DISCLAIMER - The following is a fictional dipiction and has in no way any relation to any real world events.
There is a automated self entertainment company called JE, they release a product called Poom7. There is also a company (Breatife Tabs) that make computerized oral excrement enhancement products. Now Poom7 uses a technology that it seem Breatife Tabs has a patent on, but seems someone else has prior art related to. When the company JE was threatened by the evil Breatife Tabs, JE folded and opted to make a comprimise with the devil, for the good of mankind. Thus saving the land...
I'm especially not sure about the ending any suggestions?
7. This is a comment - If you started a sound card company with some decent sound cards, I'd buy one of your sound cards. (I miss aureal, and creative really does need some serious competition...)
8. It was posted on a website that the PS3 might support opengl, will you support the platform if so? If not???
9. It seems to me that the game industry is suffering from oversaturation, and the rehashing of the same gameplay dynamics over and over again just with different names. Do you intend to break the mold in what you set out to do in terms of being different for your next game project?
10. Do you play games if so what are the ones you enjoy the most?
11. Was the desicion to ship doom3 with its multiplayer component as such a gameplay desicion, an attempt not to shoot ones self in the foot in terms of sales of quake4 or a bit of both?
12.Can i have a job?
2. How's the aerospace stuff going, how did you deal with the crash? Where are you headed with that stuff next? And exactly how much time does that stuff take away from your engine/game coding?
The following three questions are related
3. Do you miss working on software renderers? If so does it have to do with a lack of overcoming api limitations, the challenge... why?
4. Given that amd64 dual processing platforms share a similar architecture to the current cpu-gpu architecture (2 processors each with local ram (connected by a dedicated bus) connected to each other by another bus) and the intention of cpu vendors to push multiprocessor cores and motherboards to the consumer market do you see a resurgence in software rendering? Would you consider undertaking such a project?
5. Could you please comment on the ever rising top end price on top end video card releases? aka $200 for a high end video card upon release back then to the $600 one would shell out nowadays. Again do you see a comback in software rendering due to the fact and the fact that a cpu and extra ram for that cpu can be used for other things besides games?
6. Mr. Carmack I wrote a short story could you please give me your honest opinion on it?
DISCLAIMER - The following is a fictional dipiction and has in no way any relation to any real world events.
There is a automated self entertainment company called JE, they release a product called Poom7. There is also a company (Breatife Tabs) that make computerized oral excrement enhancement products. Now Poom7 uses a technology that it seem Breatife Tabs has a patent on, but seems someone else has prior art related to. When the company JE was threatened by the evil Breatife Tabs, JE folded and opted to make a comprimise with the devil, for the good of mankind. Thus saving the land...
I'm especially not sure about the ending any suggestions?
7. This is a comment - If you started a sound card company with some decent sound cards, I'd buy one of your sound cards. (I miss aureal, and creative really does need some serious competition...)
8. It was posted on a website that the PS3 might support opengl, will you support the platform if so? If not???
9. It seems to me that the game industry is suffering from oversaturation, and the rehashing of the same gameplay dynamics over and over again just with different names. Do you intend to break the mold in what you set out to do in terms of being different for your next game project?
10. Do you play games if so what are the ones you enjoy the most?
11. Was the desicion to ship doom3 with its multiplayer component as such a gameplay desicion, an attempt not to shoot ones self in the foot in terms of sales of quake4 or a bit of both?
12.Can i have a job?
I am sorry but this sounds like a bad idea from me. The last post prior to this post of mine is the best indication of what I mean by this. Coupled with the fact that a few here do not respect (nor understand) a simple wish and request of mine (one, no discussion... two, it's about Doom3, not general stuff), this thread is now locked.
I will just have to ask Carmack my own questions. Thanks to those that did actually ask sane questions. I'll see what can be included.
Apologies if some of you feel slighted but that's the way it is when you neither listen respectfully to a simple request of mine, nor understand what it means to send emails to John Carmack. I just can't spare the time.
I will just have to ask Carmack my own questions. Thanks to those that did actually ask sane questions. I'll see what can be included.
Apologies if some of you feel slighted but that's the way it is when you neither listen respectfully to a simple request of mine, nor understand what it means to send emails to John Carmack. I just can't spare the time.
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