bloodbob said:
In all of ID's games seeing as every object apparently has the same mass.
Why don't you go in and take a look to see how it actually works. I'll give a hint, Doom 3's objects have mass values you can set (along with density, bounciness and friction). Doom 3 as a game made crap use of the physics, but that was entirely the fault of who ever set the values, not Jan Paul Van Waveren.
bloodbob said:
While not a FPS what do you think this game would be like without decent physics?
http://www.chroniclogic.com/ .
There's no question that physics can have a huge impact on gameplay (I'm a Trespasser fan, or rather, a fan of what Trespasser was supposed to be), but what will physics hardware do to help (at least right now)? The fact is you can't make it do anything more then stick ten zillion objects bouncing around on screen. Why is it worth going to the trouble of adding hardware physics support when you can already bounce objects around and do ragdolls and what not with the software physics? (You just can't do as many of them) Hardware physics won't give you the kind of improvement that hardware graphics gave.
bloodbob said:
I guess your not a fan of prey ( which is based on the D3 engine ) either seeing as the walking on walls and the changing of gravity are just graphical enhancements.
Prey doesn't use physics hardware. And besides which, the two examples you gave could have been done with Quake's physics.
bloodbob said:
No carmack is saying simply putting extra effort into developing physics is pointless if it doesn't do anything for the gameplay. As he quite clearly said "physics and physics hardware" and he thinks it is pointless.
They already have a physics engine. (Which means there's not a lot of fundamental developing that needs to be done...it already has proper path based collision detection, they beef up the calculations and turn off their silly cut switches that turn the physics off after a few seconds and they're right up to date for their next engine.) I'd like to point out that Doom 3's physics were actually quite a big deal back when it was announced, since no one since Trespasser had done anything like that.
bloodbob said:
Why did carmack even bother switching to opengl? he could have done everything on his fast serial processors anyway opengl ( and in the future for him D3D ) has simply been graphical enhancements. Frankly if carmack thinks intel ect can keep up the increase of IPC for ever he is joking himself as what we are getting X^2 die increase with shrinkage but every if/else in code adds 2^X complexity die shrinkage is going to hit a wall very soon anyway. ( However 3d processors will fix that )
No, as I said the difference made by graphical hardware is much larger than that of physics hardware. And you can scale graphics quite easily without directly effecting gameplay, whereas physics (if they are actually implemented into gameplay) would have a huge effect, thus making it a large design challenge. Carmack already talked about this, why should I have to tell you this? If you're going to have such a strong opinion, at least stay half way informed.
digitalwanderer said:
You make him out to be some neutral party though and he's not, he's always been and probably always will be nVidia biased.
He didn't seem particularly reluctant to run Doom 3 on a Radeon 9700 back in 2002. After that he tended to prefer NVIDIA hardware, but on the other hand he had perfectly valid reasons. It's interesting to note that NVIDIA has always been the one pushing itself as the card for Doom 3, ect. However, Doom 3 is not a TWIMTBP game, and I think that's an interesting point to be made. In fact, when Doom 3 came out Carmack said that either highend card was fine, despite NVIDIA being somewhat ahead in benchmarks, which if anything came across like he was saying the difference didn't matter that much and ATI was still quite fine. Again, I'm having a hard time seeing a bias. Honestly, the only time I can think of him really bashing a card, was the Geforce 4MX, because he thought it a dishonest way to market essentially a Geforce 2 MX card.
digitalwanderer said:
I like the Carmack, but I don't worship him. I think his game engines are fabulous and his games suck.
Doom 3 wasn't his game.
Doom RPG and Orcs and Elves are the only games he's done major gameplay design on since Quake 3.
Skrying said:
Are you blind? Nvidia HAS been successful in having id nearly tailor their engine around Nvidia hardware in the past, present and future. Its not secret at all. I'm not sure how you can say such a thing without knowing you're basically skipping over the facts.
As was said before, it was more a case of NVIDIA tailoring their hardware around Doom 3 then vice versa. And no wonder, given Carmack picking ATI's card to show Doom 3 off on at E3 2002. Since then, as was pointed out, NVIDIA has simply had the better hardware for what Carmack was trying to do. At least until the Xbox 360 came along, and now he finds it easier to test things on it because it won't get broken by driver updates. And in case you missed it somewhere along the way, the Xbox 360 is
ATI powered.
Skrying said:
The engine sucks because it was a huge investment and has basically done nothing. I struggle to name 4 games that use it. Of the three I know two are id franchises. Previous efforts from id had MUCH better success, because the engine could do everything. The Doom 3 engine has produced games that so far all look the same. Quake Wars being the lone exception, which isnt out yet, that is extremely heavily modified to reach a certain goal.
Skrying said:
I think Doom 3 as a game was terrible. I think the engine was a commericial failure. I love Prey and it uses the Doom 3 engine, still doesnt chance my thoughts that as a whole the engine didnt do near as well, commericially, as id wanted it to.
How do you know how id intended the Doom 3 engine to do commercially? Consider these facts: They stated several times (mostly back in 2002-2003) that they make far more on game sales then on engine licenses (why do you think Epic, which does rely quite a bit on engine licenses, do so much engine hyping and support in order to win the shit loads of licensees? Because they need that many to actually make that kind of focus pay off). They didn't openly offer the Doom 3 license for sale until after the game was released (Prey being an exception, because 3DRealms is an old buddy of id Software), and about a year and a half ago, they started encouraging prospective licensees
not to license the Doom 3 engine, and instead steered them towards their new engine technology (which presumably they
are openly licensing before their next game is released).
I don't consider Carmack a god or any such nonsense, but I find all the Carmack bashing to be rather unreasonable. I also find it ironic that it's often bashers who seem to think he is some kind of deity who is responsible for everything id Software does, and all the game design choices. The fact is he does technology stuff, mostly graphics related. It's people like Jan Paul Van Waveren who is in charge of the physics, and it's the game designers who are responsible for the gameplay (and the way that the physics objects are set up).
