Tidbits on Id Software's next engine

[Gabrobot]

The D3 expansion pack comes with CG versions of the interaction.vfp.

Whoa, I hadn't noticed that...odd since I just checked Doom 3 and the Cg and Exp paths have been replaced with the Arb2 path (I assume since patch 1.2), so the game has no use for any Cg programs. I went back and ran Doom 3 1.1 with the Cg programs however, and it did work...no bumpmapping, though I assume that's due to the Cg program.

 

[Reverend]

There're probably 2 reasons:

1. Carmack doesn't trust the Cg/GLSL compiler. I believe there's no driver scored 100% in the GLSL parse test ATM. And Cg doesn't compile quite good on ATI HW.

2. He wants total control on the instruction count. When the shaders get too complex, you'll find yourself running out of instruction slots occasionally.

That's what I think too. I'll ask.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

BTW, id is hiring for an enviroment artist - with terrain building experience. Guess they're going to prove that they can do outdoors

 

[DeanoC]

1. Carmack doesn't trust the Cg/GLSL compiler. I believe there's no driver scored 100% in the GLSL parse test ATM. And Cg doesn't compile quite good on ATI HW.

Actually as pointed out by Humus on these very forums, ATI hardware actually does better on Cg code than HLSL at the moment due to Cg being more unoptimised, so ATI's back end is able to do a better job. Of course its possible that John doesn't know this as its pretty counter-intuitive...

 

[Gabrobot]

BTW, id is hiring for an enviroment artist - with terrain building experience. Guess they're going to prove that they can do outdoors

They also seem to be using ZBrush for modeling...

 

[Intel17]

BTW, id is hiring for an enviroment artist - with terrain building experience. Guess they're going to prove that they can do outdoors

Well of course, considering how Carmack is going out of his way to make sure shadowmaps work well in outdoor scenarios!

 

[Zeross]

They also seem to be using ZBrush for modeling...

They already used it for Doom III : Softimage|XSI for "basic" modeling and ZBrush for adding detail. Maya was used for the animation.

 

[Intel17]

They also seem to be using ZBrush for modeling...

They already used it for Doom III : Softimage|XSI for "basic" modeling and ZBrush for adding detail. Maya was used for the animation.

Perhaps the level of detail in the next game will be upped significantly because they're using ZBrush from the start?

 

[Gabrobot]

They already used it for Doom III : Softimage|XSI for "basic" modeling and ZBrush for adding detail. Maya was used for the animation.

I was under the impression they used Lightwave...I know that the guy who did the Imp and Cyberdemon (among other things) used Lightwave, because there was an interview with him on some Lightwave site.

 

[Colourless]

One of the Doom 3 preview videos even showed Lightwave being used.

 

[Zeross]

Hummm yes maybe it was Lightwave instead of Softimage, I will check.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Id used mostly Lightwave for modeling, and Maya for animation. Nowadays, custom tools are the more important part of the art pipeline, as more and more time is spent with engine specific tasks - thus modeling and animation will work fine in most 3D packages.

 

[Zeross]

It was indeed Lightwave, sorry that's my bad.
Models generated with Lightwave are about 350 000 polygons, then ZBrush is used to add details and that number is pushed to 1.5 million polygons or more for certain models. These ultra high poly models are used to generate the normal map.