Unreal 3.0 and Dynamic Radiosity Lighting

Saying Doom3 is "Carmack's stupid little outdated game" is what I consider to be either grossly uninformed of the business of making games or completely egoistic.

I wouldn't find fault with your words but the addition of the words "stupid" and "little" just makes you look bad in my books (not that you may care, of course).

Doom3 (the game) is not "stupid" and it is most definitely not "little". Doom3 (the engine) may be slightly "outdated" but when you are a programmer that started on an engine 4 years ago and 2 major APIs (and the resulting hardware) ago, there will always be some " technology lag". Ferchristsakes, look at the state of OpenGL then and now.

Your words are insulting to a man who has done much to change not only the way game engines (and not just the rendering part) are made but the way hardware are shaped. If you think Carmack has been given too much credit, perhaps you can do something about it beyond words on public forums. I look forward to your first game (don't take too long now).

 

Both wrong.
I explained why it was outdated... the rest is me getting annoyed, human nature, you know?

Funny that there are other games that have been released, or will be released soon, that have not been affected by this "technology lag" nearly as much.

There is a difference between what was, and what is.
Sure, Wolf3d, Doom, Quake, great... fantastic...
Doom3? Nah. Been done before and better. Heck, I even wrote an engine like that myself back in the GF2 days.
Why would I possibly look up to Carmack still, if even I myself have done the same stuff years ago? If I can do it, anyone can, I'm nothing special, just your average graphics programmer.
And it pisses me off that below-average programmers, or even non-programmers go on forums like these, spread all kinds of nonsense about Doom3, and when people who DO know what they are talking about, because they have coded the same stuff aswell, and moved on from there, explain what it's really like, they just get ridiculed and insulted.

There is no cure for stupidity.

You don't even know who I am. Perhaps you've been playing my games for a long time now?
That's another stupid thing about human nature. They assume that people they don't know are not capable of anything, and can't possibly be smarter or more experienced than they are.

 

Except that nobody else has yet produced the game that combines the shadowing and the polygon-based bump mapping that Doom 3 has. Sure, we've all seen tech demos for some time that used Doom 3-esque technology, but it's still the first game to do it.

 

I doubt if there ever will be realtime engine without preprocessing. Even raytracing, no matter how unified is it, has to do some preprocessing )data structure for efficient ray queries). There will always be hacks unless there will be some revolution in physics that would allow the construction of massively parallel processors capable of simulating universe.

Doom 3 must do some preprocessing, however not to do lightning but to do efficient occlusion culling.

I wonder if it's still using Quake-style PVS+BSP, or something more dynamic.

 

No, but as I said before, that's just a formality, not something revolutionary.

 

Yes, but that would be unified preprocessing, and it would not alter the lighting system in anyway, it is merely there to accelerate the processing.

No it does actually use preprocessed lightmaps, as stated many times before. And these lightmaps introduce limitations on the lighting and animation system. All been said many times before.
Ofcourse you can just continue to ignore it.

 

A Doom 3-equivalent has been done before, and better? When and where? I don't consider tech-demos to be games. There is a huge difference between producing a game and a demo.

 

That's not the issue here really - it's the way you post replies and hold discussions. You bite every single time; you let your personal feelings dictate what you post in a technical discussion. If you're a lone voice in a debate, the only way you can ever expect people to follow your side/point of view is via thorough explanations and/or demonstrations - I'd be out of job in an instant if I had to reply to all of my students who disagreed with my explanations with comments such as "I find your ignorance amusing".

I tell you one thing though, if I'd written a Doom3-copy engine several years ago, I'd be flogging it for all it's worth right now. Opinions and technical discussions aside, the D3 engine is clearly the flavour of the month/year and anything as good must surely sell as well.

 

When we talk about real-time rendering, "accelerating" (as you call it) is essential so that you don't have to wait ages for rendering to complete.

Here is my point: Ray-tracing is proven (theoretically) to have better scalability that z-buffer rendering. (It's only much harder to do in hardware than z-buffer). But even if we had ray-tracing GPU-s, we would have to resort to some hacks to update the scene hierarchy. That makes me think hacks in games will be there for at least next 50 years. (hacked != unified).

Can't you read? I wrote that Doom's preprocessing is not about lightning, it's about culling.

 

But that's another point altogether.

How exactly are lightmaps not about lighting?

 

I believe we were talking about the rendering system here, and the technology used therein.
In which case, Doom3 isn't very revolutionary at all. Everything is based on concepts that have been in use for years. Heck, the main components of Doom3, namely shadowvolumes and Blinn-Phong per-pixel shading date back to the 70s.
They weren't used in games before for a simple reason: we didn't have the hardware. Obviously that would change eventually, now it did. Revolutionary? I don't think so.

 

Hey, if you attack me and talk rubbish, I make fun of you, you ask for it.
I have already given thorough explanations many times before, I am sick of it. Everyone who still doesn't get it... well, they will never get it. And therefore they should stay out of the discussion, because it is apparently out of their league... But instead, probably because of some emotional bond with Carmack, they find it necessary to attack me.

There is a big difference between writing a simple rendering system like Doom3's, and actually producing a full game with all the AI, physics, and whatever content the game requires.
We were discussing the rendering system, I made a similar one years ago, and I bet a lot of people have. That part doesn't impress me. The content of Doom3 is nice, but that has little to do with Carmack's work.

Also, we have yet to see how well Doom3's engine will actually sell. So far, I only know of Quake 4 using it, and that game is not entirely independent of ID anyway, obviously. I wouldn't be surprised if the Source-engine will be a lot more popular.

 

By your definition of 'revolutionary,' id hasn't ever produced anything worthy of your praise.

Theory is always going to be far ahead of application.

 

Not at all. Wolfenstein clearly was a novel approach to rendering, and obviously it created a new game genre: the first-person shooter.
Which is... revolutionary.
Doom may have been more evolutionary though, it improved upon the raycasting method.
Quake pretty much was an application of standard concepts, much like Doom3... for the first time, hardware was fast enough to do it in realtime.

Doom3... I see that as Quake + normalmaps + stencilshadows + hacks.
Anyone who knows Tenebrae knows Doom3 wasn't the first
Ironically, Tenebrae applied Doom3's concepts (just like 3DMark03)... problem was just that Doom3 got delayed.
If anything, the prize for 'first full stencil-shadow game' should go to Tenebrae.

 

So the renderer is the easiest/shortest/smallest part of the total workload in a game development?

The next AvP game will be using D3 and RTCW2 will almost certainly use it; there was another one too but I can't remember off the top of my head. Source definitely has a far larger confirmed list though.

 

Scali if you are so important why do you have a morbid fear of saying who you are? Your arguments rely heavily upon your supposed expertise and opinions, so it is only logical that people might wonder about your experience. Why not show what you actually coded years ago, or tell us who you supposedly are so we can all see how right you are instead of just blathering?

 

Lightmaps are not the only kind of preprocessing that is done by real-time engines like doom 3.

 

I wonder why you are talking about doom's lightning over and over. How does doom differ from other games when it comes to visible surface determination (or occlusion culling)? Is it PVS+BSP?