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E3 Doom III Preview
Warped-Reality writes "GameSpy has a new Doom III Preview covering aspects of the storyline and how Doom III will be different from the rest of the FPS genre. It includes some pictures of the E3 Doom III demo booth. As the article says, "This is DOOM III, and it's going to scare you to hell."" Looking at these images, I can only say two things: Wow and Cool Toilets. Update: 05/22 19:55 GMT by M : There's also an interview with Carmack giving a few more details about the game.
This makes me sad. I was kind of looking forward to this one since I kept hearing about the multiplayer cooperative aspects of the older Dooms. Visions of scary multiplayer co-op firefights (punctuated, perhaps, with moments of one or more teammates running away from something particularly surprising, screaming like little girls) danced in my head. Now I find out that maybe, if I'm a vewy, vewy good boy, there might just be a little deathmatch slapped on the side for me. Ya-a-aa-wn
It's pretty, I'll give it that. It just may not be my type, though. We'll see.
While there's no denying this looks stunning, particularly the environments, I can't help but notice the characters are all pretty low poly. They're hardly better than Quake 3 level it seems. At first, sure, they look pre-rendered almost, but you can see poly edges around the sihlouettes first, and then on closer inspection you can start to see sharp angles elsewhere within the models.
Carmack's trick of using high poly models for lighting and shading calculations and then projecting that onto lower poly models may make for some amazing visuals, great damage effects, and much better facial animation, but IMO the low poly in game models need to have maybe 2x the detail just to make a good base for the higher poly lighting/shading calculations. That or hope that all the next gen cards have N-patch support or some other form of HOS support *and* that it can be used with Doom 3. Otherwise it looks like it's going to be an incredible engine that will be let down a bit by low poly characters. No doubt the in game assets and performance are still being tweaked of course.
- JavaJones
Anyway, I saw DOOM 3. It's very cool and all, but when you really see the action, and when you see the monsters, um.. it kinda makes you feel DOOM 3 is attack of the clones. There are about 4 different monsters that I saw, and all other monsters were clones of these monsters. I mean, the big fat belled one, it's very cool and all, but does ID need to have 100's of the same monster running around? What's the logic here? It's the same friggging model and all. I know it worked OK for other monsters in older quakes -- dooms, but when the detail is so high and when every mosther looks like the other, it's kinda silly.
I've been wondering (if John reads this too), if the individual monsters could be changed a bit, just slightly, so they wont look so repetitive and clone like, that would be just great for the single player experience.. Not just the body color, you could slighty alter the model as well, maybe define a model constrain and randomly generate models on the fly? I seriously didnt feel at ease looking at the multiples of the same model.
Hans B. Ammafui.
There are differences.
Doom 3:
- Single player oriented
- Years ahead of the technology of Quake 3, and rightfully so as q3 was released in 99
- Has a story line
Quake 3:
- Multi-player oriented
- Starting to age a bit, but still PLENTY of fun
- has no story line
Doom seems like it will be a more 'realistic' eye candy rich game. Where Quake 3 is a fast paced multiplayer game with more of a fantasy set of physics.
You've expressed your opinions on using Java as the language to replace DLLs in the past. Two of the reasons you gave for not using Java were the bleeding edge nature of the APIs which added more chaos to the already chaotic Quake stew than you were willing to give, and the speed of execution. Although it isn't as efficient as straight C code, what are your impressions with Perl since you learnt it a while back? Would you consider writing the client and server game logic modules in a multiplayer oriented game in a different language from each other?
Early during the development of Quake 2, Brian Hook said in an interview once saying that you said that you would most likely be a leader in the real time gaming graphics field until around 2004. If this is an accurate recollection of something you said at that time, what did you foresee happening that might raise the question of your respectable dominance in the realtime gaming graphics field?
Doom is going to be using hardcoded DLLs again, since the move to C++ negated your ability to use LCC retargeted to bytecode. This has, most likely caused you to see the significance of standardizing the bytecode instead of the language. Are there any plans in the future for retargeting compilers of other languages for the purpose of security and cross platformism wins with using virtual machines? If so, will they use the same bytecode as Quake 3 did?
You have expressed enthusiasm many times for the NeXT STeP environment and how you might still be developing under it if there was support for target hardware. Have you looked at the functionality of GNUStep, which is a project attempting to close the functionality of NeXTSTeP?
In every Id product, the bugs that have crept up are rarely related to the renderer and therefore rarely likely to be code you wrote. Do you feel that you produce few uncaught or unreproducible bugs in general compared to most developers, or is it because the renderer is so throughly tested in the development of idgames due to it's fundamental placement in the games architectures?
Even if it wasn't the intent of Doom I/II they were both somewhat scary. I still remember playing Doom late at night - with all the lights off and the sound WAY up - and just beings scared shitless when an Imp or some other god aweful creature makes a sound just as you round the corner run smack into their ugly face.
Boy those were the days =)
I can't wait for doom III, it sounds and looks great.
Yeah, and the fact that the monsters shot each other too.. :)
Open the door, 30 guys in there. They see you and start shooting. But one hit another, and the chaos begin. The door closes, and you wait outside, just hearing the shooting and screeming inside. When everything is calmed down a bit, you open the door again and find lot's of corpses, and just one or two monsters alive..
That was fun.
Or just type iddqd and run through the level "collecting" monsters, bring them to a big room and watch them fight.
I hope so! They deserve it!
I am not buying my video card so for an improved MS Office experience (I dont view many Word documents that need environmental bump mapping or Z-buffering).
I am buying my video card for the SOLE purpose of playing Doom III. In fact, I am not going to purchase a new video card until Doom III comes out, at which time I shall buy the latest greatest model.
Already started to save my $500.
Not to nitpick, but the plot description sounds exactly like half life's plot. An isolate research facility is experimenting with teleportation qhen things go bad and people start turning into zombies. Some members of the upper management have questionable motives...
I am sure they will go in a bit of a different direction than half life, but hte starting point seems the same.
While Doom was the first Really Good FPS, it was still a take off of several other stories, it is no more orginial than Half-Life is related to Doom.
True that. Saving humanity from the spawns of hell is probably one of the oldest plot devices in human story-telling history. Beowulf (the book not the cluster) is the oldest known work in the English language and basically follows the same plot line.
There is nothing new under the sun.
I find it hilarious that the movie runs at 5 fps even though it's 100MB. If they had used mpeg or something similar, I bet they could've had it at 20 fps for the sams size. I call that movie a slideshow, not a movie.
I truely like that they are focusing heavily on the single player line. I single player is integral to most games as it introduces new players (even veterans) to the world and gives them a significant challenge (well, ideally) well before they have to lay anything on the line pridewise in the online arena.
Quake3 felt like it detracted from this a little bit. Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but it wasn't the same challenge as running like a mother fucker from a dozen cacodemons when you're only armed with a chainsaw.
What I think is sorely missing from a lot of the games arriving now is CO-OP! Well implemented Co-op has been very high on the wishlists of a lot of the gamers I know for a very long time. A game designed to scale with player numbers. So far the only game I've seen that remotely does this is Diablo2 and a few MUDs (yeah, you remember those?). Maybe Condition Zero will change that. Maybe Doom 3. Who knows, but someday, I want a really well thought out Co-op game.
Minimal multiplayer support... It might not be such a bad thing. As long as the SDK's are in place, the mod community can build things as good (or better) than the original game (Counterstrike anyone?). Good single player levels are hard to find.
Linux/Mac support... "In actuality, DOOM III is currently being developed for the PC and PC only - there could well be an Xbox version at some point (John Carmack is a member of the Xbox advisory committee), but that decision hasn't been made yet, and probably won't be for some time." *sigh* I just hope that it'll run on Win98; I'm not buying XP from Doom 3.
Weapon balance... Hopefully id will learn from Valve and get the weapon strength balanced with monster "hit points". Half-Life was fun because you didn't need a BFG10K (except for the Garg). Unlike Quake 2, where circle-strafing with a chaingun or hyperblaster (or railgun, etc) didn't even phase most monsters...