Doom3 and OpenGL2.0

Screaming Lunatic writes "John Carmack has decided to write an OpenGL2.0 rendering path for Doom3. You can read his .plan or you can finger him. This will be huge for the development of OpenGL2.0. Video cards are typically benchmarked with respect to the framerate when running Quake3. Future benchmarks will be based on Doom3. This means IHVs will be somewhat forced to write good OpenGL2.0 implementations."

Comments

Easy Target

[CaffeineAddict2001]

You can read his .plan or you can finger him.

Okay, this is just too easy. This is +5 Funny bait if I ever saw it. It's just a matter of time.

Re:Easy Target

[MattW]

It's mildly amusing that this comment is getting modded down at the same time as it is being proven utterly accurate.

Re:Easy Target

[Jester998]

"You can read his .plan or you can finger him."

... but it's so hard to choose!

Re:Easy Target

[Ironfist_ironmined]

You can read his .plan or you can finger him.

I guess they are just coming up with more interesting ways of getting paid for this stuff.

__DUCKS__

Re:Easy Target

[sydneyfong]

No, it's not an XOR!
What keeps you from doing both?

Re:openGL

[elite lamer]

Yeah, it also sells video cards.

And why would this be a good thing?

[PissingInTheWind]

DirectX has already won. OpenGL is dead.

Why people can't just agree that it's a nice, easy standard, very powerful, flexible and open?

oops, excuse me for a while, I think I forgot to take my medication today.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[MrResistor]

Maybe because it isn't open?

I'll believe OpenGL is dead when I can run all my DirectX games on Linux.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Dwonis]

Lol. Yeah, and OSX is dying too, since it's based on BSD, which is clearly dead. ;-)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint .. It was supposed to be a joke.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Squarewav]

as fun as it is to mock all things microsoft but directx has some very big advantages over opengl, most notably is the fact it works well with nearly every 3d card on the market from crappy SiS and trident to powerful nvidia and ati, dont forget that most pcs sold today come with some pretty crappy built in video cards that simply wont do opengl the only major disadvantage is its not portable to linux&mac but when you look at the numbers your more likely getting more pc customers by using directx then linux and mac users under opengl

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[NanoGator]

It's not just games. Lightwave is cross platform (Mac -- PC, no Linux yet) and it relies HEAVILY on OpenGL. Nearly all 3D rendering progs use OpenGL for the interface.

Personally, I'm all for anything that gets OpenGL development pushed. The more supported extensions, the more feedback I get from LW w/o having to render.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 funny, if I wasn't on the moderation-blacklist
- And that guy who actually modded this post down would get some justice through meta-moderation..

"The world is hard but unfair"

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[SirKodiak]

That is a valid point regarding market share.

However, how many of those crappy built in video cards are going to be able to run Doom3? In the case of Doom 3 you won't get any more potential customers by supporting PCs with crappy built in cards. On the other hand, there are Linux and Mac users with nice graphics cards that are capable of handling the graphics in Doom 3, but can't do DirectX. So in the case of Doom 3 using OpenGL instead of DirectX makes sense even just from a marketshare perspective.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Squarewav]

your right, I wasnt trying to say that opengl does not have its place, if a developer wants to make a visually stunning game such as doom3 or quake3 or whatever directx just wont do, however simpler games such as froger or games ware you want the largest share possible with minimal tech support problems such as everquest directx is a better choice

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[jeffehobbs]

"I lost 5 karma points over mentioning I had a gf. Lesson learned: envy = troll.", NanoG

Are you quoting yourself in your .sig?

Maybe that's where the karma points went...

~jeff

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really trust microsoft to write efficient and stable code that will be used in every game? In a game like Doom3, you're searching for performance tweaks on every line.. and you just can't do that when you rely on microsoft crap. (heh.. why don't all the good xbox games use directx then?)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Disevidence]

No, you lost karma points because you insisted on having mobile phones in cinemas, and argued the point rather poorly.

When will you learn to grow up?

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, If that were true, I wouldn't have gotten so many 'why are you at a movie without your gf?!' responses.

As for growing up: I got flamed for saying "jamming cell phones is too extreme." People called me names, one guy threatened to 'break my nose', and so on. I'm the one that needs to grow up? Either everybody who participated in that thread has waaaaaaaaaaay too much emotional involvement with cell phones (go see a counselor if you do...), or they couldn't stand the concept that I have a cell phone with a girlfriend to talk to.

Either way, I'm not the one who needs to grow up. The people who disagree and call me names for it are the ones that need to show some maturity.

The fact that my sig would make you attack me over it (in the wrong thread, no less) proves that some of you take things way too seriously.

So, as you said, grow up. It's just a discussion forum. There is 0 need to get hostile.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[DetrimentalFiend]

They are--it's called OpenGL 2.0.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother telling somebody to grow up when you should obviously take your own advice. That's why you got modded down, dumbfuck.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely they were jealous because of your phone rather than that ugly-ass cow you call a girlfriend :-)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you lose karma points because you usually come off like an arrogant prick just RogerBorg.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but most game companies don't give a damn about the small population stupid enough to try gaming in linux. I am sure they will really miss that target 1% of the computer population that thinks linux is anything more then a server OS.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if I care what an AC has to say. You don't have to say anything intelligent when you don't have to worry about people knowing who you are.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Tokerat]

When will you grow up and realize that not all cel phone users are irresponsible?

Maybe we should ban cars from the road because some people are inconsiderate drivers? Disallow programming computers because someone could write a virus?

Smarten up, tough guy.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Disevidence]

Did i say i was for or against mobile phones, fuckface? No, i said he argued the point rather poorly, which is my own fucking opinion, not fact. Don't treat it as such.

He also needs to learn that you get modded down and modded up, not matter what. He gotted modded down, and feels like its his duty to tell the whole world that.(Thats why i said he needs to grow up)

Moderation never works, and someone with your UID should realise that. Nanogator can't handle slashdot moderation.

Normally im pretty polite, but sometimes people who think they're better than everyone else get to me. Nanogator is one such person.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Disevidence]

Listen, whether or not you want mobile phones or not in cinemas is really none of my business. But complaining about being modded down at slashdot is really, really, pointless. I mean, i don't post anything insightful or interesting, yet i've got a bonus. /. moderation is completely random. Don't treat it as a personal attack.

I like leaving sigs on, because there are some witty and informative sigs. But yours, in bold nonetheless, is annoying. At least turn off the bold, and if possible, stop quoting yourself.

And i didn't attack your sig. I attacked the comment you made in reply to someone asking about the sig. FFS.

And the comment about someone being an AC, when you yourself posted as an AC, was pure gold. (Unless that wasn't you, in that case i will apologize.)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Disevidence]

Like i care about being modded down. Unlike some slashdoterians, i think karma != penis size.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to come up with an original idea, you retard.

they have been saying opengl is dead for 4 fucking years.

by the time opengl is gone, so will directx, microsoft, and all of the money your parents give you so you can buy your Geforce999 to run the latest microcrap.....and i won't give a shit about any of it much anymore.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[jcast]

How did this get (Score:0) when NanoGator usually posts at (Score:2)?

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Dwonis]

OpenGL is dead.

Yeah! Just like BSD...

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Dwonis]

Aw crap. I just made the same reply as I did earlier today...

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Tokerat]

Well, in my defense, this is /. and someone with my UID knows implied meaning and hostility are rampant here.

Makes it rather hard to correctly assess unknown users' comments, and for that matter, moderate properly.

We need a <sarcasm> tag.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid *and* repetitive. What a combo.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Dwonis]

Hah! And moderated up! Welcome to Slashdot, I guess. :-)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[NanoGator]

"But complaining about being modded down at slashdot is really, really, pointless. I mean, i don't post anything insightful or interesting, yet i've got a bonus. /. moderation is completely random"

You have no fucking idea why I put that sig up. I was being personally attacked. What happened was during that thread, a moderator went through some of my previous posts and modded them 'overrated'. Since I have no clue who that person is, I just put that sig up so I could take a poke at him. I think it worked because more of my stuff got modded down. Eventually I got sick of losing karma over it, so I moved on to the AC that kept bothering me. Hell, I still have messages from him coming in. I don't care about being modded down, but I do hate when people hold grudges against me for days at a time. That topic happened two days ago and as of last night I was still getting comments on it on what a yuppie jerk I am. It's childish. My only defense against a shitty moderator is... well I don't really have any. I had to be creative. It's the same thing with AI's. (Anonymous Idiots)

As for quoting myself: I'm doing it because people are bugging me about it, and it's funny to read the dumb-ass replies. People seem to get reaaaaally upset over it, and it's stupid. When I get bored with it, I'll take it down. (Or maybe I will when somebody asks me nicely.)

The original reason I did that had nothing to do with ego or whatever, it had to do with people not realizing that it was my sig and not part of my post. There was a thread that got out of control (like that one you know about) where everybody used a metaphor to try to illustrate that I'm a selfish idiot. So I put in my sig "dont use a stupid metaphor, it means you dont get what i said." A couple of people responded, not realizing it was a sig vs. part of the post. So I quoted my self out of silliness. And nobody said anything, so I let it go. It got popular last week. Heh.

I would have taken it down like a week ago if I wasn't still getting a 'youre a tool' response here and there. It's funny watching people try to be insulting. I did have one guy make a funny response, the rest were about the quality of Bob Saget insult.

As for 'attacking or not attacking my sig': Just shut up! I don't CARE what you think! Mainly, because the whole thing about my sig is really a private affair. You wouldn't be seeing it now had Slashdot given me a way to know who modded me for what. At least then I could report it to somebody and get this moderator to leave me alone.

"And the comment about someone being an AC, when you yourself posted as an AC, was pure gold. (Unless that wasn't you, in that case i will apologize.)" -- Heh I did that on purpose. It was one of those "heh, that'd be funny" moments. :) The joke there is that when somebody responds to it, I won't get a message, and I'll never see it.

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[Zathrus]

What a load of hooey.

I favor OpenGL over DirectX because OpenGL is an open standard and available on multiple platforms. DX is an ad hoc standard pushed by MS, not by anyone else.

That said, if you think you can't make a "visually stunning" game in DX, you haven't played many DX games recently. Go take a look at DungeonSiege as one example. In fact, I'd bet that most of the more visually impressive games use DX, simply because the vast majority of games use DX. OpenGL doesn't give you some magical visual improvement over DX. Nor does DX give you the same over OpenGL. It's all about support (to the programmer, not to the end user) and knowledge bases.

The reason that EQ looks like crap is that their engine is shit and their graphic artists wouldn't know how to reduce poly count if their lives were at stake.

DX also doesn't give you any real advantage over OpenGL for end user support -- people have just as many (if not more) problems with DX as they do with OpenGL. Go talk to Verant about the joys they had upgrading the EQ engine to DX8.1 last year. And how they desupported every Win95 user in the process.

As a final note, it certainly seems that DX is what's driving graphics board features today (or graphic board features are driving DX... one of the two, I'm not in the industry). DX9 will have features that aren't in any currently available boards - but the new ATI and Nvidia chips will be fully DX9 compliant. I'm sure that OpenGL can support the same features through extensions, but the whole schema for OpenGL extentions is hokey and one of the reasons that most developers shy away from it to start with (of course, DX has fallen down much the same path...)

Re:And why would this be a good thing?

[fferreres]

Do you think Id has been making Linux ports and supporting OpenGL just to get some extra bucks (if they ever managed to cover the porting costs).

I'm not trolling really. I just happen to think he has a nice attitude towards open standard, always had, is unbiased in comparing card, etc. and is, all in all a faily good guy.

I believe they do the posts because they don't sell themselves, they like Unix/Linux and that's about it. It's _not_ about the money, I could be on it.

Fingers

[Wrexen]

..or you can finger him...
*pictures thousands of /.ers fingering him at once*
I think this is going to be a very uncomfortable day for someone

Re:Fingers

[Huge Pi Removal]

If someone posted the goatse.cx pic at this point, would it be the first time ever it was ontopic?

Re:Fingers

[leuk_he]

Did they user finger for that picture or ....something else.

Anyway posting about goatse.cx is always reason to be moderated off-topic. (until Taco post about it)

Anyway if you smile about finger you must be a windows user.

Re:Fingers

[Wrexen]

Moderation Totals: Funny=4, Overrated=3, Total=7

What the mods giveth, the mods taketh away

Re:Fingers

[Helmholtz Coil]

..or you can finger him...

Reminds me of my job description, HR copied and pasted it straight from a generic description:

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occassionally required to stand; walk; sit; use hands to finger, handle or feel; stoop, kneel; and taste or smell.

I plan on retiring the day I'm asked to stoop/kneel and finger/taste anything.

Re:Fingers

[ipjohnson]

Alot of the unix commands still make me blush ... touch , unzip , finger , mount , unmount , sleep

And I've been a unix developer for 5 years ;-)

Re:Fingers

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, I don't think anyone has fingers big enough to do that to someone.

Re:Fingers

[Sir Spank-o-tron]

Let me guess, University of California?

Some other public institution ?

Re:Fingers

[ArsonSmith]

No it was on topic one other time back when it was really getting in all over the place.

If i remember right it was ranked at the top doing the code red virus outbreak with the heading:

This is what the new microsoft security hole looks like.

or something simiilar

Re:Fingers

[Helmholtz Coil]

Close...government contractor.

Don't tell me there're other poor souls with the same deal.

A Proverb

[GigsVT]

You can finger your girlfriend,
You can finger John Carmack,
But you can't get your girlfriend to write good vertex shading code!

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of /. is pasty 13 year olds with no lives, social skills, and a warped idea of what real adulthood is... and the rest wish they were still there... how many of them do you think have girlfriends to finger?

Re:A Proverb

[tswinzig]

What if your girlfriend IS John Carmack?

(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's even one, that's one too many.

Re:A Proverb

[FueledByRamen]

There is something wrong with that - Go see Penny Arcade for a good example of what it has done to [Gabe or Tycho, I don't remember which...]

Re:A Proverb

[Bruce Perens]

Hold out for a girlfriend who shades higher-order surfaces. Also, hold out for a girlfriend with higher-order surfaces!

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry! "womanfriend."

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

There IS something wrong with that. What are you, some kind of fucking faggot? This politically correct bullshit is fucking this country up. YES, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT

Re:A Proverb

[Listen Up]

Yes, yes, there is absolutely something wrong with that. Normal and correct is not always the same as politically correct. Not everything is right, natural, or normal just because it is different.

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, strange moderation today.

Re:A Proverb

[Anonymous Coward]

3D programmers and math nerds would get the joke. High-order surfaces make for better rendering than polygons. And high-order surfaces are those curvy ones.

Re:A Proverb

[Viper118]

And if she can, you'd better marry her.

Re:A Proverb

[joekool]

dude, you're thinking of john romero

Thankyou ! ! !

[Anonymous Coward]

That could make the difference between life and death for Open GL in the face of Direct X etc. Thankyou ID, even if I don't like your games!

Re:Thankyou ! ! !

[HishamMuhammad]

I wish I could mod you up.

Especially for the "I don't like your games" part :)

Re:Thankyou ! ! !

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't a troll. Moderators are starting to have trollitius - seeing trolls everywhere, even where they aren't :)

Huge

[SirSlud]

This is fantabulous. Yay. MS will not own yet another chunk of the architecture I rely on. Woot. Etc. :)

OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[dmarien]

Well firstoff I'd like to commend Carmack on his choice to utilize the new OpenGL extensions -- I think this is the absolute best thing for graphic cards to be focusing on. It levels the playing field and doesn't favour certain chipset manufacturers with propietary extensions.

Also, what are the (linux ported) open sourced applications (read: games) which use OpenGL for rendering?

Are they common? Would this possibly mean that a future port of Doom3 would be (more) easily done once the game is finished?

Also, does anyone know if there will be a supported version of Doom3 for Linux, or will we be relying on ported versions? If the latter is true, didn't Loki games file for Ch. 11? If they did, what is the likely hood of another company/group making the transistion. By the time Doom3 comes out I'll prolly buy a brand new system, and if I could throw linux on that brand new hardware and still play Doom3, well heck - that would be peachy :)

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[DudemanX]

Quake3 was all done in house by id for Win32, Linux, and Mac. Loki did not port Quake3 to Linux, they just distributed it. Carmack writes code using OpenGL specificaly because it's a cross-platform standard. I'm sure that in standard id tradition we'll have a simultaneous release of Doom3 for all of the above mentioned operating systems.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[EyeOn]

Loki games did file for Ch.11 (it's mentioned on their website). I doubt id will out-source the linux conversion to anyone else, but to the best of my knowledge there's been no offical word on the matter. A sound bet would be that they'll go back to doing what they did in the past and just do it themselves and release it via the web after releasing the win32 version for retail.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[Anthracks]

Though I don't know a whole lot about it, I would assume almost any 3D game you're playing under Linux uses OpenGL for its rendering. On Windows, the other big option is Direct3D from Microsoft, which for obvious reasons has never been ported to Linux. So I imagine some implementation of OpenGL is what the majority of 3D games running under Linux use.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the parent marked +3 interesting? Asking FAQs and thinking that porting and supporting are orthogonal concepts shouldn't encourage positive moderation points ;)

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Also, does anyone know if there will be a supported version of Doom3 for Linux, or will we be relying on ported versions?

id has released nearly simultaneous Linux binaries for all of their games (client and server) since Quake 1, and released Linux patches for Doom 1 and 2 as well. Loki was involved inasmuch as they published a retail box of Linux Q3; however, this was never really important because you could always get Linux Q3 by buying the Windows version and downloading a small patch from id. (Indeed, the retail Linux version sold poorly, probably because it was released a couple weeks after the Windows version and thus many people went the buy-Windows-and-download-patch route.)

I believe id has officially announced that Doom 3 will available for Linux (and Mac), but if not it's still a virtual certainty. id has always been a tremendous supporter of open standards; Carmack chose OpenGL over DirectX for Quake (and thereby single-handedly created the consumer OpenGL market), and in addition to working on Mac, Linux and Windows versions of all 3 Quake games simultaneously, released Doom ports for Next (id developed on Next workstations back then), Solaris, IRIX (I think, or maybe that was unofficial), and I believe even Linux on Alpha in addition to the already mentioned x86 Linux ports.

Again, id has always done the port themselves; most likely, you will have to buy the Windows version and download a patch which will almost certainly be available within days of release.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the retail Linux version sold poorly, probably because it was released a couple weeks after the Windows version and thus many people went the buy-Windows-and-download-patch route

Well, when the prices on the linux version dropped below that of the win version, I know that plenty (including myself) opted for the buy-linux-and-download-point-release route

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[demonbane]

If you look back around '98 in the FSF contributors list, you'll see John Carmack. And lets keep in mind that ALL the games that he's worked on up to and including Quake 2 have been GPL'd by now. I have heard that Carmack actually develops on a Linux box, but that's just speculation. Either way, a Linux version of Doom III is a certainty.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

And lets keep in mind that ALL the games that he's worked on up to and including Quake 2 have been GPL'd by now.

Very good point. (Not technically correct, as neither the id branded Commander Keen games nor any of the non-id branded games he has worked on are GPL'd...but all the important ones, yes.)

I have heard that Carmack actually develops on a Linux box, but that's just speculation.

No, he uses NT. Perhaps 2k or XP these days, but you'll notice he says "NT is definitely going to be the primary development platform for our next project, but I will be evaluating alternatives for a possible transition after that." That "next project" is Doom 3. (The interview was from Oct '99, late in the Q3:A development process.)

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

"The development/test platform is Windows 2000" for Doom 3.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 and OpenSource

[thre5her]

Then the next project was RtCW...

...which was done by Gray Matter. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Don't mod parent up before reading this.

[GigsVT]

http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/pc/carmack/index2.sh tml

I wish I could rip off Carmack's words and present them as my own, that would make me uber-leet like you.

Re:Don't mod parent up before reading this.

[Anonymous Coward]

next time make it a link you lazy cumguzzler.

Re:Don't mod parent up before reading this.

[GigsVT]

Heh, I'm glad the moderators heeded my advice, but I sure don't think my comment is worthy of +5. I'm flattered, but next time save your points for messages that are more than just troll warnings. :)

Re:Don't mod parent up before reading this.

[forged]

That was a beautiful interview. How come no-one seem to have noticed it before :(

Thank you for bringing it up !

MOD PARENT UP -- GOOD INFO

[Anonymous Coward]

Good info here, especially relating to the future use of DoomIII as a benchmark, versus QuakeIII.

Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[cculianu]

GREAT. Just when I managed to FINALLY get OpenGL 1.2 working in Linux, I have to now struggle with getting OpenGL 2.0 working. Can you say: sleepless nights and/or much frustration?

Also, I hope the card manufacturers get off their derriers and actually release OpenGL 2.0 drivers and libraries faster than like 2 years after they do it for Windows. Stupid MS loving bastardos!!

Isn't it about time

[CaffeineAddict2001]

You made a carmack icon? Impale it on a stick for extra grins.

Re:Isn't it about time

[sheetsda]

I believe it was Romero's head on the stick (last level of Doom2, but I think everyone here knows that...). In any case I know it wasn't Carmacks, he has blonde hair, not black.

Re:Isn't it about time

[CaffeineAddict2001]

It was. But like even in quake 3 they had the decapitated heads of Id employees scattered about.

Re:I'd read it if I could...

[FrEaK7782]

Hey, my company's firewall blocks it too. Suckage... I wonder if our companies are using the same stuff. Or *gasp* do we work at the same company??

Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[VenTatsu]

This won't force companies to write good OpenGL 2.0 drivers, it will only force them to write drivers that impement those functions that DOOM 3 uses, the other functions may not even be implemented properly or implemeted at all.

As a former VooDoo (various versions) owner this is just fine if you only want to play games made by a few big name companies, but if your like me and looking to play smaller or indy games you'll find that your lucky if the games even run.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[phriedom]

Good point, but at least we have something better than the card manufacturers only focusing on DirectX.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[Angron]

Getting them to provide some functionality is better than not getting any at all.

The difference between this situation and that of 3Dfx's minidrivers is that the mini-drivers were made on a per-game basis, with a separate .dll for each game on your system (i.e. a 3dfxgl.dll file in each of your quake, quake2, half-life) rather than on a system-wide basis (one .dll for any game you throw at it). IIRC, Carmack railed against them for this, and with Quake3 discontinued support of the minidriver implementations, requiring 3Dfx to get off its ass and produce a full working OpenGL ICD.

So I really don't think we'll have the same problem as the Voodoo cards had. Thankfully.

-A

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[Viking Coder]

It won't be very easy to selectively implement the parts of OpenGL 2.0 that DOOM 3 uses. It's kind of like the developers of gcc trying to pick which parts of C++ that DOOM 3 uses, and only support those. (It's probably easier to just do it right!)

I know what you're saying, but that kind of trickiness is much, much harder to pull of with OpenGL 2.0 than it was with OpenGL 1.x.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually all the "seperate DLLs" were the same files, just in different directories, probably to help stupid people figure out how to use the MiniGL. I know that's the case, as I did a FC on them and there's no difference. There are 4 different 3dfx MiniGLs out, all of which you can get at http://3dfxunderground.cjb.net if you're curious.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[NanoGator]

"This won't force companies to write good OpenGL 2.0 drivers, it will only force them to write drivers that impement those functions that DOOM 3 uses, the other functions may not even be implemented properly or implemeted at all."

I think you're being a little cynical, though there is some truth to what you're saying. I've heard of drivers being tweaked especially for Quake 3. Pretty nasty, eh?

The good news, though, is that the 3D Rendering market uses gaming cards. This is a case where if the card doesn't perform, actual money can be lost, and I'm reasonably sure most card manufacturers would rather avoid those potential problems.

If that's not enough, Nvidia has a form of 'global driver' that works on any of their chipsets. I have a feeling this idea may catch on. I personally trust NVidia and keep an eye on what they're up to. I'm a little hesitant with other cards like Radeon.

I do have a piece of advice for new card shoppers though: Best Buy has a pretty good return policy. You get 30 days price match and satisfaction guaranteed. CompUSA, though, is 14 days and I think they charge a restocking fee for returns. If you go shopping for a card, look for stores that have a policy similar to Best Buy. The reason I mention BB in particular is that you can order from the web and return at the store.

Cheers.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're near a Micro Center, they have a really good return policy too... 30 days, no restocking fee, no obnoxious "why" quiz... Plus they don't have a refrigerator department :)

disclaimer: I work for them.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[DetrimentalFiend]

I think you and others don't understand OpenGL 2.0 like the person you replied to. OpenGL 2.0 makes almost everything programable meaninging that there are much closer to infinite possibilites of how the program can use OpenGL. In 1.x everything was fixed and only had a few ways that things were typically done. Now it's doubtfull that two games will use OpenGL 2.0 quite the same. Sure there will be faster ways to pass the vertex data and generally smarter ways to write code, but I don't think we'll see anything to the same extent as with OpenGL 1.0.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[NanoGator]

"I think you and others don't understand OpenGL 2.0 like the person you replied to. OpenGL 2.0 makes almost everything programable meaninging that there are much closer to infinite possibilites of how the program can use OpenGL."

Interesting...

Question: How do they deal with all these possibilites? Do they compile a little dll with each game that gets called? *Confused*

Is there a layman's reference I can read about how OpenGL 2.0 works? I think you're right, I'm a little confused now.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[kryoptic]

It may not force companies to implement all the features, but if they want to compete, they will. Full compliance is what people are looking for. Personally speaking, when I go video card hunting, I make sure that the card I'm interested in fully supports whatever graphics API that is popular(OpenGL, DirectX). I won't settle for partial support/implementation. Also, if they don't implement all the features in the drivers, then why would they spend all that time to develop the hardware to support it? It seems to be a pretty good waste of resources. Finally, programmable vertex shaders and whatnot are what is going to be in store for the future, both in OpenGL and DirectX. Very likely a lot of the games that will be coming out will make use of these features, and so they will have to support them. It's kind of hard to partially implement the API when the API is primarily composed of programmable hardware.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[chris_oat]

Implementing a driver that only supports a subset of OpenGL2.0's functionality sounds just about as complex as implementing the entire API (this is particularly true for GL2.0 as it is currently spec'd). That being said, it would be a foolish move to develop a "DOOM3 GL" driver when it is inevitable that we'll be seeing a flood of new games using the Doom3 engine and these new games will probably extend and modify the GL2.0 rendering paths thus breaking any "just enough" drivers.

Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0

[cyborch]

Is there a layman's reference I can read about how OpenGL 2.0 works?

There's a very nice overview with more information here.

(google is your friend.)

Carmack's word is like a blessing from god himself

[DooBall]

He's todays modern day Leonardo da Vinci! His brain is an untapped resource. We need to tap into his brain directy. A digital connection from his brain straight to PC.

Sad and wonderful

[y8]

I really think that it's both sad and wonderful that gameplaying abilities drive graphics cards. It's sad that there's no better use for them and wonderful because, well hell ... they make for GREAT games!

Re:Framerates differ based on application.

[phriedom]

That is true, but entirely beside the point. Benchmarks are usually run with a prerecorded demo so that each video card/driver is asked to run exactly the same thing, and net lag and some game engine elements are not in the equation, just graphics.

This is a positive thing for open standards.

Doom Source

[Anonymous Coward]

void Mordor(Doom as Mountain){
One Doom::Ring to rule('') them(ALL)
One Doom::Ring to bind('') them(NULL)
One Doom::Ring to bring('') them(ALL)
In VRTX_SHADER("Darkness") bind('') them(NULL)

return Frodo;
}

Wait. Wrong doom... nevermind

Re:Doom Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, probably because...it's a magic function? Duh.

Re:Doom Source

[Anonymous Coward]

AHHAHAHAHAHHA!!

Stop it, you're killing us!

Re:Doom Source

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck i love slashdot. my day would not be as good without the smart asses cutting the retards. thanks...

re OpenGL2.0 and Opensource

[Anonymous Coward]

It will make it easier to port to linux or Mac or any other platform that uses OpenGL. The alternative is windows only direct X.

Doom 3 is only win/PC at this time.

You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because DoomIII uses OpenGL I don't believe card manufactures will race out to upgrade their OpenGL support. If a dozen or so games do, that's another story but to bend over for one game just doesn't make sense financial, especially since the other 95% of games use DirectX.

Sure my Nvidia 4400 might not get Doom to run as well as Serious Sam, Unreal II, Star Wars Galaxies, Neverwinter Nights, etc. etc. but who honestly cares? If Nvidia increases their support of OpenGL more power to em, that would be great, but one game won't decide the future, even if it is Doom III (Which I believe will fail to live up to hype).

Not intended as a flame by any means (it seems anything with a negative viewpoint is a 'flame'...whatever....) but there's a lot of hype on Doom III and some of it is deserved and some of it is just hype. I'm guessing it won't meet expectations when it does come out and won't be in the same spirit of the original Doom games (which were frag fests and fun not horror and lighting).

Let's also not forgot a general user who will have a higher end machine and not comprehend how their other games look gorgous and run exceptionally well and Doom III just doesn't meet their framerate and effects expectations due to the fact its in OpenGL instead of DirectX.

I hope they support both standards as DirectX isn't going away anytime soon and like it or not, it is a great set of tools which have helped bring about computer gaming to what it is today.

Got enough angst?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could rip off Carmack's words and present them as my own

There's no evidence that the parent ripped off Carmack, save for a lack of proper citation. And given the fact that the opengl link was munged, who's to say a link to the carmack article wasn't munged as well, or the quotes? He's clearly making a valid connection here, especially given the future use of DoomIII as a benchmarking tool.

Furthermore, the poster never claims authorship. Quit karma-whoring and do something useful.

Re:Got enough angst?

[Boiler99]

Considering that Slashcode munged the shtml part and not the poster...

Try to go read the article, the words are exactly as Carmack said without reference, that seems to me worth modding down.

Doom3 != Good OpenGl 2 Implementation

[RaboKrabekian]

this will mean that card makers write drivers that are *optimized for Doom 3's use of OpenGL 2*, not that they'll write good OpenGl drivers in general. This has been the case sicne Quake 2. Drivers are optimized to score well on Quake benchmarks above all else, which hurts their performnce in a more generalized sense. This will help adoption of OpenGL 2, but not as quickly or as robustly as many would like to see.

Re:Doom3 != Good OpenGl 2 Implementation

[dpilot]

Not necessarily bad news.

Look at it this way, a "Doom 3" OpenGL2 implementation at least gets it mindshare, and gets IHVs used to working with it. Back in the GLQuake days, there were a bunch of Quake-only OpenGL implementations.

But those restricted implementations eventually were dropped in favor of full ones. They were a good steppingstone.

Re:Doom3 != Good OpenGl 2 Implementation

[sgtsanity]

A Doom3-optimized version of OpenGL2 driver is better than no driver than all. Also, many in the industry take the advice of "The Carmack" rather seriously, and this may mean that more games will switch over to OpenGL2 drivers. Finally, Drivers and Implementations have always been a case of the Chicken and the egg. Carmack just gave us a chicken.

Re:Doom3 != Good OpenGl 2 Implementation

[YourGarbageMan]

Vendors optimize their drivers for the software that they expect their customers to run. How is that bad? Why wouldn't they optimize for the most popular software? If it wasn't for Quake, there probably wouldn't be OpenGL support at all in a popular sense.

Great!

[labratuk]

This is really great news. This was one area where OpenGL was under threat of being overrun by Direct3D and/or proprietary, vendor specific extensions.

In recent months I have become worried that OpenGL 2.0 would be dead in the water as a standard, because progress seemed slow. I was wondering whether we would ever see OpenGL 2.0 as an accepted standard. Now that is far more likely. This is definately a Good Thing as far as standards are concerned. Nice one, Mr. Carmack!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's progress IS slow. Horribly, horribly slow. Members of the board themselves were saying just a few months ago that if the 2.0 spec wasn't done damn soon they should all just packup and go home. 2.0 came out just before the bell. But that doesn't automatically give it another 10 years of life. They need to get their asses in gear and keep up now. No, standards need to lead, not merely keep up or trail as they frequently do.

It is quite amusing though that so many people think that OpenGL's future is dependant on Games. Oh how things have changed in the last 10 years...

Nothing like a little Carmack...

[mbourgon]

...to make me feel both ignorant and stupid at the same time. Really puts things in perspective. Sure, I may be smart, but there's no comparison.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Dr. Awktagon]

No kidding..

their implementation of hardware displacement mapping is NOT quad based. ... so even if we don't use it because of the geometry amplification issues, I think it will serve the noble purpose of killing dead any proposal to implement a quad based solution.

Yes! I was thinking the same thing myself! Geometry amplification is key here.

support for both the fallback ARB_ extension path (without specular highlights), and the NV10 NVidia register combiners path. ..... They don't support NV_vertex_program_1_1, which I use for the NV20 path, and when I hacked my programs back to 1.0 support for testing, an issue did show up..

Definitely, any fool could see that! Watch those extension paths!

A GL2 driver won't give any theoretical advantage over the current back ends optimized for cards with 7+ texture capability

It certainly won't! 7+ is definitely not the optimized back-end texture capability quad rendering shade vertex OpenGL. Specular highlight.. Phong.. wireframe.. raycasting ... shadow cache.. texture map.. bump map... uh.. BFG 9000!!

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[tswinzig]

Don't feel too bad, when you ask Carmack to speak about something other than 3D graphics, it sounds something like this:

John: My underwear have my name in them. Aye'm. They say John Carmack. These are definitely not my underwear. I get my underwear at K-Mart in Cincinatti, Ohio. Aye'm.

You: Did you fart? Did you fart, John? Did you fucking fart? How can you stand that, John? How can you fucking stand that?

John: I don't mind. Aye'm.

You: I'm gonna let ya' in on a little secret, John. K-Mart sucks.

John: Five minutes 'til Wapner.

You: OK, back to your area of normalcy, John. If you were going to draw a cube, what lengths for x, y, and z would you use?

John: 82, 82, 82.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Pancake]

Yeah carmack is great. He's a really smart guy, but he chose to waste his life coding pc games. He could have been doing something really productive, changing the world, but instead just makes games were you shoot people with guns. Pathetic.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Ralph Wiggam]

He has a custom built 1000 HP Ferrari. You don't see a lot of those parked outside of FermiLab.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a physicist who has a Dodge Viper GTS... you know, V10, 460 HP... it may not quite compare with Carmack's wheels but you gotta admit it's not too shabby.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Coward]

Farking hilarious!

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[MrResistor]

Well, I know a retired physicist whose pension pays over $250k/year. He only drives a Lexus, but hey, he's retired.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Forkenhoppen]

Quad-based geometry has to be converted back to triangles at some point for rendering anyways. Since this can be done two ways (quads don't have to be square, or even equilateral, but imagine a sandwich on texas toast; you can cut it top left to bottom right or top right to bottom left) geometry can look slightly different with different implementations. If the points don't exist on a plain, then the normal won't be correct either, which is another problem. (ie; What do you do if your quad's warped?)

Also, if your triangles don't map perfectly with the texture, you'll get tearing along the crease between the two triangles. To fix this, you have to subdivide the triangles further until it's no longer as noticeable. It's a real bother..

ARB_ path refers to what we're used to; multiple texture rendering stages, dot3 bump mapping and the like. Stuff that works on Geforce 2s, ATi Radeons, etc. These are standards agreed on by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, usually extensions that will be promoted to being part of the standard in the next version of OpenGL.

The NV20 path is for Geforce 3 and up. A vertex program is NVidia terminology for vertex shader. Assuming the OpenGL version numbers reflect the DirectX ones, version 1.0 was a holdover from pre-release; it's missing a register that's required to do index/palette-based matrix skinning. 1.1 has this register. Other than that, there is no difference.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why 82?

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Coward]

why not 82?

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there were four toothpicks left in the box...

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[some guy I know]

"Also, if your triangles don't map perfectly with the texture, you'll get tearing along the crease between the two triangles"

I've never understood what the purpose of GL_QUAD_STRIP was if it doesn't interpolate the texture, normals, etc., between all four points of each quad.
You may as well use a tri-strip.

Also, it would be nice if it interpolated when the four vertices were non-coplanar, although I can understand why it doesn't.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[Iscariot_]

The "Aye'm" stuff that Carmack does is called Tourette Syndrome.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack...

[prator]

The parent comment made me laugh. You not only made me laugh, you literally made me crap my pants. Now I have to figure out what to do with the pants.

-prator

But at least

[germinatoras]

...they're using it in the first place. The original "mini-GL" driver for GLQuake was wildly successful even though it was only a partial implementation of OpenGL 1.x. Down the road, we now have full hardware openGL implementations, which probably would never had happened without the initial momentum that GLQuake caused. The video card vendors will never release OpenGL drivers for their hardware if they have no demand for it - this accountment will give them just that. There is now a business case for assigning developer hours to the project.

Besides, what would you rather have? An impetus for groundbreaking work on a hardware OpenGL 2.0 implementation, or another ringing endorsement for DirectX 8?

What I would really like

[javilon]

Is the Doom3 test been released about a month or maybe two weeks before the windows test.

In previous releases idsoftware has released test versions of their games before the full release, in order to do some beta testing.

If they decide to release a linux version of Doom3, and given Carmack's good attitude towards open source and OpenGL, I really really would love if they go and piss off Mr Gates by releasing the test for Linux first.

I bet that a zillion gamers would install Linux just to be able to test Doom3. They have been waiting for years!!

Re:What I would really like

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

If they decide to release a linux version of Doom3, and given Carmack's good attitude towards open source and OpenGL, I really really would love if they go and piss off Mr Gates by releasing the test for Linux first.

Could happen. For Q3, id released the first test for Mac only, to keep the beta testing group small enough for the first round. (Later tests were of course released for Windows, once the first round of bugs was ironed out.)

I bet that a zillion gamers would install Linux just to be able to test Doom3. They have been waiting for years!!

Wouldn't that be a hoot. Anyways, that just might be the reason for id *not* to release the D3 test on Linux first; it's a lot easier and cheaper for gamers to install Linux to run the D3 test than it is to install Mac OS X, so the test group might not stay small enough for their purposes.

OTOH, the main purpose of the Q3 test was to iron out netcode issues, stuff they couldn't easily test in the lab. As D3 is focused heavily on single player and probably will not contain much new in the way of netcode, they might even do without a test altogether...

Re:What I would really like

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were true then there would be no Mac users, they would have switched to Windows to play games. 1 out of 100,000 users tops.

Re:What I would really like

[FreeUser]

If they decide to release a linux version of Doom3, and given Carmack's good attitude towards open source and OpenGL, I really really would love if they go and piss off Mr Gates by releasing the test for Linux first.

I bet that a zillion gamers would install Linux just to be able to test Doom3. They have been waiting for years!!

That would really rock.

I have friends flocking to GNU/Linux anyway (literally people I do not do any evangelizing to coming up and asking me to install GNU/Linux on their systems ... its truly amazing how many lay people are simply sick of Microsoft in virtually every resepct), but this would be a remarkable thing from the coolness factor point of view ("now you get to try out Doom 3 weeks ahead of all your friends who run the 'Doze")

Even cooler: ship a bootable CD that starts up GNU/Linux, snatches the network settings from the windows hard drive, and runs the game, allowing Windows users to run Linux+Doom3 without having installed Linux, and never release a windows version [evil grin]. No game or OS installation required, and no Microsoft compromises in speed or stability required. Well, one can dream [grin]

Re:What I would really like

[Jondor]

I bet that a zillion gamers would install Linux just to be able to test Doom3. They have been waiting for>years!!

Yeah, and they would rush back to windows at the release of the next big title. In the meantime they would endlessly complain about everything which was to complicatied for their single-minded view.

If you want get people to use linux, they have to come for a better reason. That they can play their games under linux too is a very nice bonus.

Re:What I would really like

[bzzzt]

Could happen. For Q3, id released the first test for Mac only, to keep the beta testing group small enough for the first round. (Later tests were of course released for Windows, once the first round of bugs was ironed out.)

Nope, the first Q3 test was for Linux; after that the Mac and windows versions.

Re:What I would really like

[DeadMeat (TM)]

This actually happened with Q3Test; they released Mac first, then Linux, and finally Windows. Carmack wanted to go in order of least gamers to most in order to shake out the bugs before it hit a really wide audience.

I seriously doubt Apple or Red Hat's sales jumped much overnight over it. A few gaming sites with way too much money on their hands bought iMacs to try it out, but that's about it. Installing a new OS (or switching hardware platforms entirely!) is an awfully daunting task for a couple of weeks of early play.

Re:What I would really like

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Even cooler: Doom3OS. Screw using an existing OS - let id Software take a crack at developing a microkernel. We've seen what they can do with 3D engines, so let's see what they could do with OSes.

Re:What I would really like

[davew2040]

Everybody needs to start somewhere, and most people need a reason to switch (especially those weened entirely on Microsoft, who are used to changes being very hazardous). The Microsoft machine has a powerful marketing capacity, but it's not too difficult to pick up on the advantages of Linux, or of open source. Sure, newcomers will complain, but a few of them will stick with it. Some of these gamers are some really smart people who, importantly, care about what happens in the computing world (people who only use their computers for spreadsheets and word processors typically don't).

Linux has a place in the world. Please don't sabotage it by assuming that everyone has to be a network administrator or a programmer to benefit from it.

Re:What I would really like

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Nope, the first Q3 test was for Linux; after that the Mac and windows versions.

Bzzzt, wrong. (Sorry, had to say that.)

Q3test 1.0 was released for Mac on April 24, 1999; the first q3test release for Linux, 1.03, came out on April 29. The first q3test client for Win32, 1.05, was released May 10.

Re:What I would really like

[Now15]

Hate to break it to you, but you're wrong (JK, wanna back me up here? ;)).

IIRC, he released for MacOS first because it had the most consistent hardware, thus allowing one array of bugs to be fixed before moving to more complicated systems.

I suspect in the case of game playing, Windows would be the most complicated platform, as it'd support more 3D hardware, have a wider array of driver versions, and codebases (NT or 98, anyone?).

So it wasn't ordered from least gamers to most gamers, it was ordered from most consistent to most complicated.

Simon

Re:What I would really like

[Jondor]

Sure, It's just that I'm sure that people who change OS for a single game change back as easy for an other game.

And don't forget, even administrators like to play games (just installed scummvm to reply Day of the Tentacle! ;)

John Carmack

[RichiP]

If there was any doubt of it before, this finally proves it: John Carmack, You Da Man!

I've been reading the OpenGL 2.0 whitepaper and it has a lot of things I like. Let's just hope that 3DLabs, et al. will finish with it soon.

I Can't Wait...

[$0 31337]

... For this game to come out! I just went on my super cool linux box and renamed all my OpenGL1.2.1 files to OpenGL2.0.0!!! I am soooo ready for doom3!

Re:I Can't Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

your attempt is futile without using:

ldconfig

I feel so ashamed to be compelled to correct you in such a way. I feel ashamed more of myself than of you. Haven't I taught you everything there is to know about trolling, Son? I don't think I can live with myself. (*cries) (*blam******thud*)

Whatever became of Precision Insight?

[dpilot]

That was where much of the Linux Mesa and OpenGL work, especially the hardware stuff, was collected. I remember seeing a while back that they had laid off a bunch of workers, including Brian Paul. The Precision Insight URL no longer responds, but a quick Google shows Mesa work ongoing, and Brian Paul now at Tungsten Graphics doing largely the same type of stuff he's been doing all along.

Maybe there's hope of OpenGL 2 for Linux, after all. Next will be pursuading Carmack et al not to use Microsoft lock-in compilers.

Re:Whatever became of Precision Insight?

[Svartalf]

Try Tungsten Graphics instead as that's who they've become.

BFG Blast? Secret Exit? Footbal Hiker? What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't figure out what this is a picture of...

Oh wait, I know. It's your wife.

You think that's bad

[wrinkledshirt]

Go read some of Abrash's Black Book. The guy makes jokes out of assembly language. The only laughing I ever did was that nervous kind that you do while thinking, "Boy, am I out of my league..."

OpenGL patents

[flacco]

Didn't MS buy OpenGL patents from SGI recently?

Re:OpenGL patents

[dthable]

I do recall something of that nature, but I don't think it was all of OpenGL. Just a subset of stuff they couldn't duplicate into DirectX.

Re:OpenGL patents

[uncleFester]

Didn't MS buy OpenGL patents from SGI recently?

Hard to tell... (more stuff found here). The opengl.org Licensing page links back to oss.sgi.com...

It's not easy to tell who currently owns the rights to OpenGL.. er, the OpenGL API. *gak*

-fester

Re:OpenGL patents

[abdulla]

I heard that's generally not any key assets, it's things that aren't useful at any rate. That's what I hear.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[ragnarok]

Looks like you're out of luck:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20503&cid=2194 363

Another proverb

[Jester998]

You don't have a girlfriend,
So you finger John Carmack instead,
But you'd sure like to find a girl who can write good vertex shading code!

:)
- Jester

I can.

[damas]

So finger yourself.

Whoops.. hit submit instead of preview...

[User 956]

I wish I could rip off Carmack's words and present them as my own, that would make me uber-leet like you.

Whoops. I hit "submit" instead of preview so I could do link checking, before I had finished the post/citation. You've covered the citation, so I'll get to the point.. My point in quoting Carmack was that Doom 3 is going to be a much different benchmark, simply because as a primarily single-player game, it's going to be far more complex, graphically, so it wouldn't really be like comparing apples to apples.

Re:I want to say something about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

In a particular cranky mood today Seth? Were michael and JonKatz over last night,. . . all night long... ?

Why not benchmark both?

[jobugeek]

Future benchmarks will be based on Doom3

Why not benchmark Quake3 and Doom3? Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer my video card have the capability to run both openGL and Dx.

Re:Why not benchmark both?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3 is an open gl engine. So that last comment makes no sense. MAybe you meant you want your video card to play opengl 1 and opengl 2 games??

Re:I'd read it if I could...(-1 spelling)

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it is already Offtopic..
it is Company's (possessive) not
companies (plural) unless you work for
multiple companies and they ALL block it...

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[qurob]

GL Doom helped create the 3D Graphics market

iD is about 1-3 years ahead of ANYONE else. All the other game houses follow their lead

3Dfx had the market in their hands with GLIDE...

um ID is responsible for todays games.

[Anonymous Coward]

jackass. and nvivia has always been a big supporter of openGl

Re:Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't think I can live with another configure, make, su, make install. That's just too much work. I might have to wimp out and learn how to type rpm.

Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack, you are what the words "prime mover" refer to.

Re:Isn't it about time QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for one of my favorite images from 1998... There's a new kind of hero on the streets!

sorry to tell it to you like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This means IHVs will be somewhat forced to write good OpenGL2.0 implementations.


Uh, no it fucking doesn't.

UNIX Finger jokes are fucking old

[qurob]

They probably were funny...back in like...1990 when I first used UNIX. And I didn't even put 2+2 together until one of my friends said heh heh you said FINGER

Re:UNIX Finger jokes are fucking old

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the finger jokes were old in the 80's, so the fact that you found them funny in the 90's proves that someone should find them funny in the 00's. Someone will be learning Unix (and Unix humour) right up until Unix is dead.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[HalifaxPenguin]

Just because DoomIII uses OpenGL I don't believe card manufactures will race out to upgrade their OpenGL support.

New game engines from id are Big Deals in the game industry. These are what most people benchmark on, these are what people can't wait to get their hands on, these outsell anything claiming to be competition. It's make-or-break for video card companies. If their cards are shown to be poor performers compared to the brands that did race to upgrade GL support, their sales will plumit while the others escalate.

If a dozen or so games do, that's another story

A new game engine from id does not mean just one game. They license their game engines out to many companies, and from there many games are made. ...Maybe even "a dozen or so", enough to make any video card makers that handn't already... take notice.

Has anybody asked John C.

[2000 Britneys]

how he feels about it????? "You can read his .plan or you can finger him" I don't think anybody would appreciate being fingered by so many people :-) And especially the /. crowd hm it brings the new meaning to the /. effect - finger anyone?

Re: buy a 3DLabs card then...

[lugonn]

...you'll have OGL2 drivers that are fully implimented.

why?

3DLabs developed OGL2, becuase OGL1.x couldn't keep up with DirectX anymore. 3DLabs sells high end cards for *NIX boxen, and DirectX isn't available for those OSs, so they extended OGL1.x.

My GVX1 is still an awsome card, hope it runs doom3.

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack... QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's not as if building an X-prize level rocket ship doesn't have any world-changing potential.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know of the 4 games you listed 2 support opengl. Neverwinter Nights uses opengl for graphics and directx for input and such. Serious Sam supports both, but (for me atleast) opengl runs about 10% faster and is more stable.

It really does not seem like 95% are direct3d only to me.

Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[User 956]

I wish I could rip off Carmack's words and present them as my own, that would make me uber-leet like you.

Calm down, cowboy. I hit "submit" instead of preview so I could do link checking, before I had finished the post/citation. You've covered the citation, so I'll get to the point.. My point in quoting Carmack was that Doom 3 is going to be a much different benchmark, simply because as a primarily single-player game, it's going to be far more complex, graphically, so it wouldn't really be like comparing apples to apples.

Re:Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this also your excuse for plagiarizing a kuro5hin post not once but twice?

Re:Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[User 956]

My roommate got hold of my account and was screwing around.

Re:Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Suuuuuuure.

Re:Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[GigsVT]

Come on man, as if the links to goatse all over your account weren't enough of a tipoff, most of your previous posts were also the same kind of karma whoring/trolling, posting stuff other people wrote as your own.

I thought it was kinda funny at first, especially when people kept falling for it, but then I got sick of it.

Re:Jumping the gun, aren't we?

[Jonathan Swift]

Hmm. It seems like someone's jealous because they can only get +5 posts whilst being an anal-retentive boy scout.

NWN does use OpenGL...

[kabir]

No direct 3D there, just OpenGL. It also used Direct X elements (Direct Input and Direct Sound, at least) but all the 3D goodness is via OpenGL.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[be-fan]

Two things:
1) Its Doom 3. It is guaranteed to sell like crazy, whether its good or not. If you're card doesn't run Doom 3 well, you might was well just not release it.

2) ID licenses the engines. Doom 3 will be *the* engine to have over the next year or two. If you're hardware can't run all those games (definately more than a dozen) again, don't even bother releasing it.

and my mac

[Lysander Luddite]

"I'll believe OpenGL is dead when I can run all my DirectX games on Linux."

And my Mac.

Re:and my mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll believe Mac isn't dead when I can run all my DirectX games on it.

Re:Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[friedmud]

You must own an ATI card...

Go get yourself an nvidia card and you will have OGL2 within a week or two of the windows version (or maybe sooner).

People bash nvidia for releasing closed drivers - but they should really be praised for even considering it in the first place.

Derek

Some issues with NVidia's stuff...

[Svartalf]

There was a spinlock deadlock in one of the earlier versions of their drivers. You had to wait for them to get around to fixing it. Now, the same could be said of the ATI drivers, but someone skilled enough could go and fix that bug.

Actually, that'd be harder than you think...

[Svartalf]

OpenGL 2.0 is a shader language specification amongst other things. In order to support Doom3, you're going to very likely have to support all of it pretty well- it'd be like someone stripping out features from GCC or VC++ so that it compiled Doom3 better than anything else.

Re:I want to say something about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Go shoot some palestinian kids or something you zionist murderer.

Re:Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[sloanster]

uh... let's see.

1. Install Red Hat 7.3
2. Download Nvidia drivers
3. Install according to instructions on website

Voila - accelerated 3D on Linux -

Q3A and RtCW run great!

(just what were you supposedly spending all this time on?)

"decided to"? You mean Doom3 isn't done?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, it won what... "BEST OF SHOW" at E3 or something? So what they're basically saying is that all that, and all the shit they showed at an apple expo the year before, was all FAKE.

Yo, good FAKE carmack. Nintendo did a better job with Zelda, but this was pretty good.

This is depserately needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

You bring up an excellent point.

A couple years ago something similar was tried and somewhat successful.

When the Unreal Tournament demo was released, Epic teamed with 3Dfx to release a glide version before the directx one. Many people bought up the latest voodoo cards just to play this.
Sure it wasn't enough to keep 3dfx from eventually being swallowed up by nvidia, but it does prove that hard core gamers will do whatever it takes to play the latest stuff.

It would be very interesting at least to see Id do this for Linux.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this sums it up nicely

Re:Whoops.. hit submit instead of preview...

[mrobinso]

> it's going to be far more complex,
> graphically, so it wouldn't really be like
> comparing apples to apples.

Maybe its an apples to oranges comparison, just to make sure they're both fruit.

--Bluesnews sure looks horrible in IE6--

What will nVidia do

[Screaming Lunatic]

Firstly here is a mirror and another mirror

From reading various bits of info on the web, there seem to be four different code paths. An nVidia codepath, an ATI codepath, a default codepath, and now the OpenGL2.0 codepath.

So Matrox and 3DLabs pretty much have to put out OpenGL2.0 drivers to run Doom3 or they can implement nVidia/ATI OpenGL1.3 extensions. But the interesting case is the nVidia codepath.

The Geforce3/4 has 4 texture units. The Radeon8500 has 6 texture units. You would have to assume that the next line of nVidia cards would have more texture units. To take advantage of the extra texture units, it would seem that nVidia would have to write OpenGL2.0 drivers. This is definitely a good thing.

take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

honest, this isn't a troll. true story, a sad one.

good friend of mine, a roommate for years , was in a decent learning stage with computers. Blue collar worker, saved his nickles and dimes, bought a decent but used and still almost new computer. Was doing fine, learning new things, etc.

got a copy of doom.

He became addicted, I got to the point I hated that evil sound coming from that game. He would stay up until very late playing it, lost all interest in learning about computers. His modem screwed up and he didn't bother to get another one, stopped surfing. He started mising work sometimes, claimed he was "sick", but it was doom and beer and lack of sleep. He worked at that demon fucking game like a job paying triple time. We're talking some days 16-18 hours playing doom.

One day he gets in a small beef at work, it was reallynothing, but he walks off the job, goes home. (we worked the same place). I get home later, he's drunk playing doom, oblivious, not responsive, wouldn't haerdly acknowledge a "HI0what happened today?" from me.

He stayed up all night playing doom, getting drunker.

In the morning, I had to go to work, I see him stagger into the kitchen and go to the cupboard and barely be able to uncap an aspirin bottle, shakes a few out, goes back to doom.

So, I'm hitting the shower, got to go to work. a few minutes later Ihear BANG!

He'd walked out into the front yard in surburbia, stuck a 12 gauge in his mouth, and there was pieces of skull and brains and hair all over the front yard.

fuck doom and the doom developers. fuck them all to hell and back. I knew that game was evil first time I saw him play it, along with the subsonics in the audio youcould feel. it's just "wrong". that shit is evil. so are a bunch of other video games I've seen. Not all of them by any means, but some certainly are. They are jack off violence pornographic. That's as simple and clear as it can be put into the english language. They implicity revel in heinous repulsive activity, merely "simulated". It's porno, admit it, sickass violent porno.

This is a real story, happened 4 years ago. This is also after around 50,000 or so estimated forum and news posts I've done on the net over the years the most I have ever cursed in a single post. In fact I hardly ever curse, I really can't cuss this shit out enough. Ya, he did it to himself, it was his "choice" but I'm telling you, that fucking doom had something to do with it, too, it was obvious as shit. It hit him same as any hard drug, and I'd bet a years pay there's people here just as addicted to doom or something like that, or theyknow someone like that, but are chicken shit to go against geekdom and admit that some things are just plain "wrong"and shouldn't be done.

If there's an doom developers read this, I fucking hate you. You are some sick people.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear about your 'friend.'

That is all anecdotal evidence. Is there no website or new story that can be accessed from the web?

Also, how many millions of other people have played shooters and not gone out and shot someone?

How many thousands of uber Quake fans have played the game for hours on end and still chose to lead a semi-normal life?

I think your 'friend' was fucked up, that's all.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

==to answer you, no websirtes per se, but I dropped a few posts on it to some forums I was on at the time. I had never thought much about video games before then, I had played a few, but just never had much interest in them very much, to each their own, I honestly don't care.

to me it's like some porn, where is the fine line between good ole healthy lust and wanting to look at some good looking babes, and then there's sites like..well.. the one everyone drops here as a joke is one weird stupid place, I imagine there's more, I dunno, don't like "sick" stuff. Same with video games. You can get addicted to anything, and pruprient interest is just that. If it's involving getting pleasure from torture and murder, that's 'sick" in my book. Same with kiddie porn. Our society makes kiddie porn "illegal", but scenes of mayhem or simulations thereof are just "fun".
I disagree, not much I can do about it but occassionally rant about it. I do know I have read a few stories about some of these kid shoot em up massacres that the kids involved had a coupla things in common-addiction by their parents and the government to drugs like ritalin, and addiction to violent video games. beer is a drug, that I will grant you, addictive. but I NEVER saw anyone personallysuccumb so fast to anything like that doom did to him. I'm not naieve, grew up in the 60's as a teenager, seen drugs, soft and hard, obviouslyseen alcohol abuse as well, but that particular addiction was the worst I've ever seen. Not seen "crack" so I don't know if it was as fast orr as thorough as doom was. the subsonmics got to me, he had an amp and speakers, and it sounded like your stereotypical "depths of hell" to me.

I had even gone to a court house once because I was contemplating having to kick him out because he wouldn't stop playing the thing. I was that serious about it. Wish I had now. I'd tell him, "geez man, you realise if you were working another job and even getting minimum wage tyou could buy a brand new car with the hours youare spending on this?" Stuff like that, he didn't care, he'd actually get foul mouthed angry if you said something like that to hiim, same as any junkie or alky in denial.

It was fuckin scary, eventually he offed himself, what can I say. I got a sheet and threw it over the headless corpse in the front yard-there was kids coulda walked by. Lucky the cops came by and took care of stuff real quick like after the 911 call. What a mess.

A combination of factors, but doom WAS a major part of it. I have zero doubt, none, would testify in court with a polygraph hooked up on that one. It's a psychological menace if you ask me. It's porno propoganda brainwashing. Maybe some folks can deal with, but I bet he wasn't an isolated case, it would just be a bitch to prove.

I guess you had to be there, I can't write it well enough to get it across. I tell people to not let their kids play video games unless they really look at the game first. For adults, I don't know. Pass a law, where do you draw the line? I don't know, honezstly can't answer it. I would hope people would voluntarily not release evil vile crap like that. Some things the money ain't worth it.

that's just me, YMMV of course.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

Your story is B.S unless you can prove it with some sort of news source.

If I'm wrong, I'm deeply sorry about your loss.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[sg_oneill]

If this is true dude, thats some real sad shit.

There are a lot of things that can 'hook' people tho. I've seen grown men turn into hermits by CIV.And IRC can sure do it too.

Either way. Sad sad sad.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

DAOC. Happened to a friend once... sad.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? Oh, you believe a 'news source' is more trustworthy than a person's testament? Cool, if it is bs, where's your news source that shows it? If your viewpoint can't handle a game causing a person's demise, say it. Trying to change reality to suit your viewpoint ("oh its bs!") simply puts you in denial.

The burden of proof rests with you.

What is BS? That a game cannot, under any circumstance, make a person suicidal? Games aren't made good/bad? Game designers' don't try to make games addictive? There is no psychology to play, play, play .. behind these games? That there are no evil games which distort a person's sense of reality?

By saying its bs or you're sorry simply shows you lack discernment. You're trying to cover yourself on both sides of the moral tree. Wonder where you got that idea from? Hmm, you play Doom and you're a good person, Doom must be good too and harmless, so anyone who claims Doom is evil is indirectly saying you're bad for playing it and must therefore be wrong. But if anything bad did happen, you a good person for being sorry about it.

It doesn't matter whether the author fabricated the 'friend', the issue raised is whether these games harm people. If just to one, would you like to be that one harmed? Perhaps the name 'Doom' means play, fun, entertainment, and good thing, to you? Doom 3 probably means much more of those good things, right?

Maybe these things won't happen under OpenGL, who knows? btw, I played doomI and managed to get through all levels, but didn't find all the secrets. Yes, I played at the mayhem level. I've also tried getting it to run on GNU/Linux and edit .wad files, but it is more trouble than its worth. It's technically interesting, but I'm not into its culture. If playing it (or failing to) makes me a 'bad' person, so be it.

"When Life says,'Turn left here', you will do that, no matter what your viewpoint or conscience decides"

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

--sorry. I'll make this my last reply. This was in a major city, deaths are common place. This story got a mention with the funeral notice in the paper, it wasn't anything that didn't happen several times a day in any major city across the US-some sort of violent death. Like I said I dropped a few somber posts about it on the small boards I was active on at the time, they don't exist any more.

I can't prove it, but to me, extreme-violent video games cheapen life and death, and are conditioning and desensitising people, to the "bad". I think it's part of how this society is changing. Umm, not exactly better, either. More gadgets, less "niceness". Bigger companies and "more money", also more high level crooks.

I grew up in the 50's and 60's, you can see how much more extensively violent-and strange- our society has gotten since then. There just wasn't the same...I dunno, can't describe it. the same amount of not-caring and viciousness. There wasn't school shootings. A set of divorced parents was extremely rare. I remember ONE friend had divorced parents, that's it. I don't remember any kid had to be on prescription psychotropic drugs just to go to school. I honestly never even heard the term abortion until high school. No, I'm not joking either.

I'm trying to not be overly accusatory or anything, but I LOOKED at that game, it was evil. I can't see how anyone can look at it and not see that. It's wrong. bad. I'll say "demonic". I mentioned kiddie porn before, I'll sayit again, it's very similar in how it is designed and for what it does. Look at the thread, the sheer glee of hundreds of people waiting for the latest and greates murder simulation experience. Oh boy, we can 'develop"more reralism in what again? Oh ya, killing maiming and torture. Hmm, when I was a kid this was called 'crime" and was "bad". goody goody goody, now the gore is in accelerated 3-D with sensurround. It needs to be "developed" more, with hardware improvements.

I expect it to be "more popular" once it's tactile and you can smell it and feel it.

And I'm really supposed to think that I am weird because I think this is strange behavior, actually likeing "games" like this? Isn't this in a way like the old torture the prisdoners in the colliseum, just a simulation, but ther same? Where is this going, is there a limit, or as long as it's violent there is no limit, and it's 'fun"?

Rhetorical question, only answerable personally. I can't answer it for anyone else, but for me, no, it's evil.

Fresh spilled mass quantities of blood actually stink pretty bad and have a very unique smell. Never gonna hardly forget what it looked like. Pretty dang gruesome.

Of course, the whole idea of doom is pretty similar to that, isn't it? To realistically portray similar things?

I just don't get it, I guess, why this is "cool".

Seen enough violence in my life so far, no thanks, violence is neither fun nor a game for me. Seeing that event happen was the kicker for me with those sorts of games, they are just "wrong" to me. I was "uneasy" with them, but like most people, thought "what the heck, it's just a game". Well, until I saw it actually addict and influence a grown man. Watched it happen. Watched it get to be ten or much more of hours at a stretch, loss of work, stopping doing anything else, no more go out to eat or go to the movies, stuff like that. Just home/work/beer/doom.

fucking strange to watch happen. didn't take too long either, I'd say if I'm remembering correctly around 6 months. the last two months were insane, it had gotten bad by then, that's when i went to see how you kick someone out when they got their rent all paid up, found out it took either relatives or several people to go down, testify, etc. No one else I approached discretely to help with this would help, they just didn't want to bother, and he was too far gone to speak to rationally about it. Tell ya the truth, I was almost to the point I was gonna move out and abandon that place, a small house I was buying, just to get away from the addict and that game. Wish I had now, wish I had done anything but try and put up with it and ignore it.

Enjoy them if you want to, I'll pass. I get no enjoyment from simulated murder/pain whatever.

Thanks for the thoughts in the latter part of your reply, just wanted to let you know this isn't any troll post, I just don't "do" troll although I will argufy some on a thread.

I don't have a handle here because I stopped using email. I am "spam free", kinda neat. I don't need it professionally whatsoever, and I got so many long distance cell phone minutes per month I use the phone exclusively, or once in awhile I'll 'q someone, but not too often, or irc, but zip email. So, never registered here, ie, "no handle". Glad I can still post, though. Not trying to be a bummer for folks, just this one particular subject came up, and it's worth discussing, when is simulated violence 'too much", when does it become pornographic? Is there a limit, because the way computers are expanding, it will be pretty "real" soon. I think doom crossed the line, and if this is doom3, God help the people who think this is "good", as they just might have a problem or two. Maybe, I don't know for sure, but liking death and mayhem and gore is a little ..well, it used to be "weird", guess it's not now.

And I sincerely hope the company goes under. No use for them whatsoever. There is so much other neat stuff that could be coded and developed for, too, what a waste...ya, I know "but the money is good". Like I said, last reply on this subject. Folks who want to play, go ahead. In meatworld that's actually one of my criteria, if someone is a heavy player of those violence games, I usually just phase out becoming friends with them.

To each their own, I like positive cornball "nice" things I guess.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[Anonymous Coward]

honest, this isn't a troll. true story, a sad one.

good friend of mine, a roommate for years , was in a decent learning stage with computers. Blue collar worker, saved his nickles and dimes, bought a decent but used and still almost new computer. Was doing fine, learning new things, etc.

got a bag of potato chips.

He became addicted, I got to the point I hated that evil sound coming from that bag. He would stay up until very late eating chips, lost all interest in learning about computers. His modem screwed up and he didn't bother to get another one, stopped surfing. He started mising work sometimes, claimed he was "sick", but it was chips and beer and lack of sleep. He worked at that demon fucking bag of chips like a job paying triple time. We're talking some days 16-18 hours playing doom.

One day he gets in a small beef at work, it was reallynothing, but he walks off the job, goes home. (we worked the same place). I get home later, he's drunk eating chips, oblivious, not responsive, wouldn't haerdly acknowledge a "HI0what happened today?" from me.

He stayed up all night eating chips, getting drunker.

In the morning, I had to go to work, I see him stagger into the kitchen and go to the cupboard and barely be able to uncap an aspirin bottle, shakes a few out, goes back to his bag of potato chips.

So, I'm hitting the shower, got to go to work. a few minutes later Ihear BANG!

He'd walked out into the front yard in surburbia, stuck a 12 gauge in his mouth, and there was pieces of skull and brains and hair all over the front yard.

fuck potato chips and Lays, and Fritos, and Wise. fuck them all to hell and back. I knew that snack was evil first time I saw him play it, along with the subsonics in the crumpling bag youcould feel. it's just "wrong". that shit is evil. so are a bunch of other snacks games I've seen. Not all of them by any means, but some certainly are. They are jack off eating pornographic. That's as simple and clear as it can be put into the english language. They implicity revel in heinous obesifying activity, merely "simulated". It's porno, admit it, sickass violent porno.

This is a real story, happened 4 years ago. This is also after around 50,000 or so estimated forum and news posts I've done on the net over the years the most I have ever cursed in a single post. In fact I hardly ever curse, I really can't cuss this shit out enough. Ya, he did it to himself, it was his "choice" but I'm telling you, that fucking bag od chips had something to do with it, too, it was obvious as shit. It hit him same as any hard drug, and I'd bet a years pay there's people here just as addicted to chips or cookies or something like that, or theyknow someone like that, but are chicken shit to go against geekdom and admit that some things are just plain "wrong"and shouldn't be done.

If there's an snack developers read this, I fucking hate you. You are some sick people.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[re-Verse]

First of all - sorry about your roomie. I've lost those close to me from addiction as well. But want to know something terribly sad? Almost everything is addictive. There have been people who have eaten themselves to death with food addcitons. Adreneline junkes have often pushed their need for thrills to fatal levels. Once i even say somebodies fanscination with books drive him away from family, friends, and eventaully all normal life.

Everything is horrible, at a certain level. People should be taught to recognize when they reach unacceptable levels of any activity. And if they are lucky, they will have friends that will intervene when their behavior becomes dangerous.

As far as violent online games - you're wrong. For many people, its about skill. I met my future wife in a game of quake, over 3 years ago. We have a sharing, loving relationship, and still play together. Its not a "sickass violent porno", but as a challenge to eachother, a test of skills. Its also incredibly good as a part of conflict resolution. Some of the cooler, more interesting people i know i have met in violent online games. I've never seen any of them at all violent in real life.

As far you you telling the doom devs they are sick, and you hate them... Its your right to hate whomever you want. But you can't make a judgement call on people you don't know for what they choose to do with their time. I do wonder if some of your haterd at others is really misplaced hate for yourself when you did nothing (or didn't do enough) to help your roomie who was obviously an addictive personality, lost in a game addiction, so similar to so many peoples television addiction.

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[xg0blin]

Not meaning to sound hostile or anything, and I am sorry about your room mate, but you post this stuff to gun sites and stuff too, I mean, they made the gun your friend killed himself with, I knew from the moment I saw one that they were "evil", and what about people that make beer, do you go to places where they talk about beer and pills and rant and rave about how your friend played doom and drank beer until he killed himself, I mean it is a depressant, it could only have helped. I'm really sorry about your friend, but I really hate people that find other things to blame when something sucks. Doom isn't evil, you're killing demons, you're the good guy... I am sorry about your loss though

Re:take this in the spirit it is written in

[fferreres]

The bad part is not the killing stuff. The bad part is the killing without fear, getting killed without suffering. Seen the dead from a distance and not careing.

When you read 40 Afgans got bombed while celebrating a marriage and know nothing WILL happen is when you realize we, as individuals, dont care a shit about anybody else. Unless we are able to talk to them, share experiences with them, get to know them.

It's pretty cheap to go simulating you are a hero killing lad all over the place for NO reason. You don't knw them, we don't care, they don't exist.

Well, It affects people. Probably the ones playing Quake (ME INCLUDED) are by no means more agressive. We are the same exact cowards as before. But we now care less about other people's lives. They re like a sprite on TV, a film or whatever.

If you actually happen to withness a masacre you'll only then know Doom (or whatever the like) is just not that much funny. The killing nonsense I mean (not the team play or abilities, which are good stuff).

Anyway, this is just a thought. I play Doom (llxdoom -opengl actually) sometimes, but I regularly try to remind me it's not so COOL, but ADDICTIVE. It's a great game, but cheap for the mind.

sig.: I never post cowardly anymore

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not horror and lighting?

Doom was ALL horror the first time I played it. Same thing with Quake -

miljam

Get over yourself already

[Anonymous Coward]

While other people just waste their lives bitching about how someone else is wasting their life. Get over yourself already. Just because you personally don't approve of someone else's career choice doesn't invalidate that choice.

The guy enjoys his work. He's an inspiration to many coders. He changed the game industry and the graphics industry. He's provided countless hours of entertainment for millions of people. Games have been an important and integral part of human society since the dawn of civilisation. Just because you have a stick up your ass and can't enjoy life, don't expect everyone else to be the same.

He's also a multi-millionaire. Perhaps you have some inside information on his charitable donations? No? Didn't think so. So STFU. You have no idea what other contributions to society he has made. Your assumptions and self-rightousness make you look like an ass.

WTF

[frooyo]

DirectX has already won. OpenGL is dead.


And that is why Apple is going to have its next release (Jaguar) render all output through OpenGL (including 2D desktop). So everyone in technology is trying to contribute to the enhancement of OpenGL. So where in the world do you get a comment like that?

Direct3D against OpenGL

[krogoth]

"I'm sure D3D will suck less with each forthcoming version, but this is an oportunity to just bypass dragging the entire development community through the messy evolution of an ill-birthed API." - John Carmack, 1996

Re:Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[Heretik]

Yeah. They should be praised for not releasing specs for their cards. Oh thank you, Nvidia, for this sweet black box of a video card that likely won't work on my system in 2 years. *cough*

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you can't even get you're grammar correct, don't even bother posting.

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Why do people think MS stuff does everything???

[BitMan]

I cannot stand people like this. They think, "why do we need OpenGL when we have DirectX?" They never stop to think it's maybe because DirectX isn't work crap for professional applications! And there are many others where DirectX (fka "direct DOS memory map") is quite limiting.

There are probably another 1,000 different Microsoft technologies that are the same. Like MS Word for example. Publication companies don't use it because they need a standardized, documentation and typeset language underneath that doesn't change every 2 years!

Re:Nothing like a little Carmack... QWZX

[ath0mic]

...isn't coding just a subset of rocket science? Then again isn't everything just a subset of rocket science?

XBox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't they need a DirectX version if they decide to port it to XBox?

Re:XBox?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because Nvidia's OpenGL drivers have been available for the XBox since the first dev kits went out.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[abdulla]

Who'd know what doom was about better than the people who created it?

Is there a `clean' mod of doom

[r6144]

I will play doom more if there are some pwads that remove all those bloody things so that monsters just disappears if I hit them enough times (just like the famous Chex mod). And the `impaled human' or `gut mess' sprites ought to be changed to something pleasant like hanging ornaments, and some bloody textures will have their bloods removed. I have even tried to do this myself, but it is too much job.

Re:Is there a `clean' mod of doom

[Anonymous Coward]

That's strange... I can smell something. Did anybody fart? And then: BANG! There she was... my 5 year old niece. Blown to pieces because some idiot forgot to put out the oven.

Ah HA

[Anonymous Coward]

I had been WONDERING why JC and Trent Reznor get along so well.

This explains it

Re:Great. More time wasted installing in Linux

[Viper118]

So don't waste your time. Setup a dual boot and play games in Windows. Why anyone would spend so much time trying to get games working in Linux is beyond me. Regardless of what operating system you like, games are currently made for Windows.

You are so wrong.

[Karellen]

Get a grip dude. Doom is not evil.

I have to admit, that is a tragic story and something no-one should ever have to go through.

That said, it's a fucking computer game. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not a physically addictive chemical. It wasn't created from a pact with the devil, in an attempt to lure people to sinful (suicidal) deaths. It's pixels (blocky ones at that) on a screen, and a pretty limited set of sounds being repeated through a set of (normally pretty crappy) speakers.

Your friend got addicted to it - well I'm sorry, but don't go blaming anyone else, even the people that made it.

Your friend started skipping work and playing 18+hours/day? Shit, didn't that clue him into the fact that something was getting a bit fucked up with his priorities and he ought to stop? When I started playing CivIII until 3:00 in the morning and I had to get up at 6:30 for work, I realised that it was time to delete the thing. Do I blame the writers for making such a great game? No. I congratulate them. And then I deleted it. When I realised that I was really _needing_ a drink to get me going some days a while back after I'd started drinking heavily for a month or so after a girlfriend left me, I realised it was time to stop drinking completely for a while and just get over her. Do I blame beer for being a seductive place of solace, or the brewers who made it? No. Do I blame by girlfriend? No. She didn't see a future for us and ended it. What was she supposed to do? Stay in a relationship she didn't like for the sole purpose of not hurting my feelings? Hell no. That's part of being an adult. You realise when your life isn't doing what it should, and sort it out. It's your life, and you gotta take responsibility for it.

Shit, didn't it occur to _you_ that you oughta talk your friend out of this sort of behaviour? Or force him out of it? Get rid of the source of his fix? Some fucking friend you turned out to be.

All Doom had to do with your friends unforunate demise was be there.

It's not `wrong'. It's not `evil'. Neither is it `right' or `good'. It just is. And you or your friend or anyone else on the planet can take it or leave it. What they get out of it is entirely their own responsibility. That's one of the breaks of being an adult in a free country.

Stop blaming other people for your friend's death. It's not their fault. Get. Over. It.

K.

Re:You'll need more to bring about OpenGL support.

[Phleg]

Just because DoomIII uses OpenGL I don't believe card manufactures will race out to upgrade their OpenGL support. If a dozen or so games do, that's another story but to bend over for one game just doesn't make sense financial, especially since the other 95% of games use DirectX.

Well, considering ATi has been waiting on Carmack hand and foot to fix any bugs he finds in their drivers, and Nvidia strongly pushes OpenGL, I'd say you're wrong. It also might be the fact that [b]many[/b] games will use the Doom engine, as many have used the Quake engines before. Plenty of games have been either using these or OpenGL, as well. Neverwinter Nights, Quake III, Serious Sam, etc.

Sure my Nvidia 4400 might not get Doom to run as well as Serious Sam, Unreal II, Star Wars Galaxies, Neverwinter Nights, etc. etc. but who honestly cares? If Nvidia increases their support of OpenGL more power to em, that would be great, but one game won't decide the future, even if it is Doom III (Which I believe will fail to live up to hype).

Errrm, Neverwinter Nights and Serious Sam were both done with OpenGL. Nvidia already has stellar support for OpenGL, and has definate plans to have support for OpenGL 2.0. One game isn't deciding the future here. Many games use OpenGL as things are right now, and also, OpenGL is the de facto standard for 3D graphics programs.

I hope they support both standards as DirectX isn't going away anytime soon and like it or not, it is a great set of tools which have helped bring about computer gaming to what it is today.

You're...joking, right? Direct3D has in fact slowed game development, as coders have to sort through the jumble of code you need to write to get anything to work with it. Its tools are pretty much identical to those of OpenGL. Why was it used? Partly because it's more of a burden on hardware companies. Where DirectX tries to adapt itself to every single card released, OpenGL requires the developers of hardware to conform to the standard.

Re:Mod Parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

goatse is not dead. that rumour came from a pic on stileproject.com about old man with the nickname 'goatse'.

goatse.cx is the webpage of the defunt hacking group Goat Security. google around for them.

the actual goatse guy, i don't know who he is. the pics are at least 2-3 years old, and stileproject also has the full set.

me again

[Anonymous Coward]

--ok, I said it would be my last comment, but seeing the response and yours in particular I'll reply again.

It's a real event that really happened.

One poster pointed out it's not a chemical drug. Well, yes and no, the drug itself is manufactured in the brain, a few studies I read about this (sorry, again no link, this was some years ago now), found evidence of this. It's not a drug directly, but it does cause biochemical changes to some degree. Anecdotally, I'm sure people here know of someone who seems to be more than preoccupied with this or that video game.

I've seen all sorts of people play games, I've played some myself, most likely most people have. It's like anything else I guess. But watching this sort of "transformation" happen in real meatworld, that ended like it di, was, like I said before, quite scary.

Propoganda, advertising, brainwashing-these are all 'real things". Movies at the cinema include subsonics in their sound tracks, carefully designed to enact emotion, to add to the "feel" of the movie, along with the "hearing" level audio.

the game itself uses graphic visual based on a theme of ultra violence. the audio supports the 'feelings" of it. that's just non professional observations of it, but judging by it's popularity, I'd say it's an honest assesment that not only is it addictive, but it is addictive on purpose, for financial gain.
any game can be built that way-that's the point! The designers pick the theme or subject for the game, build the best audio visual and interaction around it. the more realistic the better, again, the main "tech" subject of the thread.

My beef is with the theme, it's murder/pain/destruction. It's pornogrphic, that's the only word I know to describe it. Sadism glorified.

If these audio/visual techniques -in general- DIDN'T work in inducing "programmed" like responses in people, there wouldn't be the industry called 'advertising". If subliminal advertisng didn't work, there wouldn't be laws against it. In video games it's still "legal"

our society is fscked up. Sex, normal hetero sex between two people is x-rated, laws passed somewhat about it, etc. Taken to an extreme, again, the kiddie porn reference, most societies and cultures it'shighly illegal and jailable offense to not only "do it" but to show graphics and audio of it, ie "porn".

Violence? Nope, not much regulated, millions of parents let their kids play these "games".

I think it's legitmately described that way.

Thanks for your's and even the trolls posts, at least people decided to address this, in any fashion. Most responses I ever got on /., BTW.

Wish I didn't have to write about it.

If it makes even one person think about it, stop playing, or maybe stop letting their kids play it, anything of that nature, it was worth it. I see a lot of emotional outrage over MP3's and the law, about microsofts bogus policies, etc, but violent videogames are 'accepted"by most folks here, I just wanted to note as in all things, there are more than one viewpoint, I added mine, and the "why's" behind my point. I would like to see them voluntarily stopped as people realised that they are becoming-gradually, but it's happening- desensitised as to their basic "humanity" with them.

There's a lot of games out there and other ways to have fun. thousands and thousands of other games and ways. Glorifying violence doesn't have to be one of them. I term it a gateway experience into-maybe-"other things" that might not be *nice*, and gave one good example that at least to me proved it. I'm not saying that JUST the game did it, no way, but it was a big part of the deal, of that I am sure. Absolutely no doubt. Several of our mutual friends said this to me 'after" as well. Stuff like "ever notice all he did lately was play that ^&^*ing game?"

One of the most weird things I ever went through, really a dismal scene all around.

Thanks again for yours and the others replies.

Let's see it turn water into wine.

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD did die, it was just ressurected in OSX. It was the OS of God, and it was good.

Re: reminds me of a 1996 interview

[fferreres]

with John. He was asked "Hey, you guy are incredibly talented. Why don't you use it for more seriuos purposes".

The answer was that they made games because nobody will die if they make a bug or if something does not work.

How things turned out. Ok, this guy that commited suicide was ill, but if it's true, they did end up killing people indirectly (not that they really killed anyone, but in the sense that you can't know what would have happened if they haven't programmed Doom).

Anyone remembers that interview? (it's been a long time since then!)

nice

[matrick]

Ahh.. this is good news, can't wait to try out Doom 3 :)