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New DOOM III Shots
Warrior-GS writes "There are some new DOOM III screens on GameSpy coming from QuakeCon 2002 in Texas. There are also new screens of Elite Force II, the Return to Castle Wolfenstein expansion pack Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PS2. Carmack is also scheduled to speak tomorrow for about two hours."
Some say these screenshots don't look impressive. Well - in a way they don't, but the actual game does. And the reason why the screenshots don't make the game justice is that the animation, bumpmaps, lighting etc must be seen in motion to have any effect. DOOM III's *realtime* lighting is what makes it a game/engine of the next generation. Wait for official videos...
Hard Polygonal Edges
It doesn't matter if the fingers are as round as a triangle or as round as a dodecahedron: it still doesn't look round. What the industry doesn't seem to realize is that the brain is much better at interpolating the details of a fuzzy image than Nvidia is at displaying a kazillion pixels at a gajillion frames per second. The cell structure of animals, humans and whatever twisted monsters come out of the minds of modelers these days should not look like they were drawn on graph paper, from point to point. Whether a face is displayed using 30 polygons or 3,000, there's still the awkward-looking, jagged edges and connections that the use of polygons dictate.
Interactions between models and structures
I'm tired of watching models claw their way across the ground with their feet sliding as if they were a hooved animal walking on butter in a country with a gravity coefficient of 0.5. I've not yet seen a game that shows REALISTIC movement of 3D models. At least in Doom, when the imps were clawing the walls, they were obscured enough that my mind could make up for the lack of detail. But the basic problem of "interacting" things that move vs. things that don't has never been solved very well.
It's the details that really count. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, when told by a frustrated subordinate, "The Devil's in the details!" cooly responded, "No. God is in the details." Details make or break the project. The last 10% of a project--the details part--usually takes as much effort as the first 90%. Perfection is impossible to attain, but to me it's perfectly obvious that a great game is complete when the details are properly completed.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a realistic-looking lifeform that doesn't slide across the room.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Agreed. The "more jaded than thou" set likes to feign disinterest in id's latest, claiming they don't even need to look at the screenshots because they know the gameplay's going to suck.
Regardless of the validity of judging a game's gameplay from 15 seconds of video, they're missing the point-- id makes a good chunk of its money licensing its engines. Lots of games used the Quake 2 and 3 engines, and many games will use the Doom 3 engine. If you play the sorts of games that use these engines, you should be interested in id's latest engine because it's a peek into the future.
is simple physics. FOR GOD SAKES If you are strafeing sideways and fire a ballistic weapon at a distant entryway, the "projectile" should propel not just forward but sideways, and end up MISSING the door.
And if I'm riding the Half-Life train and jump up, the train SHOULD NEVER slide from under me. I should instead plop STRAIGHT back down in my seat (unless I bump into the ceiling or the train's speed changes.) How high I jumped doesn't matter. It's simple physics like this that would allow for NEW strategies and skills.
This would be TRUE advancement because ALL games are missing this! (Even 360 games like the Descent(R) series) But yes, EVERY SINGLE GAMER would have to retrain their skills but why not! It'd be added realism that could be turned off with a real_weapon_physics switch for any multiplayer game...
And Yes--one could still have "homing" missiles that fly to the exact spot your cursor was pointing at the time you pulled the trigger. (But even here, they wouldn't fly straight but at an ARC. The front of the projectile would try to point the opposite way of the sideway force, whipping the tail end back, etc.)
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