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Carmack Expounds on Doom III
Rainier Wolfecastle writes: "Non-high-end-comp-owning geeks rejoice! GameSpot is reporting that John Carmack has confirmed that Doom III is Xbox-bound. Carmack said that id is totally commited to bringing the game to Microsoft's console with its visual splendor intact. Best of all, the game could be available on the Xbox as soon as May next year." And Warrior-GS writes: "John Carmack gave a two-hour presentation about Doom 3 and engine technology. GameSpy reports on the presentations and analyzes Carmack's comments and how they apply to the future of gaming. There is also a look at the demo of Doom III"
The folks here managed to record the audio of carmack's speech despite the "no audio, no video" policy (who knows how they snuck it in!).
enjoy!
More than likely, anyone with less than a Geforce3, or Radeon 8500 (i.e. has programmable vertex and pixel shaders and DDR memory), 128mb or ram, and ~750mhz will not be able to play this game at playable frame rates. Or they could just change the resolution down to 512x384 and live without all the nifty vertex/pixel shading.
So be thy forewarned all those with GeForce2 MXs, Rage 128s, and integrated graphics, upgrade or don't try to play this game.
Nvidia has an ICD for the XBox, IIRC. MS didn't throw a fit about it for exactly this reason.
"i heard that it will be available for ps2 but gfx wont be as good as on pc/xbox because ps2 isnt powerful enough..."
I'm going to have to defend Mr Emir here. What he said is not flamebait, it's the truth. The pS2 has bottlenecks that render it impossible to achieve the same visual quality as the XBOX with this game. It's too RAM heavy. It's widely known that the PS2's texture buffer is very slim compared to XBOX or even GameCube. The fact that it doesn't have texture compression doesn't help it either.
The PS2 could get a version of it, but it'll definitely be noticably worse than the XBOX version. Call it flamebait if ya like, but I find it ridiculous to believe that anybody'd disagree with me. The PS2 wasn't built for that!
"Derp de derp."
My comment specifically regards the "shelf life" of a rendering engine. I think that an upcoming game engine, either the next one or the one after that, will have a notably longer usable life for content creation than we have seen so far. Instead of having to learn new paradigms for content creation every couple years, designers will be able to continue working with common tools that evolve in a compatible way. Renderman is the obvious example -- lots of things have improved and evolved, but its fundamental definition is clearly the same that it was over a decade ago.
This is only loosly related to the realism of the graphics. I don't think a detailed world simulation that is indistinquishable from reality will be here in the next decade, except for tightly controlled environments. You will be able to have real-time flythroughs that can qualify as indistinguishable, but given the ability to "test reality" interactively, we have a lot farther to go with simulation than with rendering.
John Carmack
The XBOX boots a minimal Win2K-embedded kernel with just enough support to run the built-in menus and bootstrap the DVD drive. Beyond that it is up to the software vendor to load up any additional modules they need for their game from the DVD drive. Theoretically there's nothing that says the XBOX has to use Direct3D, they could just as easily boot up and use an OpenGL library. Presuming there is one for that graphics chipset -- and since it's essentially a GeForce 3 Ti, I don't see why there wouldn't be.
As for the porting, I can't imagine there's much to it. The XBOX is a PC at heart, after all. Basically, they just need to pick and choose which Win2K modules they want to load and test it all to make sure it works as expected. Of course, if the game has a complex GUI (which FPSes usually don't) they may need to rework the GUI for simpler use with controller, but that's about it...
According to the article, yes. Just pull down the console and type 'editor'. They even demonstrated it by adding lights and stuff.