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Carmack Expounds on Doom III

Posted by timothy on from the lots-of-monsters dept.

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"

2 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. API? by Sivar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does this mean that JC (John Carmack, not the other one) has caved in and will be using Direct3D, or can he use OpenGL without Microsoft throwing a fit?

    --
    Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
  2. Rendering - two generations from done? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From what Carmack is saying, we're about two generations of graphics card technology away from being done. This is encouraging. But there's an assumption that you have a controlled game world, where the world model doesn't overwhelm the graphics pipeline.

    There will still be scaling issues, where the world is big and a lot of it is contributing to the image onscreen. Level of detail processing can help, but there are situations where you have to examine an excessive amount of geometry. One of the worst cases is a detailed city street, where you can see many blocks ahead and there are lots of trees, signs and whatnot that can obscure surfaces further away. Doing that well requires grinding through a lot of geometry. An insane amount of CPU time went into those long views down streets in Toy Story. All those houses have full detail. Game designers currently avoid such situations. Most driving games are laid out so that you never look down a really long street. And fog is your friend. It's still going to be a while before we have architectural-flythrough quality for long views in urban areas in real time.

    Then again, a background process rendering billboards of distant street sections...