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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!
Before anyone accuses Carmack of selling out to Microsoft, please keep in mind that his wife is really hot and he owns his own aerospace company. He doesn't have to sell out to anyone.
[o]_O
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
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...
Funny, I thought MS created the XBOX to move gaming away from PCs. Turns out that PC games are keeping the XBOX alive.
Developers that only make console games will always make games for the PS2 because of the bigger market. Developers that make PC games however, will rarely make PS2 games, because the hardware is different and its difficult/impossible to port. PC games like Doom III and Morrowind will keep the XBOX alive simply because they aren't/won't be available on PS2.
It looks like MS's only hope of growing their market share to compete with Sony is to cozy up with the PC game developers. How ironic.
disclaimer: I do not own an XBox. I sell them, have played extensively with them, but do not as of yet own one.
I don't see the point of FPS's on XBox. Granted, I've played Halo, got through most of the beginning levels, but it still nags at me that I could be a order of magnitude better at it with a simle keyboard and mouse.
Now games like DOA3, NFL 2K3, stuff like that, rightly deserves to be on a console, it is easily (and in the case of the former, recommended for play) on a gamepad. Give me a keyboard and mouse option, and I'll be a happy guy.
"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."
Am I the only one that absolutely HATES playing an FPS on a console? I don't understand the popularity that games like Halo, Half Life and Quake have had on various console systems...it's just not the same level on control if you're not playing with a mouse and keyboard. Maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways to learn a new method of control, but I simply can't enjoy those types on games on consoles.
The only games I can enjoy on a console are platformers (Sonic, Jak and Daxter, etc), sports games, racing games, and fighting games (mortal kombat, virtua fighter, etc)
So, is it just a matter of getting used to the controls for FPS-type games on consoles or am I do I actually have a point?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Before someone writes that smug, self-righteous, "there have been no gameplay advances in years" post let me head them off at the pass by saying two words.
Your wrong.
I can't believe the incredible about of really good and *different* 3d shooters I have played in the past 3 years. They are too numerous to mention. There is Counter Strike's complete revolution of internet play (buying weapons instead of them just laying around, asymmetric goals, mission based play, etc). There is System Shock 2's and Deus Ex's mixing of shooter and RPG. There is the Thief's series and Deus Ex's use of stealth (more in the Thief series obviously but you could go through a good bit of Deus Ex w/o firing a shot). One of my favorite 3d shooters of the past couple years is Jedi Knight II which is the most immersive games I have ever played. I felt like I was a Jedi. The list goes on and on.
So before you comment on the supposed sad state of gaming, try playing some games first.
Brian Ellenberger
Well, there is a "Death to Bill Gates" t-shirt on underneath...
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The current X-box or the next X-box???
And if the current X-box... Absolute minimum gives the engine a lot of room to move given the difference between Quake III at low detail 640x480 and high detail at 1600x1200.
In other words, having a low bottom end does not necessarily hold back having an insanely good top end.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
To the kid down the block who grows up using these controls, he will say the same thing about "clunky mice and keyboards" because they aren't what he grew up with.
Funny thing then that many old school fps gamers that at first were very reluctant to change from keyboard only to keyb+mouse, later did. They grew up with using only the keyboard, but as soon they started playing online (Quakeworld anyone?) they realized that they were no match for people who had made the switch. These guys complained about keyb+mouse being inferior, later when they was fragged into oblivion, some even went as far as calling keyb+mouse cheating. The majority made the switch though, many in silence.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
(also the home of arj and other odd archivers that are still not as good or just as good as gzip+tar, too bad they've never heard of bzip2).
Yeah... nothing like stereotypes or popular thought to cloud hard facts, eh?
In the Sound (WAV) Compression Test on compression.ca the GZip 1.2.4 + TAR combo comes in at 7.29b/B (91%), bzip2 0.9.5d + TAR is at 7.01b/B (87%). RAR on the other hand, comes in at 5.65b/B (70%) and Monkey's Audio 3.96 rocks in at 5.01b/B (62%).
So my 10mb of WAV takes up 9.1MB after being GZiped and 7.0MB after compressing it with that odd archive that [is] still not as good or just as good.
GZip and bzip are *excellent* compression tools. But they are not - and have not been for a long time - the kings of the hill.