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Tim Willits Interview: Lead Doom3 Designer
Joe writes: "PlanetQuake3.net has a interview with id Software's Tim Willits who is the lead designer and project manager of Doom 3. Tim talks about the new generation of level editing in Doom3, his favorite maps of all time, how designers and coders work together, and many other subjects. One of the most interesting parts of the interview was this question: 'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?' 'Tim Willits: Yes, most of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer.'"
Girl you know it's true!
Pentium IV 2.8 GHz provides the best overall around performance in Doom 3! More information forthcoming on slashdot.org
first pr0st hehehe :-) rules.
Are maps designed with hardware constraints in mind?
1/2 Life (Team Fortress Classic) is better than any Doom game ever made.
I like it vary much. I saw ur mom at the store today she smiled at me and I remebered that time I wet to your house but you were gone and your mom was home and drinking martinis. That saturday we were supposed to play he man but you were visiting your dad. ur mom played with me. Ahr doo blee yah ess ?
Fifth Post!
Pump sniffs cack!
What up on dat AMD Hammer, yo? ya heard me?
I'd hope the multiplayer performance is decent, considering its only FOUR people. Those are gonna be some awesomely huge lan parties.
I don't know what the others think but for me a game is not only about gfx. I still play Half-Life (OZ mod that is) and yes, the gfx and levels are not that great but the multiplayer experience is still the best (for me). Why do we have to go further and further with gfx, new levels, etc when the old games still have their challenge? So it will be more realistic to shoot up monsters, more realistic sound, creepier levels, etc., but does that really make for a better game? Just wondering ...
I *refuse* to play new online games like Q3. I hate the way lag "feels". No longer do I actually seem like I am moving slower. In fact you feel as if nothing has changed yet to other players you are in fact standing still.
It is VERY annoying to have sudden lag and see players hopping around on the screen. Explain to me how the hell you are supposed to compensate for that?
We need to go back to the way Q1 felt as far as lag was concerned. At least that way you could at least learn to adjust to the speed of your connection and change your aim accordingly.
will this game promote liberalism like the previous 2 doom games did. in those games there was lots of immorality and also redistribution of wealth, will doom three be better than this.
is how he can sleep at night. Despite the ravings of the Slashdot crowd, violence (especially against and among children) has grown in lockstep with video games since the introduction of the first game, PacMan. It might not be so bad if he were designing relatively harmless puzzle games like Tetris, but a game where the player virtually totes around a huge gun and blows people away is simply unconscionable.
One of the most interesting parts of the interview was this question: 'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?' 'Tim Willits: Yes, most of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer.'"
I guess that's interesting. It's also been true of id's games since at least Quake 1.
How do you think all those mods get made? By hacking the executable?
I met Tim Willits a while ago when interviewing at id. All the other guys were pretty laid back and nice, but he was a real jackass. He kept preening about how popular his Raven WADs were. I'm sure he's probably matured by now, but man...he was a real prick back then.
PlanetQuake3: How much does it help you to be able to edit the game in real time? Did you request that feature be added?
Tim Willits: It is great for aligning textures and working with the lighting. Yes, we requested that feature be added, it is an example of the designers working with the programmers to make the best possible editing environment for the game.
This sounds surprisingly like the Build engine, which was used to create levels for Duke Nukem 3D and a few other 3DRealms games. The editor had a complete instance of the engine so that a level designer could go in and build levels around himself, aligning textures and specifying shading levels all the while. It was surprisingly intuitive once you figured out which keyboard key was responsible for which editor action.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
In a recent interview, they said that it would not be uncommon to see 80 MB textures in Doom 3. 80 MB for ONE texture! Now I think I finally have a need for that ATI 9700 I've been drooling over.
A whole new frag fest is just what we need, something to finally stretch our P4/1.5GB RAM/ Ti4600 systems to the brink... Like playing Q3 for the first time on the blazing 600Mhz. LAN parties arent going to be boring for a while now...
I am a lead developer at a major game company, and my opinion is that this engine is a disappointment. It has no breakthroughs just more eye candy plus better support for current cards. And don't even get me started on how unimaginative the game content is going to be like.
I wish our company could repackage the same old cash cow every two years.
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'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?' 'Tim Willits: Yes, most of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer.
Is this the same multiplayer that you haven't started yet.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
"[M]ost of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer."
Yeah this is so cutting-edge. Never before has a game put its game logic outside the main executable. I foresee this design paradigm spawning multiple "modifications" using the Doom 3 game engine. Many of them will be free and I imagine some may even use OSS licenses. This is truly a revolution for PC gaming!
That is a cop-out. Violence in the U.S. has actually decreased over the last ten years. If video game violence were to blame, that trend should be the opposite.
Our times are actually among the least violent in the history of the world. If you consider the incredible violence that has occurred over time, and that violent video games have existed for approximately for 0.001% of human history, it becomes obvious that your argument is full of shit.
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Intel will make sure that they realease a binary that is optimized for the P4 with one of their compilers. The 'real' intel C/C++ compilers are always faster then the MS or GCC compilers when optimizing for their chips. AMD AFAIK doesn't have a compiler suite that optimizes for their chips.
I really don't get what's so great about these Wolfenstein/Doom/Unreal/Quake games. I mean, its all so repetitive. Same kill the baddies, destroy everything scenario every time. And it, of course, feels completely unrealistic because a computer is trying to emulate the motions/actions of a real person in first perspective, which is next to impossible to do.
I really don't see why more people don't try out vehicular shooter games like Descent and Freespace, which feel realistic because your flying a ship, not moving a person, which means that collisions feel much more real (a real bump or knock). Also, they're alot more challenging and you're given a lot more freedom, as you can move in all different directions.
How many times do we have to get the same old shoot-em-dead, destroy everything that moves, kill everything, watch stuff bleed and blow up guts all over the place type games like Doom? These are really the same games, but just with face-lifts.
Do yourself a favor, try a game that doesn't involve mindlessly killing everything in sight. Try out Descent (1-3) or Tomb Raider (1-6), or Resident Evil, or (if you can emulate the GameCube using gCubix) Eternal Darkness. Might also be interested in games like "Of Light and Darkness".
I'm not saying that the latest releases of Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein are bad games. They're great games. Only problem is they are unoriginal -- they were preceeded by many very similar games before them. And they don't really evolve from the previous versions, except in terms of graphics/sound/physics. The game-play is pretty much the same, with few wrinkles added.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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A tremendously hyped up game that involved GameSpy monkets drooling all over it as it was prophesized by the ID soft marketing department. Excuse me while I ride out the hype, close my senses to the massive marketing campaign (partially funded by proc builders and nVidia) and wait for the actuall damned game to show up and flop big time a la Black and White and Tribes 2, making the entire aforementioned ID soft marketing department commit suicide.
Cheers!
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Nothing more to say ;)
When will you ever learn?
Why not "edonkey" it?
Why not use sharing for something legal?
Now it says:
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Looks like someone was displeased with the traffic...
see a Text Widget
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Seems they have some serious resources problems with the infamous Slashdot effect :)
Super Mario Doom: No more carts of jumping from platform to platform over mushrooms and barrels, its Mario goes a'Fragging.
M.U.L.E.'s revenge: The proletariate goes Marxist on Mechtrons, Gollumers, Packers, Bonzoids, Spheroids, Flappers, Leggites and Humans. No more colony tap-dancing contests, ever!
Bear Day Afternoon: Bentley rules these Cyrstal Castles with enough firepower to cut down even the surliest centipede, tree spirit or skeleton.
Cooking with the Iron-fisted Chef: Eventually everything looks like spaghetti and lots of it, marinara everywhere! Woo!
Star Wars: Attack of the Anaklones: If they could clone Jango Fett, imagine a clone army of twisted, anguished Anakin Skywalkers. May the force be with you, cause everyone else is on the last train out of town!
Living and Dying with Martha Stewart: Shrapnel and gore, but extra bonuses for tastefully arranging the recently departed. Watch for subpoena servers, though, they can bring down even the mightiest empire.
CowboyNeal's Duck Hunt: Point gun, hold down trigger, hours of entertainment or you could just tape down the button and leave for a while.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We get it. Doom 3 is same old same old, a lot of you are bored with the FPS genre, blah blah blah.
:)
Doom 3 is a single player (our 4 player co-op) FPS game that is doing something most of you dorks haven't figured out yet. It's time for PC games to move beyond the Charlie Chaplin -> Talkies phase and into the Studio Picture phase. Doom 3 doesn't seem to aim for the blockbuster game of the year. Essentially, it's time for games to seperate the technology from the story and art. Every once and a while, a new game will be the first to showcase new technology, in the same way Star Wars recently started hitting up digital theaters. But, by and large, this is just a project to showcase some new technology which will not only try to tell a good story and make a nice profit off of it, but also to pimp the technology that powers it.
What makes this different from the projects like it in the past is that they are making no bones about what Doom 3 is... Doom 3 is to the game industry what "Harvey" was to the film industry. I guess.
Anyway.
my site can't handle this traffic.. RogeR PlanetQuake3 webmaster
I wouldn't consider Doom 3 as part of that set since they haven't finished making it yet.
science is a religion
you can carry weapons to modify the environment in real-time as you multi-player.
imagine a "wall gun". somebody is running, running, you shoot, and a wall (of spikes) appear in front of him. he can't stop in time and loses 30% health. you laugh your ass off until another team-member hits the ground you are standing on with an "infinite abyss canon".
you can also do texture guns / mirror guns etc. imagine painting all the walls into (100%) reflective surfaces in real time, when you run into an enemy. (like in bruce-lee movies). or even spray the texture of yourself all over the place.
it would make an interesting game, for sure.
it would also make excellent "god" games. where you raise the lava or cause huge chasms in the ground, etc.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Sounds like a good mod for a game with a Heretic theme.
science is a religion
Why not create a slider bar like the guys did for Unreal Tournament? I always play at 150% game speed. Things really start to hit the fan at 200%! I just hope they don't try to skimp on the pretty graphics and the special effects. I was completely won over by the 7 minute long demo at QuakeCon 2002. I hate it when I see a product, pour $60 into it (or more) and find out the company cut corners to push the release date up sooner to boost revenue. That pisses me off when that happens and I'm sure it does to the rest of you folks too.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
That we could have a Doom3 section? It seems that we're getting an article every couple of days, and I'm getting pretty tired of seeing previews plastered over the front page. I mean, I want to play Doom3, but I'm prepared to actually, you know, wait for it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
who ever asked these questions are pretty retarded, cant he have got an interview off of slashdot?
Quake never had it, but UT allowed you to adjust the game speed between 50% and 200%. It seems as if Doom 3 might give you some control over this, even if it's just a variable in the game you have to adjust.
Why is adjusting the game speed a good idea? Well.. I used to play UT all the time, and then moved to Quake 3. Quake 3 was a far faster game (in gameplay terms) and I got to love it, and my 'skills' improved. When I went back to UT, the levels felt too big, the moving about felt slow and nasty, and I yearned for more speed.. so I just put it to 110% gamespeed, and it was more like playing Q3!
Adjusting game speed is quite important and I wish more games would allow you to do it. One of the first was Maxis's 'way ahead of its time' 1993 sim A-Train.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I've been playing CS (counter-strike) for some time now, and I must say that every new high-tech game I've tried I've ended up deleting. They are all too complex, and they was no fun playing in multiplayer-mode. There was so many things that players could hide behind. Also, they seem to lack realistic movement, even if they have good graphics.
It seems like every game tries to look good on pictures, and developers put zero time in building a good gameplay.
I remember the game Stunt Car Racer on Amiga 500. The models sucked and the environment looked like h*ll. But still it was one of the best racing physics I've ever played in a game.
I suggest game programmers look into some older games and learn from then, instead of looking at fancy rendered 3d graphics and say "hey, let us program that realtime!"
it is a great time to be in games!!
I'm not so sure that I agree with this.
Is it really a great time to be 'in games'?
As a lone programmer, I say not. How many even slightly successful games these days are produced by single programmers or even small teams? Sure, there are a few very successful examples but they're all lo-fi or Shockwave games.. and not the typical 'computer games' we're used to.
It might be a great time to be in games for the coders like John Carmack who have about 20 art guys behind them, or for individual members of their teams who get control over a tiny aspect of the game (like Tim Willits), but on a personal level, it kinda sucks right now.
Games have taken the same track as movies. In the early days of movies, a small team would make a simple enjoyable film of 10 minutes or so.. but then as time went by, the land of Hollywood came in and hundreds of people were required to make a single movie. In the 90s, we had indie efforts like the Blair Witch Project that took movies back to small teams again.. could we experience the same with computer games one day?
I know I just sound cynical, and I am ready for the 'Troll' and 'Flamebait' moderation points, but I just don't feel it's such a great time to be in the gaming industry right now.
Even as a -consumer- many of the games now are unoriginal and not as good (relatively) as they were in the 80s. Why is now such a good time?
mogorific carpentry experiments
This exact thing happenned with Bungie's HALO and ONI before they came out. There were ambitious plans, some people speculated pure crap (HALO would be a MMORPG with persistent universe, ONI would have multiplayer), and so when the games came out and were respectable in their own right everyone was "disappointed" that they didn't live up to the hype. I hope ID doesn't let things spin too far out of control before the real product comes out.
Tucked onto the side of this article, we see the slashdot effect in action.. :)
;)
Download Stats
1052 files downloaded
2074624 times.
107087.42 GB served.
Damn,people..
Hey, if you jump up there you can see her (insert female body part)
Horrible 3rd person camera....
And Descent just made people DIZZY!
It was a fun game though.
How many times do we have to get the same old shoot-em-dead, destroy everything that moves, kill everything, watch stuff bleed and blow up guts all over the place type games like Doom? These are really the same games, but just with face-lifts.
Obviously you've been playing all the new FPS in DM only mode.
Questions:
1) When was the last time you revived a fallen comerade with a needle so he could shoot flames down a hallway, clearing your way to cap zee documents? (RTCW)
2) When was the last time you sat tailgunner in a fighter/bomber while your pilot dropped bombs on unsuspecting American tanks, then downing the American fighters that come to shoot you down?
(BF 1942)
It's called teamplay. Thats what you're mising.
Very true. We've seen this happen many times.
While many people were disappointed with HALO (and some for the mere fact that it came out only on XBox), I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I wasn't paying any attention to the game at all and only noticed it in the game press about a week before i bought my XBox.
I don't think that I will be disappointed with DOOM 3. Mostly because I am primarily a single-player game player, and I am jazzed that DOOM 3 will be focussing on the SP aspect.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?'
sorry to demystify but unreal tournament has such a setting, as well as on the fly changing of gravity.
which is most cool since its first version? whats the deal?
I disagree. Counter-Strike is by far and away the best online multi-player game. The whole structure of the netcode gives players with 56k modems a chance to play against the people with T3's. Yes, lag spikes are there, and occasionally you'll see unfair deaths but it's a minor annoyance. If you are open minded, you'll realize that Counter-Strike/Half-Life has more man-hours put into it's netcode than any other game. There are a minimal amount of packages sent over the wire, and the downloading of maps, sounds and other customizations is painless. I'm sure you didn't know that "sv_unlag 0 automatically turns off client side shot prediciton and lag compensation (cl_lc and cl_lw respectively) so that you can lead your targets and shoot AHEAD of them, like the quake rocket." Of course, Counter-Strike is a team-based game with actual strategy so I don't expect you death-matchers to understand anything except how many frags you get.
Namaste
Are you blind?!? Some of the one-person-developed games have gathered cult-followings!
Soldat
Porra Sturvat
Crimsonland
Not to mention mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, also...
I just hope that they will get to produce better level this time. One of the reasons I did not like Quake3Arena so much, was that most levels were not well playable at all with a low number of players (2-4). Maybe with the better level editors they will have better multiplayer maps this time :-)
Bye,
Squisher
I see people complaining about the reasoning behind having so many games that are all the same. Doom, Quake, Unreal, Tribes, etc. Well, id will stop making games like Doom and Quake when either a) they want to try something new or b) when they stop making money. Obviously they're still making money as they're probably some of the best paid programmers out there right now. And if they're still making money, obviously then people are buying these games, even outnumbering those that pirate the games. which along should keep you amazed.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
There was so many things that players could hide behind.
That has more to do with the level designer than the game though.. I really do like CS, but here in Australia CS servers are populated by 14 year olds who keep calling me "ghey" everytime i frag them.. Aparently ghey men are better at the game..
As for Stunt Car Racor, R0XZOR!
I spent hours playing that game, i'll have to hunt around for an emulated version of that.. If only there was a remake of it.. That was honestly the most original car racing game of the time, and sadly never got ported to any other systems (that i know of)..
I know it was discussed the other day but things are bugging me about this.
Why the switch from a client/server setup?
Client/server has every advantage over for p2p except the obvious burden of the steep requirements to run a server. This doesn't seem to be a problem though as there are literally thousands of quake servers (never mind all the other fps).
When I am playing on a quake server my only concern connection wise is 'Can I send/receive packets fast enough to/from the server?' With P2P, I now have to have a good connection with each player, which obviously doesn't scale well. P2P is also only as strong as the weakest link. One player with a bad ping can hurt the experience for everyone. Nevermind the overhead of having to tell say 6 other computers where I am/what I'm doing in the gameworld versus telling one computer.
Id brought us the first popular online game experience with client/server and all the nice things like player prediction that made it possible to enjoy a fast paced game over a modem.
So what is Carmack thinkin?!
Is there some other advantage besides no need of a server that P2P has?
from Chronic Logic, you have the superb 1 man (i think) effort, Pontifex. (Sounds like crap but play it... it's so much more fun than it sounds!) ./ a while back (which probably whacked their sales up 400%) - Introversion's Uplink... Not so good, but minimal dev team and zero marketing (except for the viral kind...).
And another one that made
It can still be done. It just takes a bit of luck, some real dedication and a decent game before you actually get noticed.
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
For god's sake, how many times do reviewers, fans etc. need to be told that the game is SINGLE PLAYER focused?
For god sake just leave the multiplayer questions alone. I for one am very much looking forward to another engrossing SINGLE player game.
My favourite games of relatively recent time have all been SINGLE player games like Half Life, Medal of Honour etc. I really do prefer the scripted, well thought out drama, scares, fun etc. I vastly prefer this to the mindless blastfest that most multiplayer games seem to end up being.
So, please, just leave the questions about multiplayer alone. It'll be there, it just won't be the damn focus. I applaud them for trying to make a scary, moody game, and look forward to playing it.
Doom2 and Doom1 used the same engine. It was still the same 2.5D, and the doom.exe 1.9 worked on both the doom1 and doom2 IWAD files.
..." stuff. Yeah, Doom2's story-line isn't segmented like the Doom1 one is (in that you have 2 complete episodes), but it still is the same technology, and it does have separate parts of the story.
So I call shinanigans on your "nicer technology,
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
PlanetQuake3: Does the fact that the editor is integrated into the engine mean that there won't be an open source version that is continuously updated like GTKRadiant?
Tim Willits: Too early to say.
correct me if i'm wrong, but i think "build-in editor" doesn't mean there's only ONE executable. the rendering engine and the editor (create and manipulate brushes and objects) are different thing, even if they are integrated so tightly, there must be a interface, i don't think it's a must to be in one executable, and i do think Id won't do so.
Marathon and it's younger cousin Halo. Story literally transformed that game from being a Tribes-like FPS into an epic saga. But it nessisarily take a story when the game is done right. Tribes? Laughable plot, but loads of fun (T2 might have been fun except for a certain "Fatal Exception" error popping up every 5-15 minutes of play) as was Tourny Unreal. These games got it right. Q3 just didn't have soul. Spark. Whatever, it just didn't have it.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Makes baby jesus cry! :(
What are they doing to this game? :( Doom is going to be ruined :(
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