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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.'"
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.
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!
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.
Are you referring to the P4 2.8 GHz? I'd heard that it was out, but haven't seen anything about it on slashdot yet. These editors need to get with the times. Most other news sites would have posted a story like that *at least* once by now...
do not read this line twice.
idiotic.. As if solving the human prediliction towards violence was as easy as censorship.
I dont have the figures on hand, I'll leave it as an excercise to you to find them and prove me wrong.. But,
Market research these days shows about 90% of all video games are purchased by those 18 and over. Of those, 75% are purchased for the purchaser.
This myth that 'kids need to be protected' is crap. Kids are the tiniest fraction of the video game market, and are not the target audience of game publishers.
Adults are responsible for themselves.
As an adult I have the right to any entertainment I deem appropriate, from watching Barney and Friends to the most hardcore of hardcore porn.
You and your ilk have no right to force my hand through taxation, legislation, boycotts, or any other means.
When I was a tot, it was Dungeons and Dragons (non video-game) that was the root of all evil. Imagine encouraging people to pretend they're warriors fighting each other with swords. Gasp.
BTW, since when was Pac Man the first video game? You never heard of Pong? Pac Man was the first marketable video game 'character' to appear on lunchboxes, etc.
Also, they're alot more challenging and you're given a lot more freedom, as you can move in all different directions.
.plan file, back when hardcore gamers thought that More Polygons meand More Gameplay.
I agree that the core gameplay of Quake-like games has gotten stale. But then you take a wild leap of fanboy logic with the above statement. Moving "in all different directions" is equated with "a lot more freedom"? That's crazy. It sounds like something from a circa 1997 debate over some comments in a
So you've played Doom 3 then? How was it?
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Thanks to Loki (RIP) I've had a chance to do both on my Linux box:
Quake
Quake2
Soldier of Fortune
Quake 3
Descent 3
And to be honest, I found the "Quake-alikes" to be a lot more fun; a lot more immersive, than Descent.
I've run for my life from a Shambler, gotten totally creeped out when I found a lab full of my fellow space marines begging for death, and laid patiently behind cover while scouting an area with the scope on my sniper rifle - great fun, all. I could suspend disbelief enough to make me care about what was going on in the game.
Descent... left me cold. Robots drifting around endless corridors? Why? Where's the motivation?
Story can really change a FPS into something much more than "run amok shooting baddies" - Bungie's Marathon is a prime example. Done well, it can really hold your imagination. And isn't that what fun is all about? Not every game needs an original play mechanism, if the story is gripping enough.
That's why Q3 didn't do much for me either - pretty engine, awesome control, gameplay that left me flat after a little while (no story) But hey, lots of other people love the game, so I don't have any problem with it. To each his own.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You probably don't understand what makes pong or even computer tennis great, either. Or tetris, bust a move, sonic the hedgehog...Simple can still be fun. Sure simple games could get boring as the repetition grows, but for some people they don't get bored easily.
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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
"80 MB for ONE texture!"
In a word : no.
Education is the silver bullet.
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.
I bet they're just jealous :>
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.
Funny, I've always been the exact opposite. Although Quake (particularly 1) had potential, it was always "gee, another level, it's kinda weird, but what's the point? Why am I playing this?" Although Q1 felt something like Doom, which was nice to start out with, it wasn't carried through.
Quake 2 was infinitely worse in my book. "Another factory on another alien planet with... aliens to kill. *yawn*" It was all the same, all the way.
We won't discuss the lacking of Quake 3.
Oddly enough, I've been playing Doom 1 again lately, and it's been great. I really, really miss Doom's automap in new games (like everything after Doom), and even the quick story they have, coupled with the wonderful level design, makes it a much more interesting game in my book.
(I picked up Doom 2 recently too, and unfortunately it seems to suffer from some of the same problems as Quake did; nicer technology, less reason for me to play the game. And no, just shooting demons/aliens/whatever is not enough motivation for me to play something, particularly in things like Halflife where even if you turn things up to the hardest mode there are very few things to shoot. Red Faction was kinda fun though, decent if slightly bland story, but good level variety and lots to shoot at.)
Descent 3 also had a story coupled with gameplay that let you actually feel like you were part of the mission, at least for me. (Plus, it had lots to shoot at, and even an automap, woo hoo. Although I liked Descent 1's map better.)
Anyway, hopefully Doom 3 will bring back the old days of Doom 1, and it sounds like they're trying to flesh out the story, which will be cool. "Ultimate single-player FPS experience" someone said, and that'll be a nice break in a long line of bland deathmatch clones.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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.
I've got to argue with you on the descent bit. I played through every version (not the freespace ones though), and loved every minute. Is it as immersive as doom and counterstrike? No. However, the game play is amazing. Having full 3d, 3 axial rotation rocked.
Ultimatly, it depends on what you want. I value gameplay very highly. While your gravity bound FPS are cool, I find myself coming back to descent a lot. Not for the story, but for the running around backwards from those clawbots shooting at them.
Of course this probably explains why I have a GameCube.
Zapman
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
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
Well, gee. Second question in the interview:
PlanetQuake3: Is Doom3 at the stage where everyone at id plays a deathmatch game over the LAN or is that stage a ways off?
Tim Willits: We are all focusing on making a great single player game and haven't started on the multiplayer component of the game yet.
Just because they haven't started the multiplayer component yet doesn't mean their engine design isn't complete enough that they know it will allow the features in your quote.
-Puk
[...] from watching Barney and Friends to the most hardcore of hardcore porn.
Whew. For a minute there I though that said: do
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...
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.
2) I agree that immersion is very important. I would posit that it is very subjective. Shareware (original) descent did it for me.. learning how to yaw roll, the first time I got buzzed by a vulcan mech or ate a homing missle, etc. Q1 let me down simply because (and I know this is unfair) it wasn't as creepy as Doom, and I'd already seen 3D done "better" with Descent. (I used a slow computer at the time and Q1 was just too pixelated and vomit-colored.)
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.
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