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Carmack On Doom III And The Evolution Of Graphics
Toasty16 writes "David Kushner over at Wired has a write-up on the progress of Doom III, hinting at a possible fall release, that is unless Microsoft convinces id to sit on the game until an Xbox version is completed. He also talks to Carmack about the evolution of game engines and the possibility of a "next-generation rendering engine [that] will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time." Will this lead to a shift from coders to "technical directors," as Carmack believes? This ties into the Slashdot story awhile back about new titles for sysadmins."
The graphics were created by God at the beginning of time!
Oh bloody hell, the Duke Nukem Forever people will want to start from square one again.
Trolling is a art,
Had to work an MS slam into it. Oh wait, Timmy was the editor.
Figures
I guess I don't quite see how this ties into the older story about new titles for Sysadmins. Technical Directors have been around a long time, and have always existed in the game creation arena. It isn't just some new spin on Sysadmin or Computer user or something.
...to individual games. Kind of flies in the face of the whole Doom spirit of "let's release the code and let the gamers develop their own levels, etc."
Offer him rocket fuel.
Can't wait to hear more about a next-generation renderer(spelling? ;) though. I've heard pretty cool stuff about Doom III . . .
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
This ties into the Slashdot story awhile back about new titles for sysadmins."
No it doesn't.
it's off topic...
ps this is on Windows 2000 with dx9.
We've been seeing this for quite some time already. Developers buying completed engines and building their game around that, instead of doing everything from line 1.
Guess it makes sense if you can get a decent engine, that fit your needs, for less money than it would've taken to write it yourself. Real coders still want to do it all by themselves, of course :)
Now maybe we can reap the benefit of this soon, with some games actually centering on gameplay, rather than cool rendering techniques. If I want nice effects, I'll rather watch a demo.How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Is anyone else a bit dissappointed that the focus on games seems to be the rendering engine and the color depth and frame rates. Doom/Quake sorta started all the emphasis on 3d graphics. I miss the old days of plain old gameplay. Games such as Zelda, Everquest, civilization really are the pinnacle of gaming for me. I like everyone else used to stay at work late so we could have a lan party playing doom, and quake CTF and download the latest patches and maps. However the concept has not changed since day one. shoot everything that moves. make a team and shoot everyone that moves. I think it's time the game concept and story line be updated.
Are they releasing doom for linux? Sorry for the offtopic post.
Later,
John
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
One of the most interesting parts of the article was Carmack's speculations about graphics engines. He sees the graphics engines getting to the point where new ones are no longer needed. After dynamic lighting, how much is there left to do besides minor refinements and optimizations? Carmack remarks that graphics engines will eventually only be done by hardcore enthusiasts. Anyone think that he's right?
I won't be playing a game with demons and other evil elements. IMO, I'll pass on this garbage. I don't care how beautiful a game looks if it has such satanic crap inside it negates any good qualities any graphics and sound may offer, IMO. As they say, garbage in garbage out. People can rant on about how video games can't affect one's mind but studies have shown that what you watch (and play) do affect you. That's fact. Those who worship their ego and deny anything spiritual are some of the people likely to laugh at my remarks and anyone else who shares similar feelings towards violent video games. It's funny though that science has proven that there is much more to discover that's invisible which can include angels, God, demons, and the devil. Once viruses and bacteria were invisible to the naked eye and thoughts of "something invisible" causing a disease could be thought of as lunacy. Science has discovered these invisible realities and we have much more to yet uncover. Like the lunatics that existed and future generations that eventually discovered, revealed, and proved the invisible to the naked eye viruses that cause disease, so those who have faith in the invisible realities such as angels and demons are sometimes laughed at or ignored but will one day be appreciated for their faith.
IMO, I will not let 3d demons be a part of my entertainment, which only serves to bring those demons which do exist even closer.
That is the question.
"Will this lead to a shift from coders to "technical directors," as Carmack believes?"
Confused Philosopher says:
No.
Why slashdot? Why not?
The X thing is basically a PC running a form of you-know-what OS, with a Nvidia graphics processor, that you likely have to program with a well know M$ API the code already works on. How long could it take to get it running on the X-box if it's ready for Windows? Sure, there are differences, but I wouldn't expect any significant changed for an x-box port. Just add some code to let it reload saved games and/or boot Linux and it will be a sure winner.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I must say the evolution of grafik engines for games is astouning - from the humble Wolfenstein 3d engine (hmm.... another id product) over Unreal, Quake, Unreal Tournament, to finally UT 2003/Unreal 2 and Doom 3 sometime (hmmm... I'd really love to see Duke Nukem Whenever's engine sometime :p)
Its astouning how powerful these engines have become, and how they often allow programmers to concentrate on what really counts - the gameplay! (HL - Counterstrike anyone?)
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Seriously... This is like the fifth or sixth story from this month's Wired that's been posted to Slashdot. I got it in the mail and read all of these articles weeks ago, and yet they're still slowly rolling in. At this rate, Slashdot will have summarized each Wired article in the current issue individually over the course of the month.
Can't people just go to Wired and read the articles that interest them?
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
I sometimes get Carmack and Romero confused. When I hear Carmack, I think Daikatana, and this time thought, "Great, Doom III will never be released. But then I realized, he's not Romero.
SCO to Hell
no text
Parent contains a hidden link to Tubgirl!
We've already demonstrated that an FPS can work well on the X-Box(Halo)
I'd take a minute to re-assess that "self evident truth".
FPS are mouse games, pure and simple.
Two analogue joysticks does not a mouse make
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If there was no wired.com, Slashdot's front page would be half the size. Maybe just have a big link at the top of the page that says "Fellow nerds, go here."
You might like Black Hawk Down. Much of the team games are stalking, and shooting anything that's not on your team, and one solid shot gets a kill. So instead of hording weapons, it's more about detecting the target before the target detects you.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Garagistes
A bunch of guys that buy a chassis, an engine, a gearbox & some tyres & just build the stuff that goes round them.
Ferrari disliked them because he built the whole she-bang, chassis, gearbox the lot.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You managed to squeeze in an anti-Microsoft comment!
Or just a cool looking MotherFucker.
HEINEKEN! FUCK THAT SHIT! ---PABST BLUE RIBBON...
How will game companies lure us after graphics become photorealistic? More variety? Better physics or AI? Games for girls and the elderly? Content on demand? More team play? Player-created content? Better sound? Better inputs? More handhelds than just Game Boy?
Even when graphically game engines do reach a plateau, the need for coders in the gaming industy won't be over with. Graphics are only part of the need for realism... I believe it will still be a very long time before games are fully dynamic.
Just imagine a game that you can litterally do [i]anything[/i]in the game's world! The perfect game would have the capability to create a world to the extent of Star Trek's holodeck. I'm talking more about on a 2d monitor however... But what's next?? Perhaps som sort of neural interface that would let you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell everything?? This to me seems much more possible than an actual holodeck.
Doom III sounds like it will need mega powerful machines to look decent. Will the PIII 700 in the xbox be enough?
BC
I remember a while back there was a way to make a keyboard and mouse for your XBox posted on here :
http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/
of course, they don't work on any of the games, but MS may eventually support it. After all, PS2 has a keyboard and mouse.
Personally, I hate the XBox controllers for FPSs, except for Splinter Cell. Keyboard and mouse are useless on Splinter Cell, you need a gamepad.
Course, I'm not drooling over the XBox port for two reasons: 1) I play games on my PC where I can jack up the resolution and download level mods and design my own skins; and 2) all those perty DX9 effects don't exist on the XBox, making the true glory and splendor of DOOMIII a non-existant on the XBox.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
If this is going to require me to buy new hardware, I'm out for now. However, if I could use *all* my machines to process it, I'm in. Wouldn't it be like running a dedicated server, except single player?
I have a feeling that D3 on my current hardware would be like playing myst on a 286. Screensavory!
[quote]Games such as Zelda, Everquest, civilization really are the pinnacle of gaming for me.[/quote]Everquest is DikuMud with a GUI and its gameplay is about on par in design as a 1970's-era pencil-and-paper RPG, so I don't understand how this fits in with your deprecation of graphics technology.
There's supposed to be something funny here that points out that Doom III is another in the line of identical games that all ma
Steve
--- What?
FPS is a vantage point, not an input device. Halo, with the possible exception of Half-Life, is the best single player FPS ever made.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Does this "Make a 3d engine that will last a long time" have anything to do with the fact that microsoft has announced directx9 to be de defacto standard for gamedevelopment for comput... I mean windows for a long time? I like to think so.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
I have always enjoyed the fact that the creators of DOOM are from my hometown. In fact, Romero graduated from my roommate's highschool. Little trivia like that always pays off sometime.
It has also always amused me that these guys basically wrote their first games while they were supopsed to be working. Makes you think it just might be okay to read the occasional slashdot post at work, eh?
Some people say that control for FPS's is better with a keyboard and mouse, but I think I'll have to disagree with them on that one. The controller scheme for Halo was simple, elegant, and it actually feels quite natural once you have used it for a bit. Combine that with the fact that I can sit on a bean bag chair and play the game, as opposed to being at a desk to play, and I'm won over. you should rent an Xbox and try Halo out sometime. I'll guarantee that you won't be disappointed.
p.s. Zelda is pretty cool too...
Will this lead to a shift from coders to "technical directors," as Carmack believes?
I believe this has already happened. Look at the credits for any recent big game, and you'll see that the number of graphics designers and other artists dominates the number of programmers on the staff. Seeing this has convinced me that the profession of "game programmer" will never be more than a niche.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I'm going to stay very far away from this game no matter how good it might be for that reason alone. I refuse to give in to the Microsoft monopoly. Its so damn sad one of the best gaming coders has collapsed under the might of the Microsoft Monopoly. F'that. Bleh.
Hey, just because your thumbs aren't as dexterous as mine... :)
Personally, I am an avid PC gamer and an avid console gamer. I found it a bit difficult to switch at first, but once I practiced a bit I found I could have just as much (in some cases more, in some cases less) precision using two analogue joysticks as a keyboard and mouse.
The whole argument of less control via console is old, don't get me wrong, I used to say the same thing. However, I remember a similar sentiment switching from DOOM to Quake... i.e. mouse control sucks. Keyboard only is where it's at.
Like anything else, takes some time to get used to, but once you do, it's not as bad as you think.
----- "Blame the guy who doesn't speak English." -- Homer J. Simpson
CmdrTaco. He's one fucked up motherfucker. Literally.
The graphics are more than 100 miles away. Our troops will destroy them.
There is no Doom 3. It is a fabrication of the desperate ID software infidels. Even as we speak the source code is deleting itself.
Allah willing, Duke Nukem Forever shall emerge victorious over the ID Software infidels and their vaporware "Doom 3", AND be released on time!
Repeal the DMCA!
Even as computer graphics rapidly approach the quality of those we see on the big screen, CG movies are still a long ways from convincing me they are real. Turing said that a good way to test the quality of artificial intelligence would be to see if it could fool a human into thinking it was a real person. The same concept can be applied to computer generated graphics. We haven't really reached the finish line until CG can effectively fool us into thinking we are looking at a photograph.
As CG in games progresses, software and hardware will need to be increasingly effient (i.e. fast). This almost requires that game engines be written in fairly low level programming languages, ruling out heavy OO design and especially Component Oriented Design (which is the strongest candidate for long-life software).
With each passing year and each passing game, we will be trying harder to achieve the true feel of reality. If engines were component oriented in design, changing one feature such as lighting would not necessarily effect other parts of the engine. In this way it might be possible for a game engine to last more than a few years. However, the fact remains that this is too slow and is impractical for our uses.
Will we ever reach that finish line, fooling ourselves completely? Probably, but certainly not anytime soon.
And in other news, following allegations by the RIAA that Microsoft had a long-running top-secret illegal "MP3" server on campus through which their employees could pirate music with each other, a DOJ raid on Microsoft headquarters revealed that Microsoft was hiding weapons of mass distruction.
What was to be a routine DMCA2 inspection has quickly turned into an international incident, as police discovered in the subterranean tunnels of Bill Gates' house a number of missles which the DOJ estimates are capable of going several thousand miles further than the limit imposed on Microsoft by both UN resolutions and their 2002 antitrust settlement, as well as several barrels of chemicals which, pending testing, are expected to either be rocket fuel or chemical weapons.
"This isn't what it looks like, i swear" said a beleaguered Steve Ballmer. "We were just going to use them to secretly bribe John Carmack with, to get him to make Doom 4 XBOX-exclusive. That was all. We weren't going to use them. Fuck. Fuck. I knew this was a bad idea."
In other news, Canadian forces, afraid that a cornered Microsoft may decide to attack, have massed near the Seattle border.
More news on FOXNews as it develops: We report, you decide.
That Gates will co-opt Camack....
This is the sort of money oriented bad stuff that happens...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
No matter how much Doom III's gameplay or storyline could possibly suck, that's not really the point.
id is not known for making games that suck the player into a virtual world with a complicated storyline, complex plot folds, and exciting climaxes with spectacular resolutions. In fact, in that aspect, all their games have sucked. The acceleration, deathmatch, and graphic detail have always been years ahead of the curve, however.
The article isn't being metaphorical by stating that Carmack and Romero created an industry - they literally licensed their engines to the entire gaming industry for further development and increased revenue. Everyone wins, especially the hardware makers. I'd venture to say that id is single-handedly responsible for the proliferation of OpenGL drivers and hardware for consumer-level graphics cards. Remember the Voodoo pass-through accelerated 3D card?
But anyway, don't think of Doom III as a game that may not meet your expectations, but think of it as the technology that an entire generation of games will be based on, just like other id releases. Think of what half-life et al. did with enemy AI with the "old" Quake II engine.
Read the article, people!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I was really excited about DOOM3 until I read that Wired article and saw that the plan Carmack originally pitched was something like the Snow Crash Metaverse.
///Will
Damn them for making the sure-fire cash cow instead of the Metaverse!!!
Anyone remember the episode of News Radio where Phil Hartman was the spokesman for Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor?
"Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor. Damn! It's Crizappy!"
The physics of games is, and always will be based on fooling the user through tricks. You don't render a box on the molecular level, you make 6 squares and call it a box. The future holds refinement. Defining the mass of a wall maybe. Say instead of a wall simply blackening when a rocket is fired, a chunk of it is blasted out, based on the type of weapon, and to go even farther, we shoot a nailgun at that, and nails are embedded inside the crater.
Another hurdle to pass is truly lifelike biomechanics, not just in movement, but in reaction. Get shot in the arm? Your arms gets forced backward forcing the rest of your body to do so. Want to run real fast, instantly do a 180 and jump? Maybe with correct modeling the game'll slow you down as you make that turn, and delay the jump.
Modeling the physics of our world is no small task, and I, frankly think Carmack is thinking too much iside the graphical box he built, and not within the new physical frontier.
Photos.
How will game companies lure us after graphics become photorealistic?
They'll have to start making them fun again.
There's a reason why Namco and others make so much money reprinting and repackaging old game, and it's not because of new graphics engines...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
evolution...no
fun times....probably
anal retentive gamers....you bet
stupid useless post.....absolutely
FPS is a vantage point, not an input device. Halo, with the possible exception of Half-Life, is the best single player FPS ever made.
Perhaps. I'll find out when I can play it conveniently on a decent display with nice inputs...
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Carmack sugests that the only the _rendering_ engine will soon become stable and future improvements will be only incremental.
This does not mean that engine programmers will be obsolete, relegated to support and optimization or that innovation slows down. Doom III and Quake engines has been optimized for tight, enclosed indoor spaces. There are lot of different possibilities not yet explored.
Just off the top of my head I can imagine game engine technology spanning a decade into the future:
- soft shadows or realtime radiosity lighting. This might be not that far off, but a lot of intersting research will be involved on top of current stencil-buffer and projected depth map based techniques.
- high dynamic range (hdr) light calculation across the entire pipeline, including effects like light bloom and hdr reflections. you start to see some of this in Splinter Cell.
- real-time, arbitrary resolution, procedurally generated texture maps and generated displacement maps (ex. RenderMan). The previous methods of doing texturing progressed from manually shaded (doom-quake3), to manually colored with normal maps for shading (doom3). The general case would be to use nothing except procedural shaders and geometry to generate all detail before approximated by texture maps.
- arbitrarily dynamic solid world geometry. Current renering engines work with a heavily pre-processsed visible shell of the world, which can be modified only in special rigid cases. It will take some effort for an engine to deform or destroy arbitrary world geometry. Imagine taking off a chunk of the wall and seing the layers of concrete underneath, then having the building collapse when supports are removed.
As the last point suggests some time into the future the latest engine might be quite exotic compared to the current ideas. I can imagine a type of voxel based representation with some image based rendering.
Innovation will never stop.
"...the ultraviolence of Grand Theft Auto III"...
Ultraviolence in GTA3? What ultraviolence? I wouldn't mind, but they claim it followed Doom.
GTA3: Simulation of a city.
Doom: Run around and kill.
GTA has its moments, but ultraviolent is not the term for it by far.
"Derp de derp."
He's a hero among coders for particularly elegant programming that pushes the limits of hardware.
(bolding by me) Carmack may be known for many things, but elegant code isn't one of them.
It's not Id's fault that DirectX has no competition unelss you count $4,000 OpenGL cards. Face it: DirectX is buit for games and it runs damn fast.
i started playing doom ii in 1994.
;-P
i never played quake.
i never played wolfenstein.
i have, sitting in a row, my p100, my p333, and my pentium 1.5g, representing 1994, 1998, and 2002 upgrades respectively.
i have mainlined doom ii on all 3 computers, playing it once a month at least, for 10 years.
i look forward to doom iii mightily!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They have Doom III listed for release on 7/31/03...
Anyone else already paid for their copy?
I wish I knew why this was limited to 120 characters... If I ever find the guy who did that I'm going to drag him out in
I am looking forward to DOOM III, I hope it will run on my Linus Beowulf clusters. I do expect DOOM III to be a MUCH different game from my favorite game, DOOM.
My favorite game, DOOM, which I play on my Linus beowulf clusters, is a game in which you the player run through a maze, shooting evil humans and monsters. When you shoot an evil human he says "HEY! HEY!" kind of in slow motion and sounding a bit like Fat Albert. Which makes sense because the evil humans are fat.
I think that DOOM III will not be anything like DOOM at all, because John Carmack and his company Id are so good at coming up with original game concepts and ideas which I can run on my Linus OS computers.
I played it on an HDTV a very responsive and comfortable controller(provided you aren't a 10 year old girl with little hands).
Any other excuses?
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Will it run nicely on my machine from 14 months ago? No.
In other news, Carmack has been dethroned as the God of PC Geeks as the dirty Apple (not even with cool BSD based OS) secret from his past comes out:
"After being thrown into a juvenile home for stealing an Apple II at age 14"
Still, bonus geek points awarded for stealing a whole computer at a time when most people were blowing cereal whistles in to pay phones.
You like the joystick you say.... .. who buys a special mouse or mouse pad for their gameS?!? hands shoot up.. dood get with the time and let us all try and get MS to create a mouse for FTPs games.. we have damn wheels for car games.. geesh....
Compare the 2 side by side and really notice the gameplay. If you like slower game play then you will like the joystick. But if you like the speed and the quick response time then the mouse is where it is out. for me i would kill to have a mouse for my xbox.
DOOM did not have up/down view so the mouse was not a factor. When i moved to a mouse with Quake i smoked all..... if a controller was leet for FTP then why are there not more people using a joystick on the PC?!?! oh, they don't go out and buy one just for a game?!? ha ha
"FPS are mouse games, pure and simple."
Right, where as this is perfectly self evident.
Oh, wait, but you're so smart and everyone else doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. I forgot about that one.
SD greatness is in the discussions created here by the readers. The criticism and new prespectives that you cannot find in the original article.
Well said!
Then again... WHAT???
"Keyboard only"? I played Doom with an analog flight-style joystick.
Half-Life was a hugely modified Quake 1 engine, not Quake 2.
"This is the best game ever yeah the gameplay sucks but man look at those graphics."
Yah, you start with a 3d engine, give it some physics rules, and you can make several different types of games using it.
What else is great is that you can use it as a mathmatical space for generic modeling systems... As the technology increases, the modeling potential does too. Artificial intelligence is one technology that requires a 3d imagination space. Thats why I'm doing some independent video game programming at the moment. It sucks dedicating an unpaid year or two of your life after college, and I only have 100 to 1 odds of beating the corporation... But my alternative is sleeping and laying around the house. Thank you Bush for doing nothing about the economy.
God spoke to me
"How are the fingers?" coder Jim Dosé asks artist Kenneth Scott, as they stand in the kitchen of id Software's Mesquite, Texas, headquarters. "Shattered," Scott replies wearily, waving a splint - the result of a rare office football game played to ease tension. But he'll type with the eight digits that work. Lead designer Tim Willits hobbles in with a thigh of busted capillaries from the same game. The art guys just scanned his wound to use as skin for a monster.
:)
:)
Is this dedication or what? Man, this would be the geek office heaven..
-'f (scanning the pimple on his lip.. a good wound texture?
-'fester
While I'm sure you're correct that two analog sticks can be very precise, its been my experience that its the *turning speed* that you lose when you move away from the mouse.
This is the same story on the keyboard. The keyboard is easier to aim (you can move in one direction at a time), but turning around is limited to a particular speed.
Granted, its limited on a mouse as well, but because you can make more dramatic motions, as well as just plain *faster* motions, you make up for it.
I assume you can go faster with analog as well by adjusting the sensitivity, but its a far more direct tradeoff between turning speed and accuracy..
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
playing with dual analog isn't as hard as some people (i.e. those that just spent $3000 on a new 'box' or $300 on a video card) want to talk shit to make it seem (so they can declare their system they just spent waaaay too much money on is the best). that being said, i prefer pc fps, but it can be done right on a console. takes some getting used to but i think it's worth it.
I'd take a minute to re-assess that "self evident truth".
Halo is currently regarded by the majority of gamers as the best FPS game at this time. It is currently avalible only on XBox, and is played WITHOUT A MOUSE.
Ergo, it's possible for them to work well on a console without a mouse.
It's really quite a simple concept to grasp (though evidently not as simple as you).
FPS are mouse games, pure and simple
No - they are games played from a first person perspective (HINT: That's what the 'FPS' bit stands for).
A 'mouse' is an input device, *not* a gaming genre. And, incidentally, it's fucking useless for FPS games without a keyboard.
Playing an FPS on a large screen, such as a widescreen TV, or projector is great - using a mouse on your lap or on you sofa while also juggling a keyboard is *not*.
That's why consoles have joypad's, it's much more convenient for playing games from a sofa, which people do because they like playing on a large screen, with beefy speakers.
...was released in 1999. The Unreal Warfare engine is hardly an improvement over the perfection that is the original version. Sure, it's a bit prettier, but take a look at the original version on a machine with cojones. On an Athlon XP 1800+ with a GeForce Ti4200 with 128MB RAM, you can crank the anti-aliasing up to 4X and still be running at 70FPS and just be totally awestruck.
Between the graphics not improving by much, and the really bad choices made in "improving" the weaponry and gameplay, Epic Games really didn't give us much over UT1999 with UT2003. I look forward to seeing what others will do with the UW engine, though. It does have potential.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
According to the Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf:
By the glory of Allah, I have been playing Doom III and Duke Nukem Forever, and Allah is good. Do not believe the lies of the infidels, Doom III is available in aisle 7 of the Baghdadi Walmart. Praise Allah, for it is an uncensored version.
So there you have it.
Ok guys, these games are becoming scarily beautiful and realistic...now where is my virtual reality? Hell, even something as simple as the original Doom series (or even better, Doom Legacy) in fully immersive 3D would be a nice start.
Lawnmower Man? I want that. Come on, it must be trivial now!
Hey, if you people want gaming news you can have a slashbox with shacknews. This is so 8 hours ago :)
I mean, 1/2 of slashdot's stories are from other news/blog sites like shack and the register. Just add some sites to your freaking slashboxes and stop posting other people's news!
In my opinion, one thing gets overlooked. That is the evolution of technology. I don't mean speedwise, I mean the actual tech. I expect that more and more games would have additional tech features to suck its users in as good engines become commonplace, such as stereo support, multiple monitor support, etc. There will most likely be a rush to make new engines as technologies such as holography become available, or perhaps a revolution in control devices instead of mouse and keyboard. I expect games to utilize available tech to the fullest.
Also, I wouldn't mind seeing some new concepts once in a while. You can write a FPS engine and beat it to death all you want with many other games (Quake III anyone?), but you won't be able to use it for a fighting game, for a RTS game, or space sim. I would like to see more effort be put into original game genres instead of rehashing the old ones. If the Doom 3 engine is robust, stable, fast, and easily modifiable (as I'm sure it will be), many companies will have less need for programmers and more for artists and concept designers. If this comes about, I expect and hope companies will try to go for a new concept with a new engine, because that's where the future is. Right now, sales are good for FPS games. They will probably continue to be. So, it won't be easy to compete, but I really hope to see some original games written by talented programmers with smooth execution. And I have faith I will.
webpage
I mean, what do you want to do? Counteract the practice of releasing for all platforms at the same time by boycotting all industries worldwide? If you expect id to release at different times for different platforms then you probably expect other things... "I mean, what's next, id stops releasing source code to their games for educational purposes?!"
It makes sense to release a game for all platforms at the same time. How stupid would it be, for example, if The Matrix was released at some theaters first because they had DTS, two weeks later at other theaters because they had THX and a month after that to remaining theaters, which had Dolby Digital... How stupid would it be if the game were made available on platforms X and Y, everybody plays the game and gets sick of it, and then the game is released on platform Z? Nobody would buy it for platform Z.
Consider this argument the other way around: id releases Doom IV for Windows, XBox, PS2 and whatever other platforms there are out there. But it takes them forever to release the game on Linux. How would you feel then? I think I would feel quite bad. In that case, it would make sense, again, for them to wait before releasing the game until the Linux version is complete. Consider another example in which they wish, also, to release a version for some new computing platform and operating system that sucks and nobody uses, but there is one customer in the entire world who is using that operating system and that customer wants to spend the $39.95 (USD) to buy the game for his platform. Suppose, also, that the entire design ideology employed in the design of this computer platform is completely, utterly and in all other ways different from anything we've ever seen, and the only compiler available for this platform is an INTERCAL compiler. In that case, id should wait until a C++ compiler can be coded in INTERCAL and the game is ported over to the new platform before releasing for all other platforms. In other words, the entire world should be made to wait because we need to be fair to that ONE person. We are a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, after all.
DirectX 9 will install on a machine with a fricken S3 Virge. It's not going to magically make the video card fast and support all the DirectX 9 features.
Id has been a phenomemnon, but let's give credit where it's due.
I couldnt be bothered reading through all the posts but had something to say so im probably redundant (bring on the moderators!!!!). Is it just me or is the emphasis on the money they can make from the engine, its damn good, i doubt any hardware im gonna have soon will run it, but quater of a mill for the q3 engine, bit steep! it makes me think how much they make from the actual game rather than the engine, how many games have licensed the q4 engine so far, I bet the gameplay will suffer, Dramaticly, the expansions paks sound like a bad idea, cool and everything, but if its worth buying why isnt it in the original game!
I don't have HDTV and can't upgrade my hands?
Sex and Violence is what led Acclaim to be delisted. XXX BMX anyone?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
This is one little gem. Cool 2D graphics done in a 3D engine. Minimalistic but beautiful. And the great simple game idea of Robotron on crack. Free Demo available. And yes it runs on Linux!!!
Free demo with 14 levels here:
http://www.pompom.org.uk/
I spent the money for the full version and it is extremely cool.
Spacetripper is nice as well, but not as crazy and addictive as mutantstorm IMHO.
Moritz
Or the demons will eat you.
FPS are mouse games, pure and simple.
Two analogue joysticks does not a mouse make
So how do you rotate/alter camera angle while changing aiming point at the same time with a mouse? How many buttons you got on that thing, and how many fingers do you have? Or perhaps the PC FPS games are 3-D challenged? :)
You're a young one, aren't you?
When Doom first came out everyone I knew played it with a joystick, occasionally tapping at the keyboard to change weapons or to hold down shift to run. I didn't start using a mouselook until Quake2.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Ok.. Firstly you're talking about being able to change the camera angle and change aiming point at the same time ? That's over the shoulder - not first person. Almost by definition, First Person Shooters tend to place the aimpoint directly in the center of your view angle. When you change where you look, you change where you aim. It's only in over-the-shoulder games like tomb raider, splinter cell etc where you can have an independant view angle from aim point.
Secondly, what you gain in over the shoulder games with the ability to rotate camera angles using your dual analog joysticks you lose by giving up the precision of the mouse.
Generally speaking, people are more adept at using the mouse for precise positioning than other input devices.
(Oh - and BTW playing Splinter Cell on the PC with the mouse was much easier for me than playing it on the X-Box with their controller, due to this very problem... and I used the Keyboard to change the camera angle, while changing the aim point with my mouse...)
The target platform for Doom 3 probably is 512M main RAM plus 128M video RAM. The Xbox has 64M total (video RAM comes out of main RAM).
So, to make a program run in 1/10th it's normal RAM? How long could that take? Up to and including forever.
"that is unless Microsoft convinces id to sit on the game until an Xbox version is completed."
I can't immagine Carmack selling out to Micro$oft like that. =\
Who doesn't like free music?
I played a FPS version of PacMan back on an old IBM XT when XT's were still the top of the line. It was a CGA/Monochrome game.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
This is the very sort of Satan-whispering-in-your-ear thing that people like Gates specialize in, and are good at.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Nope. It started out based on the Quake 1 engine, but when Quake 2 came out, the engine was updated to the same.
I would like to see more effort be put into original game genres instead of rehashing the old ones
They do, however, license out their engine, letting all of the companies who find that sort of genre profitable focus on the storyline, plot, etc. - and *still* deliver amazing graphics.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
First of all, let's understand one thing: id Software does NOT need the cash. The company has a history of hits -- they create the technology next-generation games are inspired by, if not based directly on. They're one of the few companies that can spurn the Microsoft money machine and not regret it, because they've been more successful marching to their own tune than just following the easy money.
Second, Carmack has said he's getting tired of making games. But he's not looking to call it quits and retire: he's looking at ROCKETRY, for goodness sake! So here we have John Carmack, one of the most technically saavy minds of our time -- he's a geek's geek, he posts on Slashdot, he doesn't give two shytes about the fame that people would love to heap upon him. Why, then, should the gaming public begrudge him the seed money that could very well open up a new door in rocketry?
Sure, it'll push back Doom 3's release date -- we're still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, aren't we? Give id Software its due -- let them have the cash, let Carmack make the millions he richly deserves. Because I want to see what Carmack can do when he really applies himself full-time to a REAL-WORLD endeavor.
Yes, the X-Box will have another instant hit if Doom 3 comes out. Is that what some people are hung up on -- MS pulling a Bungie and buying their way to success? Not that it's worked so far -- they have a handful of AAA titles (Halo being the only one I've ever played), and the PS2 still outpaces it in sales.
Well it would seem that like many people out there Tyco and Gabe would disagree with you
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Doom III uses OpenGL, and thus the DirectX version is irrelevent. DoomIII was designed from the start to target the features of the GeForce3, which the Xbox certainly has.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
This game must have been written by some real men then:
TunnelRunner Screenshots
Now these guys did "cheat" a little in that the cartridge had a little bit of extra ram in it. But hey!, we're talking about a first person game on a 2600 that isn't a low detail flying game. Tunnel Runner came out in '83 as well. The object of the game was to find the key that would let you go to the next maze. Three differently colored pac-man like Zots chased you and got in the way. Each Zot had it's own theme music that varied in intensity as you got closer to it. It made for some nice tension. Much like Adventure, they varied in speed/intelligence. Of course, the Red one was the most dreaded of all. It also had a random teleporter and the ability go through a door to the previous level. Not too shabby at all.
Yet another "oh microsoft isn't so bad" post. There seem to be a lot of these on here these days.
Does "Halo" mean anything to you? It's not like there isn't ample precident.
Some aspects of an engine have a large likelyhood of affecting gameplay. For example, once Quake was developed and you had the ability to aim vertically, and that changed gameplay quite a bit. While we haven't really had revolutions in gameplay quite that dramatic since, Doom III does offer new lighting technology, which can obviously be used to heighten suspense. It also has an effect on how objects could be seen.
So, to succinctly answer your question, an engine can have a very large effect on the gameplay. It's just that we haven't made any huge steps towards reality recently that affect gameplay in any way. And if you don't like the same-old gameplay that exists today, I suggest you play a fantastic game called Deus Ex. And Half-Life 2 will likely be revealed at E3.
I have a question, why cant' you change the game engine from a First Person Shooter to a Strategy to a sim? doesn't the rendering engine just render graphics?
oops, you're right, it does use OpenGl. My mistake stemmed from the fact that he complained about being unable to use OGL2 and because he used vertex and pixel shaders. However, I do know that it was inteded to run on a GF3, but without any of the special effects (real-time shadowing, etc). For those you need the newer cards.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Great article. But there were a few things that made me cringe, like:
:-)
"He was so immersed in his task that he saw the world around him as an optical display. In the shower the next morning, three perfect bars of light reflected on the tiles. Hey, Carmack thought - that's a diffuse illumination by a specular reflection."
Isn't LSD wonderful?
"When he rose from his desk, his photosensitivity lingered like a hangover."
Um....yeah. Something like that, yeah. ( 8:00 AM "Ah, my eyes!!!" ) Damn, John, that musta hurt.
Keep on codin'
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
It seems like a number of games these days look really purty, even though the number of games that actually use the latest hardware or API seems woefully small. It's certainly true that Carmack's one of the key people pushing the industry forward, and that's an important point.
On the other hand, even the prettiest games sucks donkey balls if the AI sucks, or the physics are clunky. I like the suggestion made by another poster--why not code a real deformable physics engine, or come up with a decent AI package for enemies?
On a tangential note, I would be most eager to find out some add-on company bought some balls, some software engineers, some patents and/or R&D, and some cheap, cool X86 or RISC processors and said, OK, we're building an AI/physics daughtercard, and the industry tools to make it work. Oh, and that next-gen cards would be hybrid AI/physics/GPU systems. With PCI Express, we might just have the bandwidth to make it work.
I have to agree, at least where sophisticated FPS games are concerned. Even with easier ones, there tends to be more options than are easily accessible from a double pair of sticks + buttons.
F'r instance, my fav alltime FPS is Heavy Gear II. There is *no way* you could ever be effective in that game with two sticks and a few buttons; there are way too many complicated options. Playing that game for a few years taught me how to find anything on the keyboard with my left hand only, and I've found that that particular skill makes me more effective at any game in which I can set the keyboard up the way I want it.
I don't want to have to learn *another* interface to play the games I want. It reminds me of the old 80s arcade days where every game had it's own controllers, setup, and quirks. To get the best performance when I play I prefer an interface like mouse + keyboard + customizable keys, not just because I'm used to it, but because it can easily be made generic across games.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Yeah, but mouse+keyboard had clear and obvious benefits to keyboard only. A joystick, even two, is no substitute for the versatility or a keyboard+mouse combo. Moving the mouse translates very well to moving the target graphic and aiming at things on screen. There are no benefits of a joystick here.
I am not a concept, I am a person.
they are games played from a first person perspective (HINT: That's what the 'FPS' bit stands for).
No they're not. They're SHOOTERS (not games in general) played from a first person perspective. (HINT: that's what the FPS bit stands for.) I assure you, despite your apparent experience to the contrary, a mouse is a far superior device for pointing at things on screen and shooting them. Why does Halo have such a huge active zone around models and such insane autoaim? Could it be that otherwise players wouldn't be able to shoot worth shit because they can't properly and accurately aim at anything?
Controlling your torso/direction of movement and aim separately is accomplished much easier and more intuitively with a full-size rotating handle joystick, such as this one from MS. Most useful for the likes of MechWarrior. And, like someone already said, FPS-type games (ie, shooters) do not benefit from this feature. They are meant for quick, straight-forward control of direction, speed and aim.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
So you've got a photo-realistic graphics engine, which generates entire worlds of vision, but it all goes to a pre-recorded soundtrack. It's like "Doom 1" or something with all those pre-rendered sprites on a nearly-proper 3D background.
So I'm imagining the next generation of computer games generating sounds on-the-fly by simulating the physics of (for example) alien vocal chords, perhaps changing as you damage the monster's throat with bullets. No more hearing the same old sounds over and over - If you have ever walked through a fort in Morrowind and heard the same voice giving you the same greeting over and over again, you might see the need for development in this field.
Quothe the raven:
People like to apply words like evolution to any developmental process presumable for the coolness factor, and in the literal sense they are right (change over time). But it's just silly to imply that CG has evolved in a darwinian sense.
I disagree. The CG that is in use to day was naturally selected from all the CG developed, including and pointedly that tech which is no longer in use. Darwinin evolution, by definition, yes?
It may be a stretch in the literal sense (although I don't think so), but an analogy is most certainly validated in ensuring that the average reader can associate the changes with processes widely understood. The analogy extends to a greater lingo, permitting, at little expense, a greater descriptive vocabulary otherwise not available.
One could go around using the "developed" or "enhanced" or "extended" lingo, but they do not adequately encapsulate the "evolutionary" meaning, in the sense that the technology does things now that it could not before, which makes it superior to previous "generations". There is a plateau of stability, where feature sets are frozen, associated with a "generation" of CG, also leaning towards this analogy.
Or at least, that's my take. I don't mean to belittle the engineers (like myself), but I am not so certain that an engineer's thought process is that functionally different from natural selection. And from that precept, I have come to this disagreement with your assertion.
I don't mean to belittle the engineers (like myself), but I am not so certain that an engineer's thought process is that functionally different from natural selection. And from that precept, I have come to this disagreement with your assertion.
:)
I disagree
A CG programmer (engineer, artist?) already has a preconceived idea of what looks 'realistic' or aesthetically pleasing. Visuals that do not look 'right' get discarded.
Biological evolution has no such luxury, the sole selection criteria being "will this change increase my chances of survival given my environment?".
If a CG programmer's efforts do not 'work', then the usual course of action is to find out what went wrong, and try to make it better. Programmers code with a specfic purpose in mind, even before culling the 'unfit' code. Unlike biological evolution which relies on random mutations.
If one irreducibly complex new trait requiring four mutations would be very beneficial to the organism but we only have three mutations, then those mutations are of no benefit to the organism and it's basically back to the drawing board. Those mutations are no more or less likely to appear again. I see this as being very different from the selection process of programmers, engineers, etc.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
But what is actually better for a kid to see? You drop a 50 pound anvil on a rooster and he gets up and walks away. You see a guy get shot in an old western and he just falls over...you see no blood, no cries of pain, no body.
So what is actually worse? Cartoon type violence that is funny and nobody really gets hurt, or realistic violence that has consequences?
There are already plans to license out the Doom III engine for Quake IV.
I don't see what the big fucking deal is? Another dark gloomy game from id where you go around shooting zombies and monsters. Gee, I've never played that game before. I will not be impressed with new graphics engines until we are talking about photorealistic worlds. UT2003 is fine until then. However, I AM looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever. There is a franchise with an attitude all its own!
"Your face, your ass: what's the difference?"
I know this is off-topic somewhat, but I wonder if the guys at id would consider using BitTorrent to distribute the official downloadable Doom III Shareware when it comes out. That would be much better than offering it by mere FTP. (FTP sites seem to just jam up when big games like that come out, and FileShack is going to have long waits, at least for freeloaders.) BitTorrent is cool.
(I'm assuming of course that they do come out with a shareware version. As popular as the guys at id are, they could probably skip it, and they know it. Like most gamers, I will buy the game anyway, right after I buy a new 4 GHz Pentium 5. Heh. But if I have a shareware version to run on my old computer, I might decide that I can put up with the low framerate for a while, and buy the full game before I buy a new computer. So they get their money sooner. -- On the other hand, I might decide the framerate is too low, and then I have to wait until I buy a new computer. But at least I'll know.)
So, guys at id, are you listening? How 'bout it?
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Quake3 -> MOHAA
Explain to me how this is any part of a Microsoft monopoly. I mean, I'm not pro-Microsoft, but if they pay ID to sit on the release until they get the xbox port running, and then id releases in their traditional, cross-platform fashion, how is that monopolistic? I mean, I'll get to play the game on my mac, it'll undoubtedly run on linux and windows, and if Microsoft really gets their way, it'll run on their console at the same time.
How is that worse than, say, Sony kicking a whole bunch of money out to square to keep the Final Fantasy series on the playstation?
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop PC market, and depending on who you talk to, the Office Suite market for said desktop PCs. That's all. They don't have a monopoly in the console market, they're a minority player. They certainly don't have a monopoly in shady corporate behavior. It is just fine to dislike the company, it is just fine to be unhappy with the prospect of waiting for a finished product because of some corporate bribe, but at least be clear about what it is that you are upset about.
Don't just yell monopoly or down with Microsoft because it happens to be the fad. This sort of response sends the wrong message to the wrong people, and that doesn't help anyone. In this case, I'm not sure what your proposed boycott of this product actually says. Don't release on multiple platforms? Give me what's done when it is done? I am an uniformed, selfish consumer? Probably the latter.
You want to fight the monopoly? Cool, contribute to a useful project. Write some documentation if you can't code, or offer organizational or monetary support to any one of dozens of projects that could use the help.
But not buying doom3? Come on. That won't make one tiny iota of a difference. Use your head.
-- caleb
if id waits on an xbox release or pulls an xbox exclusive, i will never buy another id product again. ever.
Mahjjong live?
My personal favorite quake mod was Thunder Walker CTF
;) LOL
The sounds were hilarious, and the runes made gameplay.. umm.. interesting!
I loved that game!
No way, buddy. I wasn't that impressed by HALO at all, and it was a little to easy, I thought. Even Timesplitters 2 is more fun and challenging than HALO. On the Gamecube controller it's also a peach to play.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
You forgot the edit: majority of XBox Gamers.
I agree that realism is a useful tool some of the time. However, as an avid counter-strike player, realism isn't a strong point. If anything it plays exactly like a team deatch match with mission objectives as a second thought. In fact, the most mission like levels (cs_backalley, as_oilrig) are considered to be the most boring (myself included). Real world physics have there place, but they are at such an infantile state that their true potential is yet beyond sight.
Photos.
Actually, the graphics are the same as the Dreamcast version (which, to be fair, are very very good). No retooling, though apparently there are some new glitches introduced in the Japanese version. Not sure if they fixed them yet for the US release.
:P
And it is really targeted at the people who *have* been playing games like it up until now - fans of games like Dodonpachi, Battle Garegga, etc. It is a really difficult game that is not at all friendly to new players. It requires huge amounts of dexterity and memorization, and is just very, very intimidating to people who just play shmups casually. (This memorization also makes me question the game being the pinacle of the genre - a little too old-school for my tastes.)
The storyline *is* amazing, no question. But most people really aren't going to get it in America, as it is steeped in Eastern philosophy (in particular, Zen Buddhism), and is very subtle in how it portrays the storyline. No real cinemas, no exposition dialogue from talking heads, no catchy intro scene to set the scene, only one character really (the player), massive amounts of visual symbolism, etc. Already you can see rave reviews of the game on big review sites that pretend the storyline is the same as games like Defender - they just don't get it.
Other problem is that it is a really short game - one more level would have been awesome. Also, it is designed to be played on a rotated TV (actually, in the arcades it was a rotated VGA monitor). You can play it without this, but it makes it much harder, as the lowered resolution makes it even harder, and you get black bars on the screen,
It is a fun game, no question, and everyone should give it a shot. But I don't think it is a good idea to try and sell the game to people as an update to easy games like Defender.
I'm sorry.
I predict that the Information Minister troll will be the next slashdot staple. It beats Soviet Russia in funny factor and has more flexibility. Of course, I propose that they have a defined format (gotta have standards) and begin with the word Lies!.
I wonder, though, will Information Minister trolls be redundant to the less common Bizarro World trolls?
I realize (ise) it's not a true troll, but is off topic and intends to make you laugh, so lets count it as such. (positive points awarded for funny trolls etc.)
Enough said really
3d shooters everywhere. Graphics all look the same.
The great game programmers are now in Japan.
Think of it this way, if Microsoft wanted to, they could buy nearly every publically traded game producer, this includes a hostile takeover of Sony, and make every game for the next year only available for the xbox.
"Doom III is available in aisle 7 of the Baghdadi Walmart"
There are no more Walmarts in Baghdad. They have all been replaced with Targets.
Well then you're just a poor bastard with little bitch hands.
They haven't changed, but the graphics: original.
Boring is relative. I've seen oil-well maintenance workers enjoy boring.
Actually, there were male prostitutes in GTA3, but the developers took them out after the all-male game testers whinged that they felt uncomfortable about so MUCH realness.
GTA IS violent, with the kind of headline grabbing, exploitative sex and violence that attracts lots of controversy and sells lots of games.
You are wrong.
Quake 2 beat the game out, but it's well documented that Half-Life is based on a massively-modified Quake 1 engine. It's not the same as the engine used in the release of Quake 1, in that it was a "point" release.
See here for the most definitive account.
Please don't speak about that which you obviously know nothing about in future.
and before anyone had a VCR
and before anyone had heard of Star Wars
and before anyone had played Dungeons and Dragons
so don't come it with the age thing
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Sort of; ID's paying Raven to write Quake 4, using the Doom3 engine. It's not really them licensing it out so much as sub-contracting the work.
Anyone care to point out links or explain what the current status is? Thx.
The point of confusion for the above fellow is that the forces creating new and potentially adaptive iterations of technology are human-driven whereas the forces that generate new genetic iterations and create new forms that are subsequently subject to natural selection are still rather poorly understood and often viewed as mystical, magical, or divine.
The best analogy to follow is the breeding of animals versus natural selection. Breeding animals is still a Darwinian, and therefore evolutionary, process. The selection pressures imposed through deliberate breeding may be 'artificial', but the process of evolution through selection itself remains unchanged. We're not talking about just breeding toy poodles and lab rats here. All domestication follows the same pattern. For example, in the 'natural' environment almond trees originally thrived by having nuts that were inedible on account of their cianide content (don't ever eat wild, bitter almonds), but a mutation leading to poison-free nuts was suddenly adaptive because humans exerted 'artificial' selection pressures on these trees, tending them, planting them, and ultimately ensuring their evolutionary success.
No I meant what I said. That's why I said it. Halo has had top-quality reviews in every main stream independant cross platform gaming journal (for example, magazines such as Edge).
g ot-you-killed-just-when-you-were-doing-so-well so I don't include it for that reason).
'PS2 Fanboys Monthly' may say 'well you know it's alright, but it's not great, there are better PS2 games' but that sort of propoganda has been going on since the early 80's Atari/Intellivision/etc and is just as transparent.
I prefer to read mature gaming magazines with *honest* reviews that don't simply pander to the readership and tell them how smart and cool they are for buying their chosen console.
It's a good game. It would still have been a good game if it was released on SGI Indy only. I have 3 consoles, Halo is the best FPS game on all of them.
The only truly comparable game is Half Life (DN3D was very innovative, but a little frustrating in places due the big-explosions-and-isane-nubmer-of-bad-guys-that-
I don't know who to blame, Wired or Carmack, but Road Runner was not a Hanna-Barbera character, he was a Warner Brothers character. Not to mention, Disney, Warner Brothers, and pretty much every other animation house was using background paintings some thirty years before Hanna-Barbera existed.
It's really quite a simple concept to grasp (though evidently not as simple as you).
I am not a concept, I am a person.
I was infering that you are simple, not that you are a concept.
Now do you see how simple you are?
Christ-on-a-bike....
It's more fun to play games on a big screen with a good surround sound setup on a comfy sofa. Keyboards and mice are just shit in the context of sitting on a sofa. Joypads are very good in this context. VERY SIMPLE.
It's not about 'how big your recticle is' it's about HOW MUCH FUN YOU HAVE and there is WAAAY more fun to gained from a huge projected/back projected image, backed by a decent home cinema sound setup.
With all the advances made in Linux over the past couple of years, I still use Windows (2000 flavour) almost exclusively as my day to day OS environment.
Why? Because it is the ONLY viable PC gaming OS.
Nearly every other task involving computers on a day to day basis can be successfully done in Linux.
Sadly, Windows in all its flavours is still a huge resource hog compared to its cut down XBox OS, which is designed purely for gaming.
What I would love to see is an open source gaming OS devoid of anything not strictly associated with pumping out pixels and noise at the best framerates possible. The problem is proprietary standards. Right now Microsoft has sewn up the gaming community with its DirectX de-facto standard. This gaming standard is the reason I run Windows and not Linux. I'm a gamer and play most days, and for that I need Windows on my box.
I don't think that there are many games that could force a change to a new OS to play it. The only company I can think of is id Software.
What I (and no doubt others) would like to see is an open source, but most of all OPEN STANDARD, GameOS designed from the ground up for PC gaming. id Software could create such an OS I believe. Make it platform agnostic so it will run on x86s, Macs and others, and make it easily bootable from any other OS on those machines, and you could finally precipitate the shift away from Windows lock-in.
I'd buy such an OS, run it alongside Linux, and finally be free of Microsoft! (I already use OpenOffice.org so the only MS product I use is the OS itself)
How about it, id?
Visceral Psyche Films
If you read the article, you'll see that it mentions a port to the XBOX will be an easier task. Dropping the resolution, taking out certain features, that you wouldn't see through a TV screen. Tweaking to meet the XBOX specs.
Another words, all XBOXs are the same. Plus, the xbox doesn't push out rediculous rez, b/c of the TV factored in. He knows everyone will have the same setup. That's not the case for PCs. Someone will have an ATI or NVIDIA. Someone will have 2Gigs of ram, others much less. Some people will have monitors that can support beyond 1600x1200, some still use their 15in.
Tweaking for a common system would be an easier task than making a game to fit all users needs. Besides, he started to spec to work with an NVIDIA GeForce3. The demo was merely to test a certain ATI code, doesn't show the real performance impact on a PC.
Sure, I see your point that movies special effects dudes come out with new stuff every year to top last year's hits, but we're talking about a graphics engine. Already, we are seeing how other types of related technologies are playing a role in the evolution of special effects. For example: MASSIVE (AI) and the Matrix's new technology (Realistic Animated Texture Creation) -- not the graphics engine itself. Carmack's not talking realistic character movement or physics or how to take real-life photography into 3d animation. A 3d graphics engine is like a camera and once the engines are good enough, there will not be the yearly imperative to upgrade them anymore, there will be other related technologies to work on (texture creation, physics, AI, etc).
Even if you don't buy this argument, look at the rest of the history of software development. Programmers used to have to build their own file systems, databases, network libraries, and on and on and now we just use whatever is included on a given platform, filling in where necessary. 3D Graphics will be no different.
I hate trolls. This falls in the same line as PC gamers vs Console gamers.
3d shooters everywhere. Graphics all look the same.
Yeah, probably all using ID Software's engine. The game programmers you're probably talking about are all console devs. It's starting to be an occuring trend where they showcast their devs similarly how a director is showcast in films.
The article says Quake pioneered 3D polygonal characters and the freedom to look in any direction. Not quite. Parallax beat them to the punch with Descent a year earlier.
To everyone complaining about a lack of AI and physics advances in games. In particular, everyone ragging on Carmack because you think his comments ignore physics and ai enhancements to a 3d engine. Read what Carmack says, he states that the rendering engine will soon be stable and not rewritten for a long time. He is not saying major enhancements to 3d engines will not still be developed, he says major rendering enhancements need not be developed. He is basically observing what your complaining about, future enhancements will be less graphical and more on the simulation(ai/physics) aspects of a 3d engine.
With vertex and pixel shaders, the rendering engine can be written reasonably capable of lasting many years while still looking up to date. This leaves the other aspects of a 3d game engine as areas where that effort will be pushed. Carmack recognizes that people like himself who primarily push the rendering portion of engines, will soon work themselves out of a job. That doesn't mean other aspects of engine design are being ignored by him, he's just aware of his focus on graphics/renderer enhancements over the years.
Sure, it'll push back Doom 3's release date
Maybe that'll give me some time to save up for a brand new computer. I mean, I can't expect the one I bought 3 months ago to be able to play it now can I?
When I first played doom, it was keyboard only... two hands... one for moving, one for controling weapons and jumping/door... a joystick was a luxury and IMHO too imprecise.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Good argument, I was against Id taking the money until I read this. I like that Carmack stands up for his principles.
However, I don't think there is anything wrong with accepting a massive pile of cash from MS to allow for a simultaneous release -- as long as it is still released for the other platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows).
mbbac
We haven't really reached the finish line until CG can effectively fool us into thinking we are looking at a photograph.
How do you know? Maybe is really a CG creation? Have you ever met him/her in the flesh?
More seriously, a lot of movies that aren't sci fi are using digital techniques in ways that the audience is completely oblivious to. So maybe it's closer than you think.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
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When I first played doom, it was dip switches only! But this is nothing compared to my dad, who was playing pong by resoldering wires for every move!
The NVidia chip as used in the XBox is basically a GeForce3, which is not anywhere near the performance of a decent GeForce4, much less an ATi Radeon 9700. I just don't see D3 on an XBox looking decent.
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maybe. The best games are on console and the japanese bring an artistry that U.S. makers don't have.
Maybe someday it will change. Don't see it yet.
... and then there is the small matter of providing sensory feedback other than audio/visual stimuli to the user, i.e. more realistic tactile feedback ("D'oh - I was just shot in the head, there goes my rumble pack" > becomes "Arrgh! YeowW! Damnit - I hate it when the force feedback+pain suit kicks in")...but I'm not sure this would sell too well, outside of the lucrative S&M market.
I agree. D3 won't run nearly as well on an XBox, and trying to play a FPS with a videogame controller is an exercise in frustration.
But D3 is going to be a huge game, and is going to attract a much wider audience then the typical first person shooter. A lot of those people aren't going to know that the XBox version is inferior, or they won't really care. They'll see it strictly as a question of buying an XBox or trying to figure out what new hardware they'll need to run the PC version. Most of them will probably take the safe way out and pick up an XBox.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Please continue to be an asshole in the future. We all appreciate it!
But doom 3's will not by any means be near the end. Face it, the doom 3 demo looked good - for starkly lit futuristic interiors. Not 'til radiosity is realtime will lighting TRULY look good I think.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
replace some GodBlessed polygons by voxels 4 Christ sake !!! or d3 will kill anyones framerate!!!!! I demand it!
... will be affected. Carmack has always been good about making his games available on a variety of platforms -- remember, the Quake3 test came out on Mac BEFORE PCs. Time will tell....... in the meantime, now there's Half-Life 2 to look forward to / keep us occupied until Doom ]|[ comes out. :)
Yeah, getting a box that will allow you to take full advantage of Doom ]|['s capabilities will probably take some new hardware. Although I believe that the most expensive / demanding piece of equipment will be the graphics card..... I remember reading somewhere (Tom's Hardware? Ars Technica? ShackNews?) that the Radeon 9700 Pro -- then the fastest graphics card available -- would only be able to crank out 20-40fps on a high-end box.
What kind of box do you have right now? Would you be gaming under Linux, Mac or PC? I'm pretty sure that if you have 1GB of DDR RAM, upwards of 1.6Ghz CPU, a 7200RPM 8MB cache HDD and a fast video card, you'll be able to play it and not go without. Here's a box that has most of those features -- it's a SFF box that I spec'ed out a few days ago, and it costs under $1000 ($979):
$280.00 - Shuttle XPC SB51G SFF
$184.00 - ATI Radeon 9500 PRO w/ TV-Out & DVI
$190.00 - Intel Pentium 4 2.53Ghz / 533mhz FSB
$130.00 - Western Digital 120GB HDD (8MB Cache)
$142.00 - 2) 512MB Corsair PC2700 DDR
$ 53.00 - Lite-On LTR-52246S 52x24x52 CD-RW
Yes, $1000 is still a lot of money to shell out for a PC. But it's not as much as it used to be for a quality box. And the longer you wait, the cheaper components will get.