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."

Comments

How does it tie to the older story?

[poisoneleven]

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.

bored with first person shoot em ups

[Brigadier]

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.

Re:bored with first person shoot em ups

[ansonyumo]

Hear hear.

However, I will take a different tact than you. I miss the simplicity of side scrollers, bottom shooters, etc. These were great little 5-30 minute diversions that didn't require reading a user's guide. There was also a lot of creativity that went into the design of the better entries in this lot. Q*Bert, Tron, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Track and Field, Zaxxon, Defender, Robotron and Tetris (among others) were all groundbreaking games when they debuted. Sure, you can find all of these titles in various "museum" releases or on the emulators, but it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry.

On the more cerebral front, I really enjoyed the Infocom games. Pretty cool that they have them all for the z machine on Palm OS.

-brian

Re:Typical

[anon*127.0.0.1]

Well, the article *does* quote Carmack as saying that Microsoft is offering Id a boatload of money to sit on the PC release of D3 until they've got an XBox port ready for release at the same time. Seems to me that thats one of the more significant news bits in the story, along with Carmacks musings that he might be out of a job soon.

I guess Microsoft figures a lot of gamers will be upgrading their hardware when D3 comes out. If the XBox version is ready at the same time, those gamers might decide to buy themselves an XBox instead of sinking $300 into another new video card.

Coders already outnumbered.

[pmz]

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.

Re:Typical

[sweetooth]

This has nothing to do with Microsoft maintaining a monopoly. They may have made a lot of money from the monopoly, but even if they had made the boatloads of money they have without a monopoly this would still be a wise move. As others have pointed out a Doom III release that was for all platforms at the same time gives the X-Box a small advantage. Some people might rather go out and buy an Xbox and copy of Doom III rather than spending $300-500 on a new video card.

Re:Why not just reprint Wired?

[ralico]

If we just read Wired, then we wouldn't have the opportunity to make comments and taunt each other like we can do here.

There is much to do

[metalhed77]

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.

Re:There is much to do

[NeoSkandranon]

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.

You make good points, and those are features i would REALLY like to see in games. But the problem is, that alot of people DONT want to see that---they want to be able to run and strafe and rocket-jump without a modicum of impairment. That's why more people play Quake-style shooters than MOH:AA and Ghost Recon, because they see the movement physics as impairment, not realism

Re:There is much to do

[GlassHeart]

But the problem is, that alot of people [...] see the movement physics as impairment, not realism

Your point is well taken.

I think the most interesting thing about more realistic physics is that it has the potential of taking the game out of the designer's hands. The game can provide you the ability to modify terrain, but the player figures out you can use that feature to build a "dam", and then blow up the "dam" to flood your enemy, or use the dam to irrigate your crops more effectively. The designer only has to provide the problem and the simulation, but is freed from providing specific solutions to puzzles.

Imagine a space flight simulator, where naturally a game designer would not have expert personal knowledge on. However, if the physics is properly simulated, it's not impossible for good players to figure out their own tactics and maneuvers that the designer never even thought of. I'm talking about that idea, applied to the other genres like FPS, RTS, or RPG.

Basically, the opportunity to play in a world that doesn't even feel "designed", the way a Doom level must be. Many games today play like you're playing against the designer (in absentia), trying to figure out what he was thinking, which I think takes away from an immersive effect.

engine coders will never obsolete

[mbaranow]

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.

Ultraviolence in GTA3?

[NanoGator]

"...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.

Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3?

[Treeluvinhippy]

I don't know maybe the fact that in GTA3 you can

1)Steal a cab.

2)Beat the shit out of the cabbie for the hell of it.

3)Drive around with the cab and do drive-bys with your Uzi.

4)Pick up and have sex with a prostitute then beat said prostitute's head in with a baseball bat to get back your money.

Which is the more shocking movie? Resident Evil or Natural Born Killers? Resident Evil has plenty of blood and violence but really is standard fare. On the other hand Natural Born Killers isn't any more bloody , it's just that you or me or Cowboy Neal can go of the deep end and do that stuff.

Doom maybe about shooting up zombies and demons. However to the best of my knowledge you can't do that in real life(If it was I would be born again real quick).

There's stuff in GTA3 that you CAN do and does happen in real life. That's why it's shocking and considered ultraviolent(and fun!).

Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3?

[NanoGator]

"2)Beat the shit out of the cabbie for the hell of it."

Yeah, you can bop him a couple of times until he falls. It's hardly shocking in light of Bugs Bunny catoons that we've all watched for years. It's violent, but it's not ultra violent.

Ultra violent would be like the first part of the Animatrix where that group of men attacked the female robot, ripping her to pieces.

I can't believe GTA3 is that misunderstood, considering how popular it is.

Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3?

[TheLink]

Uh, but you're the one deciding whether to "beat the old woman to death with a baseball bat".

You aren't required to do that in GTA3. The game allows you to do lots of things but you don't have to do all of them.

If _you_decide_ to do violent stuff that disturbs you then you take a large share of the blame. Similarly if you decide to buy a game and play it even though it disturbs you, or let people who might be disturbed by it play it.

I personally like flying the dodo into the sunrise, do loop the loops. Take a boat to the lighthouse, jump backwards all the way up to the top, etc. Try to push a boat to the other side of the airport (at a certain point an invisible force suddenly shoves the boat back really hard).

But blowing up stuff is fun too ;).

id is doing the right thing!

[rice_burners_suck]

I would usually post some very anti-Microsoft sentiment right about now, but in this particular case, I believe that id is doing the right thing, if only on a matter of principle.

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.

Re:Doom III to be a letdown? I doubt it.

[NerveGas]

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