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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."
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.
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.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
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
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.
If we just read Wired, then we wouldn't have the opportunity to make comments and taunt each other like we can do here.
SCO to Hell
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.
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."