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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,
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.
Actually, the XBox delay angle has been reported on several places, including very pro-MS/pro-XBox sites.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
This ties into the Slashdot story awhile back about new titles for sysadmins."
No it doesn't.
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.
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?
Wait a minute, yes they do!
Anyway, getting a story submitted on Slashdot is almost as cool as getting my letter printed in PCXL. Cool is a relative term, BTW.
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 $300 into another new video card.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
i really don't get ppl whining about posts . . . this is the internet
there goes my cred . . .
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
The X thing is basically a PC running a form of you-know-what OS, with a Nvidia graphics processor, that you likely have to program with a well know M$ 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.
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
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
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?
Doom III sounds like it will need mega powerful machines to look decent. Will the PIII 700 in the xbox be enough?
BC
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!
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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.
"Keyboard only"? I played Doom with an analog flight-style joystick.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't Doom III singleplayer only? I don't think there would be any netplay to speak of.
Id has been a phenomemnon, but let's give credit where it's due.
The very fact that they have to release it for xbox shows a huge shift over there at Id. PC gaming is dying, they need console revenue to break even with this dog.
PC Gaming is Dying!! It will be buried next to BSD! Heck, I'm a console gamer, and even I don't believe that.
"Granted, they would all be professionaly made, but who cares? Most of the player-made doom wads were pathetic. "
The player-made Quake mods were awesome.
Don't be willfully ignorant to my point.
"Derp de derp."
You are correct this does not have anything to do with maintaining their monopoly, this is about extending their monopoly. It has been discussed here before that their home entertainment division is losing massive amounts of money while their monopolized divisions are making large amounts of money. Businesses that are faced with real competition look for solutions to failing divisions, but Microsoft doesn't have to because it can always throw money at the problem.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
shit dude! you're right. I was laughing my ass off while I played this old copy of Doom but then I looked out my window and there were bunnies everywhere... er rather bunny heads on pikes. Quick! Where's my shotgun and chainsaw?!?!?!
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.
"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.
> "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."
Heh, I get like that all the time. Just this morning I woke up after ~2 hours sleep and though "I wonder how I can get more sleep in the same amount of space... I know, I'll GZip it!"
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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
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.