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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,
Offer him rocket fuel.
This ties into the Slashdot story awhile back about new titles for sysadmins."
No it doesn't.
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?
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.
Well, don't expect it to run smoothly on such an old piece of crap computer. Try upgrading to a Quad P4-3GHz system with the best ATI Radeon you can buy and you MIGHT get 15fps if you're lucky. You can't expect a piece of artistic genius like Doom III to run on crappy commodity PC hardware can you? To get the real performance you need to buy an Xbox.
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
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.
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.
Id has been a phenomemnon, but let's give credit where it's due.
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.