Doom 3 Q&A Gives More Gameplay Details

Arcane writes "This interview with id lead designer Tim Willits at Gamespot goes into more detail about Doom 3 than the usual 'mind blowing graphics' or 'changes the future of gaming' phrases." It's nice to see some new screenshots, mention of multiplayer modes, and most of all, Tim's descriptions of actually playing the game. New trailer debuts at E3, apparently.

Comments

Longevity not "Doomed"

[patoco12]

As usual, the game looks to be great.

But the game will have longevity if only because most people (and by people I mean people, not hardcore gamers) won't be able to play the game until the market is saturated with the power needed to run it.

whoa..interview duplicate in HTML source

[Dr. Awktagon]

Hey, just did a "view source" because the page was rendering all wrong... the whole interview is in plain text within a comment at the beginning of the HTML source code (do a view source).

Cool! Plain ol' text is so much easier to read.. is this a common gamespot thing?

Re:whoa..interview duplicate in HTML source

[Pyrosz]

Get Opera 7.10 browser and you can select what they call Author Mode by a single button click, makes it an instant text only view (after you turn off graphics). It maintains some of the layout but not the annoying colours and such.

Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[ctr2sprt]

The description given sounds an awful lot like Splinter Cell. There are definitely parts in SC where you can track an enemy's progress by his shadow, and naturally sticking to the shadows yourself is a critical part of that game. Most of the lights in SC are also destroyable, which makes for great fun. The model physics are rag doll-like, though probably not as advanced in SC as in D3. I've never played Thief or any of the other games in this genre, but I imagine they are similar too.

It's interesting to imagine Doom with a kind of covert-mission aspect to it, instead of a mindless bloodbath. I'm sure there will be a bloodbath part of the game, and I'm sure it'll be significant, but... it's an interesting twist on the Doom series, which has never exactly been subtle.

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[mr3038]

What worries me is that Carmack has gotten so caught up in his ragdoll physics that he'll forget to make it look spooky. One of the things that made Doom I and II so good was precisely the fact that it wasn't true 3D - when you looked at a bad guy he was a perfect bitmapped image of that bad guy, not a frame of painted triangles. Unless Doom III has some unbelievably huge number of triangles for each model, i'm not holding out much hope for realistic-looking monsters. I'd rather have low-res bitmaps than high-res high-poly-count frames.

Are you sure? Would you really rather have graphics that looked like DOOM2 instead of Final Fantasy (the movie) or Monsters Inc (hopefully DOOM's monsters are more scary)? Pretty much all movies use high-res high-poly-count frames for the FX shots. The only problem with the games is that most games have less than 20K polys per frame when you would really want 20-80M polys per frame [1].

Unfortunately, DOOM3 isn't going to display that many polygons. I guess it's more like 200K polys per frame but I'm pretty confidient that DOOM3 as a whole does look better with its polygon based characters than any game with pre-rendered characters glued on more-or-less-static background. That is, if you have hardware to run DOOM3 with full rendering quality.

[1] It has been claimed that one would need roughly 80M triangles to model a single scene so that it would be indistinguishable from the real thing. One could first thing that because 1024x768 screen has only about 780K pixels one could have one polygon per pixel with a 780K poly model for the entire scene. However, once you start throwing transcludent stuff to the scene, you'll notice that you need more than one polygon per pixel if you want high quality rendering. In addition, as DOOM3 has shadows, some polygons outside the scene in your view can cast shadows to the scene and increase the complexity despite the fact that the polygons that made up the shadowing object aren't visible in the final picture. If you don't need shadows, some voxel-based technique could be the answer. However, without the shadows, the end result would be far from great -- I'm not aware of any technique to quickly render shadows with voxel-based scene.

Re:PR blurb

[The Evil Couch]

well, if you've been working on a game for about 3-4 years, you'll either love it and think it's the best thing since sliced bread or hate it and dream about stabbing Carmack every night. when you're in something for that long of a time, it becomes a part of you.