Slashdot Mirror
No Doom 3 This Year?
Ant writes "According to an article at Blue's News: 'Though id Software basically invented the idea of using "when it's done" as a release date, and thus did not specify a release date when DOOM 3 was announced, many have been assuming that the game would be available for this year's holiday season. Now a report on HomeLAN Fed cites Activision's 2003 release calendar and quarterly financial conference call... [saying that] Activision admits that this matter is entirely in id's hands, but that they are not expecting the game this year, and have it "penciled" on their calendars for fiscal Q4 (Jan-March) 2004.' Additionally, Quake IV is now due in Fiscal 2005 (which begins April 2004)."
That's from the folks that bring us the Duke Nukem games. C'mon. Let's give credit where credit's due.
.plan from the developmental Doom 2 era. Nice try, though.
It's straight out of Carmack's
StoneCypher is Full of BS
It is not Doom IV, if you read the post it says Quake IV. Which is not even being made by id, it is being made by Raven using the Doom III engine. Two entirely differnt games, same engine.
For some reason known only to accountants and PHBs, many corporations base their 'fiscal' year off of a different quarter than the calendar year. In general, the fiscal year number is the number of the highest calendar year that forms part of the fiscal year.
So, for id/Activision, fiscal year 2004 runs from April 2003 to March 2004.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Wow are you dead wrong.
When the "marketeers" (also known as management) decide to ship a title before the techies think it's ready, debacles like Falcon 4 happen.
It's a great game now...after many patches. The initial reviews sucked, and sales never recovered.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't think it'll come as a shock to anyone that when you let the engineers decide when a product is ready to ship, that it will never ship.
That's only true if you have a culture that encourages (or forces) engineers to add features at their whim. If you have a culture that says, "This is what we're going to do in this release; we may do less, but we won't do more unless we are told we have to," then you have a much better chance to ship.
Reading that, you may think that it's a Dilbertesque way of working ("less work! more pay!"), but it's one strategy for actually getting things done.
Having been in the game industry, it's about 180 degrees from the way they work, though... it's nothing to come in on a Monday and find that over the weekend, some programmer got uppity late Saturday night and coded an AWESOME NEW (unplanned) FEATURE that will plague you with bugs in six months. Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but that was the state when I was there.
Additionally, I don't know what segment of the industry you work in, but most channels have such a long lead time that if you don't have your marketing people putting out tendrils and your sales people booking units long before the ship date, you'll be burning through a lot of cash before you get dollar #1 out of the customer...
Even if you assume that to really play the game you need twice the minimum specs which would be approximately:
2 Ghz CPU
512 MB RAM
GF2 or Radeon 8xxx series card
I would guess that's gonna be one outdated computer system by Jan-March 2004.
So much for Doom 3 forcing everyone to upgrade and sparking a business revivaling for PC parts manufacturers....
Where the Music Matters
It seems that everything imitates one of a few different styles. I'm saddened to see that an intelligent and creative man like John Carmack is just repeating himself.
Carmack is mostly a 3D guy...Kindof like the kernel hacker in the back. He has say and cares in what type of games get put out, but in general he is focusing on the engine... id releases their engines every once in a while, with new upgrades of features taking advantage of the latest video cards, 3D innovations, and performance upgrades. The game they are working on just happens to be the label for that new engine.
So far, Carmack's only 3D sons are Quake, Quake2, and Quake3 engines. Technology from Quake1 and 2 spawned halflife, and thus the HL MOD Counterstrike. It became a huge success, with id's engine doing the grunt work underneath.
Then Quake2 begot Soldier of Fortune, another huge single player and multiplayer success. So successfull that SOF eventually begot SOF2 (based off an independant engine I believe)...
After a while, id decided to release their Quake3 engine. It came with a multiplayer DM and CTF style game only, with no single player except playing the MP game with bots inserted. This quake3 engine gave a whole new meaning to 3D graphics engines, with curved surfaces, fully 32 bit color rendering, huge advancements in lighting, and large terrain support, stable and known consol/script interface for the "pro" gamers, amongst numerous features. (note: there were other competing engines that had similar functions, UT for example)
Quake3 was an instant hit. It carried on the hardcore gamers tradition from the land of Quake2 deathmatch and CTF to a newer generation of Quake gamers. With the release of OSP competition mod, quake3 was the first game to introduce serious gamers to serioius tournaments. People started Modding the Quake3 engine and created navy seals games, and others. Companies started putting out their own mods and releasing them as standalone games. Namely, Quake3 begot Jedi Knight II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and the new FREE multiplayer online game: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The latter 3 saving private ryan like semi massive multiplayer FPS and James bond like single player games were huge successess both in sales, but also in online gaming. Semi massive multiplayer reality online FPS games are one of the new big things, and id's Quake3 engine is behind it. (note: Battlefield 1942, using a competing engine, is of the same type, but with vehicles and larger terrains)
Quake3 will likely spawn more games, and improve its children into perfection. Quake3 is showing its age though. No vehicle support, and very large terrains are hard to build without killing framerate (wolfenstein has shown this). And new technology has built up since Quake3 has been released way back in 2000(?).
DOOM III will be id's next generation engine. With a new name, and an all new rendering paths for various card manufacturers. The latest technology in 3D rendering will be included, and you can bet it will be stable and fast and beautiful as ever. From the looks of it, DOOM III is scheduled to beget Quake IV as its online counterpart (developed by a seperate company, but using the DOOMIII engine). DOOM III should support vehicles in all shapes (aircfaft, cars, bikes) and will have unbelieveably large terrain support. Improved lighting engines and geometry and physics engines. All new sound engine. One thing I MUST mention is the all new network code. It will be improved to allow better scalability for massive multiplayer online gaming and with better prediction technology and lag fixes.
Virtually everything will be all new and improved. You can bet that the DOOMIII engine will live long and prosper.
thank you.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
David Braben, when coding Frontier: Elite 2, at least as early as 1990.
Then Quake2 begot Soldier of Fortune, another huge single player and multiplayer success. So successfull that SOF eventually begot SOF2 (based off an independant engine I believe)...
Soldier of Fortune 2 uses the Quake3 engine, along with some other technology called GHOUL2 from Ravensoft.