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Doom 3 vs. Source: Comparing Engines
Tom V. writes "DevMaster.net has an article that outlines some of the technical differences between Half-life 2's Source and Doom 3 engines from various game development aspects such as graphics, A.I., physics, networking, etc. According to the author, the winner is the Source engine based on its 'completeness' as a game development package. However, in terms of graphics, the clear winner is Doom 3."
I think you're being a little hard on Source... but I have to agree with you on Havok. Oh how I hate it (as a developer and gamer).
RTFA dumbass. It has nothing to do with open/closed source. If you had RTFA and played both games, you'd see that Havok walks all over the built-in physics engine of Doom3. Your comment suggests that a very limited engine is superior because of who wrote it.
Yeah but the Source engine is going to win on the consumer market because Joe Random PC user that buys a dell and doesnt know how to upgrade the video card is never going to be able to just walk through a store, pick up doom3, and have an enjoyable time playing it. He'll return it because it runs like garbage and to him a video card is just a thing with some RAM on it.
The reviewer's methodology seems to be:
1) Play both games.
2) Compare graphics/sound/AI etc between the 2 games.
3) Assume that those comparisons are solely founded on what the underlying engine provides, rather than some of what the games add on top.
It's disappointing that a site with 'dev' in it's name didn't actually review the functionality, performance, and extensibility of the engines outside of games that might use it. Doom 3 is not just map and sound data fed into Id's engine, and Half-Life 2 is not just map and sound data fed into Source.
The title should be "Doom 3 vs. Half-Life 2: Comparing games". This has the potential to be a fascinating topic, but this article is sophomoric.
It would of been nice if the game wasn't so dark.
I mean, wasn't there duct tape in the future?
I've played both games. Beat both games. I also took a dump today. People say Half Lifes physics are revolutionary, and that's just wrong. They spent 6 years working on this damn game that took my 15 hours to beat. My quess is they tried to work in their own physics system, and it failed, so they just spent the money to stole from users with their Steam thing, and license Havok.
Not only that if you play the right games you would have already seen the use of physics. Deus Ex 2, the disgrace that it was, allowed you to pick of stuff and hurl them at people. Right when you walk out of Tarsus, you pick of a trash can and hurl it at the Order lady. That uses Havok.
You people think the gravity gun is such a cool weapon? Maybe skinny little Gordon Freeman cant throw for shit...
This guy says "I haven't been able to listen to the sounds in HalfLife II" - OK, but then did he really play the games, or is he just going on other people's statements about the engines?
/. post?
Or did he in fact play HL2, but for some reason was not able to hear the sounds?
This alone makes me wonder about the validity of the review.
And I am sorry, but while the issue of portability may not matter to many, it is important to me - and in that regard Doom wins.
And one last thing - will this reviewer receive the flamage about saying HalfLife was based upon the Quake II engine that I did in when I said that in a previous
www.eFax.com are spammers
This category is tricky, because I haven't had the chance to experience the sound of Half-Life 2.
Maybe it's just me, but good sound is almost as important as good graphics to overall gameplay IMO. I'm not really sure I understand this article - either this guy is comparing Doom3 and HL2 by what's on paper only, or he played Doom3 with sound and inexplicably played HL2 without sound. How do you play a FPS without sound? Sound is atmosphere - good sound gets your blood running - I just don't get it - I wound't even bother playing without sound.
Anyways, sorry to say, I didn't really get anything out of this article. To sum it up: Doom3 has better graphics and HL2 has better physics/AI/gameplay/multiplay. Oh you knew that already? Yeah, me too.
"Even more ironic is that Half-Life used the Quake 2 licensed engine from id." That's wrong. The original Half-Life used a modified version of the Quake engine, not the Quake 2 engine.
Should I bother to finish the article?
Last night, I built the incredible mattress-car - basically, just a mattress with a (powered) car wheel at each corner. It writhed and wriggled in a gloriously disgusting manner, and somewhat disturbingly started following me around. I tried shooting it but that didn't help, so I tied a fridge to it, set it on fire and chucked it into a lake...
Doom 3 might have a basic physics engine, but I'm really looking forward to what modders can do with Source's network-friendly version of Havok.
Doom 3's sound engine is awful compared with the original Half-Life, let alone Source. I've got a below-minimum-specs PC with a cheap sound card from 1998, and in Half-Life 2 I get real-time, room-specific reverberation and sound occlusion. I once walked off while a character was talking, and his voice became muffled when I went round a corner. It sounded real. Plus, the gun and bullet sounds are physically modelled - notice how they vary with distance and surroundings? The only things I haven't noticed it simulate are the speed of sound and proper Doppler effects (which Halo does!), but still, Doom 3's sound playback just seems bland and flat in comparison.
Doom 3's graphics might be the first of a new generation of engines, but Source, while primitive in some areas, is an old-school engine taken to the logical extreme. Which is why I like it so much...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
That's not any old RAM. That's either Ardy or Deedee the famous crossdressing Ram. Baaaaaaa.
With my PC (a 1.1GHz Pentium III, 384MB RAM, 128MB video RAM) I can run Half-Life 2 on High (with its now-legendary stutters of course, but not too much difficulty).
That you need 384MBs RAM just to run Doom III horrifies me, more than any of its monsters I've seen.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
"Doom 3's minimum requirements are [...] and a DirectX 9.0 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card just to get the thing to even run."
People should learn to better research their stuff. Just because the iD website says it requires a DX 9.0b compatible card doesn't mean it requires a card with DX9 capabilities. The Doom 3 engine runs "fine" on GF3 Ti hardware.
The article definitely seems buzzword compliant, but to get a really good grasp, I think you'd have to try to develop a mod or something on each one to have a proper opinion.
The other question is how expandable are they. In other words, how much can you do with them, with the least work. I think that improving half life graphics will be much harder than improving D3 networking.
I'm not sure about Doom3 physics. How related is it to the game versus the engine. I seems that they just limited its use in the game, short of its potential in the engine.
If you're an XML parser, you should have done so on the very first byte.
That said, it's too bad that Half-Life 2 can't be run on software unlike the original should the need/desire arise. I don't think the engine really matters, so much as the scalability of said engine. Half-Life 2's Source is about as scalable as...well, not much (requires DirectX, and at least version 6). Whatever HL's engine was, and however bad it looks now compared to HL2, it could still run on LOTS more PCs--OpenGL, DX and (again) plain old software. That helped its popularity.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Gotta love depth-of-field. Boy that mod looks awesome.
On a side note: this just gave me a new sig.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Source Engine? Am I the only one here who thinks that Valve is trying to capitlize on the mindshare of Open Source Software by calling their engine "Source"?
First thing I thought when I heard the name was that it might just be something like that (with source available), but, alas, no...
I RTFA, and this guy is clueless.
Quote: "The Source Engine's main lighting system is real-time radiosity lighting."
There are no games using "real-time radiosity," period. Radiosity (or more generally, global illumination), almost by definiton, is too slow for real-time.
This should probably read "pre-computed radiance transfer." It's pre-baked radiosity, cooked as a variant on spherical harmonic lightmap encoding. In other words: no real-time lighting, just PRT, faked dynamic lights (which EVERY other game does) and projective shadows. There is also no real HDR (high dynamic range) rendering in Source, just the same clever faking everyone else has.
This stuff is old hat. Relatively speaking, Source is not technically advanced at all. The only place it consistently (purportedly) wins is the content tools.
The big point that is NOT mentioned in the article is performance. Anyone who has played a lot of HL2 and CS:S can tell you that Source is just sloppy, on any hardware configuration. It is prone to periodic chugging, studders, fps drops from particle effects and physics lag online, etc.
D3, comparatively is just tight. The unified surface shading model (lighting and stencil shadows) rocks, and iD knows exactly what they're doing. Valve apparently can not compete in the brainpower department.
Game-wise, I personally preferred Doom 3 to Half-Life 2, old school playability vs. hype-tour-04, but that has nothing to do with the technical content.
Valve can only hope to win by being the preferred mod platform. Their SDK uses tested and proven, centuries old, Elaborate Puppet Theater(TM) technology, so naturally everyone adores them for maintaining the traditional status-quo. Hooray for Valve.
Insert "use the Source to escape Doom", "use the Source or else face Doom", &c joke here.
Actually, I believe, ironically, Nvidia don't make the source for their Source engine but ID Software do for Doom (at least for older versions).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
How about using the word "obvious" twice in the same sentence? Maybe he was trying to point out that everything mentioned in the article was obvious to the point of being vague. Am curious about who the intended audience is for this article? The writing is bad and often inaccurate - not only the previously mentioned fact that it was the Quake engine (not q2) but also counter-strike was developed by 2 dudes in their free time, NOT Valve. It may be maintained with assistance from Valve now, that's all well and good, but to claim that Valve is in any way responsible (aside from providing an easily modded engine of course ;) ) is really silly.
And the writer didn't even hear the sound in HL2? Very confusing...I would say that probably does not make him an authority on advising young modders?
Seriously. Doom appears to be "opengl" cross platform for easier porting to Mac/Linux. That might not matter to others but its a huge advantage when porting your game from windows.
Cross platform can cause a slight performance hit.
I feel old, but since when is AI part of the engine? shouldn't that be somewhat specific game to game?
That it declares Source the more complete engine, yet it doesn't include physics (Havoc) or probably AI either.
So if your developing Source you have the most complete engine, but have to go buy Havoc + pos AI stuff too.
Hmm very "complete".
What really buggers me the most is that people can sit and adore the "Beauty" of the games running on the "source" engine. THEIR LEVELS ARE CONSTRUCTED ALMOST PURELY OUT OF BSP GEOMETRY! I cant count how many times ive seen cube buildings, cube train cars, and just general hard edges on everything. They apply cubemaps and bumpmaps on things, which doesnt look too bad, but there are still these incredibly hard edges, that look awful. This was feasible back in 1998 when HL1 came out, but when you see doom3 and unreal tech's - this is just a joke, performance wise as well. Unreal/D3 engines can run about equal or just about lesser performance, and make much more beautiful scenes. On a side note, I dont really see how they took soo long to release this. I have worked on many mods, and such are capable of creating HL2 style or equivilant graphics, on the HL1 engine, by implementing their own shader systems, and texture managers, and produce nice shots, like this one.. Jumping around again, the hl2 engine is just a very very very very botched up hl1 engine, for those that actually got to look at the source when it was 'released' last september. Keep in mind that is just a botched up quake1 engine :P.
Those who want to see how well Doom 3 can pull off Half-Life 2 style environments should check out the Doom 3 Can Do It Too project. I don't think they have a site but their forum is on http://doom3world.org. Anyway, if you just want to see results here's their latest video: http://www.pcgamemods.com/9875/ (still a work in progress, obviously)
CS was a fan mod, as noted by Planet HalfLife and About.com
But I don't think the Mod touched networking code. So do they mean that Half Life had superior network code?
But Half-Life was rooted in Quake2's engine from Id's excellent Licensing terms. Id even makes note of Quake2's networking code right before discussing its use in Half-Life.
That statement is a dead giveaway. This article was probably written some time ago, and it was written based off playtime in Doom3 and Screenshots/Movies in HL2.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Opengl ... as a mac and a linux user i simply cant stand behind an engine which uses only directX. /2 alot more than these modern versions)
but this isnt about the gameplay , its about th engine , if i want to use one of these engines then i simply must have doom3
now I know this may be a tad biased and a bit political but with doom3 (opengl) i have a choise as to which OS i run my game under Im well aware that i can run half life 2 with cedega and i have done however its unlikely a mac port will ever appear.
I will admit that half life 2 had better physics, and i enjoyed the game slightly more( all be it i enjoyed half life and doom
For those that are interested, you can find the project here:
The D3CDIT Project
The latest Test-Build Video can be found here:
Latest Video
And finally, for those that wish to try it out for themselves, the latest build can be found here:
Latest Build
Seriously, if he's talking about engines, why is he making mention of the character models?
The monsters however seem much more lifelike with their detailed skin combined with many details. The Source Engine has better models, especially human, but combined with the lighting and shadowing, the Doom 3 Engine creates amazing textures.
Though it is important to note how the engine renders the models, but the models themselves are not part of the engine! It's possible to export the human models from HL Source and stick them into Doom3. It's as if he's comparing the artists, and not the engineer of the engine.
He also says something to the effect of Source not having cut-scenes. Last I remember from playing Doom 3, the cut-scenes looked like they were being rendered by the engine, and not pre-recorded.
It looks like he's confused engines for games. If I were going to compare the engines, I'd create my own levels and models, render them with both engines, and base my results off of that.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
John Carmack admitted that the Doom 3 was so dark because the game couldn't handle light on the engine level. There is, apparently, some pixel bleed-through and seaming of textures when light-entities are placed more generously. He said, on his blog I think, that he essentially made a game to suit the engine, but that the engine would develop with each new game release
Unfortunately, I do not have a link on-hand.
And completely neglects engine extensibility. Almost everything in Doom 3 is controlled through, esentially, text files. Nothing game-specific is hard-coded. The only things that aren't text are the textures, engine, and engine-script interface (gamex86.dll). I haven't checked out HL2 yet, but it certainly isn't that flexible.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
The article should have mentioned the price of licensing as well. I believe the Quake 3 engine is still $250,000USD (which includes limited support from id programmers). D3 and Source must be a pretty penny.
Exactly what I thought.
I mean, it's a common myth - so I merely shrug when I hear it from a gamer. But from someone trying to divine the nuances of two of the top engines?
So... what about including the Unreal 2k4 engine in this roundup? Sure, it came out a little before the others and doesn't have some spiffy single player mode. But from a developer standpoint Unreal is probably the most complete platform of the three. It is a complete package that has been used to make everything from racing to real time strategy mods. Epic has even expanded its capabilities so that it's used for MMORPGs like Lineage 2.
Thank you for reading my article and taking the time to comment on it, even if those comments were sometimes a bit harsh.
.plan entries, which I submitted to DevMaster.net. I'll admit looking back on it I made a few errors like saying the original Half-Life used Quake 2 when it mainly used Quake 1 code with some Quake 2 code. Someone mentioned this is a common myth, which I somehow adopted at the time. I was aware that the original Quake Engine was used at the beginning of development, but thought Valve switched to Quake 2 after deciding to redo most of the game. I wasn't able to listen to the Half-Life 2 sound, because I didn't play it at a computer with speakers. Since writing the article (I wrote it in mid-November) I've listened to the sound and still agree that are equally good in the sound category. I tried not comparing the actual sound clips, but instead the way the sound is able to resonant.
As the author of this article I was happy to see my first article Slashdotted. Some of you came off as pretty harsh, but I can see where some of your criticism is valid. I'm not a crazy fanboy of either company, I'm not getting paid by Valve to write this, and picking at my spelling mistake of using "then" instead of "than" are ridiculous. I simply submitted the text article and the nice editors at Devmaster added the pictures, title, and summary. One of us should've probably caught the mistake, but it's easy to overlook. Whether I picked the Doom 3 Engine or the Source Engine I would've been flamed. The debate is similar to the Republicans and Democratic parties where you just can't win. I don't think anyone can rightfully say with an unbiased view that the Doom 3 Engine is a more complete engine then the Source Engine. Once you get past the graphics the rest of the engine just can't compete with what's out there today.
The article was originally one of my
I tried my best to compare the engines as best as possible without comparing the actual game's content. I used the SDKs to try and do this, but it still came down to in-game content for stuff like character models. Someone said that Doom 3 can achieve Half-Life 2 quality models, but that is completely untrue. The engines use different methods for creating character models, which gives each engine its own distinguishable type of model look.
I only compared the Source Engine and Doom 3 Engine, because those were the two people had been taking about. The discussion has been up for debate on forums all over the net, which is clearly seen by reading these comments. The Unreal 2004 Engine is a great, flexible engine, but it wouldn't have been far to compare it with the others. I did write a FarCry article, which should be published at DevMaster.net soon. If you want to read it now it's up on my site.
I appreciate the constructive feedback, because it lets me know how to revise my writing style for my next article. Like I said before this was my first article, and I made a few mistakes. I'll make sure to not repeat those when writing my next article, which will compare Unreal Engine 3 with Oblivion's graphics engine.
Every game that came out of Id Software is pitch black. I turn the brightness, gamma, contrast up to the max, and it's never bright enough. In my own tests I have purposely ran demo tests with different brightness. I swear the FPS is the same.
If Doom 3 weren't so f***in' dark, I could probably compare the two engines myself.
This happens to be the most subjective reveiw ever. He basicly said that "HL2 obviously wins lol cause I can't look into code, or can't be arsed to go look at anything else in doom 3 besides normal mapping and lighting. LOL it had good sound too I guess LOL!!, and I also can't admit that Valve didn't make anything that makes there game "revolutionary" or "obviously better" LOL!" This was sad. What a waste of good internet.
Eat sleep die
-and I wasn't saying that FPS was the issue for Doom 3. The engine's bandwidth capacity was never in contention, only its rendering capability in very particular situations.
As for your having trouble with allId Software games, I have only a few ideas what could be wrong. Id Software's color palette tends to that of a worm: Brown, off-brown, and the occasional green. These dark colors don't do well, especially on LCD monitors. That brings me to the second possibility: your monitor is either high-latency or innapropriate for displaying low-contrast images (or both, if you have a standard LCD screen). The final possibility is that you have a low tolerance for dark games. Period. You simply don't like them. Enough people are frustrated with Doom 3 that a change is merited, but Quake I was plenty-bright to most people. For better or for worse, your personal opinion only practically matters to Id Software if it matches a well-represented consumer population.
Yeah, Commander Keen was so fucking dark, I couldn't see anything.
Doom3 is brand new, written from the ground-up to take advantage of new technology. Source, however, is STILL just a hacked up, reorganised and updated Quake1 engine (+a bit of q2/qw stuff, and tons of crap code).
Thus, both the core engine and the development environment is mature and well-tested, only having to deal with ensuring the NEW functionality works right - which just sits on top the old bsp and mdl formats anyway.
Big difference from a engine (D3) that was -really- written from the ground up and still has many years of maturing ahead, and an engine (source) that only claims to be written from scratch.
Most people can't throw dressers and radiators twenty feet with their arms.
My understand is that Half-Life uses Quake 1 but with some code from Quake 2, that supposedly caused a delay in release so it could be integrated. I have no citation so it could be complete bullshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're supposed to tweak like a l33t gamer. r_mapoverbrightbits is a favourite for brightening it up without either burning retinas or making it too fugly.
What, you people can't?
The following is probably false:
"Now these are the top engines out there and something no other game will be able to top for a couple of years (Unreal Engine 3). Here's a comparison of each engine, not game, in each critical area of game development. Lighting and Shadowing"
How about testing Riddick (details) and FarCry(distances and details)?! Stalker is vaporware.
Of course it's gonna be the same. Why wouldn't it be?
It would appear that people can write articles entirely on heresay now!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I'm trying to figure out why using Havoc is a bad thing. It's arguably the best physics engine out there, so why should Valve re-invent the wheel just so that they made it? Why spend years developing a complex physics system when it's already sitting there ready to be used?
Sounds like a lot of wasted effort to get what would most likely be an inferior product.