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Doom 3 vs. Source: Comparing Engines

Posted by Zonk on from the apples-and-apples dept.

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."

12 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Couple of questions by wowbagger · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

    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 /. post?

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
    1. Re:Couple of questions by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes.

      Q2 or Q1?

      It's pretty apparent from a gameplay standpoint. In Quake2 to bunnyhop you had to run forward and strafe sideways. In Quake you could gain speed by just curving in the air-- Exactly the same way HalfLife does it (Except HL unregisters the +jump command if you're in the air, so you have to spam it within a frame or two of hitting the ground, rather than holding it in air like quake)

      And as the valve-erc page I linked noted, the mapping tools are identical, and theres the whole timeline thing->
      Quake1 : Jun 1996 [28 months from hl]
      Quake2 : Dec 1997 [13 months from hl]
      Half Life: Oct 1998

      Which sounds like enough time to create all of HL?

      And the console commands being so similar.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  2. on sound.... by jlapier · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  3. Running Doom 3 at the highest setting by game+kid · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Doom 3's minimum requirements are Microsoft Windows 2000/XP; Pentium IV 1.5 GHz or AMD Athlon 1.7 GHz XP processor or higher; 384MB RAM and a DirectX 9.0 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card just to get the thing to even run.

    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.
  4. System Spec BS by JF · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "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.

  5. Re:Really a review of the games by casings · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly, it sounds as if the whole article was written by a 14 year old Valve fanboy defending source against some evil company trying to take its rightfully deserved title for creating such things as "Counter Strike."

    I quote: "The Source Engine once again takes the title and rightfully so as the most popular FPS multiplayer game Counter Strike was developed by Valve."

    A little less bias would also do this article some good, not to mention fixing the authors grammatical mistakes. Does anyone else find reading "then" when it's used as "than" to be extremely vexing? Maybe not.

  6. sloppy article, sloppy engine by Bobtree · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Source by Mike+Hawk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Doom 3's sound engine is awful compared with the original Half-Life, let alone Source.

    Really? How can you claim this when its well documented across many end-user systems that after every loading screen the sound skips degrading performance for an extended period of time. None of Valve's attempted fixes so far have worked for me. I don't care how their positional audio sounds when it doesn't just work.

  8. Interesting by fozzmeister · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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".

  9. Re:Really a review of the games by analog_line · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But in that case, why no inclusion of data from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, also based on the Source engine?

    Well, since there aren't any Doom 3 engine games in the marketplace aside from Doom 3 itself, it wouldn't be an especially well thought out comparison. Once Quake 4 gets released and we have more data points on both sides, I agree, that should be done.

  10. He talks about developing games.... by niteice · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  11. Re:Source Engine? by spyrochaete · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Valve explained this once. The lake is the source, the filled glass is the game, and the faucet is the valve.