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