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Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown
bonch writes "Steve Bowler, lead animator for Midway Games, has written an article for Next Generation called Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown. He talks about id no longer being the king of the hill in the FPS genre, losing the multiplayer gaming wars to Counter-strike and the engine licensing wars to competitors like Unreal 3.0, and focusing too much on rendering realistic environments at the expense of modern gameplay features. From the article: 'It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.'"
I think that the guys over at penny arcade got it exactly right with this cartoon.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
*sigh* I wish people wouldn't post drivel like this (or mod it up, for that matter) when they clearly don't know what the hell they're talking about.
No, that's not what radiosity is. The effect you're referring to is called diffuse interreflection, and radiosity is a finite element method for simulating it based on heat transport. Of course, in the real world most surfaces aren't totally diffuse, and radiosity would have been a bad choice for simulating global illumination effects in Doom in particular since there's an awful lot of metal and other surfaces with strongly specular BRDFs.
More to the point, all global illumination algorithms are too slow to use in real-time game engines, and so level designers typically precompute these effects and store them in textures. This has nothing to do with the choice of engine: if your engine can display textures, it can approximate these precomputed effects. I don't know whether id decided to do this in Doom or not, but if they didn't it isn't because the engine is fundamentally limited in some way.