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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.'"
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Counterstrike runs on crap hardware, and basically, a crap internet connection. You'll get called a lagger, a newbie, and a lamer, but it will work, and you can play, and have fun.
Gameplay is extremely important, but so too is availability.
Morrowind, of course, was an RPG, but it wouldn't be impossible to remake Doom 3 or UT2004 to look and act like it.
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
The lesson: forget the graphics arms race, achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that, and concentrate on a deep, complex, non linear, "easy to get into it quick" story lines, and endless paths of quest resolution. Give FPS players a world to explore, tweak the outcomes, and generally have fun in.
ID somehow appears to be furthest behind in pursuing this goal, even though Doom 3 is no more linear than HL2 or Unreal 2.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is an ingenious mod. Seriously - in my view, the main reason Doom 3 was such a poor game was the fact that you could see *nothing* without the flashlight. Who cares about the super new graphics engine if you're barely given an opportunity to take a look at the environment?
I take it that you have some significant experience in non-realtime rendering, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience with game engines and how level designers use them.
Precomputed light maps do indeed have to do with the choice of engine, because the engine takes care of computing the lightmaps for you. Halflife 2 for instance, supports normal mapped radiosity calculations, in which the diffuse lighting components are added along different vectors during compilation, and then dotted with the normal map during the rendering. "Level designers" don't store them in textures, the compile tools that are associated with the engine do, and the engine takes care of displaying them appropriately.
Having precomputed lightmaps in the doom 3 engine would break all the internal consistency of the lighting. Mobile lights in engines based on precomputed lighting are treated differently from static lights. Doom 3 doesn't have this distinction.
The doom 3 approach allows lights to be much more dynamic, but when a light is that dynamic, you can't have precomputed light maps. You wouldn't have any way of updating them to reflect changing light conditions. Every time an imp warps in, all the lights dim. This couldn't be done realistically with precomputed light maps.
Adding precomputed light maps would require redoing all the internal assumptions about lights in the engine, and you would be basically writing your own.