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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.'"
Dupe...original article can be found here.
Almost the same title, too.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Zombies can remain animated independant of if their head is intact or not.
Who writes these things anyway? Honestly folks.
RTFA again for the best results.
Light dancing around the room?
We're talking about doom 3 right?
Light?
Umm.. maybe how nice it looks when you shine your flashlight around the room... unless you have your gun out...
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.
And this is based on your real world experience with Zombie's I presume?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Now that's something I've never understood in the movies or in the games. I mean, if you're a zombie, you don't have a brain. Period. It's all mush and all you want to do is to eat the brain of someone else for some obscure reason (protein content, perhaps?). So, why would a headshot be more effective against a zombie than a bodyshot? It just doesn't make any sense. If I were facing a zombie and I had a shotgun, I'd just shoot his bloody legs off and run away bravely.
The owls are not what they seem
...and irrelevant rant about Doom 3. It's clearly not everyone's taste, but the hell, I really enjoyed playing id's final version of what the original Doom was meant to be, but could not become, due to technological drawbacks back in time. So this guy, while providing you mit wrong "facts" about "no headhsot in teh g4me 'n stuff dud3!12" (in fact, the Doom 3 engine FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER featured collision-detection based on the actualy polygonal structure of objects, NOT just el-cheapo-hitboxes, and definately recognizes different body-zones of its models!) basically just spills biased mud in the company's face that will get Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as the sequel to Quake 2 delivered soon, constantly innovates the industry in the field of real-time 3D-graphics, and sold its latest and greatest groundbreaking engine to be incorporated into some of the most eagerly awaited games in the genre.
Yeah, I see clearly now, id is doomed.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Even though the gameplay itself for D3 was far below what it should have been, I have to say I must give them credit for being able to create such a powerful and frightening environment as they did. D3 was the first game I've played since the Marine campaign of AvP that actually made me scream, jump out of my chair, and have to leave the room. (Yes, I'm a sissy.)
Everyone craps on D3 so much, and it bugs me. Yes, gameplay is probably the most important quality in a video game, and I admit it was severely lacking in D3. But dammit, they really really excelled in other areas and did a few things other video games just don't do. They do deserve some credit.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
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!
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
now they get slashdotted on the dupe, too.
Holy cow, that's gotta suck.
At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
*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.
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.