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First Doom 4 Production Shots Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "Actor Brad Hawkins has been tapped to do motion-capture work for Doom 4, and revealed that the game features the military and civilians fighting side by side. Does this mean the game is set on Earth for sure? GGL Wire has an interview with Hawkins and a selection of production shots. '[Filmmaker Mark Bristol] was very specific on the civilians having a certain personality and the military characters having a separate one as well. The body language of the civilians is less, well, "trained." They carry their guns in a looser fashion and are a little sloppier when they run, a little more freestyle. The military characters are sharp as razors, with very swift moves, exact hand positioning and can turn on a dime.'" This follows news from last month that British novelist Graham Joyce was brought in to develop the story for the game.

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  1. Re:Pleb ;) by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Black is sometimes very useful. You can spare a lot of work in places where you don't need any detail and safe a lot of valueable time which you could invest into other places. But only dark levels... of course this truly sucks.

    Well, I was actually just aiming for "Funny", but I'm probably not that funny if I end up having to explain it.

    Of course I'm not proposing to elaborately paint the parts of the texture which aren't even used, or which don't need any detail.

    I _do_ find it kinda weird though that so many games, especially on the PC, seem to be (A) stuck with some black-and-brown palette from the 90's, and (B) have to make everything dark. It's like a quest for some devs to use all those amazing graphics possibilities juts to make more "realistic" black-on-black images.

    I bought my first console very late. It was a Dreamcast. Let me tell you it was a shock to see the lush and bright scenery in those games, after coming from the everything-is-an-unlit-sewer games I had been playing on the PC. Mind you, a lot of PC games have discovered colours too in the meantime, but we're talking about ID and the successor of Doom 3 here. I can't resist taking a jab at whichever genius thought it's a great idea to make a game where half the time you can't see a fucking thing at all, because you can't use a flashlight and fight at the same time.

    And the second jab was at the accursed depth-of-field effect. My first contact with it was when I applied one patch in COH and suddenly everything past 100 ft or so was blurry. As if my character had severe myopia, and couldn't _possibly_ focus on anything at a distance.

    In the meantime the annoyance seems to have just spread. E.g., I've installed "Hellgate: London" a Vista computer at one point and turned all the graphics options to the max. (Hey, it's a GTX285. It can take it.) It actually made me squint. There was a road sign some 50 ft or so away, and I still remember that it was so blurry, it was practically smeared into the surrounding pixels. (The effect only seems to exist with DirectX 10, btw.)

    I find it pretty damned sad. Here we have more than a decade of GPUs and increasingly sophisticated mapping and filtering possibilities, billions sunk into R&D both on the software and hardware size, etc... and they're used top make the game as blurry and smeared as something rendered in 320x240 on an old VGA card and upscaled badly on a 10 year old TFT.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.