id Software Demos Rage On iPhone, Releases Source Code For Two Games

glenkim writes "Kotaku has posted their liveblog of the QuakeCon 2010 keynote, with some big announcements by game developer and Slashdot regular John Carmack. Highlights include a video of the id Tech 5 engine (aka Rage) running on the iPhone 4G at 60fps, with claims that it also runs on the iPhone 3GS. Carmack noted that performance on the iPhone was able to 'kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2.' He also announced the source code release of two games, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Also, Carmack finally admitted that Doom 3 was too dark!"

Comments

Slashdot regular?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's his UID?

Re:Slashdot regular?

[Sir_Lewk]

101025

Re:Slashdot regular?

[Anonymous Coward]

101025 but I wouldn't call him a regular any more. He hasn't even posted anything in at least 2 years and there was a similarly huge gap before that.

Re:Slashdot regular?

[anethema]

http://tinyurl.com/3276efb

Re:Slashdot regular?

[pinkushun]

Can /. be /.'ed? Stay tuned to find out...

Re:Slashdot regular?

[Tim C]

You mean you've never seen an error 500 here? They're rare, but they certainly happen.

Re:Slashdot regular?

[whoop]

Six digits? Noob.

Not to mention his last comment was May 1, 2008. So it's for varying definitions of the word "regular."

Re:Slashdot regular?

[pez]

Pretty impressive three digit ID.

As far as regularity goes, I read /. every day but comment infrequently... I'd suggest that different people use /. differently.

Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[F34nor]

I kept waiting for some killer game but didn't notice it ever. Any ideas?

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Tamran]

I was hoping they'd port full doom1 and doom2 to the doom3 engine as an expansion pack. There'd be little programming effort there, mostly art and modelling. If they went for a more modernized game, with a similar feel and speed of the old one people would line up for it for sure. Well ... I'd buy it.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[MakinBacon]

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was pretty good, even though it sold poorly.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Blakey Rat]

It was actually pretty poor. I guess you you'd never played Tribes, or any of the Battlefield games you could think it was good... but Battlefield: 2142 basically did everything ET:QW did, with better balance, and was released earlier.

The funny thing is that the original Enemy Territory game on the Wolfenstein engine was actually really innovative. But by the time Quake Wars came out, everything they did was old-hat and they didn't improve on it at all. (And in some ways, they anti-improved on it! The grid system for laying out deployables? Welcome to 1995. Even 1997's Tribes let you plop them down anywhere there was a slightly-flat surface.)

Basically, it sold poorly because the balance wasn't very good, nothing in the experience was new, and since it was a latecomer it didn't have the established playerbase of games with identical features they had been released before it.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

This gets my vote for "Most Uniformed Post of The Day".

Very little programming effort.... yeah just rewrite it all. If you don't understand why, quit commenting.

Mostly art and modelling.... here's a hint --- modern games.... MOST of the cost goes into the art. Teams have a lot more artists than coders.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[gman003]

I think there was a mod that did it. And they did copy a few set-pieces over into Doom 3, but they were hard to identify.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[morari]

Prey was pretty entertaining. I also thought that Wolfenstein was decent, even if the mouselook was sluggish and suffered from console-itis.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Tamran]

This gets my vote for "Most Uniformed Post of The Day".

Very little programming effort.... yeah just rewrite it all. If you don't understand why, quit commenting.

Mostly art and modelling.... here's a hint --- modern games.... MOST of the cost goes into the art. Teams have a lot more artists than coders.

What part of the words "expansion pack" don't you understand? I'm not saying they would reprogram the whole thing. Some other guys already did the first episode of Doom1 as an expansion pack:

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Classic_Doom_for_Doom_3

They didn't have significant programming effort to do that - and that's ALL I said. I said NOTHING about how much effort the art and modelling would be. Quit trying to read what's not there.

Your post, however, must have seemed off even to you given that you had to post it anonymously.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Skillet5151]

I only played the Quake Wars demo but the movement and combat on foot seemed vastly smoother and more natural (read: Quake-like) than any of the Battlefield games. It seems to me that a lot of recent id games have had strong technical merits but not so great gameplay. *Shrug*

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Blakey Rat]

vastly smoother and more natural (read: Quake-like)

Maybe it's because I played Tribes first, but I never particularly thought Quake could be called "more natural". Maybe if you're hopped-up on crack.

But the real point, while there is value to that (although we disagree), it's vastly outweighed by the other problems with the game.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

There'd be little programming effort there, mostly art and modelling

Because that's cheap or something?

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[creat3d]

If id was to sell a Doom 3 version of the old Doom(s), they'd make a hell of a lot more money off of it than it would cost to produce.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[aiht]

I disagree. I don't think that post is wearing a uniform at all.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[bonch]

Supposedly, Modern Warfare and its sequel are running on modified versions of id Tech 4.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[AnonymouseUser]

The Dark Mod is the best TC created on Doom 3. The Dark Mod

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[cgenman]

That's funny: I always wanted Doom 3 in the Doom 1 engine. It would have been a faster, tighter, more enjoyable game.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prey was awesome. It was easily the best game based on id Tech 4. If you haven't played it, you're missing out.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a straight port using available high res texture and 3D models assets for Doomsday would only require a rebuild of the levels. Since Doom levels are extremely simplistic, it wouldn't be that much work at all.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Hamsterdan]

You can get the entire first level maps there

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Classic_Doom_for_Doom_3

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[mweather]

Compared to making the engine, yes, it's very cheap. That's why game companies are able to license an engine and churn out crap all day.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Fri13]

I could think that most game developers has 20% coders (engine, AI, scripting etc), 20% artists (textures, environment ideas), 50% mappers and modelers (the accuracy in maps and characters have grown dramatically since 2005) and 10% writers, actors and other company persons who writes the stories, character infos, subtitles, speeches and handles the company money and other PR functions.

Many will even include beta testers but typically those are all the people as well in the game development.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

What he means is porting the maps and so on to Doom 3. That would mean Doom 3 physics and game mechanics (which, of course, wouldn't work, since you couldn't jump in 1/2 while you can in 3). Replacing textures and so on (which, indeed, costs a lot) would go a long way to recreate the older games without any coding, though.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[melancolico]

I kept waiting for some killer game but didn't notice it ever. Any ideas?

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is pretty sweet still...

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Narishma]

That would be id tech 3, the quake 3 engine. They licensed it for Medal of Honor, then Call of Duty and kept improving it.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[FreonTrip]

It sort of exists. I haven't tried it, but search for Doom 2.5.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for the "Classic Doom 3" Mod. Someone did recreate the first episode of Doom 1 in the Doom 3 engine, complete with music updates.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you require textures when porting to the Doom 3 engine, you only need to use a single colour = #000000.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[danieltdp]

I would buy it. Instantly

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Skweetis]

Classic Doom 3. It's not exactly what you want (they only ported the shareware episode), but they did a reasonably good job with that, and it's free anyway.

Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dark Mod. It is a thief-inspired tool-set that allows people to continue making Thief-style missions on an engine from *This* decade that can actually work on multi-core systems. Thief 1 and 2 were great, but the engine needs updating to work on modern machines, and the publishers/developers don't give a shit. They will neither fix the bugs nor release the code so someone else can do it. This is why I won't be buying Thief 4. It is the old proprietary software mantra of "take the money and run"... just like that Steve Miller Band song. They only care until they get your money.

Doom3 to dark?

[DigiShaman]

It was too dark to play in a well lit area, but the perfect game for playing with the lights out and surround sound. Too niche of an audience to experience the game that way I suppose.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[F34nor]

What has a light side and a dark side and holds the universe together?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[exomondo]

I found that to be part of it's appeal. Play it at night, in a dark room with sound cranked up!

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[BabyDuckHat]

It was too dark to play in a well lit area, but the perfect game for playing with the lights out and surround sound. Too niche of an audience to experience the game that way I suppose.

Like, in a darkened, maybe unfinished, parents basement with eerie acoustic properties? I'd say they have they're audience nailed.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Ironhandx]

Myself and a friend used to have a shitload of fun in this exact scenario. We did our own version of Co-Op mode, I was good with the shotgun, he was good with the MG, we'd swap back and forth as we ran out of bullets for our weapon of choice. Throwing the controller across the room in the middle of trying not to die added an awesomely fun level of excitement to the gameplay.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[DigiShaman]

Agreed. Unfortunately, we're in the minority as far as their target market was concerned.

I have to disagree with Carmack here. I thought Doom3 was great game. Perhaps he was more disappointed in the games acceptance and not its content?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[stevenvi]

Oreo cookies?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[childprey]

duct tape?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[opportunityisnowhere]

He admitted to it being too dark a while ago because he was obsessed with having a high framerate.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Pharmboy]

Comedy?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Blakey Rat]

Now he should apologize for the hilariously outdated use of monster closets, terrible storyline, idiotic directorial decisions (no flashlight on guns, only 60 seconds of air!!) and extreme "meh"-ness of the entire Doom 3 experience.

Normally, you're happy when a game experience lasts 20+ hours. With Doom 3 it was more like, "there's more? Fuck me!" Especially after you beat the boss from hell, and have to go *back* to Mars for another few hours of tedium.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. The dark was part of the appeal, and the surround sound was very impressive. More than once I very nearly shat myself while playing that game late at night in the dark.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[gman003]

No way, man. I was scared out of my pants playing it under full lighting at noon. Of course, I also refuse to play Resident Evil 4 past sundown, and I even turn up the lights for the Ravenholm chapter of HL2.

I guess I'm just not a horror guy.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[cyfer2000]

route 69?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pussy.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[bronney]

You gotto try FEAR then. I dare you, play it at night with lights off.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[cstec]

It was too dark to play in a well lit area, but the perfect game for playing with the lights out and surround sound.

Spot on. I'd play in the dark, at night with the speakers cranked and the lights out and damm, it was perfect! One of the greats!

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[creat3d]

Sex.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[exomondo]

Perhaps he was more disappointed in the games acceptance and not its content?

Yeah i'd say you're right there, seems he's taken the biggest complaint and run with it. I dunno about anyone else but i actually really enjoyed Doom3.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[bonch]

I didn't mind the dark atmosphere for the first thirty minutes, but after it lasted almost the entire game, I was totally burned out. The hell levels were an amazing breath of fresh air after so many generic, dimly lit rooms of silver and brown tech walls.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[zaydana]

The Force?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Khyber]

Man, the original AvP would make you shit your pants, then.

I remember playing that with a 12MB Voodoo2, SBLive! and quadrophonic surround sound using huge home theater 3-way speaker cabinets and two separate amplifiers for each speaker pair, front and rear.

Lights out, invite some friends over, crank up the game and watch them start screaming.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Hadlock]

Its spelt "too" but yes, John Carmack said it was too dark. Most people played the game in their well lit living rooms and weren't pleased with not being able to see the game they bought. The rage iphone demo was pretty cool though..

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[hairyfeet]

Bah! don't be a wuss, you only live once and a good scare is good for you, gets the blood pumping and all. if you have the original Half Life (and who doesn't? They might as well have given away copies with boxes of Tide considering how common that game was in everyone's collections) get a killer single player mod called "They Hunger" parts one through three and play THAT in the dark. The sounds and "cheap shots" on that game are awesome!

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[mestar]

Windows update?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[QuantumG]

GRRRARRAAAHHH!! WTF? Oh, was that a monster? What's going on, why am I losing health?

Doom 3 made me think there was something wrong with my graphics card.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed.

The excellent sound and the beautiful darkness made up a really great atmosphere, one that no other came could top until now. Playing it was a truly unique experience, the best I've ever had when playing a game.

Maybe it wasn't a mainstream FPS that you could just play to have some fun, but the overall feeling you have when playing it sure made it an excellent game - even if the story wasn't very complicated.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Thats how i played. In our wet basement too (seriously). My wife and daughter would sneak down the stairs and scare the crap out of me. I really liked Doom 3. I also really liked quake 4 (single player for both). For serious fraging however, quake 3 is still on the money.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Threni]

I remember people telling me it wasn't too dark. It was odd, because you only had to look at the screen to see that it was. I don't understand people sometimes. "Change the gamma setting" they'd say. "Fix the bugs in the game", I'd reply. I noticed that a few but not all games had this problem. I notice that this isn't a problem any longer, unless perhaps you're trying to play OpenArena under Linux. I tried, but gave up. QuakeLive doesn't have those sorts of bugs.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[ciderbrew]

Don't play system shock 2 then. You may have a heart attack.

*revamp of this game please please please.*

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Vectormatic]

mod parent imformative (google ducttape + doom 3 if you dont get it)

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Vectormatic]

Nah, the difference in acoustic propperties between the concrete of a parents basement compared to the steel walls inside doom 3's martian facility kills the entire aureal experience

The number of people with steel plating in their basement proved significantly lower then id's market researchers led them to believe

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the Ravenholm chapter to be amusing instead of scary. Take a sawblade and decapitate zombies with it - very fun and you get an achievement.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Rhaban]

idiotic directorial decisions (no flashlight on guns,

Sometimes, gameplay must prevail over realism. The fact that the player had to choose between the flashlight and the gun was an inherent part of the gameplay, and made the game better (at least for players who actually wanted to enjoy it).

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Pinhedd]

I played through the whole game in a dark room, quite atmospheric I must say

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[tenco]

Planets?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[barzok]

Yer mom?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[FreonTrip]

A lot would have been forgiven if they'd acquiesced to Trent Reznor's demands. I don't remember many games that had less impressive sound effects out of the box than Doom 3. Firing a machinegun was like menacingly shaking a coffee can full of pennies at the legions of hell, never mind the pistol that sounded booming and impressive when it was being fired at you, but turned into a 'piff-piff' affair in your hands. Installing a modified version of the leaked / extracted Doom 3 alpha's Reznor-provided sound effects made a huge difference.

Off the top of my head, here are just a few bad design decisions. The incessant use of imps. Ammo being incredibly available, and absurd carrying capacity - my marine can carry around up to 320 shotgun shells at once? Bosses with lame, 16-bit era gimmicks you had to use in order to defeat them. New monsters being introduced with no fanfare, then suddenly "emphasized" in a subsequent cinematic 20 minutes later. Poor use of monsters in maps, given their strengths and weaknesses. Monsters standing in place, screaming at you for upwards of two seconds of vulnerable shoot-time, then moving into position to attack. Tremendously effective monster jump scare in one map as a new demon's head tears through the overgrown hellflesh... then never seeing a trace of that monster again. Terrible specular mapping, giving every character and monster in the game the appearance of a cheap wax mannequin. Visual design still ripped off Aliens 18 years after the fact, without any apparent understanding of why that visual design originally worked. Finally, most damningly, the inability to render many monsters on-screen at once made it impossible to replicate Doom's defining sensation of being alone, hunted by a merciless battalion of monsters.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[elrous0]

Doom 3's problem wasn't its lighting. The problem was that it was a linear hall-runner with every hostile encounter completely scripted with obvious triggers, made in an age of games like Half-Life 2, Halo, etc. Going from playing games with wide-open spaces and multiple ways to approach a problem to Doom 3 felt like a step back in time (and not in a good way).

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Blakey Rat]

I think it's clear that the vast, vast majority of people disagree with you. Of course, you're going to turn that around in your head to, "OMG I am so 1337 I *get* Doom 3, man, and nobody else does! I'm so fucking 1337!"

If the lack of gun-flashlights was the game's only issue, then it probably wouldn't be so generally mediocre. The truth of the matter is that there were tons of things wrong with Doom 3, the flashlight thing was just one of the most apparent.

So even if you *like* the lack of flashlights, and think it made the game better-- well, ok, but it still didn't make the game *good*.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[L4t3r4lu5]

My morning coffee. $Deity help you if I don't get my morning coffee...

Sincerely,

Every IT Dept in existence.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[L4t3r4lu5]

I tried playing that once. It reminded me too much of Ring (The original, Ringu). That movie gave me the worst fright of my entire life so far. I had to unplug the TV set in my room, and turn it away from my bed, and it would still take me over an hour to get to sleep. For 2 months.

Just reading about it on Wikipedia has made me turn on every monitor in my room, lest it turn itself on and I see a picture of a well. Petrifying.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[PixelScuba]

Actually it looks like you're in the minority. According to Metacritic, Doom 3 averages a respectable 87 Rating, it even garners a little over 7 in the user average. Additionally, id software moved over 3.5 million copies of Doom 3 as of 2007

So, I'm going to call bologna that "the vast, vast majority of people disagree", because it seems a large majority of people actually agree that Doom 3 was a decent game.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Blakey Rat]

So, I'm going to call bologna that "the vast, vast majority of people disagree", because it seems a large majority of people actually agree that Doom 3 was a decent game.

You're moving the goalposts. We were talking about users liking the lack of gun-flashlights, but whether Doom 3 was a decent game. You do realize that those two things are not mutually-exclusive, right? Apples do not compare to oranges.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Trent Hawkins]

if you turn on some of the locked features you can light up the room with gun flares which made those sections quite awesome. Why they decided to turn it off is beyond me.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[PixelScuba]

I think it was a valid post. You began by arguing that Carmack should, "apologize for the hilariously outdated use of monster closets, terrible storyline, idiotic directorial decisions (no flashlight on guns, only 60 seconds of air!!) and extreme "meh"-ness of the entire Doom 3 experience." then continued later saying, "The truth of the matter is that there were tons of things wrong with Doom 3, the flashlight thing was just one of the most apparent."

You were dragging more than just the flashlight into the discussion, and there was a general sense that your comment about vast, vast majorities was about more than just the flashlight. I'd also argue that there is just as little evidence to support most people hated the flashlight decision.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[ildon]

The game was less fun with a flashlight mod, for me. That's all I need to know. Weapon switching was a fun part of the game for me. Reloading and making certain weapons more or less ideal for certain situations was another aspect that became more important later in the game when you had more weapons. I thought that overall the game's combat was pretty good, and for me that's the most important part of an FPS.

For example, I never really understood why people love Half-life 1/2 so much because I don't think its combat is that great.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Listening to you two argue is about as interesting as the cut scenes from Doom 3.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Force?

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[F34nor]

You sir are correct. You win a roll of gaffer's tape.

Re:Doom3 to dark?

[Tukz]

Turn of your lights lock the door and play through Silent Hill (the first one) in one setting.... Bring extra pants.

Commander Keen

[phrostie]

I want my Commander Keen!

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Riker wasn't all that smart. Someone who was a bit more on the ball would have helped muchly!

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

Several years ago I asked him the same question by phone. Basic story was that his copy of the Commander Keen projects were lost during a move into their new offices, but someone else (Romero) might still have a copy. He also shared that the source code was very simplistic, almost embarrassing at the time we spoke, and that anyone with a little motivation could make a better game engine. Good point, but I still think it should be made available for historical purposes if anyone still has it. I bet comments in the code are just as humorous as the game itself :-D

Re:Commander Keen

[oljanx]

I want my John Carmack back! Remember the days when there was a clear 3D god to worship? And he wrote engines for the PC. And they rocked. What happened to all of that?

Re:Commander Keen

[BigDXLT]

Now he's building lunar landers and other neato stuff.

Maybe he grew up?

Re:Commander Keen

[QuantumG]

Hmm.. I suppose I could rewrite the engine to use the original artwork.. the only problem would be getting signoff from whoever owns the ip these days.

Re:Commander Keen

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Fact is that opengl/DX and the hardware to back it up, have made solid 3d engines much easier to write at an acceptable standard. Quake 1 came out before we all had hardware 3d. Hell it was very influential to creating that market. Writing something that *worked* at all was hard. All the original iD titles pushed hardware to the edge and did things others just couldn't replicate. Its not then anymore.

Re:Commander Keen

[Vectormatic]

the fact that someone with a little motivation could make a better engine should be obvious, hell, i cobled together a simple raycasting engine with texturing built in that rivals wolfenstein 3d in a few spare hours.

The source is interesting in the same way that a pioneers museum is interesting to see how people did things in the old days

Re:Commander Keen

[Vectormatic]

i still have tremendous respect for carmack, he did that stuff before giant middleware libraries and managed code runtimes and all that malarky that developers can use these days.

No matter what 3d effects a modern game can dish out on screen with all that easy-to-use click and configure stuff, my respect for the guys who wrote the original doom, quake and unreal engines will never go away

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter what 3d effects a modern game can dish out on screen with all that easy-to-use click and configure stuff,

I think that's part of the problem: games used to be built from scratch all the time, as the engines. I have still a book laying around with a stepthrough in C++ how to code your own FPS game with OpenGL and DirectX support.

Now, people rely on engines, so each generation of games sortof feels or looks the same and gameplay is too simular while gamedesign is more decoupled.

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, you have Tim Sweeney, now.

Bow down.

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not have grown up, but John Carmack did. He's got stock options, he drives a Ferrari, and he's married to some sweet yellow 'tang. He still makes a living writing screensavers (which the rest of id turns into playable games) but he's realized that there's more to life than fueling the teen-Satanist fantasies of 2010's Columbine kids. He's got a rocket ship, and he's been to the moon, asshole. That's right: John Carmack has been to the moon.

Re:Commander Keen

[TheRaven64]

Computers got much faster. Carmack was a good implementer, but most of the stuff that he implemented had been presented in graphics conferences earlier (not all of it, but a lot). His skill was doing stuff on a commodity PC that academics were doing on a high-end workstation. Now, there's not so much demand for that. Any moderately competent coder can take a load of SIGGRAPH papers, implement them, and end up with an engine. The difference in skill level has gone from meaning the difference between 'runs' and 'doesn't run' to being the difference between 'runs on old or very cheap machines' and 'only runs on the kind of machine gamers own'. That's not quite true on mobile devices, but even they have GPUs that are massively more powerful than anything available even in high-end workstations when Quake II was released.

No it was just too dark

[Sycraft-fu]

The problem was that the shadows were hard. The the real world, light bounces. This is why if you turn on a flashlight, you can see things in the room not in the beam. Light bounces off one surface, then off another and so on. You can simulate this via radiosity on computers. Problem is that is real expensive computationally. You don't do it in realtime. So generally what most games do is a cheap global illumination. There is an all pervasive amount of light applied to everything, and then specific dynamic lighting.

Well in Doom 3, there was no GI, and all light bounced only once. So anything directly illuminated, you saw. However anything else, was completely dark. Shadows were complete, there was no shadowed corner where things were visible, but barely.

Re:No it was just too dark

[internettoughguy]

The problem was that the shadows were hard. The the real world, light bounces. This is why if you turn on a flashlight, you can see things in the room not in the beam. Light bounces off one surface, then off another and so on. You can simulate this via radiosity on computers. Problem is that is real expensive computationally. You don't do it in realtime. So generally what most games do is a cheap global illumination. There is an all pervasive amount of light applied to everything, and then specific dynamic lighting.

Well in Doom 3, there was no GI, and all light bounced only once. So anything directly illuminated, you saw. However anything else, was completely dark. Shadows were complete, there was no shadowed corner where things were visible, but barely.

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Re:No it was just too dark

[bertok]

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.

Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!

In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.

Re:No it was just too dark

[TD-Linux]

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

Re:No it was just too dark

[bonch]

The Source engine, while lacking the technical features of id Tech 4, looked better because the map editor pre-calculates radiosity. Based on my memory of interviews at the time, I think Carmack was interested in the technical elegance of a unified lighting path with no tricks (e.g., Quake 3's character shadows) but unfortunately, it didn't look very good.

Re:No it was just too dark

[billcopc]

True radiosity is very computationally expensive, as you say (basically raytracing), but one can fake it for game purposes by creating a faint omni light source at the flashlight's head, and another where the light "beam" intersects any objects. This would have helped Doom 3 TREMENDOUSLY.

I don't think anyone questions that John Carmack is a super-genius, but some of his WTF moments make you wonder if he ever steps outside his "bubble".

Re:No it was just too dark

[Khyber]

"a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play."

Never play games on any 8-bit or 16-bit consoles, eh?

Plenty playable at 25 or 30FPS. Plenty smooth.

Re:No it was just too dark

[binarybum]

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

Thanks a lot you insensitive clod - I did that and the bat living up there came down and bit me.

Re:No it was just too dark

[internettoughguy]

Indeed, I should have made myself clearer, when I said that global illumination isn't particularly visible, I'm only talking about when the direct light is exposed correctly, as is usually the case when you're looking at an environment illuminated by a flash (or a flash-light that's close to the camera :) ) . However when the direct light is overexposed, for example a room lit by a window, then the indirect is very important.

Re:No it was just too dark

[internettoughguy]

I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.

Go in a dark room, aim a bright flashlight at a ceiling, and see what happens.

I will see a great deal of bounce light, but now if I take a photo of it, correctly exposing the directly lit area, I probably won't.
Human eyes have a much greater dynamic range than a camera sensor or computer screen, and hence we see things very differently.

Re:No it was just too dark

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Never play games on any 8-bit or 16-bit consoles, eh?

Small nitpick: 8 and 16 bit games routinely ran at 60fps. It was the 32-bit and first generation of 64-bit consoles that brought us 'cinematic' frame rates. :D

Re:No it was just too dark

[cgenman]

Walk into your living room, look at the halogen torchlamp aimed at the ceiling.

Good modern lighting is frequently indirect.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake2 and Quake3 pre-calculated light radiosity too. Valve's 'revolutionary innovations' are older than you think.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Trepidity]

Well, it depends on what you count as a "frame". NTSC does 60 interlaced "fields" per second, but each field is only every other line, so you get a full screen refresh at around 30 fps, though that's admittedly a different effect from noninterlaced 30 fps.

Re:No it was just too dark

[tehcyder]

a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play

No it's not. Back when I were a lad playing Doom on a 286 anything over 30 fps would have seemed like unimaginable bloody luxury. But we still enjoyed it.

Kids these days, etc.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

Most games in the 8 and 16 bit era ran in a low resolution progressive mode. This is why they had really fat scanlines.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Fri13]

That ">60fps = smooth gameplay" kind arguments are totall rubbish. The science can proof that 24 is enough for totally smooth animation.

But same time science can proof that human eye can notice forms in 1/10 000 second time. The human eye is slow to adapt the light and as fast as that, will "burn" to eye for longer time.

Why some players feels that 60fps is not enough is that they do not have good hardware combination to get _stable_ framerate. If we could lock game framerate to 24 FPS (not 23,9FPS or 24,1FPS) and it would get renderended smoothly by the monitor (TFT/LCD monitors does have same problems as CRT's had) in same timing as the display card and CPU could get info fast enough from input devices and OS could calculate the movement fast enough... 24 FPS would be totally enough. But because some players machines are rubbish, they can even need 120FPS so one frame mistake is much faster than it is in 24 FPS.

But it is just always funny some people still say that they can notice the difference in 60 FPS and 120 FPS, when using 50Hz monitor. If someone would calculate the framerate difference what happens when screen Hz and jumping FPS (not just 1FPS but many times .1 FPS jumping) causes one pixel distortions to lines, maybe "60 FPS is a must" gamers could understand that 60 FPS is not needed at all.

Re:No it was just too dark

[bertok]

Sorry, I have to totally disagree, and I know what I'm talking about, having both developed 3D game engines professionally, and having used real high-refresh rate CRT monitors.

The thing is that a moving object on the screen can only be seen at a single static position with each frame. With 24fps, those positions are far apart, say, several centimeters on the screen. A human can track a moving object with their eyes quite accurately. In a real-life scene the moving object will be sharp and the background motion blurred. However, with a computer screen, the movement is an illusion. The eyes try to track something that isn't actually moving, so the object will appear to be blurred, because it's effectively a part of the 'background' around it. It's not physically moving. At low framerates, the eye's tracking capability can become confused, as the moving object seems to jump from place to place, resulting in a perceptible flickering.

This blurring can be made invisible if the object moves only about 1 pixel per frame*, because then the temporal resolution matches the spatial resolution. This can be achieved if either the movement is slow, or if the refresh rate is high. In movies you'll notice that panning is usually done slowly to keep the movement rate low, but this isn't something that can be done, in say, a 3D shooter, where movement rates are under the player's control and can be arbitrarily high.

I've played 3D games with a true 120fps monitor, and it's amazing how much smoother it makes the game feel. The 60fps of LCDs were a real step backwards in quality, which is why many manufacturers are now selling 'gamer optimized' LCDs with lower resolutions but faster refresh rates.

*) or for very high resolution displays, movement smaller than the angular resolving power of the human eye per frame would work as well.

Re:No it was just too dark

[FreonTrip]

For a single player game a target framerate of 30 fps is pretty reasonable. 30 fps was also a decent target framerate given a lot of the hardware being targeted: such obsolete tech as Geforce3s, Geforce4 MXes, and Radeon 8500s rendered the game while looking shockingly good, and managed to run at between 20 and 30 fps. I ran the game on my old workhorse: an Athlon XP 2400+ with a gig of RAM, and a GeForceFX 5900XT. It cranked through the game at around 35 fps, and I was very happy with that.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom is a bat?

Re:No it was just too dark

[FreonTrip]

Doom wouldn't run on a 286, silly man, though Wolfenstein 3D did. :P I seem to remember anything south of a 386DX/25 being kind of a stretch for Dooming, and a 33 MHz 486 offered an experience decent enough for multiplayer. A DX/2 66 was good enough to show off, and any kind of Pentium managed to top out the framerate in all but the most demanding user-made maps of the time. The video card could be a bottleneck, too - folks with 256k Trident VGA cards were at a disadvantage compared to S3, Tseng Labs, or ATI's cards. I reckon SciTech's UniVBE saved a lot of people from buying new graphics boards...

Re:No it was just too dark

[chocapix]

First, I'd like to see the science that proves that 24 fps is enough for everyone.

While I agree that insisting on 120fps when your monitor can only display 50 is silly, I actually did a double blind test on a 120Hz monitor and I could definitely tell the difference between stable 60fps and stable 120fps.

Maybe some people can't tell the difference. Most people who can probably don't care. But I know I can tell and I do care.

Also, games and movies are different. In a movie, there's motion blur which helps a lot. 24fps in movies is okay most of the time. But to do motion blur in a game you need to increase latency by a few frames and low latency is more important than smoothness in a fast-paced game.

Re:No it was just too dark

[sharkey]

On the plus side, vampires can hypnotize most women into doing anything they want. Good luck to you!

Re:No it was just too dark

[jackbird]

Even at the movies, the projector shows each frame twice for slightly less than 1/48th of a second each time. 24 fps is really low for human persistence of vision; it was chosen because film stock is expensive and it was about the lowest one could get away with with a straight face (25/30 fps for PAL/NTSC was chosen because it allows you to use the AC power for timing rather than adding electronics and raising the price of a set). Super-8 film cameras go even lower, at 18fps, but the motion is noticeably jerky in super-8 footage (to say nothing of the wacky pulldown you have to do going to video).

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why he said 30+ FPS would have been a luxury!

Re:No it was just too dark

[hattig]

At least you had batteries. I got eaten by a grue. Thanks a bunch TD-Linux. :-(

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was dropped because they wanted all their lighting to be real time in Doom3 and all their previous radiosity lighting was in the form of pre-compiled lightmaps.

Re:No it was just too dark

[ildon]

This is really really easy to disprove on modern hardware. Open 3 instances of Quake 3. Set them all to windowed mode and a small enough resolution to be visible at the same time. Set com_maxfps to 24/40/60 (or whatever values you want) in each window. Enable vsync. Run "demo four" and watch. Even better, call in someone who doesn't normally play video games and ask them to watch without telling them about the settings and ask them which one looks best.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Cimexus]

Yep. Doom ran acceptably but not brilliantly on a 486 33 Mhz, but terribly if you kicked the turbo button off (which I think reduced it to ... 16 Mhz? Or something? Can't quite remember).

OTOH it flew on my 486 DX4/100 with 8MB RAM and 2 MB Diamond Stealth video card ;) Those were the days.

Re:No it was just too dark

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck are you talking about. 486/66 with 16mb of memories is enough to play quake.

it'll be just a matter of time....

[Anonymous Coward]

until someone makes some sort of OpenWolf or something stupid like that.

I can imagine something like OA for it - anime babes shooting anime babes over island with rifles. At least their chests are GPL licensed so you could modify and copy them. X_X

Re:it'll be just a matter of time....

[Steauengeglase]

Doubt you'll see that, but I could imagine there will be a few good RTCW SP mods to come out of it. Will people play it? Well, people still play and create SP campaigns for Q1.

Re:Wow, man.

[Tamran]

It's progress if the device fits in your pocket and runs on batteries. I wonder if this thing will run on Android when it comes out?

Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[mikedep333]

One of the two games who's engine went GPL is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It was already a freeware game. Sadly its engine was getting old as people struggled to get its OSS audio working on newer distros with ALSA/Pulseaudio. I look forward to that being fixed on other great improvements being made to Wolf ET.

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[mikedep333]

Whoops, meant to say "and other great improvement"

Anyway source releases are under the GPL V3 (I see no reference of "or later.")

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I really enjoyed playing ET (and I played it a lot). The forums these days are mostly full of bots, but on the weekends there is still quite a bit of live fragging going on. It might be just me, but its the most fun I've had playing an FPS since Doom(1).

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[rotide]

Honestly, the fact that the engine is "getting old" is the reason they opened up the source. They aren't going to make any more money out off of it and students/hobbyists will love being able to tinker with it.

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[ggambett]

Awesome! I look forward to the exact same gameplay and balance ported to a new engine :)

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[Narishma]

In this case it doesn't matter since they weren't selling the game to begin with. And the game is using the id Tech 3 engine which they opened a few years ago.

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[grumbel]

Anyway source releases are under the GPL V3 (I see no reference of "or later.")

"any later version" is referenced in each source file:

Wolf ET Source Code is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

Re:Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I still play ET and just compiled new binaries with some additional optimisations. Very nice.

That's because there wasn't

[Sycraft-fu]

The engine was a total flop. It didn't look very good, personally I'd say Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004) looked better, and especially for the hardware it required. When Unreal Engine 3 came out, it was done. The complete list of games on the Doom 3 engine is:

Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
Quake 4
Prey
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Wolfenstein (the new one from 2009)

And Brink is using it, scheduled for 2011. That's it. 5 titles, one expansion for the whole engine. Compare this to the about 100-150 games for Unreal Engine 3. Games devs just did not care for iD Tech 4 (the Doom 3 engine) at all.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[MaxBooger]

The Rage engine, however, should be a different matter entirely. The MegaTexture tech gives developers the capability of porting their present-day Xbox360 and PS3 games to the Xbox4 and PS4 platforms with an immediate boost to graphic quality. If id is smart enough, they will have the game code separate from the engine code. Hell, if they do that, id might do the porting for free. In fact, that might make solid business sense, given the value that id has in the megatex tech. Keep the engine code binary-only.

Story goes that when Rage was demoed at the latest E3, the UT engineers walked out of the demo shaking their heads.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Quarters]

Megatexturing was backported into idtech4 for Quake Wars. While idtech5 looks sexy id made an announcement that will make many developers wary of the engine. Idtech5 can only be licensed if a developer publishes through Bethesda (http://www.geek.com/articles/games/id-tech-5-will-only-be-used-for-bethesda-published-games-20100812/.

Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.

Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly was I the only one who WASN'T surprised when iD sold to Bethesda (and whoever their corporate overlord is. I forget.) I mean seriously after Tech 4 iD seemed pretty irrelevant. Carmack's been wasting all his time on the rocketry thing (which is cool and all, but he really should've retired from iD and let some fresh blood take over)

iD the independent was cool when they were balls down enough to stay serious about their games, but honestly once everyone started breaking up after Quake (Q2?) to go do their own things, the team that made iD great was gone and they were pretty much riding on their prior shareware fame. Much like shareware, it's time iD faded into obscurity.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[bonch]

I wonder what effect this may have on a future source code release of id Tech 5.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[shutdown -p now]

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.

Maybe that's why they went for lock-in? Because id isn't really a strong competitor in the "game engine market" anymore?

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine "flopped" because id didn't push it as a commercial engine in the same way they did with id Tech 3. They had been there, dealt with the tech support for external devs and companies, and found they just didn't want to do that again. Aside from a couple of close-knit companies there was no encouragement to use it. Epic, on the other hand, took the corporate angle, focused on building and marketing a sellable engine, and provided a commercial support network that encouraged lots of reuse.

But yeah, don't let the facts get in the way of a good beat-up.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[dan828]

You forgot Duke Nukem Forever! It's going to use the Doom 3 engine!

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

OR GET YOUR ASS TOGETHER AND CODE AN ENGINE.
j/k
lesscapslesscapslesscapslesscapslesscapslesscaps

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't look very good

Either you never played a game based on the engine or you never had hardware capable of running it with maximum detail.

personally I'd say Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004) looked better

Scratch that, you're just on crack.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[FreeGamer]

It wasn't a total flop. You just don't know every decent Doom 3 TC. For instance, now I'm not expert on Doom 3 mods (because, frankly, I monitor open source games) but I still know about the excellent The Dark Mod - a total conversion Thief-inspired game. I'm sure there's plenty more.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard Romero was going to redo Daikatana with the id tech 3, but then then tech 4 came out and they switched over. I think he's holding out for tech 5 now...

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Quarters]

If you read the linked article about the publisher lock-in you'll see that is kind of their thought process. Hollenshead states that they view 5 as a competitive advantage Bethesda holds over other publishers/middleware creators. Developers can only have access to that advantage if the publisher through Bethesda.

Now, one way this may work is if they sell the engine much cheaper than Unreal (currently around $1m/sku). If you can get 5 for a lot less than that and give Bethesda the going publisher take on a shipped title (50% of revenue...thats probably a bit conservative). Then the engine choice might start to make sense for some 3rd party studios. But at $1m/sku *AND* giving Bethesda a % of revenue?....no way, no how.

I think the adoption of 5 will be very similar to that of idtech 4. Id games will use it, naturally, and those studios that exist by making id IP games, Raven, Grey Matter, Splash Damage, and Human Head, will use it as they make more id IP games. Some other independent studios may try it. But, for the most part, it will be an internal Bethesda technology.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The open-source community should code their own original engine. Developers may not have a talent for things artistic, but they can code. I'm not knocking iD here, but the Quake 3 clones that are "open source first person shooters" should upgrade to a more modern game play style.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[glittermage]

I hope someone ports Magic Carpet. I still have my 4 DOS CDs from the bachelor pad LAN party days.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

My crystal ball tells me it will use the Doom 9 engine.

Just before switching to the Unreal 20 engine.

Just before switching to Crytek 5.

Just before switching to...Cube??

I really should get a refund for this ball.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Monkeedude1212]

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset.

This is true. I've actually seen the jobs posting whenever Valve, Blizzard, Ubisoft, or other large publishers are looking for level designers - I've heard them all mention that extensive experience either working with Hammer or Unreal are your best bets, because those tools and engines are widespread enough that even if they don't use Unreal for their game, they know Unreal's capabilities so its easier to weed through who is good and who is bad with level design.

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Lunix Nutcase]

And he's promised that he really IS going to make you his bitch this time!

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Yaldabaoth]

Duke Nukem Forever is also going to use Unreal 2.5, Unreal 3, and Crytek! All merged together into one mega-engine! It's the only way to handle Duke! It's so crazy it has to be true!

Re:That's because there wasn't

[i_hate_robots]

actually, the latest rumor is that Gearbox (of Borderlands fame) is now going to finish DNF, so it will most likely be using Unreal Engine 3 :) http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/11/rumor-duke-nukem-forever-being-completed-by-gearbox/

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget "The Dark Mod", a Thief-inspired total conversion for Doom3, which is a fully functional game in itself, with over 20 missions already to play. And it is Open Source (including the source code and the assets), already at v1.03 and continuing to deliver new content and features :)

http://www.thedarkmod.com/

Enjoy!

Re:That's because there wasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The release of the engine will provide a boost to Wolfenstein style games. The essence is that now the Wolfenstein:ET universe would be remade with fan fiction and an improved engine. For instance with campaigns where a Gestapo agent undermines the US and finally Roosevelt. OMG! Roosevelt. Or with a moon episode with moon physics.

I mean, evil... Thanks god Wolfenstein is illegal in Germany because of the Swastika.

Re:Wow, man.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you live in a world without floating points.

and why no guns with a flash light on them or duck

[Joe The Dragon]

and why no guns with a flash light on them or duck tape on mars?

Re:and why no guns with a flash light on them or d

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there are no ducks on mars. Or did you mean duct tape?

Source release. . .

[JSBiff]

You know, about 5 years ago, I bet a lot of people would have been very excited about GPL release of ET. I suppose someone will probably do something with it, but this seems ridiculously long after the game's publication.

ET wasn't even a revenue generating game for them - they gave it away for free (well, I do remember seeing some copies for sale at computer stores - I guess you can get some people to pay for something they could just download for free, legally).

I know that iD makes some (maybe a considerable portion) of their revenue licensing out their engines to other commercial game developers (maybe even developers of non-game simulators, not sure), but even so - did anyone license the ET engine? I mean, I know it was basically the Q3A engine with some modifications - did anyone care about those specific modifications? Anyhow, releasing the game engine as GPL source release doesn't stop them from generating revenue from licensing it for commercial (non-GPL) use. Why wait so long?

Re:Source release. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no real engine modifications other than some new model formats and some localization stuff. You couldn't license the modified ET/RTCW engine at all, just only the base Q3 technology which comes with none of the format additions Wolf has. There is no "ET Engine". There is also no "Team Arena engine" as well.

The retail version is for dial-up convenience. 250mb+ is a lot for a modem.

captcha: quagmire. GIGGITY

Re:Source release. . .

[Steauengeglase]

If I recall there was still a licensee that prevented its release.

Re:Source release. . .

[JSBiff]

Buh, wah? The Q3A engine was GPL'ed years ago. What would be so special about the ET Engine, which would prevent it's release, because of some contract agreement with one of iD's licensee's? Other than Splash Damage (I suppose maybe they didn't want it open sourced before), was there any licensee of the ET engine? The other poster who responded said no one licensed the ET engine?

Re:Source release. . .

[ildon]

I got the impression they were throwing people a bone because they were unable to release Doom3's source for some reason.

Re:Wow, man.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you used an Xbox? Games for it are still visually impressive. What's remarkable is that it's done on a cellphone. OFC, games will never be equivalent on both devices. I'll be impressed when I can wirelessly connect my phone to the 100" TV and play full-resolution games on it, using the phone as an extensible controller.

Re:and why no guns with a flash light on them or d

[jgagnon]

http://www.duckbrand.com/Products/duck-tape.aspx

Re:and why no guns with a flash light on them or d

[Anonymous Coward]

There may be no duck tape, but there is duck rope. I can tie a flashlight to my rifle using the duck's intestines. Or zombie intestines.

sigh...

[smash]

... some people are bitching that the controls will suck, etc. its a proof of concept people, not really intended to be a playable game. it simply shows how well the rage engine scales.

iPhone?

[Necron69]

Screw the iPhone, John. When will ID have an Android version?
The super AMOLED screen on my Captivate is begging For a good game.

Necron69

Re:iPhone?

[rotide]

Proof of Concepts are usually built around one hardware model so they don't have to dick around spending tons of manhours making it work on a wide array of hardware/os'. I have an android, so understand that I say this with zero fanboyism, but Apple pretty much has a more or less single piece of hardware with very small variances in parts used. They could write the software to take advantage of the hardware and have a large number of devices be able to run it. Do that on an android phone and you basically have to pick _one_ phone to do it on. Again, I love Android but lets say they picked the XT720 (the one I have). Well, Cincinnati Bell is currently the only US carrier offering it. They would have a game that would run on a handful of phones. The iPhone just works for their PoC purpose.

Re:iPhone?

[Purity Of Essence]

According to GameSpot:

Next up is Android. Carmack asked people in the crowd how many people had Androids (a vocal minority, he assessed), and how many had spent more than $20 in the phone's app store. He said he's been checking regularly to see how popular the phones are, and it's to the point where Carmack is starting to think about when the company will bring its products to the platform. It's probably not going to be in the next six months, he said.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6273388.html

Re:iPhone?

[Purity Of Essence]

True enough, but I'm sure the decision had mostly to do with iPhone owners spending a hell of a lot more money on apps than Android owners.

Re:iPhone?

[Darkness404]

...And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.

A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.

B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.

C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.

Re:iPhone?

[gig]

> ..And a lot of the reason that Android users don't spend a ton of money on apps are threefold.

Your 3 reasons are ridiculous.

> A) Android has a lot of really good free apps and it has lite apps that don't suck.

Although a higher percentage of Android apps are free than iOS apps, there are twice as many free apps on iOS, because there are so many more apps. And there are many, many great free apps.

> B) Most people who use Android aren't the type of people who spend lots and lots of money on needless things.

If you don't need apps, why did you buy a smartphone? Why not just buy a free feature phone or use 2 tin cans and string? That's just pure rationalization.

> C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business
> to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for
> his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop.

Again with the fart apps! The reality is, iOS apps are native C apps, not baby Java apps, so they are much, much more sophisticated and powerful than Android apps. iOS has multitrack audio recorders, video editors, sophisticated art tools, thousands of photography tools, and tens of thousands of full-size apps, including many world class productivity apps that were ported from the Mac like Keynote and OmniFocus and iMovie. iOS apps are desktop class apps. Android copied the iPhone user interface, but they left in the 2005-style Java phone apps. Deriding iOS apps as being all fart apps just makes you look ignorant and biased to people who have actually used App Store. I've written hundreds of songs on iOS, any time, day or night, instant-on, 32-64 GB of storage, 10 hour batteries, using a $10 iPhone app and more recently a $40 iPad app that I would gladly pay again for but don't have to. They replaced a $400 multitracker I used to carry with me that was the size of 3-4 iPhones.

iOS apps are *cheaper* to develop than Android apps, because the tools are built for rapid app development, there is a very high-level framework that does a ton of work for you. That is why there are apps on Mac OS and iOS done by 1-person teams that would be a 10-person or more team on other platforms. These are the same developer tools that (non-programmer) Tim Berners-Lee used to write WorldWideWeb in 1990. Cheap, easy development is a hallmark of iOS apps. And there is an iPhone and iPad simulator in the free developer tools, you can get an iPod touch for $199 no contract required, and if you want to do broad hardware testing there are only 3 different displays and 3 different SoC's.

The one and only reason there is no money in Android app development is that there is RAMPANT BOOTLEGGING. You don't have to pay for an Android app, you can easily get it for free.

Here is the key point to understand:

- the easiest way to get a paid iOS app is to click "INSTALL" in App Store
- the easiest way to get a paid Android app is to bootleg it

People do what is easiest.

Re:iPhone?

[Terrasque]

You forgot:

D. Paid apps are not avaliable in the store for most of Europe and I think all of Asia.

Re:iPhone?

[lxt]

"C) With no restrictions on app development, the person who makes a $.99 fart application loses business to the teenager with an hour of free time and an SDK who makes his own one and releases it for free for his own amusement. With the iPhone that app might cost $50 or more to develop"

Ah, but that's not strictly true, is it? Because to get onto the Android Market you need to pay a $25 registration fee. Now, I'll admit the App Store requires a $99 fee, but I think it's worth noting both platforms require some form of payment to actually get onto the main storefront.

Re:iPhone?

[Kuad]

"iOS apps are desktop class apps."

I love my iPhone, but you're insane. iMovie on iOS is barely even related to its namesake.

Re:iPhone?

[perrin]

Not to mention that the non-gratis android market still has not been rolled out to a lot of countries yet. And I am talking about first-world countries here, like the Scandinavian countries.

Re:iPhone?

[whoop]

You're holding it the wrong way. Place the phone on the top of a desk and voila, it's now a desktop class app.

Sincerely,
  Steven J.

Re:iPhone?

[AltairDusk]

Someone needs to calm down...

First off, buying an app in the Android store is very easy, it is not easier to bootleg it. Second off, I had every iPhone up through the 3gs and have now switched to Android so I'm quite familiar with both platforms. Let's get a few things straight here.

1. "iOS apps are desktop class apps"
   No. Not by a long shot. If you actually believe that I have to wonder if you even have a desktop.
2. "... much, much more sophisticated and powerful than Android apps."
   I have to disagree here too. Both platforms have some well written apps and both have their share of poorly made apps. On average I have found more useful and powerful apps at lower price points on Android than I did on the iPhone. In addition Android allows apps to do more than iOS apps are allowed to without requiring a jailbreak.
3. "iOS apps are *cheaper* to develop than Android apps, because the tools are built for rapid app development, there is a very high-level framework that does a ton of work for you."
   I'm not even going to get into this, all I want to know is do you have any development experience whatsoever? If so do you even have any idea what the development process is like for Android?

Re:iPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android users don't spend money on apps because they're naturally superior breed of users? Wow. You aren't smug at all!

Riiight.

This is the kind of crap you hear shortly before a platform dies.
Enjoy ur carrier abandoned, rotting hardware and software fragmentation.

Posting anon to avoid karma assassination.

Re:iPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the majority off the game was written in opengl, making the game ridiculously easy to port... I mean, hobbyists got doom, quake, quake 2 running on the nintendo ds, wii, psp, etc. and it looks just like the original. Minor tweaks for interface controls, maybe a reduction in texture quality, but if you think about it, the applePhone sets the lowest common denominator in terms of control availability - touch screen and wii-like movement control.

Re:iPhone?

[JAlexoi]

Yeah, but you need to pay $99 just to run your app on your iDevice and not in an emulator. (Jailbreaking aside)

megatexture

[poached]

If I understand what megatexture is, it is like a paging system for textures so that the amount of vram used can be minimized and unnecessary texture paged out. If this is the case, what took so long for this idea to be developed? It seems obvious to me and actually I thought this was already done in all games already? I'm just curious to learn more about the technology and development behind it, and understanding how it works.

Re:megatexture

[jjohnson]

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a megatexture was the opposite of what you're suggesting: It's where you load a single, complete texture into memory just to avoid 1) chunking it up, and 2) coming up with some sort of demand-load/page-otherwise scheme.

It wasn't really possible until game machines had sufficient memory that taking up a huge chunk of RAM with a megatexture was possible. But once it was a reasonable assumption about the minimal hardware, loading a single giant texture became far preferable for performance reasons. Assuming I understand it correctly, most people saw it coming, but Carmack was the first to do it and make it work as expected.

Re:megatexture

[Adrian Lopez]

I don't think even today's systems have enough memory to load an entire megatexture into memory. Remember that Carmack is using megatextures to provide terrain detail, so the texture can get pretty huge. Then again, I don't think Carmack has ever released any technical details on megatextures, so I could be wrong.

Re:megatexture

[jjohnson]

Hunh... actually, you were closer to it than I was, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

MegaTexture refers to a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of a single extremely large texture rather than repeating multiple smaller textures. It is featured in Splash Damage's game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and was developed by id Software technical director John Carmack.[1]

MegaTexture employs a single large texture space for static terrain. The texture is stored on removable media or the hard drive and streamed as needed, allowing large amounts of detail and variation over a large area with comparatively little RAM usage.[citation needed]

Then during rendering, required parts of the texture space are streamed inside dynamically (re-)allocated textures in video memory, scaled to the correct mipmap level(s) depending on the polygon size. This allows the engine to reduce the number of texels in VRAM/number of pixels on the screen ratio (the goal being getting closer to 1), saving memory.

It does get swapped in and out of memory, and the benefit isn't performance, it's having a lot more varied texture than a repeating scheme.

Re:megatexture

[poached]

yup. I'd love to see some siggraph paper on how it is implemented. But yeah, it seems like this was doable years ago. Were there technical limitations, like hardware not mature or flexible enough that got in the way?

Re:megatexture

[jjohnson]

Since it "streams" from the hard drive, I would guess that bus and drive speeds would have been the limiter early on.

Re:megatexture

[SuiteSisterMary]

Not to mention file size; what sort of disc are you going to ship say, Fallout 3 on, where there's one mighty texture fo the entire landscape?

I thought for sure we'd be into procedural textures for everything by this point; if you have a granite rock, run your granite rock procedure on it and you get a unique granite rock. Use a seed value for each thing in the world so that any given object always looks the same, and Bob's your uncle.

Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME!

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent a couple of hours trying to make work Gtkradiant on my Ubuntu Karmic 64. I don't understand why this tool that is fundamental to make maps for many open source games hasn't a simple deb package or why it's not in the repositories of a distro like Ubuntu. The Gtkradiant's official page has so little informations. People that make maps are not programmers, they want to make maps, not get crazy trying to understand how to install a program.

Where can I download the keynote?

[Purity Of Essence]

Any clues or outright answers as to where I can download John Carmack's entire keynote? Even just audio would be acceptable. I managed to watch the rocketry talk today with him and Richard Garriott. It was fascinating.

For others, here is some pretty thorough coverage of the keynote:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6273388.html

Re:Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME

[Anonymous Coward]

People that make maps are not programmers, they want to make maps, not get crazy trying to understand how to install a program.

Why not just run it in Windows? Occasionally it turns out to be the right tool for the job...

Re:Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because I'm just using Ubuntu and I don't have a copy of Windows.
I like Linux it because is very stable for using software like GIMP , Blender , Mypaint , Krita , Alchemy , Inkscape.

I use Linux for the security, the performance of the system. I like to know how my computer treats my personal informations.

I configured compiz in a way that makes my life easier and I don't think I can have the same settings on Windows.

I don't change OS for that, probably I'll find the way to install Gtkradiant.
I just believe that not packaging Gtkradiant is keeping far from Linux a lot of creative people that would bring their art into open source videogames.

rulk

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a good phone IP4, but I really can not afford the wages! Ha ha!jiva kamas

Re:Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME

[Anonymous Coward]

Run it under wine :) I imagine there's compatibility info for gtkradiant under winehq's appdb, and it's probably more reliable than trying to compile and run the linux version.

But that's just my 2 cents (A serious gamer who only runs open source and cleanly compiling games on linux.)

Re:Wow, man.

[Darkness404]

Have you ever used a phone for gaming? It sucks. Even when emulators run beautifully for it, you either have to get a GameGripper-like device to use the keyboard or hook up a Wii controller via bluetooth to play it.

Using a phone as a controller would be one of the worst moves ever (even worse than the Wii's basic controller)

Re:Wow, man.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I said an extensible controller, and not just a regular controller. Obviously using the normal phone as an interface makes any non-sidescrollers or fixed-view RTS games literally impossible.

How far did you play?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The machine gun (forget if there was another name for it) did indeed have a flashlight on it.

Earlier on, I liked that as a gameplay mechanic -- even the duct tape mod doesn't allow it for the pistol alone for that reason. Later on, there's better lighting in general, so it's not as much of an issue.

Re:How far did you play?

[Vectormatic]

i do remember the MG in Quake 4 having a flashlight, but in doom 3? not as far as i know

The scoped/flashlighted Assault riffle from Quake 4 is much more versatile then Doom's machine gun, but then again, if you are playing doom, why are you using anything but the shotgun?

Re:How far did you play?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, that would be one reason -- the shotgun doesn't have a flashlight. In fact, the machine gun is about the only weapon in Doom 3 that has a flashlight attached to it.

It's not a particularly good one -- much narrower radius than the actual flashlight -- but a quick image search is a trivial way to verify it without firing up the game itself.

GPL Incompatible?

[PhrostyMcByte]

The source released is covered under GPLv3, but has some additional terms attached to it. I would guess this makes it GPL-incompatible?

ADDITIONAL TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE WOLFENSTEIN: ENEMY TERRITORY GPL SOURCE CODE.

The following additional terms ("Additional Terms") supplement and modify the GNU General Public License, Version 3 ("GPL") applicable to the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory GPL Source Code ("Wolf ET Source Code"). In addition to the terms and conditions of the GPL, the Wolf ET Source Code is subject to the further restrictions below.

1. Replacement of Section 15. Section 15 of the GPL shall be deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:

"15. Disclaimer of Warranty.

THE PROGRAM IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE AND MERCHANTABILITY. THE PROGRAM IS BEING DELIVERED OR MADE AVAILABLE "AS IS", "WITH ALL FAULTS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION."

2. Replacement of Section 16. Section 16 of the GPL shall be deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:

"16. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR ITS AFFILIATES, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE PROGRAM(INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), WHETHER OR NOT ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR SUCH OTHER PARTY RECEIVES NOTICE OF ANY SUCH DAMAGES AND WHETHER OR NOT SUCH DAMAGES COULD HAVE BEEN FORESEEN."

3. LEGAL NOTICES; NO TRADEMARK LICENSE; ORIGIN. You must reproduce faithfully all trademark, copyright and other proprietary and legal notices on any copies of the Program or any other required author attributions. This license does not grant you rights to use any copyright holder or any other party's name, logo, or trademarks. Neither the name of the copyright holder or its affiliates, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the Program may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. The origin of the Program must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original Program. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original Program.

4. INDEMNIFICATION. IF YOU CONVEY A COVERED WORK AND AGREE WITH ANY RECIPIENT OF THAT COVERED WORK THAT YOU WILL ASSUME ANY LIABILITY FOR THAT COVERED WORK, YOU HEREBY AGREE TO INDEMNIFY, DEFEND AND HOLD HARMLESS THE OTHER LICENSORS AND AUTHORS OF THAT COVERED WORK FOR ANY DAMAEGS, DEMANDS, CLAIMS, LOSSES, CAUSES OF ACTION, LAWSUITS, JUDGMENTS EXPENSES (INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION REASONABLE ATTORNEYS' FEES AND EXPENSES) OR ANY OTHER LIABLITY ARISING FROM, RELATED TO OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR ASSUMPTIONS OF LIABILITY.

Re:GPL Incompatible?

[PeterBrett]

The source released is covered under GPLv3, but has some additional terms attached to it. I would guess this makes it GPL-incompatible?

Yes, and also I believe that it may be violating the FSF's trademarks by advertising something as GPL-licensed when it's not.

Re:GPL Incompatible?

[grumbel]

The GPLv3 contains the section "7. Additional Terms.", which seems to allow and describe exactly the changes that they did.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you
add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of
that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:

        a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the
        terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or

        b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or
        author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal
        Notices displayed by works containing it; or

        c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or
        requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in
        reasonable ways as different from the original version; or

        d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or
        authors of the material; or

        e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some
        trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or

        f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that
        material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of
        it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for
        any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on
        those licensors and authors.

Re:GPL Incompatible?

[PeterBrett]

The GPLv3 contains the section "7. Additional Terms.", which seems to allow and describe exactly the changes that they did.

Ah, I forgot about the new section 7 optional restrictions. Thanks.

Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[cgenman]

On the note of Doom 1 and Doom 2:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[naz404]

Serious Sam HD 1 & 2.

In a gaming world now dominated by Counterstrikey FPSs, Serious Sam is a throwback to the days of Doom when waves and waves of enemies are just thrown at you. The classic running and gunning bass-ackwards is still a valid tactic in this game :)

Best of all, story mode coop play is supported, a feature missing in most games nowadays.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[ToasterMonkey]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

Uh, without traveling back in time to the 90's PC game market?

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Vectormatic]

the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.

You just made my day!

And on a serious note, a sibling suggested serious sam, which is a good one. It doesnt have the narrow passages of doom, its more open areas with massive waves comming at you, but that is probably as close as you can get, other various more simple shooters still tend to muck things up with stories and puzzles

Oh, try painkiller by the way! its a bit older (ca 2003), and the setting is somewhat different, but in terms of gameplay, it is a nice mix between serious sam and doom

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[ultranova]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2?

Why not just play Doom itself? The engine has been ported to modern machines.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Anonymous Coward]

SS, what a game that was. Awful graphics, it looked a complete joke. But after about 5 minutes of manic shooting it showed itself to be enormous fun.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I second Painkiller. I had a lot more fun with it than Serious Sam, which just didn't agree with me for some reason. The first time I fired up Painkiller, my immediate reaction was pretty much, "Holy crap! I'm playing Doom again!" I hear the sequels are mostly terrible, but the first one was great. There's no run button, because why would you ever want to not run? There's no reload button, because that would get in the way of shooting things. You just bounce around at high speed (bunnyhopping was included intentionally) and mow down hordes of demons with ridiculous weapons and tons of ammo, the way things used to be back in the day.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[TheRaven64]

Awful graphics? It was the first game I played that used S3TC (although my card didn't support it at the time) and used huge textures. You could walk right up to walls and see details, when other games at the time just had vague textures. It was also the first FPS I played that allowed really huge game worlds.

Totally agree on the fun though. Deathmatch was a bit rubbish - the large worlds meant that you'd just bounce around miles away from each other, watching rockets go slowly past. In single player and coop, it was great fun. I completed it once in each mode, and I can't think of another FPS that I've played from start to finish. The coop mode was a lot easier: you would respawn near the other players when you died, so you could turn the difficulty up to maximum, shoot until you ran out of ammo, die, and then continue shooting. In single player, you had to bother with dodging.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[L4t3r4lu5]

If I remember, doom wasn't wave and wave of enemies. It was all built around enemies you couldn't see... Cloaked soldiers / Pinkie daemons, areas of pitch blackness with an intermittent flashing light, blind corners which you knew would have a baddy behind it, but still got startled when that aggro sound played and it was right up in your face.I don't recall any more than maybe 10 enemies on screen at any one time

Serious Sam, however, was open plains with an entrance which shut behind you, no way out, with wave after wave, as you say, of maniacally screaming dudes with heads made of bombs charging at you, for which you had an abundance of ammunition (but not a lot of time) to dispatch.

Doom was "Get scared crapless, run back a little, kill the bad guys." SS is "This area it pretty open... Best break out the XPML30..." *Serious grin*

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[L4t3r4lu5]

Indeed. Someone tell this guy about Good Old Games

Oh!

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Anonymous Coward]

NecroVision

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[shadowrat]

wait, TF2 is NOT the Mario Kart of shooters?

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[nschubach]

Serious Sam to me was holding down "A", "S", and Mouse1.... but I loved every minute of it. ;)

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[samwichse]

+5 informative, you just gave away how to beat the game.

On that note, favorite game ever.

Sam

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Anonymous Coward]

Painkiller. You won't regret checking it out.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[kalirion]

Try Painkiller. Great mindless action coupled with awesome level design.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Nurgel]

Check out Painkiller. Lots of fun.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[antibryce]

Painkiller: http://www.painkillergame.com/

Tons of dumb, mindless violence. There is some sort of story, about how you went to hell to save some soul of some something or something.

Lots of just blowing away demons though, and lots of ridiculous weapons.

Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 &

[Walter Carver]

Serious Sam: the first and second encounter. They have also made an HD version with better graphics.

Re:Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME

[smash]

Be that as it may, an os is useless without software. For the task you describe, windows is the correct tool for the job.

I don't go trying to run my firewall on Windows, and i wouldn't try to deal with a (probably) slightly quirky game map development tool on an unsupported platform.

The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stuff

[Sycraft-fu]

Right now, textures are usually a bunch of smaller files. So your rocks will have some various rock textures, your roads will have some road textures and so on. There are placed on objects and tessellated as needed. The potential problem is it means things can look too much the same. I mean say I have only one rock texture and every rock gets it. They'll all look an awful lot a like in that case.

So the idea with megatexture is you don't do that. Instead you have one single texture for all the ground, and probably all the world geometry. There is no repetition, no tessellation. As with the real world, everything is unique. The game engine then handles swapping in what parts of this massive texture are actually needed at a given time.

Neat idea I'll say that, remains to be seen how it works. Ultimately there's got to be artists behind things and their time is money. Will they really design everything from scratch, or will they do copy-paste but just in the image editor rather than in the game engine? I'm also not sure how it interacts with shaders. These days more and more of games are procedural, meaning you describe things with programs that run on the GPU. I haven't seen if you can have shaders and apply them to given things (like a metal shader that makes metal shiny) or if you have to have one giant displacement map, specular map, and so on.

Re:Wow, man.

[Anonymous Coward]

Android -> Java.

So no.

Re:Wow, man.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's progress but it's not impressive really. And the form factor of the vast majority of consoles have little to do with needed space. Just as early DVD players were the size of VCRs because it was an accepted form factor. Once you get into the realm of medialess software there really is no reason that most consoles couldn't be the size of a paperback book.

Re:Wow, man.

[VortexCortex]

Android -> Java.

So no.

Android -> Dvalik.
Android also has support for OpenGL and Native C++ Code, but still probably no.

The real time "shadows" seemed to be just dark spot decals.
Also, I didn't see any dynamic lighting besides the most basic directional vertex lighting on the moving models;
Otherwise it looked like a bunch of precomputed lightmaps/textures to me.

Meh. It's "Rage" (or IDTech5) only in name.
Many Android phones could handle this no problem...

I don't see what the big deal is. Article title should have been: "id still making mobile games and releasing source code"

Re:Wow, man.

[Alien1024]

Native code is also a possibility.

Re:Wow, man.

[gbjbaanb]

Have you ever used a PC for gaming. It sucks. you need a dedicated keyboard *and* mouse to play anything :)

sure, phones aren't designed for gaming controls (erm, except the upcoming Playstation phone) so I doubt anyone would expect great things from it. If gaming is to take off on the phone, then I expect to see accessories to become available - like a keyboard and mouse - and a hdmi connector to the TV so your gaming experience on your new small PC ...erm phone... is as good as the experience on your large PC.

Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack noted that performance on the iPhone was able to 'kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2.'

Good job killing 300Mhz CPU / 32MB Ram 9 years old hardware (PS2) with 800Mhz CPU / 512MB Ram (iPhone 4G)

D'oh,

[ciaran_o_riordan]

D'oh, test that shouldn't have gotten posted

Doom too dark?

[MRe_nl]

Press Ctrl+Alt+~(Tilde) to bring up the command console,
set r_gamma 3

more at http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/doom3/hints.html

Re:Wow, man.

[Vectormatic]

The xbox 360 and ps3 thermal design team would like a word with you...

Doom 3

[CFBMoo1]

Doom 3 was too dark but I have to admit it made for some really great "Oh shit!" moments. Especially when I was going through that specimen transport area where the only light I had was from the specimen tube and the scientist with the lantern.

Objective C could be the reason for iPhone too

[Dunkz]

The original doom (and I don't know how many of the others) were written on NeXT using objective C. That is still the native language on the iphone and it's possible that this engine is written in objective C and would naturally port to the iphone that way. Or perhaps Carmack saw this as an opportunity to do some objective C work if he hasn't in a long time.

Re:Objective C could be the reason for iPhone too

[TheRaven64]

The original doom (and I don't know how many of the others) were written on NeXT using objective C

A big [citation needed] there. Doom was written on NeXT, but not in Objective-C, in pure C. Neither NeXT nor StepStone were providing an Objective-C implementation for DOS back then (and StepStone's Objective-C wasn't compatible with Objective-C 3, which NeXT were using).

Re:Objective C could be the reason for iPhone too

[mr_da3m0n]

The original doom (and I don't know how many of the others) were written on NeXT using objective C

A big [citation needed] there. Doom was written on NeXT, but not in Objective-C, in pure C. Neither NeXT nor StepStone were providing an Objective-C implementation for DOS back then (and StepStone's Objective-C wasn't compatible with Objective-C 3, which NeXT were using).

Truth. The only one who was very vocal about Objective-C back then was John Romero, who was writing all the tools and editors, and he did so in ObjC on NeXT.

The games were written in C, and the tools in Objective-C. Everything was being developed, tested and debugged on NeXT, and then ported to DOS.

Re:Wow, man.

[AltairDusk]

You mean the Xbox 360 thermal design team is still employed?!

Re:Wow, man.

[Vectormatic]

well, at least they know about not doing a job so perfect that you wont be needed in the future.

Think about it, if the first design was flawless, MS could have fired them and just found new guys five years down the road for the next job..

Re:Making maps for ET on Linux: HOW??? PLS TELL ME

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably on Windows is easier to install, but I wouldn't be so sure that Gtkradiant works better on Windows. The problem with Gtkradiant is just that they have a lack of developers.

Please stop calling it the iPhone 4G

[arceum]

Seeing 4G after the word iPhone makes me cringe, am I alone? It confuses those less educated, like leaving the word Backlit out of LED Backlit Television. I just would have expected better from slashdot.

Black levels on TN panels

[PPalmgren]

I think another important factor was timing...doom 3 was released when LCDs were starting to become popular. Unfortunately, the only real option you had was TN panel LCDs which had awful blacks. I found the game quite enjoyable on my old CRT, even though the lighting wasn't realistic, but when I saw my friend playing it on his LCD it kept me from buying an LCD for three years.

Re:Wow, man.

[petermgreen]

Power dissipation has also been an issue at least for some consoles. I remember the PS2 being the first console I encoutered that needed fan cooling and the early models of PS3 and 360 take it to an insane level. Not sure about the original xbox (i've only used one briefly)

Rage on Wii

[HalAtWork]

So can they port Rage to Wii now? If it runs on the 3GS, it can't be that far off from working fine on the Wii.

Re:Rage on Wii

[Narishma]

No, because the Wii lacks features such as shaders that are used heavily in Rage.

Re:The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stu

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot some key parts of the megatexture process. All the art is basically made in the traditional way.Every instance of the same static object uses the same texture. When the megatexture is built each instance gets its own spot in the MT. Sounds wasteful, but necessary for the next step where the designers and/or artists may 'stamp' unique detail textures/decals/etc on the entire world, really making it unique. Basically gives your initial map building process free unlimited decals and art freedom. In most games, placing decals to prettify the level incurs runtime cost, because each decal involves additional rendering. With MT, it's free, at the expense of being static, Rage looks great on the iPhone due to the strength of MT. All the beauty is in the MT, and it's rendering very few actual polygons. Lighting and shadowing dynamic objects still relies on various runtime techniques, but without needing to apply them to the environment the rendering is kept much faster than most games, while looking great.

As Carmack mentioned in his keynote. The MT technology, isn't all that complex. The growing pains with the technology have taken the form of getting a usable pipeline. It sucks to have to wait minutes or hours to preview changes to the level. It was initially thought to be solveable by throwing more systems in the renderfarm with beefy video cards to process the megatexture, until hitting the power and cooling limit of the office building. More recently the pendulum has swung back the other way, off of GPU processing and back to CPU, which is much slower in a direct comparison but far more scalable, as most people are running many core dev machines, and also that is opens up the ability for the studio to leverage services such as Amazons cloud computing.

Re:The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stu

[cymbeline]

From what I've seen of their tool demonstration, textures can be "painted" on the megatexture, sort of like a brush. With multiple layers it can have a unique effect. It's like someone painting a picture. Also, the way their shader programs (probably, since it makes the most sense) work is through multiple layers. They would have one program handling the megatexture and another handling lighting (specular, bump, etc), plus a few others for HDR lighting and deferred shading. The word texture is not really a good word to use any more, since most people think of a simple color map when they think of textures. Modern game engine materials (and probably the megatexture) reference different maps, a diffuse or color map, a specular map, a normal map, and maybe other things like a parallax map or an emission map. From what I saw in id's technology demo a few years back, painting textures onto the megatexture would also store these other maps (and could be masked if desired, if, for example, the artist only wanted to keep the color information).

Good and Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the Doom 3 engine looked really good. For me though it just got outdone by the usability in the source engine. The Doom 3 engine looked to me like it could render a more visually stunning scene but there just seem to be so many more possibilities with the source engine that Doom 3's tech just kind of fell of the radar.

Re:Good and Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Source engine is just catch up to id tech 3, there's a "been there done that"... Source is not a good example of anything, it's just a frankenstein patchwork of Quake pretending it's next-gen with valve and all its fans denying its origins as if it were a engine coded from scratch by the god Gabe Newell.

You forgot the most important reason.

[harvalen]

D) We can't buy apps because we're not in one of the countries that have support for paid apps in google market.