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

Posted by Soulskill on from the iphone-is-all-the-rage dept.

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!"

55 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by F34nor · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by Tamran · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Comment of the year
    3. Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by aiht · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    4. Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by cgenman · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    5. Re:Poll; what was the best game created on Doom 3? by Hamsterdan · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can get the entire first level maps there

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

      --
      I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  2. Doom3 to dark? by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:Doom3 to dark? by F34nor · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    2. Re:Doom3 to dark? by DigiShaman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Doom3 to dark? by stevenvi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oreo cookies?

    4. Re:Doom3 to dark? by childprey · · Score: 5, Informative

      duct tape?

      --
      Everything clever I considered putting here I got from other slashdot sigs.
    5. Re:Doom3 to dark? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Comment of the year
    6. Re:Doom3 to dark? by gman003 · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

    7. Re:Doom3 to dark? by creat3d · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sex.

      --
      Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
    8. Re:Doom3 to dark? by mestar · · Score: 2, Funny

      Windows update?

  3. Commander Keen by phrostie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want my Commander Keen!

    1. Re:Commander Keen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:Commander Keen by oljanx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:Commander Keen by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. No it was just too dark by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No it was just too dark by internettoughguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:No it was just too dark by bertok · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:No it was just too dark by binarybum · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      ôó
    4. Re:No it was just too dark by internettoughguy · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:No it was just too dark by cgenman · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      Good modern lighting is frequently indirect.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    6. Re:No it was just too dark by bertok · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:No it was just too dark by FreonTrip · · Score: 2, Informative

      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...

    8. Re:No it was just too dark by jackbird · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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).

  5. Re:Wow, man. by Tamran · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  6. Re:Slashdot regular? by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 5, Informative

    101025

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  7. Freeware Wolf ET's engine goes GPL by mikedep333 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  8. That's because there wasn't by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:That's because there wasn't by MaxBooger · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

    2. Re:That's because there wasn't by Quarters · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

    3. Re:That's because there wasn't by bonch · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    4. Re:That's because there wasn't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:That's because there wasn't by dan828 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  9. and why no guns with a flash light on them or duck by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  10. Source release. . . by JSBiff · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  11. Re:and why no guns with a flash light on them or d by jgagnon · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --
    Remember to maintain your supply of /facepalm oil to prevent chafing.
  12. iPhone? by Necron69 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:iPhone? by rotide · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:iPhone? by Purity+Of+Essence · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

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      +0 Meh
    3. Re:iPhone? by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...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.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    4. Re:iPhone? by gig · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > ..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.

    5. Re:iPhone? by Kuad · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "iOS apps are desktop class apps."

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

    6. Re:iPhone? by whoop · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

  13. Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by cgenman · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
    1. Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by naz404 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      http://www.object404.com
    2. Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 3, Funny

      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?

    3. Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by Vectormatic · · Score: 2, Informative

      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

      --
      People, what a bunch of bastards
    4. Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by ultranova · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    5. Re:Slightly OT: Modern fun, fast FPS like Doom 1 & by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  14. The idea is to wrap a really big texture on stuff by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  15. Re:Slashdot regular? by pez · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.