What game holds graphical supremacy?

[MultiVaC]

It's funny, Psuedonym only seems to come around when Doom 3 is being discussed. Similar behavior to a certain obnoxious troll we all remember.

 

[Styloid]

It's funny, Psuedonym only seems to come around when Doom 3 is being discussed. Similar behavior to a certain obnoxious troll we all remember.

Heh.... unfortunately it seems to be a pretty common behaviour....

 

[Yakuza]

well I am about to play the FarCry Demo so I can tell you guys what I think.

 

[OCybrManO]

Revolutionary means "bringing about a major or fundamental change". What is so new about D³ is the unified lighting system. Every surface is treated the same, and casts shadows on every other surface. This is indeed a major and fundamental change in how RT games are rendered, and therefore the D³ engine is revolutionary gaming technology. There is nothing revolutionary about hl2 because its the same old technology with small additions and improvements. The technique hl2 uses for rendering "dynamic" shadows has been used for quite a while now, as has using a mixture of static lighting maps and projected shadow maps. In this age of gaming technology, with games such as DeusEx:IW, Doom³, and Thief3, the projected shadow maps used in hl2 is a very primitive technique for creating "dynamic" shadows, and I doubt we will see any more use of this technique in the future.

What Carmack is doing with the new D³ engine is creating a rendering system that acts more like it should. The D³ engine has hard edged shadows and what not, but this is just the first generation of this new technology. What is important is that the lighting acts like it should, and that we start moving away from static light maps. The technology will be added to just like gaming technology always has been, but it is vital to the progression of graphics that we lay down the groundwork now so that we can start improving upon it. That is why the D³ technology is revolutionary, because it throws out the old technology and sparks the age where graphics can reach a much higher level of integrity and consistancy than they ever would have if we remained on the path we are now, just adding small hacks to the same old static and inconsistant methods of lgihting we used in the past.

I wouldn't say any technology that old (from what I have seen, nothing in Doom3 is actually new) is "revolutionary" no matter how good it looks. iD's Unified Lighting Architecture is not revolutionary. It is a small step from the standard of sparsely used stencil shadows and bump/normal maps toward the general direction of realistic lighting (except that it doesn't look any more realistic... just a bit more dynamic). If someone were to say "I like buttered toast... but there's not enough butter" and put a whole stick of butter on one piece of toast it would not be a revolutionary idea (using more of something is not a revolutionary idea). If iD didn't do it someone else would have done it... like the open source engines that were doing something similar (though not making a full-fledged game out of it) before anyone knew it would be in Doom 3.

A revolutionary change in games would be something like:
* Totally unscripted AI that learns everything it knows, yet still makes for a compelling singleplayer experience
* Lighting that realistically simulates all aspects of light including caustics, wave characteristics, and light bounced off objects in turn lighting other objects (that's something I want to see in a game... because it really helps in 3D renders)
* A game that relies heavily on advanced fluid dynamics (not just simple bouyancy calculations like HL2)
... etc.

 

[vann7]

A revolutionary change in games would be something like:
* Lighting that realistically simulates all aspects of light including caustics, wave characteristics, and light bounced off objects in turn lighting other objects (that's something I want to see in a game... because it really helps in 3D renders)
* A game that relies heavily on advanced fluid dynamics (not just simple bouyancy calculations like HL2)
... etc.

ARe you ready ,to wait the time for games to do that? something like ~20 years!! because realisitc fluids and water with caustics in needs nothing less than Photonmapping in realtime . and water consists of billions of particles all interacting with each other with light.. mm.. how about 50 years?..

What you are asking is something at the level of the the latest CG effects in the latest Films like Star Wars:atack of the clones and Finding Nemo..and even Beyond since Movies usually composite many times CG graphics with digitall shots of real life.. hehe

from quake3 to Doom3 i see a complete revolution ,RT lighting and self shadows with accurate light reflections and Normals .

 

[-JeZ-]

Yakuza, I've been looking for the FarCry demo. Where'd you get it from?

 

[Caminante]

I wouldn't say any technology that old (from what I have seen, nothing in Doom3 is actually new) is "revolutionary" no matter how good it looks. iD's Unified Lighting Architecture is not revolutionary. It is a small step from the standard of sparsely used stencil shadows and bump/normal maps toward the general direction of realistic lighting (except that it doesn't look any more realistic... just a bit more dynamic). If someone were to say "I like buttered toast... but there's not enough butter" and put a whole stick of butter on one piece of toast it would not be a revolutionary idea (using more of something is not a revolutionary idea). If iD didn't do it someone else would have done it... like the open source engines that were doing something similar (though not making a full-fledged game out of it) before anyone knew it would be in Doom 3.

A revolutionary change in games would be something like:
* Totally unscripted AI that learns everything it knows, yet still makes for a compelling singleplayer experience
* Lighting that realistically simulates all aspects of light including caustics, wave characteristics, and light bounced off objects in turn lighting other objects (that's something I want to see in a game... because it really helps in 3D renders)
* A game that relies heavily on advanced fluid dynamics (not just simple bouyancy calculations like HL2)
... etc.

You know what is your problem; you just won't give credict where is due period. I've shown or rather posted screen after screen, so that you could draw a vissual comparation between both engine rendering and yet, you still won't admit it.

 

[The Dark Elf]

This is turning into another pissing contest guys. Put away your dicks or I lock the thread.

 

[PvtRyan]

ARe you ready ,to wait the time for games to do that? something like ~20 years!! because realisitc fluids and water with caustics in needs nothing less than Photonmapping in realtime . and water consists of billions of particles all interacting with each other with light.. mm.. how about 50 years?..

Photon mapping can be done realtime.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/photongfx/

The divx video is quite impressive, all rendered on a 5800 Ultra.

 

[Wolf]

I wish you guys would stop swapping the poll question out from 'graphical supremacy' to 'most advanced lighting renderer + cutting edge features like per-pixel collision, glass fracture, custom physics etc etc'.

You don't seem to understand that 'graphics' isn't just the how capable a certain part of the renderer is - it is what the game actually looks like which will *gasp* include animated art assets, environments and effects. If you want to start a new poll be my guest, I'll even vote D3 like everyone else should. You don't seem to comprehend how absurd it is when you quote technical specs to people when they say D3 doesn't look very compelling or they are amazed at the graphics of HL2 facial expressions...

 

[Pseudonym_]

Your right, it's the end result that matters to people. Not technical details.

Just look. No one here with any reason left in him could look at this and tell me it is not the most graphically advanced piece of software in gaming.......

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

WOW!


Not even i thought doom3 was THAT good. Blimy...


Yeah, its the winner gfx wise in my opinion! Well now it is...

 

[vann7]

Photon mapping can be done realtime.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/photongfx/

The divx video is quite impressive, all rendered on a 5800 Ultra.

yes.. thats impressive for a video card.have seen thet video before. but notice that what they have done is in a very small controlled enviroment. when you want Water in a scene to behave in a natural way ,the complexity of the scene increase by a magnitude so far beyond than a single raytraced sphere ball in a small room. Believe.. if i tell you that accurate water is extremely dificult to simulate .. even in non-realtime aplications with software that can do True Photonmapping. usually when is done in a movie is done always in the cheapiest way possible ,with more computers than the ones available at ATI and Nvidia together.

 

[Dougy]

after playing far cry demo on full settings im willing to say anybody who voted for that should be shot.

 

[vann7]

Your right, it's the end result that matters to people. Not technical details.

Just look. No one here with any reason left in him could look at this and tell me it is not the most graphically advanced piece of software in gaming.......

thanks for the Pic..

looks much better that the low quality scans released by magazines. the beauty of Doom3 engine ,is that it makes no diference between CHaracters/weapons and enviroments,when it comes to Lighting and Physicseverything is threated in the same way by the REnderer. means ,that every surface can look as detailed as any other thing , Ex..as the weapons and the marine guy. most of the art released in doom3 is just the minimun of what it posible in D3. Mod makers and level editors challenge will be the temptation to not use as much graphics as they will like ,since the performance of today computer is still many ways behind of the technology in the game.

 

[OCybrManO]

How was I not giving credit where it is due? I keep saying that I think Doom 3 looks great (even better than HL2 in many aspects)... but the technology itself is not revolutionary, or even new (I didn't say HL2 was, either). That's the credit it deserves. If I hadn't seen nearly a dozen engines made by college students that do the same thing and known how to do it myself I might have been more impressed.

A video game engine doesn't have to do everything the exact same way it is done in real life to get similar results. If it did, there wouldn't be any video games since computers aren't fast enough to simulate any cool aspects of nature (exactly) in real time. I saw a great real-time water physics demonstration a while back (combined with shaders it would look even better)... and as someone else said there is also real-time photon mapping. Computers don't quite have the computational power to handle both of those and a game at the same time... but 50 years? Imagine where we were 50 years ago... 50 years seems like a lot more now, eh? I said 5 years because with the advent of PCI Express you could have (in addition to the video card) a card that is dedicated entirely to physics calculations (the CS301 shows what kind of math processing power you could get out of a regular PCI card... enough to get a desktop PC on the "500 Most Powerful Supercomputers" list) and either a card dedicated to photon mapping calculations or a video card that has hardware support for it. Dedicated hardware support is faster and requires less power than something done entirely in software on programmable hardware. We probably won't be there in 5 years (because of the lack of people working on hardware like that)... but it is possible.

 

[CrazyHarij]

Maybe it's because of my fanboyizm but I think the pseudo-realistic over-bumpmapped graphics aren't that good. Better having it lightened up and crisp&clean as HL2. But that screenie Pseudonym posted indeed looks good.. But you can clearly see the low amoun of polygons they've used, especially on the dudes left (our right) arm , looks kinda weird.

But I guess time will tell, in the end it's the gameplay that matters.

 

[Kadayi]

I think D³ is without a doubt the most advanced engine from the viewpoint of this poll. However given ID's track record for bland SP gameplay, I'm more interested to see what other developers do with the technology if at all.

All this lighting talk does mean shit if the engine simply doesn't support/provide other developers with a versatile enough platform upon which to build their games. If I'm a developer when I'm about to fork out a $million+ for an engine I'm going to be looking for the engine that offers me the greatest scope and potential for securing an audience as well as driving my product. I look at D³ and to my mind it just looks like it is going to be prohibitive on both fronts.

 

[Pseudonym_]

OCybrManO, the problem with what your saying is revolutionary doesn't have to mean drastically new. The examples your giving as revolutionary aren't even possible with current hardware. Sure it will work ok on a sphere or something, but putting it in a game is another matter.

Doom³ is changing the way games are rendered by throwing out the old, primitive method of static light maps with a more realistic lighting model. What this does is fundamentally change how rendering is done in a RT game, and that is exactly the definition of revolutionary. Fundamentally changing how something is done = revolutionary.

However given ID's track record for bland SP gameplay

id has always been about simple, fast, fun gameplay. But with Doom³ they are taking a new approach. For the first time they are making a SP game that is story driven and is meant to induce emotions(mostly fear). You make it sound as if they have been trying to do this all along but have failed, therefore we should not be optimistic about Doom³. Thats just not true. They have never tried to make this kind of game before, because they were always focusing on a more simplistic gameplay that you could just jump right into and have a blast.

id is the most talented group of developers around. They have been in the game ever since they invented it, and every game they have made has been a hit, and every generation of technology they have introduced has been top of the line for it's time.

All this lighting talk does mean shit if the engine simply doesn't support/provide other developers with a versatile enough platform upon which to build their games. If I'm a developer when I'm about to fork out a $million+ for an engine I'm going to be looking for the engine that offers me the greatest scope and potential for securing an audience as well as driving my product. I look at D³ and to my mind it just looks like it is going to be prohibitive on both fronts.

No game company makes 3d engines that are used in FPS as much as id's engines. Doom³ is no different. It's a very flexible engine, and developers are jumping all over it. So far there are 3 developers that we know of(which means there is prolly a few we don't) who are working with the engine as we speak, and it is rumored that AvP3 developers intend of using the D³ engine. When the Doom³ engine hits the market, developers will jump all over it just like they have with id's other engines. Source has what, 1 liscensee? And bloodlines is ugly as shit. Dont tell me developers will favor Source over D³ engine when there is nothing that Source can do better, which there isn't really. The only thing Source has the upper hand on is lip-sync, which is minor.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Lip synch and online play....


Which isnt small at all. Sorry, but I had to point that out.

Also, I reckon its very likely that its easier to work with.

 

[Pseudonym_]

Lip synch and online play....

Online play how? I hope your not gonna answer "it's only 4 players", because thats not true. The engine is not limited to 4 players, and id had their reasons for making it 4 players.

And lip-sync IS minor, because in hl2 it looks silly. the mouth just flaps about. it doesn't look nearly as good as the macworld facial animations for D³.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Yes Lip synch is minor. (and it doesn't look sily in hl2....) I meant online play isnt.


And I know DOOM3 can handle more than 4 players. But HL2 is very likely to have beter netcode and support for other networking... stuff...


I can't really be arsed to argue today so bah. You win.

Edit: Doesn't mean i wont b bk tomorrow......

 

[Pseudonym_]

Now your just making random claims with no basis. There is no reason to believe that hl2 will have better netcode and all the rest. id is not new to writing netcode.

and it doesn't look sily in hl2....)

I better rephrase that.

What valve has done with real-time lip-synching is great, and it does look good in-game. But then again, the motion of the mouth is very rigid and not as fluid as you would expect, and it's not perfect and frequently the lips don't keep up with the words. It's great cosidering it's real time, but it does not look better than what a professional game animator can do by hand animating it the way they do in D³. Check out the macworld video and you will see that the mouth movements are much more realistic. They are hand animated as apposed to real-time, but professional developers aren't shy about animating it themselves anyway. The lip-synching is great for the mod community though.

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Yeah yeah your right.



But erm, you have no clue either really do you.
You make claims on things you don't really know about as well. Such as bloodlines being the only game lisenced to source. You say that the source can't do anything beter. Yet how do you know?
Source could easily outdo DOOM3s engine in terms of netcode. I have read that the whole engine is geared towards online play. That has to count for something.....



Also, how big are DOOM3s single player maps (Bare with me here)
I bet they are small in comparison to HL2s, right?
Because if they are whats to say that HL2s source couldn't achieve the same level of detail on the smaller sized enviroments?




Anyway, I said I wouldn't argue with you. But meh, gets me irritated....

 

[Pseudonym_]

You make claims on things you don't really know about as well. Such as bloodlines being the only game lisenced to source.

I suppose there very well could be one or two more we don't know about, but thats just speculation.

You say that the source can't do anything beter. Yet how do you know?

Going by the technical specs, since it's all we have ATM.

Source could easily outdo DOOM3s engine in terms of netcode. I have read that the whole engine is geared towards online play. That has to count for something.....

Yes, it easily could, or D³ could easily outdo hl2. All I was saying is that there is no reason to believe that hl2's netcode is even decent, let alone superior to any other game. We just don't know. You said hl2 is likely to have better netcode, and there is no reason to believe this is true considering what we know ATM.

I bet they are small in comparison to HL2s, right?

Nope. People get confused between engine limitations and design decisions.

D³ is capable of large sprawling terrain(as has been stated by journalists who saw it demonstrated when willits popped a buggy out and drove it around the martian terrain). D³ is features small corrdiors as a design decision, in order to induce certaint feelings of claustrophobie/helpelssness/the feeling that something can jump out at any moment/vulnerability in the player. It's not a engine limitation.

Because if they are whats to say that HL2s source couldn't achieve the same level of detail on the smaller sized enviroments?

As far as strict polygonal detail, im sure it could. But what makes D³ amazingly detailed is the normal maps on every surface, and hl2 wont have that. It could theoretically, but it wont as we have seen.

:naughty:

 

[PvtRyan]

Pseudonym_ nobody is arguing that Doom 3 is the technically more advanced engine nobody. But choosing an engine doesn't only depend on what cool stuff it can do, but if that stuff fits your game. And if I were to make a game like bloodlines, I would go with Source. For a number of reasons:

- Outdoor city enviroments, while Doom 3 excels in indoor enviroments the outdoor is, from what we've seen, plain ugly compared to the rest. Reminds me of UT or Quake 3 but with bumpmapping . It has NO atmosphere, none. Because the Doom 3 lighting engine isn't suitable for this kind of stuff, lightmaps have a rare advantage here.

- Characters, Bloodlines is a mix between RPG and FPS, and NPC interaction has high priority. I must admit Troika still hasn't done a very good job on modeling, but the animation and lip sync is outstanding.

- Atmospheric indoor enviroments using the radiosity calculations of the lightmap rendering. A church in Doom 3 would be dark with hard shadows where the light comes in through the colored windows. Maybe some candle light to light things up, but it wouldn't look as good (though it's technically more advanced) as a church rendered with lightmaps with radiosity lighting on them and coloured shadows on the floor where the light comes in through the led in glass windows.

So you see, plenty of reasons to take an inferior, in technical aspect, engine.

And I too think Doom 3 isn't a revolution, no current engine is a revolution, there are more engines out there who dumped lightmaps or atleast partially, totally dumping them is evolution. And I do agree we need to dump lightmaps, but current hardware can't replace all the tasks of lightmaps with fully dynamic lighting like in Doom 3.
A revolution would be to do models in NURMS, use displacement mapping, use photon mapping, don't use shaders to do stuff like refracting, let the engine do on the fly breaking objects in a realistic way etc etc.
And this will come, but in small steps, because that's how engine developement goes, in small steps, every new engine is an evolution, never a revolution (that is since the creation of 3D engines)

And id has indeed the most talented people out there, but it's the same id that had absolutely no confidence in Valve when they knocked on id's door because they looked for an engine they would build there first game on; Half-Life
And we all know how that turned out :cheese:

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Nice post PvtRyan but you put nurms instead of nurbs



And yeah Pseudonym_ i agree, the point is that this is all really speculation in a way. Oh and I know its the more advanced engine. No denying that really....


Meh, I am gona go now, I feel ill and i am tired. I need a shower an all.....

 

[PvtRyan]

Nice post PvtRyan but you put nurms instead of nurbs



And yeah Pseudonym_ i agree, the point is that this is all really speculation in a way. Oh and I know its the more advanced engine. No denying that really....


Meh, I am gona go now, I feel ill and i am tired. I need a shower an all.....

NURMS is a modeling way
It's on the fly subdeviding, smoothening out a model when needed.
NURBS will be converted to triangles in the game anyway, so that would make no difference

 

[Pseudonym_]

Good post for the most part, PvtRyan, except I don't see whats so awesome about city environments like this. IMO D³ engine could do it better. Same with this church. Doesn't look impressive to me, could easily pass for a game that has been out for a few years.

I have mixed feelings with the characters. Some of them look decent, like the bartender, others look rediculous, like this pos.


Anyway, D³ is a very capable engine. The martian city shown in the e3 vid a few years ago looked dope(plus it was huge). There is no doubt in my mind that Bloodlines would look just as good if not better on the D³ engine, even though it does have it's weaknesses.

EDIT:

BTW, I'm sure the D³ engine could do the stained glass window effect nicely. Just look at the stained glass windows in the thief3 vids, which uses a similar unified lighting model to D³. The thing is, id just hasn't shown us the stained glass windows on the martian base

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

NURMS is a modeling way
It's on the fly subdeviding, smoothening out a model when needed.
NURBS will be converted to triangles in the game anyway, so that would make no difference

Damn.... Well ok then. I look stupid. :monkee: = me


And btw, I am not all that impressed with bloodlines myself to be honest. I don't know why exactly. It does not seem very, well, refined i guess is the word.
Plus I aint a fan of vampire games......

 

[OCybrManO]

It is harder to make a non-unified lighting system that uses a lot of hacks to cut corners as much as possible without affecting the visual quality than it is to go the easy way and make everything act the same whether or not it needs to be the same (come on... give Valve a break on the graphics... it's only their second game and their first new engine). The reason people make the extra effort to cut corners is to put that excess processing power to better use. Why do developers make engines that require you to compile your map ahead of time? Precalculating static lighting, removing things that will never be seen, and other optimizations help the game run faster. Any professional game programmer (or team) worth his salary could have made an engine with the same features as Doom 3. The engine is like a brute force approach to graphics. It may look good in the screenshots/videos but it sure is a CPU/GPU hog if you want it to look like the screenshots even at lower resolutions on anything but a top-of-the line computer (and still get a playable framerate). I've heard that the low-end people have to turn off the fancy shadows and possibly the normal mapping to make it playable. That's the entire game! I hope that's not what they are using to call it scalable. I don't know... we'll see when we get our hands on the full version.

What's the revolutionary part? Doing something that most other people have been avoiding because they don't need it is not a fundnamental change in the way games will be made. It's called "using what you need to do the job right". It's just another evolutionary step (albeit, a very pretty one) in video game graphics. If we were to jump from entirely static lighting to Doom3 lighting I would call that a revolutionary step... but we went from "moving things have dynamic shadows" to "all things have dynamic shadows". The engine brings nothing to the table that hasn't been done before (fully dynamic shadows, skipping the compiler, normal maps, etc)... except maybe tight code (John Carmack is very efficient) and having all of those features in one game that actually uses them effectively. It's not quite revolutionary, but it is very impressive.

Anyway, it's the artists that make the game look great... not the features. It doesn't matter how "advanced" the engine is if the talent behind the art is... well, talentless. If you don't have modelers that are great with high-poly modeling and normal mapping your Doom3 mod will look like shit. Most of Doom 3's appeal comes from the normal mapping. If you take that away it's just average. If you can't use that feature you should go to another engine (unless you need dynamic lighting at all costs).

Why do you assume Doom 3 has great netcode and HL2's is crap? iD's latest games had shitty netcode compared to Half-Life. iD is not known for their netcode.

EDIT: Yeah, I don't think Bloodlines looks all that impessive, either. Vampire games should be done on an engine with proper lighting for dark environments... like... oh what's that game... you know... the one with all the dynamic lighting.

 

[PvtRyan]

Bloodlines was just an example really, because you brought it up
My point was, that if I were to make a game like Bloodlines, I'd choose Source, that doesn't mean I feel that Troika used Source to its fullest potential.
I'm not blown away by Bloodlines, it looks good but it's not up to the level of HL2.

And I do think that Doom 3 has a very capable engine, but it's also a specialized engine, out side of that specialism, the game colapses under it's own technical gizmos. In other words, it's still very limited by PC capabilities. Once those are not a problem anymore, it could implement things like realtime radiosity and photon mapping, and then lightmaps would be useless. But until then, lightmaps do have their advantages.

 

[harrys]

It is harder to make a non-unified lighting system that uses a lot of hacks to cut corners as much as possible without affecting the visual quality than it is to go the easy way and make everything act the same whether or not it needs to be the same (come on... give Valve a break on the graphics... it's only their second game and their first new engine). The reason people make the extra effort to cut corners is to put that excess processing power to better use. Why do developers make engines that require you to compile your map ahead of time? Precalculating static lighting, removing things that will never be seen, and other optimizations help the game run faster. Any professional game programmer (or team) worth his salary could have made an engine with the same features as Doom 3. The engine is like a brute force approach to graphics. It may look good in the screenshots/videos but it sure is a CPU/GPU hog if you want it to look like the screenshots even at lower resolutions on anything but a top-of-the line computer (and still get a playable framerate). I've heard that the low-end people have to turn off the fancy shadows and possibly the normal mapping to make it playable. That's the entire game! I hope that's not what they are using to call it scalable. I don't know... we'll see when we get our hands on the full version.

What's the revolutionary part? Doing something that most other people have been avoiding because they don't need it is not a fundnamental change in the way games will be made. It's called "using what you need to do the job right". It's just another evolutionary step (albeit, a very pretty one) in video game graphics. If we were to jump from entirely static lighting to Doom3 lighting I would call that a revolutionary step... but we went from "moving things have dynamic shadows" to "all things have dynamic shadows". The engine brings nothing to the table that hasn't been done before (fully dynamic shadows, skipping the compiler, normal maps, etc)... except maybe tight code (John Carmack is very efficient) and having all of those features in one game that actually uses them effectively. It's not quite revolutionary, but it is very impressive.

Anyway, it's the artists that make the game look great... not the features. It doesn't matter how "advanced" the engine is if the talent behind the art is... well, talentless. If you don't have modelers that are great with high-poly modeling and normal mapping your Doom3 mod will look like shit. Most of Doom 3's appeal comes from the normal mapping. If you take that away it's just average. If you can't use that feature you should go to another engine (unless you need dynamic lighting at all costs).

Why do you assume Doom 3 has great netcode and HL2's is crap? iD's latest games had shitty netcode compared to Half-Life. iD is not known for their netcode.

EDIT: Yeah, I don't think Bloodlines looks all that impessive, either. Vampire games should be done on an engine with proper lighting for dark environments... like... oh what's that game... you know... the one with all the dynamic lighting.

IF you don't see the difference you obviously don't know shit about 3d game engines. DOOM3 engine is revolutionary because it uses realtime unifiied lighting meaning you don't have to pre-compile lights. Show me a game which does unified lighting. Dynamic lighting and shadows are totally are done in previous games(even quake 2 had it) but they are not done in truely dynamic way.
And also do some research before makiing dubious claims, most of Quake based games have very good netcode.

 

[PvtRyan]

IF you don't see the difference you obviously don't know shit about 3d game engines. DOOM3 engine is revolutionary because it uses realtime unifiied lighting meaning you don't have to pre-compile lights. Show me a game which does unified lighting. Dynamic lighting and shadows are totally are done in previous games(even quake 2 had it) but they are not done in truely dynamic way.
And also do some research before makiing dubious claims, most of Quake based games have very good netcode.

I've seen many examples of graphics students who made Doom 3 like engines, even some that seem to surpass it if given enough time.

And games like Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 approach Doom 3 pretty nicely (not anywhere near the same gfx though) but Doom 3 is just that and more of the same. No revolution, a revolution would be if you totally changed the way games are rendered, which it doesn't.

 

[harrys]

I've seen many examples of graphics students who made Doom 3 like engines, even some that seem to surpass it if given enough time.

And games like Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 approach Doom 3 pretty nicely (not anywhere near the same gfx though) but Doom 3 is just that and more of the same. No revolution, a revolution would be if you totally changed the way games are rendered, which it doesn't.

Revolution something when there is a fundamental change in process. Reason why I said revolutionary because most of the features in D3 engine are fundamentally different than game engines

 

[Kadayi]

id has always been about simple, fast, fun gameplay. But with Doom³ they are taking a new approach. For the first time they are making a SP game that is story driven and is meant to induce emotions(mostly fear). You make it sound as if they have been trying to do this all along but have failed, therefore we should not be optimistic about Doom³. Thats just not true. They have never tried to make this kind of game before, because they were always focusing on a more simplistic gameplay that you could just jump right into and have a blast.

D³ has the same postage stamp sized 'plot' as D¹, D²,Q¹ and Q². There are rooms, there are monsters (without rhyme or reason) you shoot them, or they eat you. Please don't try and convince us there are diamonds where there is only dust. ID make very good FPS engines, but that is all they make, FPS engines.

 

[Styloid]

I wouldn't say that Doom3 is revolutionary because calculating lighting in real-time has been done before and *could* have been done in a professional game by any other company with a big enough reputation and selling power to sell something that will barely run on most casual gamers' (crappy) computers and also takes away popular elements in games (like large environments, large amount of enemies, large multiplayer, etc). I've brought up the example before but Chaser's CloakNT engine could do real-time lighting but had to opt out of it because of the high systme requirements. It's good that someone has the guts to do it but it's not like they're somehow 'enlightened' and have somehow brought this brand new technology to earth...

 

[Zoorado]

I wouldn't say that Doom3 is revolutionary because calculating lighting in real-time has been done before and *could* have been done in a professional game by any other company with a big enough reputation and selling power to sell something that will barely run on most casual gamers' (crappy) computers and also takes away popular elements in games (like large environments, large amount of enemies, large multiplayer, etc). I've brought up the example before but Chaser's CloakNT engine could do real-time lighting but had to opt out of it because of the high systme requirements. It's good that someone has the guts to do it but it's not like they're somehow 'enlightened' and have somehow brought this brand new technology to earth...

DOOM 3 is revolutionary not only because of its lighting. Sure, it has the first completely unified and dynamic real-time lighting engine in a game, but that's not all. It's the unprecedentedly tight integration of this lighting engine with equally versatile and capable proprietary physics and sound engines that make the technology behind DOOM 3 'revolutionary'. Every physical entity visible stresses the lighting/graphics engine as much as it does to the other two aspects of the renderer. This results in an unequivocally generalised renderer, from lighting to particles to physics to sound: a true quantum leap above any other game on the horizon.

D³ has the same postage stamp sized 'plot' as D¹, D²,Q¹ and Q². There are rooms, there are monsters (without rhyme or reason) you shoot them, or they eat you. Please don't try and convince us there are diamonds where there is only dust. ID make very good FPS engines, but that is all they make, FPS engines.

You are obviously prejudiced against id. Tell us only after you've played DOOM 3.

 

[Wolf]

D³ has the same postage stamp sized 'plot' as D¹, D²,Q¹ and Q². There are rooms, there are monsters (without rhyme or reason) you shoot them, or they eat you. Please don't try and convince us there are diamonds where there is only dust. ID make very good FPS engines, but that is all they make, FPS engines.

I agree though I think we should give D3 a chance free of preconception when it comes out.

But yes, ultimately I think saying id are the most talented game devs without qualification is absurd. Clearly Carmack is an amazing coder and they have probably one of the best animators in business as well as generally occupying a special place in the game industry, but seriously any evaluation of 'the best' should go on past history and include having innovative and interesting design brains which id have never had IMO. id isn't even close to the design prowess of game houses like Troika, Irrational Games, ISA (pre-IW), Illusion Softworks, Piranha Bytes, Blizzard, Monolith, Relic, Rockstar etc etc... Now you might say, id has never attempted those kind of games - but come on, if id is content to churn out derivative shallow SP games (Q2, RtCW) then their reputation will suffer in non-tech areas.... Nostalgia can only go so far...

 

[Kadayi]

You are obviously prejudiced against id. Tell us only after you've played DOOM 3.

LOL you honestly think I'm going to bother buying another tech demo from ID? Hell I was fool enough to buy Doom off them, and naive enough to think Quake might be an improvement. :dozey: