new engine from id

[Skacer]

Originally posted by: CP5670
Far Cry's indoor sections were a mixed bag, but some areas were easily superior to anything in D3. It had a rudimentary form of parallax mapping from what I remember, similar to what was seen later in SCCT, and the HDR (after the HDR parameters were properly adjusted) made a lot of indoor sections look excellent.

I'd love to see a screenshot of an area you think is "far superior" to Doom3's engine. I can think of examples such as the draw bridge in Doom3 and the teleportation cube in Prey that were both done with the Doom3 engine. There is also a room in prey that forms as you walk into it, or was it tears apart, not sure which. But I'll pretend there is something equally as impressive as that or the organic flesh effects of Quake 4 and Doom 3 or the fog effects in Quake 4 in FarCry. There is a wall in Doom 3, within hell, that tears apart brick by brick. Or the scene where the bull demon busts through a metal door by continually denting it inwards.

And I really never had any skipping issues with Doom 3. Unfortunately, I can't google that issue at all from where I'm at, but I'm guessing you are blowing it out of proportion.

 

[CP5670]

The area at the very beginning is one example. I don't have FC installed right now, but a search for "far cry hdr" on google images brings up some decent examples. Also, the parallax mapping effects can't really be seen in screenshots. You have to move around to notice it.

As for the frameskipping, apparently a lot of people don't notice it until it's pointed out to them and they compare it with the slomo fix, but it then becomes obvious. Also, I'm not sure what the situation is at 60hz, which is what most LCDs use. It's definitely there at anything higher though. There was a large thread about it on nvnews some years ago. I'll have to see if I can find it again.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: CP5670
No, they are well-documented issues that occur on any system. I have gotten them on several different setups regardless of the graphical settings used. I know more about D3's problem, which has to do with the physics engine getting desynchronized with the framerate at any refresh rates over 60hz. It causes a persistent frameskipping effect that can't be fully corrected without either dropping the refresh rate to 60hz or setting a command line option so that the game speed depends on the framerate.

You do realize that the game was built to use a 60 hz max refresh for gameplay? Rates above 60 hz were only made available for benchmarking purposes.

You're complaining because you had problems "overclocking" the engine. That's not a valid criticism.

 

[CP5670]

If that is indeed the case (which I doubt), it's ridiculous to have an engine that only works properly with a 60hz monitor refresh rate. 60hz looks like crap on CRTs and even on LCDs, 75hz is often preferable with vsync enabled to increase the minimum framerates.

 

[DaveSimmons]

You're right, the engine is normally locked to 60 frames per second and to use vysnc for frame updates.

When you mentioned rates above 60hz I was thinking you'd customized settings to disable the frame rate cap and disabled sync.

Also, it's been years but I vaguely recall there being some OpenGL issue (not Doom-specific) under XP with refresh rates other than 60 Hz, does anyone recall the details?

 

[CP5670]

Ah, I see what you meant. This occurs with the 60fps framecap in place though. Actually, the only way to get rid of the problem is to remove that framecap (it can be done with some combination of the com_fixedtic and com_precisetic console commands), but that also has the side effect of making the game speed vary as I mentioned.

As for the XP thing, I think that's a separate issue. OpenGL games default to 60hz regardless of the refresh rates available in the monitor driver, unless a different rate is specified by the game itself. Most of the major OGL games have some way to set it though (IIRC it's a command line called r_displayrefresh in the Doom/Quake engines), and you can also get around it with refresh rate forcing programs or a custom monitor driver.

 

[BFG10K]

The thing I always like about Doom 3 is how it's able to produce really dark and sharp shadows and then literally pierce them with lighting efects. Also I loved the way it rendered metallic surfaces that didn't look plastic like other games.

As for textures and polygon counts, yes they were a little lower than some other games but that was to keep performance up in order to generate a unified lighting system in realtime. Despite this the monsters are still far more detailed than most other games even today. The average monster in Doom 3 looks far more detailed than the average monster in most other games.

Edit: I'm actually not sure how Farcry's vegetation was done, but I know it won't be true 3d until the new Crytek engine which will have real vegetation that the player model interacts with.

By default Far Cry had a LOD system for the vegetation - it was true 3D to a certain distance after which it would render 2D textures. However the SM 3.0 path added the ability to render all vegetation in 3D regardless of distance and accelerate it with geometry instancing.

Far Cry is another game that still looks amazing today, especially the outdoor areas.

 

[xtknight]

Doom 3 struck a good balance when it came to realism (though HL2 and Far Cry did this even better, IMO). Lighting really makes a huge difference in how realistic something looks, a lot more than poly count in my eyes. id's engines have always performed very well and they have all been rock solid compared to some other buggy excuses for engines.

Running at a refresh rate of over 60 Hz is not overclocking anything. Doom 3's internal tic (physics) rate is 60 Hz, it is not a strict video card-level output rate limit.

I thought they locked Doom 3 to 60 Hz just to make it fair for everyone. Quake 3 and other OpenGL games have worked with 120 Hz on XP for years. Even Quake 2 ran at 120 Hz fine after you adjusted the refresh rate variable (maybe custom engine or proxy prog needed).

HL2 made major inroads when it came to rendering complex outside environments with insane speed. (BF2 isn't too bad, either.) That is quite a weakness of some of id's engines, particularly Quake 2 and Quake 3 (the far clip plane was just too big, maybe, or it was simply not ready for rendering outside environments so there was no fading at long distances?) Quake 4 seems to have fixed this a bit. With ET: Quake Wars they had better have an engine that is good at rendering outside stuff. Wolfenstein: ET wasn't exactly a lightning bolt with outside environments. It felt just like a hacked up Q3 engine (which is what it was). Great game though, but I digress.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Originally posted by: apoppin

just like they saw when we first showed Doom 3, that John Carmack still has a lot of magic left."

where?


After the Doom3 letdown ... i am not going to be first in line to buy 'his' game on whatever engine ... his engines are seriously cool, however
--and i think he just wants to get in on the 'DX10 money'

edited

Wasn't "he" one of the people that laughed at DX10 and said it's nothing mroe than a way to force consumers to buy Vista.

 

[0roo0roo]

meh, his heart is no longer in gaming, space boy he is. probably result in more uninspired games from id no matter the engine.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Doom 3 is *STILL* one of the best engines out there.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game, i dont understand why anyone expected doom to be anything other than doom.

I'll stand for a lot of things, but I won't have that abomination of a game be called Doom. I was a Doom nut back in the day and to say that Doom 3 was *any* kind of a successor to Doom 1 and Doom 2 is a slap in the face to those games.

Actually, if you think about it, they are very similar, but for obvious reasons with VERY different technologies used.
They simply couldn't do much of what they did in Doom III in the original games, but many of the same tricks and such are used.
"Step over this line, monster teleports in behind you", "Monster behind door jumping you", simplistic yet moody(subjective of course) game play, and so on, the basics of the games are very similar.

Of course, the originals were more fast paced, but really, what else could you do back in those days?
It's not like you could have a whole lot of dynamic stuff in the game, shadows, etc etc.

I think one of the id guys mentioned this, saying something along the lines of "Doom III is what we wanted to make the original Doom, but couldn't with the technology at the time".

 

[BladeVenom]

For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

Well Source is Crap and a LOT of games use it

what is your point?

 

[Fenixgoon]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

Well Source is Crap and a LOT of games use it

what is your point?

i like source's scalability and versatility. the fact that HL2 is used as a benchmark for an 8800, but can be played on SLI'd voodoos is a testament to its hardware scalability. i think source hit the middle of the road in versatility - it can do good indoor and outdoor environments, while FC did outdoor amazingly, and D3 did indoor. i still like the way Hl2 renders tiled walls (whatever the prison level is) the best.

I like the D3 engine, but I really think it took Q4 to showcase how good the engine really is, and ETQW will take that to the next level with megatexturing.

carmack doesn't always make the "best" engines, but he is typically one who solves the technical problems proving to be a barrier for the industry.

 

[apoppin]

i like source's scalability and versatility.

which is it's only good point ... maybe that's why it is so popular ... it looks "good" on low-end rigs
--when you sacrifice lighting and shadows ... you are bound to get some 'peformance' as trade-off ... Source is the least capable of the "modern" engines

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: CP5670
No, they are well-documented issues that occur on any system. I have gotten them on several different setups regardless of the graphical settings used. I know more about D3's problem, which has to do with the physics engine getting desynchronized with the framerate at any refresh rates over 60hz. It causes a persistent frameskipping effect that can't be fully corrected without either dropping the refresh rate to 60hz or setting a command line option so that the game speed depends on the framerate. I actually played through D3 and Q4 with the latter settings, so it effectively went into slo-mo during fights, where the framerate dropped.

Far Cry's indoor sections were a mixed bag, but some areas were easily superior to anything in D3. It had a rudimentary form of parallax mapping from what I remember, similar to what was seen later in SCCT, and the HDR (after the HDR parameters were properly adjusted) made a lot of indoor sections look excellent.

Uh. Bullsh1t.

It ran perfect on my machine at the time at 1600x1200 so don't give me some "issues that occur on any system". It sounds like you either 1) Tinkered with console commands and screwed up or 2) have a crappy rig or 3) Are confusing the half life 2 cache stuttering problem.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Skacer

Originally posted by: CP5670
Far Cry's indoor sections were a mixed bag, but some areas were easily superior to anything in D3. It had a rudimentary form of parallax mapping from what I remember, similar to what was seen later in SCCT, and the HDR (after the HDR parameters were properly adjusted) made a lot of indoor sections look excellent.

I'd love to see a screenshot of an area you think is "far superior" to Doom3's engine. I can think of examples such as the draw bridge in Doom3 and the teleportation cube in Prey that were both done with the Doom3 engine. There is also a room in prey that forms as you walk into it, or was it tears apart, not sure which. But I'll pretend there is something equally as impressive as that or the organic flesh effects of Quake 4 and Doom 3 or the fog effects in Quake 4 in FarCry. There is a wall in Doom 3, within hell, that tears apart brick by brick. Or the scene where the bull demon busts through a metal door by continually denting it inwards.

And I really never had any skipping issues with Doom 3. Unfortunately, I can't google that issue at all from where I'm at, but I'm guessing you are blowing it out of proportion.

You can't do that with other engines because the lighting has to be precalculated at map build time. In the D3 engine the lighting is done 100% on the fly so you can alter the environment drastically and it will still render as if it were done on a rendering farm.

In Quake 1, 2, 3 ID had a dedicated map rendering box the size of a fridge sitting in the back room to compile maps. Doom 3 does it in realtime on a 2ghz CPU and a Radeon 9700.

I'll agree with the other guy tho..you might find equally impressive *screenshots* in other games but you won't find equally impressive videos. Go take a video of someone playing through the levels in hell. Now find something that looks better in another game.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

Well Source is Crap and a LOT of games use it

what is your point?

Seriously. What does business, licensing fees and whatnot have to do with how good an engine is?

Oh wait, I know! Everyone is licensing source because they like games that don't do dynamic shadows right! :roll:

Bring a better argument to the discussion, Blade.

 

[apoppin]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40199

Carmack's love of the cross-platform OpenGL language is legendary (with all his titles back to Quake 2 running in the engine) and he recently told GameInformer that he couldn't envisage any reason he'd want to step up to the Vista-exclusive DX10 platform. "There's no massive pull for me for DX10," he told an eager audience.

Especially not, we suspect, when Nvidia is opening up DX10-hardware features for OpenGL just to placate him.

But that doesn't stop Microsoft from making decisions for him. Speaking to Gamastura, the Vole's Rick Wickham said that he thought a Carmack DX10 game was an inevitability. "Stay tuned... I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn?t build a DirectX 10 title some day... and I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later," he commented, either knowing more than we do or being more optimistic than we are.

Of course, that doesn't stop multiple third parties licensing a Carmack engine and adding DX10 features to it, but that is a fair amount of work for a licensee.

Microsoft has come under fire for making DX10 Windows Vista only in what enthusiasts see as a cynical bid to drive OS upgrade sales.

It seems that, from Carmack's point of view, there's not much to belay the cynicism. The id Software chief technician is rumoured to be working on a new game engine as we speak

yes ... MS loves Carmack

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: CP5670
No, they are well-documented issues that occur on any system. I have gotten them on several different setups regardless of the graphical settings used. I know more about D3's problem, which has to do with the physics engine getting desynchronized with the framerate at any refresh rates over 60hz. It causes a persistent frameskipping effect that can't be fully corrected without either dropping the refresh rate to 60hz or setting a command line option so that the game speed depends on the framerate. I actually played through D3 and Q4 with the latter settings, so it effectively went into slo-mo during fights, where the framerate dropped.

Far Cry's indoor sections were a mixed bag, but some areas were easily superior to anything in D3. It had a rudimentary form of parallax mapping from what I remember, similar to what was seen later in SCCT, and the HDR (after the HDR parameters were properly adjusted) made a lot of indoor sections look excellent.

Uh. Bullsh1t.

It ran perfect on my machine at the time at 1600x1200 so don't give me some "issues that occur on any system". It sounds like you either 1) Tinkered with console commands and screwed up or 2) have a crappy rig or 3) Are confusing the half life 2 cache stuttering problem.

Same here.
At the time it came out, I had an AXP and a Radeon 9800, it worked fine, though hardly at 1600x1200
Then I upgraded to an A64 and X800XL, still worked fine, and obviously at higher settings.
Now I have a C2D and a GF8800GTX, and it still doesn't stutter, this time at 1920x1200 with 4x AA and all details maxed(save for ultra textures, I can't tell the difference anyway).
So, that's three systems with rather varying spec, all without stuttering.

As far as the graphics go, they're still incredible, if not "flashy", the only annoyance is with the aforementioned "blockyness" of the characters(most notably the Swann guy and Betruger).

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: CP5670
No, they are well-documented issues that occur on any system. I have gotten them on several different setups regardless of the graphical settings used. I know more about D3's problem, which has to do with the physics engine getting desynchronized with the framerate at any refresh rates over 60hz. It causes a persistent frameskipping effect that can't be fully corrected without either dropping the refresh rate to 60hz or setting a command line option so that the game speed depends on the framerate. I actually played through D3 and Q4 with the latter settings, so it effectively went into slo-mo during fights, where the framerate dropped.

Far Cry's indoor sections were a mixed bag, but some areas were easily superior to anything in D3. It had a rudimentary form of parallax mapping from what I remember, similar to what was seen later in SCCT, and the HDR (after the HDR parameters were properly adjusted) made a lot of indoor sections look excellent.

Uh. Bullsh1t.

It ran perfect on my machine at the time at 1600x1200 so don't give me some "issues that occur on any system". It sounds like you either 1) Tinkered with console commands and screwed up or 2) have a crappy rig or 3) Are confusing the half life 2 cache stuttering problem.

Same here.
At the time it came out, I had an AXP and a Radeon 9800, it worked fine, though hardly at 1600x1200
Then I upgraded to an A64 and X800XL, still worked fine, and obviously at higher settings.
Now I have a C2D and a GF8800GTX, and it still doesn't stutter, this time at 1920x1200 with 4x AA and all details maxed(save for ultra textures, I can't tell the difference anyway).
So, that's three systems with rather varying spec, all without stuttering.

As far as the graphics go, they're still incredible, if not "flashy", the only annoyance is with the aforementioned "blockyness" of the characters(most notably the Swann guy and Betruger).

Yup, I run D3 and Q4 at 1440x900 on a Pent D and 7950GT on Ultra Settings with 16xSAA and I still get +35FPS at all times.
D3 is an excellent engine.
Source runs at the same speeds at the same settings, but looks bland instead.
I pick D3!

 

[Skacer]

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

I will never have a good answer to this, but here are my thoughts anyways. Doom 3 was a poor way to demo an engine, it was a very dark game, which means a lot of the affects and power of the engine were all subtle. Developers wanted to build bright, huge worlds, and Id Software kind of nitched themselves into a small corner of the business with an engine that specializes on darkness, shadows, and very little water affects/outdoor areas.

Once you realize this, you understand why ET: Quake Wars is probably a big thing to them. It proves the Doom 3 engine could do water, it proves the Doom 3 engine could do outdoor areas.

Personally, I think a Thief game would have been absolutely excellent on the Doom 3 engine. I also thought Bloodlines would have been a better game on the D3 engine.

The one thing I can't answer for is how difficult it is to create new content with Doom 3. The ideas that were built into that engine were immense, while the Source engine was more of a small jump from the original HL engine. Therefor it would be a more friendly platform to developers.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: apoppin
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40199

Carmack's love of the cross-platform OpenGL language is legendary (with all his titles back to Quake 2 running in the engine) and he recently told GameInformer that he couldn't envisage any reason he'd want to step up to the Vista-exclusive DX10 platform. "There's no massive pull for me for DX10," he told an eager audience.

Especially not, we suspect, when Nvidia is opening up DX10-hardware features for OpenGL just to placate him.

But that doesn't stop Microsoft from making decisions for him. Speaking to Gamastura, the Vole's Rick Wickham said that he thought a Carmack DX10 game was an inevitability. "Stay tuned... I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn?t build a DirectX 10 title some day... and I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later," he commented, either knowing more than we do or being more optimistic than we are.

Of course, that doesn't stop multiple third parties licensing a Carmack engine and adding DX10 features to it, but that is a fair amount of work for a licensee.

Microsoft has come under fire for making DX10 Windows Vista only in what enthusiasts see as a cynical bid to drive OS upgrade sales.

It seems that, from Carmack's point of view, there's not much to belay the cynicism. The id Software chief technician is rumoured to be working on a new game engine as we speak

yes ... MS loves Carmack

Agreed. Indeed We do love Carmack. (although you shouldn't believe it just because the Inquirer says so hehe). There are a lot of big id software fans at MS. Carmack has traditionally supported OpenGL but EVERY game he's written runs on Windows (barring some cell phone stuff I heard he worked on). If he writes his next engine in OpenGL so what? The only people that think that would piss off MS are the ones that think DX 10 was Vista only to try and promote Vista sales. It's a crock. DX 10 is Vista only because XP lacks the driver architecture to support it and it's just way to expensive to back port. Cynics...what do you do with those sad, sad people

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Skacer

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
For those who believe the Doom 3 engine is great, explain why Prey is the only non Id game to use the engine?

I will never have a good answer to this, but here are my thoughts anyways. Doom 3 was a poor way to demo an engine, it was a very dark game, which means a lot of the affects and power of the engine were all subtle. Developers wanted to build bright, huge worlds, and Id Software kind of nitched themselves into a small corner of the business with an engine that specializes on darkness, shadows, and very little water affects/outdoor areas.

Once you realize this, you understand why ET: Quake Wars is probably a big thing to them. It proves the Doom 3 engine could do water, it proves the Doom 3 engine could do outdoor areas.

Personally, I think a Thief game would have been absolutely excellent on the Doom 3 engine. I also thought Bloodlines would have been a better game on the D3 engine.

The one thing I can't answer for is how difficult it is to create new content with Doom 3. The ideas that were built into that engine were immense, while the Source engine was more of a small jump from the original HL engine. Therefor it would be a more friendly platform to developers.

There was that whole "it only does indoors" argument about the Quake 3 engine as well...then came Team Arena where a couple spots actually got out of range of the railgun. Haters.

 

[CP5670]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Uh. Bullsh1t.

It ran perfect on my machine at the time at 1600x1200 so don't give me some "issues that occur on any system". It sounds like you either 1) Tinkered with console commands and screwed up or 2) have a crappy rig or 3) Are confusing the half life 2 cache stuttering problem.

Either you're running the game at 60hz or your eyes simply aren't very good. Turn the refresh rate above 60, set the game to 640x480 to keep the framerate high, make sure vsync is on and add the lines "seta com_preciseTic "0" " and "seta com_fixedTic "1" " to your doomconfig.cfg file. Move around in the opening area while looking down at the grating on the floor. If you still can't notice any difference, the latter possibility seems to be more likely.

As I said earlier, many people somehow don't notice it until they actually compare it side-by-side with the fix, but then they have no trouble seeing it every time afterwards. In some sense, it's a good thing if you are not seeing it, but it's most certainly there.

I know that the effect is visible on a 6800GT, a single 7800GT, two 7800GTs and an X1900XTX, with a couple of different combinations of processors and motherboards, so it can't just be a system specific thing.