Doom 3 (1 Viewer)

[Michael Geiger]

I can't wait for this game ! Here's the E3 clip:
http://www1.giga.de/gigagames/downlo...1,4564,00.html

 

[Graeme Clark]

Nice to see it, but it's only 5fps. blech.
I hear this is better, but a little slower
http://128.119.107.112/doomIIIe3leg_qt.mov

 

[Kami]

Check bluesnews for a link to a supposedly fixed version. I am downloading now and will report.
Whoever encoded the last one was an idiot, and on top of that they are also on crack. 7 minutes, 5 frames per second, and 100MB size? With Sorenson codec? I didn't even know that was possible. :rolleyes

 

[Derrik Draven]

It's hard to believe but, this game might make me dust off my 4 year old 300mhz, P2 with dual Voodoo II's, and actually upgrade it!
Upgrade, hell...it would be major reconstructive surgery!!!
Can you say, "build a whole new pc"?

 

[Kami]

Oh. My. God.
Go get the new version of the video, it's 30 frames/sec and pretty good quality. STUNNING.
Some of the environments are IMO comparable to the Final Fantasy movie...and I loved seeing them interview Trent Reznor. Him doing the sound and music would just be icing on the cake....ohhhhhhhhhh crap.
This game will take every other game in existence on every platform and eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
*bows to Carmack* I'm not worthy!!
Link:
http://www.fileplanet.com/index.asp?file=88436

 

[Camp]

Wow....I don't see how a top of the line PC today could run that. No way.

 

[Romier S]

Wow....I don't see how a top of the line PC today could run that. No way.

Camp, the demo machine they were running that on was a 2.2gig systems with a recent ATI graphics card. A top of line machine can..and will run that!!

 

[Kami]

Camp, don't underestimate John Carmack. This is going to be a 2003 game and believe me, it will run on current machines at that point. Something like a Athlon XP 1800 and a GeForce 4 should run it quite nicely...but of course by that time 1 or 2 more video card generations will have passed and GF4's will be cheap as hell! Make no mistake, the Doom3 engine is basically DONE and it runs fine on current higher-end hardware...now they just have to design the game itself.

 

[Ryan Peter]

Are they shipping this engine out to other developers and if so, what other games can we expect to see running off of the Doom3 engine?

 

[Kami]

Are they shipping this engine out to other developers and if so, what other games can we expect to see running off of the Doom3 engine?

Well, it's id's baby for now. In the past they didn't license out their engines for quite a few months after the game's release if i recall correctly. I'd say 2004 is the earliest we would ever see other games based on the Doom3 engine (doom3 is coming in 2003).

 

[Camp]

Are they shipping this engine out to other developers and if so, what other games can we expect to see running off of the Doom3 engine?

I can't remember who is doing it (Raven?) but the new Quake game will also use the Doom engine.

 

[Derrik Draven]

Id Software was always known for making killer game engines.
...here they go again.

 

[Sean Oneil]

A 2.2 GHZ P4 with a Radeon 8500? I heard that they were using a machine with a bit more horsepower to run the E3 demos.

The game looks Fuggin' Incredible.

 

[Graeme Clark]

I find the lighting the most impressive part, it's absolutly incrdible. The animation looks good too but it's hard to tell at 5 fps (downloading a better copy now... I hope).
The models very look cool in motion, but the do also tend to look a bit like carved plastic, or something created with Eye Candy (Photoshop plugin).
I suspect Duke Nukem Forever is delayed another year for them to license, and switch to this engine

 

[Romier S]

A 2.2 GHZ P4 with a Radeon 8500?

That was straight from the mouth of Gamespot. They did not specify the ATI 8500, they just said it was a recent ATI chipset. I've got some upgrading to do :b .

 

[James St]

By the time this game comes out the Clawhammer should be out as well as Nvidia's NV30 based card. From the looks of this game they will be a welcome addition for me.

 

[Kelley_B]

BTW - Quake 4 is being developed by Raven Software and it is using the Doom III engine. So not only will we get to battle the demons of hell, but also those Stroggos bastards all using Doom III technology.

Now the reason the characters might look plasticy is because they are not your standard character models with painted textures, oh no....these are fully created in 3DStudioMAX with the textures built onto the character as opposed to being painted on during gameplay.

Another neat feature of the game is that the level editor is built into the .exe . So at anypoint of a map you can press a key and boom that level opens up in the level editor and you can actually edit the maps while you are in them.

I don't think these machines were running Radeon 8500s, probably running the next ATi chip...R300 as they are due to be announced very soon.

 

[Gary King]

Now the reason the characters might look plasticy is because they are not your standard character models with painted textures, oh no....these are fully created in 3DStudioMAX with the textures built onto the character as opposed to being painted on during gameplay.

Nope.

Id used Maya (not 3DS Max) to build and animate the characters; however, that's not why they look like plastic. The textures are painted on just like normal -- you're probably confusing Id's geometry decimator/normal map creation routine with how the textures are applied.

The reason the characters look like plastic is because traditional real-time light models fail miserably at describing how light interacts with semi-porous/translucent materials like skin. However, the traditional Blinn/Phong light model works very well at describing plastic (and, to a lesser degree, metal), which is why most surfaces in games look like plastic or metal.

As pixel shading hardware advances, better approximations for complex light interactions will be created, and while skin may not look exactly like skin, it won't be the plastic shell that it is now.

 

[Kami]

Gary, I might've misread what you were saying, but the textures are not painted on as they were traditionally. Each "texture" is actually a model (according to all the Doom3 articles i read), so it can have realistic bump mapping and stuff like that.

 

[BrianB]

Kami, the whole 'texture is a model' thing is blurb to simplify the technology for the audience.