Carmack Expounds on Doom III 351
Rainier Wolfecastle writes: "Non-high-end-comp-owning geeks rejoice! GameSpot is reporting that John Carmack has confirmed that Doom III is Xbox-bound. Carmack said that id is totally commited to bringing the game to Microsoft's console with its visual splendor intact. Best of all, the game could be available on the Xbox as soon as May next year." And Warrior-GS writes: "John Carmack gave a two-hour presentation about Doom 3 and engine technology. GameSpy reports on the presentations and analyzes Carmack's comments and how they apply to the future of gaming. There is also a look at the demo of Doom III"
Whoops! (Score:3, Insightful)
Developers that only make console games will always make games for the PS2 because of the bigger market. Developers that make PC games however, will rarely make PS2 games, because the hardware is different and its difficult/impossible to port. PC games like Doom III and Morrowind will keep the XBOX alive simply because they aren't/won't be available on PS2.
It looks like MS's only hope of growing their market share to compete with Sony is to cozy up with the PC game developers. How ironic.
Re:OpenGL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see the point of FPS's on XBox. Granted, I've played Halo, got through most of the beginning levels, but it still nags at me that I could be a order of magnitude better at it with a simle keyboard and mouse.
Now games like DOA3, NFL 2K3, stuff like that, rightly deserves to be on a console, it is easily (and in the case of the former, recommended for play) on a gamepad. Give me a keyboard and mouse option, and I'll be a happy guy.
Carmack out of ideas? (Score:0, Insightful)
for this, but his speech doesn't sound too exciting.
Sure you can write an engine with better
lighting, sure you can watch the cards get
faster and polygon count get higher, but where's
the jump in technology? I wish Carmack would
find something to revolutionize rather than
focus on incremental improvements. Just think
of what the guy could do if he focused on
modeling realistic physics or decent AI...
Re:API? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whoops! (Score:3, Insightful)
No. They didn't create the XBOX to move games from PC's, they didn't do it to make Direct3D the de-facto standard, they didn't do it to make Windows a monopoly, they didn't do it to put a set-top box on your tv, they didn't do it to save the whales, and they didn't do it to demand one million dollars from the government. They created the XBOX to tap into the video game market and make money. That's all.
They made the XBOX PC-like so that PC-based developers would have an easy time transitioning to it. What makes a game system successful is a combination of number of games and quality of games. If a cool game for PC is already in development, you wouldn't have to fight too hard to make an XBOX port of it. GC, PS2, DC, etc don't have it so easy.
That's actually a really cool strategy to get a number of games onto a new system. The neat thing is that if MS follows suit with XBOX 2, then all the old games will still work. You could even make new games that work on the old hardware, but suddenly get better with the new hardware. That's brilliant!
FPS on consoles (Score:4, Insightful)
The only games I can enjoy on a console are platformers (Sonic, Jak and Daxter, etc), sports games, racing games, and fighting games (mortal kombat, virtua fighter, etc)
So, is it just a matter of getting used to the controls for FPS-type games on consoles or am I do I actually have a point?
Re:"Non-high-end-comp-owning geeks rejoice!"? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Non-high-end-comp-owning geeks rejoice!"? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, you can usually count on getting twice the performance out of an absolutely fixed platform if you put a little work into it. There are lots of tradeoffs that need to balance between the different cards on a general purpose platform -- things that I don't do with vertex programs because it would make the older cards even slower, avoiding special casing that would be too difficult to test across all platforms (and driver revs), and double buffering of vertex data to abstract across VAR and vertex objects, for instance. We might cut the "core tick" of Doom from 60hz to 30hz on X-Box if we need the extra performance, because it has no chance of holding 60hz, but the PC version will eventually scale to that with the faster CPUs and graphics cards.
John Carmack
Stop before writing that post!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Your wrong.
I can't believe the incredible about of really good and *different* 3d shooters I have played in the past 3 years. They are too numerous to mention. There is Counter Strike's complete revolution of internet play (buying weapons instead of them just laying around, asymmetric goals, mission based play, etc). There is System Shock 2's and Deus Ex's mixing of shooter and RPG. There is the Thief's series and Deus Ex's use of stealth (more in the Thief series obviously but you could go through a good bit of Deus Ex w/o firing a shot). One of my favorite 3d shooters of the past couple years is Jedi Knight II which is the most immersive games I have ever played. I felt like I was a Jedi. The list goes on and on.
So before you comment on the supposed sad state of gaming, try playing some games first.
Brian Ellenberger
Re:different backends useless then? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some borderline cases that may or may not get custom coding -- Radeon R100, Matrox Parhelia, and SiS Xabre are all currently using the default path, but could benefit from additional custom coding. I will only consider that when they have absolutely rock solid quality on the default path, and if it looks like they have enough performance headroom to bother with the specular passes.
The NV20 back end has more work in it than any other, with two different cases for the lighting interaction, but on the X-Box I would probably create additional special cases to optimize some of the other possible permutations.
John Carmack
Re:Stop before writing that post!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
It just takes the whole impact away.
Re:Of course you would be. (Score:3, Insightful)
To the kid down the block who grows up using these controls, he will say the same thing about "clunky mice and keyboards" because they aren't what he grew up with.
Funny thing then that many old school fps gamers that at first were very reluctant to change from keyboard only to keyb+mouse, later did. They grew up with using only the keyboard, but as soon they started playing online (Quakeworld anyone?) they realized that they were no match for people who had made the switch. These guys complained about keyb+mouse being inferior, later when they was fragged into oblivion, some even went as far as calling keyb+mouse cheating. The majority made the switch though, many in silence.