Carmack On Doom III And The Evolution Of Graphics 586
Toasty16 writes "David Kushner over at Wired has a write-up on the progress of Doom III, hinting at a possible fall release, that is unless Microsoft convinces id to sit on the game until an Xbox version is completed. He also talks to Carmack about the evolution of game engines and the possibility of a "next-generation rendering engine [that] will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time." Will this lead to a shift from coders to "technical directors," as Carmack believes? This ties into the Slashdot story awhile back about new titles for sysadmins."
How does it tie to the older story? (Score:3, Insightful)
Evidently (Score:2, Insightful)
We've been seeing this for quite some time already. Developers buying completed engines and building their game around that, instead of doing everything from line 1.
Guess it makes sense if you can get a decent engine, that fit your needs, for less money than it would've taken to write it yourself. Real coders still want to do it all by themselves, of course :)
Now maybe we can reap the benefit of this soon, with some games actually centering on gameplay, rather than cool rendering techniques. If I want nice effects, I'll rather watch a demo [scene.org].bored with first person shoot em ups (Score:5, Insightful)
Is anyone else a bit dissappointed that the focus on games seems to be the rendering engine and the color depth and frame rates. Doom/Quake sorta started all the emphasis on 3d graphics. I miss the old days of plain old gameplay. Games such as Zelda, Everquest, civilization really are the pinnacle of gaming for me. I like everyone else used to stay at work late so we could have a lan party playing doom, and quake CTF and download the latest patches and maps. However the concept has not changed since day one. shoot everything that moves. make a team and shoot everyone that moves. I think it's time the game concept and story line be updated.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess Microsoft figures a lot of gamers will be upgrading their hardware when D3 comes out. If the XBox version is ready at the same time, those gamers might decide to buy themselves an XBox instead of sinking $300 into another new video card.
Re:mod parent down (Score:2, Insightful)
i really don't get ppl whining about posts . . . this is the internet
there goes my cred . . .
Re:Typical (Score:1, Insightful)
"We've already demonstrated" - er NO! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd take a minute to re-assess that "self evident truth".
FPS are mouse games, pure and simple.
Two analogue joysticks does not a mouse make
Re:Fall? (Score:2, Insightful)
It may just be that, but from what I've heard, it contains some very good physics (e.g. bodies falling down individual stairs), and new dynamic lighting effects.
So, if it does end up being another lame shoot 'em up (and the story sounds pretty lame/stupid to me), perhaps it will at least provide a good new base for some really good games to build on.
Re:Graphics Engines (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you build AI? I don't know but there has to be a better way then the current way we have now. Most games don't have good AI.
For example, look at Zelda:WW, one of the coolest games out this year. Very good graphics, good art, good design. Very fun game. But the AI is so limited. All the townspeople walk pre-set paths. The baddies walk preset paths and are triggered dumbly. Pathing is bad, but hidden by the fact that the baddies only appear in limited areas. Most areas to fight in are large open arenas. Not closed areas with lots of corners and walls. The few fights that are in closed areas you end up fighting bats and other flying creatures.
Ok I could go on, but I hope you get my point. This game is a AAA quality title, most games are no where near the quality of this game. Yet the AI is bad. You could counter this example with another, but if you were to take this argument to it's end I think that you woudl find that the number of games with good AI is miniscule compared to the games with bad AI. Which is why online gaming is so popular. It's the only place where you can get good competition that doesn't suck.
Re:Another new graphics engine.. (Score:2, Insightful)
But instead we get games like tribes 2 and battlefield1942 which are great idea's with horrible implementation. Who coincedes the first patch with the release date of the game?!?!?! Then release patches that create more servere bugs than were fixed.
I understand that the companies are under high pressure from their publishers to get something out to start earning revenue. It just seems to me that games would be made in a shorter timeline and cheaper if they were based on a proven 3d engine.
Re:bored with first person shoot em ups (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I will take a different tact than you. I miss the simplicity of side scrollers, bottom shooters, etc. These were great little 5-30 minute diversions that didn't require reading a user's guide. There was also a lot of creativity that went into the design of the better entries in this lot. Q*Bert, Tron, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Track and Field, Zaxxon, Defender, Robotron and Tetris (among others) were all groundbreaking games when they debuted. Sure, you can find all of these titles in various "museum" releases or on the emulators, but it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry.
On the more cerebral front, I really enjoyed the Infocom games. Pretty cool that they have them all for the z machine on Palm OS.
-brian
Re:bored with first person shoot em ups (Score:2, Insightful)
Typically they do not get as much press, or are developed for console gaming. However, if you are not looking at the places these games are advertised then you will never hear about them. If you never watch TV how would you know the different from one show to the other?
Look at all the gaming sites out there. There must be games that do not fall under the FPS category people enjoy. Otherwise nothing else would be developed, because no one would buy them.
Coders already outnumbered. (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe this has already happened. Look at the credits for any recent big game, and you'll see that the number of graphics designers and other artists dominates the number of programmers on the staff. Seeing this has convinced me that the profession of "game programmer" will never be more than a niche.
Re:Typical (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fall? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gaming after Photorealism (Score:2, Insightful)
More Sex and Violence!
Re:How long could an Xboxen version take? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not just reprint Wired? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is much to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Another hurdle to pass is truly lifelike biomechanics, not just in movement, but in reaction. Get shot in the arm? Your arms gets forced backward forcing the rest of your body to do so. Want to run real fast, instantly do a 180 and jump? Maybe with correct modeling the game'll slow you down as you make that turn, and delay the jump.
Modeling the physics of our world is no small task, and I, frankly think Carmack is thinking too much iside the graphical box he built, and not within the new physical frontier.
Re:Here's a dumb question. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fall? (Score:2, Insightful)
though i still find it hard that they will make it fit into 64mb well.
the new line should be '64mb should be enough for everyone'
engine coders will never obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
This does not mean that engine programmers will be obsolete, relegated to support and optimization or that innovation slows down. Doom III and Quake engines has been optimized for tight, enclosed indoor spaces. There are lot of different possibilities not yet explored.
Just off the top of my head I can imagine game engine technology spanning a decade into the future:
- soft shadows or realtime radiosity lighting. This might be not that far off, but a lot of intersting research will be involved on top of current stencil-buffer and projected depth map based techniques.
- high dynamic range (hdr) light calculation across the entire pipeline, including effects like light bloom and hdr reflections. you start to see some of this in Splinter Cell.
- real-time, arbitrary resolution, procedurally generated texture maps and generated displacement maps (ex. RenderMan). The previous methods of doing texturing progressed from manually shaded (doom-quake3), to manually colored with normal maps for shading (doom3). The general case would be to use nothing except procedural shaders and geometry to generate all detail before approximated by texture maps.
- arbitrarily dynamic solid world geometry. Current renering engines work with a heavily pre-processsed visible shell of the world, which can be modified only in special rigid cases. It will take some effort for an engine to deform or destroy arbitrary world geometry. Imagine taking off a chunk of the wall and seing the layers of concrete underneath, then having the building collapse when supports are removed.
As the last point suggests some time into the future the latest engine might be quite exotic compared to the current ideas. I can imagine a type of voxel based representation with some image based rendering.
Innovation will never stop.
Ultraviolence in GTA3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultraviolence in GTA3? What ultraviolence? I wouldn't mind, but they claim it followed Doom.
GTA3: Simulation of a city.
Doom: Run around and kill.
GTA has its moments, but ultraviolent is not the term for it by far.
Re:Gaming after Photorealism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is that a complement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is much to do (Score:5, Insightful)
You make good points, and those are features i would REALLY like to see in games. But the problem is, that alot of people DONT want to see that---they want to be able to run and strafe and rocket-jump without a modicum of impairment. That's why more people play Quake-style shooters than MOH:AA and Ghost Recon, because they see the movement physics as impairment, not realism
Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3? (Score:5, Insightful)
1)Steal a cab.
2)Beat the shit out of the cabbie for the hell of it.
3)Drive around with the cab and do drive-bys with your Uzi.
4)Pick up and have sex with a prostitute then beat said prostitute's head in with a baseball bat to get back your money.
Which is the more shocking movie? Resident Evil or Natural Born Killers? Resident Evil has plenty of blood and violence but really is standard fare. On the other hand Natural Born Killers isn't any more bloody , it's just that you or me or Cowboy Neal can go of the deep end and do that stuff.
Doom maybe about shooting up zombies and demons. However to the best of my knowledge you can't do that in real life(If it was I would be born again real quick).
There's stuff in GTA3 that you CAN do and does happen in real life. That's why it's shocking and considered ultraviolent(and fun!).
Re:no. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you can bop him a couple of times until he falls. It's hardly shocking in light of Bugs Bunny catoons that we've all watched for years. It's violent, but it's not ultra violent.
Ultra violent would be like the first part of the Animatrix where that group of men attacked the female robot, ripping her to pieces.
I can't believe GTA3 is that misunderstood, considering how popular it is.
id is doing the right thing! (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, what do you want to do? Counteract the practice of releasing for all platforms at the same time by boycotting all industries worldwide? If you expect id to release at different times for different platforms then you probably expect other things... "I mean, what's next, id stops releasing source code to their games for educational purposes?!"
It makes sense to release a game for all platforms at the same time. How stupid would it be, for example, if The Matrix was released at some theaters first because they had DTS, two weeks later at other theaters because they had THX and a month after that to remaining theaters, which had Dolby Digital... How stupid would it be if the game were made available on platforms X and Y, everybody plays the game and gets sick of it, and then the game is released on platform Z? Nobody would buy it for platform Z.
Consider this argument the other way around: id releases Doom IV for Windows, XBox, PS2 and whatever other platforms there are out there. But it takes them forever to release the game on Linux. How would you feel then? I think I would feel quite bad. In that case, it would make sense, again, for them to wait before releasing the game until the Linux version is complete. Consider another example in which they wish, also, to release a version for some new computing platform and operating system that sucks and nobody uses, but there is one customer in the entire world who is using that operating system and that customer wants to spend the $39.95 (USD) to buy the game for his platform. Suppose, also, that the entire design ideology employed in the design of this computer platform is completely, utterly and in all other ways different from anything we've ever seen, and the only compiler available for this platform is an INTERCAL compiler. In that case, id should wait until a C++ compiler can be coded in INTERCAL and the game is ported over to the new platform before releasing for all other platforms. In other words, the entire world should be made to wait because we need to be fair to that ONE person. We are a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, after all.
Re:Typical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doom III to be a letdown? I doubt it. (Score:4, Insightful)
They do, however, license out their engine, letting all of the companies who find that sort of genre profitable focus on the storyline, plot, etc. - and *still* deliver amazing graphics.
steve
Re:Gaming after Photorealism (Score:3, Insightful)
Once eye candy becomes eye nourishment, games almost have to revert to good game design: plots, dynamic and interactive characters and populations (AI), social structures, and real consequences for player actions.
Even still, "Gaming after Photorealism" only addresses a single sense: sight. We also have very advanced audio realism. Tactile realism is limited because of hardware design & cost. Who will innovate the taste and smell aspects of a game, and when will that happen?
Full immersion can't happen until all the senses are involved.
Re:There is much to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Your point is well taken.
I think the most interesting thing about more realistic physics is that it has the potential of taking the game out of the designer's hands. The game can provide you the ability to modify terrain, but the player figures out you can use that feature to build a "dam", and then blow up the "dam" to flood your enemy, or use the dam to irrigate your crops more effectively. The designer only has to provide the problem and the simulation, but is freed from providing specific solutions to puzzles.
Imagine a space flight simulator, where naturally a game designer would not have expert personal knowledge on. However, if the physics is properly simulated, it's not impossible for good players to figure out their own tactics and maneuvers that the designer never even thought of. I'm talking about that idea, applied to the other genres like FPS, RTS, or RPG.
Basically, the opportunity to play in a world that doesn't even feel "designed", the way a Doom level must be. Many games today play like you're playing against the designer (in absentia), trying to figure out what he was thinking, which I think takes away from an immersive effect.
Re:Evolution is a lie. (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course large complex systems don't just happen. They are developed by *groups* of minds working on strings of smaller, intermediate ideas. One says "let's make it automatic". Another designs a circuit to allow for telephone calls to be connected by sending an electronic pulse to a coil, and so on.
Just because no one engineer conceived of every single facet of an entire complex system does not make that system the product of any natural process. It is a system developed by many hours of collaborative, conscious thought.
Because many new technologies are created through an iterative process of throwing failed prototypes away in no way implies any kind of natural selection. The inventor already has a criteria for what they want the product to do, and therefore has a picture (information) of how it shouldbehave.
But of course, technologies couldn't possibly be created, could they, no they just inexplicably evolve, just like humans. Excuse me I need to go find a ratchet tree now.
Doom III and BitTorrent (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this is off-topic somewhat, but I wonder if the guys at id would consider using BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] to distribute the official downloadable Doom III Shareware when it comes out. That would be much better than offering it by mere FTP. (FTP sites seem to just jam up when big games like that come out, and FileShack [fileshack.com] is going to have long waits, at least for freeloaders.) BitTorrent is cool.
(I'm assuming of course that they do come out with a shareware version. As popular as the guys at id are, they could probably skip it, and they know it. Like most gamers, I will buy the game anyway, right after I buy a new 4 GHz Pentium 5. Heh. But if I have a shareware version to run on my old computer, I might decide that I can put up with the low framerate for a while, and buy the full game before I buy a new computer. So they get their money sooner. -- On the other hand, I might decide the framerate is too low, and then I have to wait until I buy a new computer. But at least I'll know.)
So, guys at id, are you listening? How 'bout it?
Re:Ultraviolence in GTA3? (Score:4, Insightful)
You aren't required to do that in GTA3. The game allows you to do lots of things but you don't have to do all of them.
If _you_decide_ to do violent stuff that disturbs you then you take a large share of the blame. Similarly if you decide to buy a game and play it even though it disturbs you, or let people who might be disturbed by it play it.
I personally like flying the dodo into the sunrise, do loop the loops. Take a boat to the lighthouse, jump backwards all the way up to the top, etc. Try to push a boat to the other side of the airport (at a certain point an invisible force suddenly shoves the boat back really hard).
But blowing up stuff is fun too
Re:Gaming after Photorealism (Score:2, Insightful)
Realism is not the ultimate goal for most creative people. The experience is more important. Hollywood has known this for a long time which is why we hear tie fighters scream by in a vacuum and can see a gas nebula with the naked eye even though neither of these things are possible in real life.
A story told to me by a graphics researcher was that he did a film where snow was falling on a river. In order to find out what this looked like he went down to the river when it was snowing and saw that the snow just melts into the rivier without a splash. When the film was judged it was heavily criticized for not showing the splash that the judges expected when the snow hit the water.
For the AI and Physics Whiners (Score:3, Insightful)
With vertex and pixel shaders, the rendering engine can be written reasonably capable of lasting many years while still looking up to date. This leaves the other aspects of a 3d game engine as areas where that effort will be pushed. Carmack recognizes that people like himself who primarily push the rendering portion of engines, will soon work themselves out of a job. That doesn't mean other aspects of engine design are being ignored by him, he's just aware of his focus on graphics/renderer enhancements over the years.