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Games Entertainment

New DOOM III Shots 209

Posted by timothy from the such-cute-little-monsters dept.
Warrior-GS writes "There are some new DOOM III screens on GameSpy coming from QuakeCon 2002 in Texas. There are also new screens of Elite Force II, the Return to Castle Wolfenstein expansion pack Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein for the PS2. Carmack is also scheduled to speak tomorrow for about two hours."
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New DOOM III Shots More

New DOOM III Shots

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  • The real question ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fehson ( 579442 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @01:44PM (#4078886)
    I haven't a terrible amount of innovation from first person shooters in the last few years (Other than graphics). Hopefully Doom 3 won't just be one of those "but it looks cooler" games. I'm counting on some innovative gameplay, not just the best graphics I've ever seen.
    • Hate to say it but I disagree. I see id as pushing the graphical envelope, while everybody else can license the engine and give it a plot.

      Then agin, I like playing Unreal Tournament, and Halo. So what do I know about plot?

      (Actually, I like the campaign in Halo. Decent plot and I still get to blow stuff up).

      • Re:The real question ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by startled ( 144833 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:49PM (#4079136)
        Agreed. The "more jaded than thou" set likes to feign disinterest in id's latest, claiming they don't even need to look at the screenshots because they know the gameplay's going to suck.

        Regardless of the validity of judging a game's gameplay from 15 seconds of video, they're missing the point-- id makes a good chunk of its money licensing its engines. Lots of games used the Quake 2 and 3 engines, and many games will use the Doom 3 engine. If you play the sorts of games that use these engines, you should be interested in id's latest engine because it's a peek into the future.

    • Re:The real question ... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think it was said best on PA [penny-arcade.com].
    • I used to think that way about all the new games before I upgraded my G400 to GF4-ti4200 three weeks ago. Now the first thing I do with new games is to see how much better it looks with my G4 card.

      Wonder if it's just a coincidence or was the NPC's uniforms in these screen shots modeled after the ones used in STTNG movies?
    • I agree, Q3 Arena is a solid game, but basically its just more of the same, just perty-ier! I mean if the speed of the rockets and the physics calculations for rocket jumping are the only thing besides looks thats different between Q2 and Q3, I sure hope its not going to be the same with Doom3.
      I hear the "its a formula that works.." arguement, because it does....
      but c'mon with all the technical know how ID has, they can make a gorgeous, engrossing, game, right???
    • Innovation in FPS == jedi outcast.
      Lightsabers and force powers make this one a completely different ballgame than most FPS games.
    • By the looks of the graphics it won't even be that much of a leap. They still had many hard edges on beings with rounded body types, etc. I'm looking forward to the day when 3D skins go over 3D muscle-skeletal frames that have real weight and movement like the dinos in JP or other movies. I want grey-matter with head shots and bowels from the belly. Maybe the ability to cut off a major limb and watch them bleed to death. It will be a few years but that will be the next big step in any realism for me.
      • "Won't even be that much of a leap"?

        You, buddy, sure haven't read anything about this engine. Let me give you a hint: Every object casts realistic shadows from Every light. Not only on other objects, but on themselves. And it's fully coordinated with the bumpmaps.

        You'll see the difference. Until then, have faith in Carmack. I want "crazy super ultra-violence realism" too, but it's not going to happen for at least another five - ten years.
    • Oh, I'm sure it will be:

      Take the stunningly-rendered totally realistic looking truly curved 8000-polygon red key to the stunningly-rendered totally realistic bump-mapped real-world-physics-based red door.

      See? That's like, light years better than Doom (I).
  • [insert cultish praise to carmack here]

  • Great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by soapvox ( 573037 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @01:44PM (#4078893)
    Just what I need another thing to keep me from working.... Has anyone done a study on the effect of productivity as new games come out?
  • i think i've seen other screen shots from Doom 3 that look WAY better... am i crazy?

  • oh (Score:1, Funny)

    by sheean.nl ( 565364 )
    I thought Windows XP2 was out, sorry...

  • Doom 3 Music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mattyohe ( 517995 ) <matt.yohe @ g mail.com> on Thursday August 15, 2002 @01:49PM (#4078944)
    Hopefully someone can grab a sample of some of the music in doom3... Im curious as to what Trent has created
  • The one on the right looks a lot like a picture I took of my dog. Scary.

    I just don't remember that background....

  • Time to buy a new video card! Ouch.

  • Hmm, not terribly impressed... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by casio282 ( 468834 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @01:51PM (#4078969) Homepage
    I'll probably get modded into the basement for saying this but...is it me, or do those shots not look that impressive? Part of it is the JPG artifacts, which we should disregard. But even still, it doesn't look "next generation" to me.

    Am I alone in thinking this?
    • The environment, minus the monster, seemed quite rich to me. As long as the monsters and players match up to current tech and the environment *completely* immerses me, I am there. Doom III still seems to have that potential.

      Jeremy

    • Re:Hmm, not terribly impressed... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Plutor ( 2994 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:18PM (#4079048) Homepage
      The real improvements in the Doom3 engine can't be seen in a static image like this. You won't realize what a difference completely dynamic lights and shadows will make until you SEE it.
    • Am I alone in thinking this?

      Yes. Why? Because these are still shots. They cannot compete with beautiful raytraces, etc. You must judge the graphics quality when watching the game in live motion, because much of the quality of a video game's graphics comes from how light/shadow/reflection is handled, how realistically things move and blend in with the world, etc.
    • Well, those pics sure scared the hell out of me, especially the one with the monster with the nasty teeth at crotch level.

    • It doens't look as good in these pictures as I've seen in others. The NPC's looked blocky, I thought that this was suppose to be smoother than that.

      But in the end it doesn't matter, FPS's make me sicker than a dog after 30 minutes.

      Sean D.
    • Carmack said in one of his interviews that all his engine has been since quake 1 has been a variation on the same theme.

      The difference with this engine is one major fact: Carmack is no longer using hacks to produce lighting effects. The lighting you see in those pictures is done on the fly without hacks. So you'll see more accurate and more detailed shadows and lighting. Perhaps the quality of graphics and AA will improve as well. But compare those two screenshots to quake3 and quake2, you won't see shadows that vivid in most 3d games out right now, and i think that's quite next-gen.
    • Nope, you're not alone. I can't understand why so many people go nuts over screenshots like these. As long as I see lines and corners where I should see curves, I won't be impressed.

      I'm not saying the games aren't fun, but for me, the graphics don't seem to be any monumental improvement, even over a few years ago.

      My 2 cents.
      • I'm thinking these aren't the complete, fully polished models and environments. Take a look at some of the Quake3 Team Arena shots and compare to these. The doom3 shots are quite bad compared to q3. I'd expect a huge improvement by the time Doom3 is released. Like others have said too, the big thing with Doom3 will be the real-time shadows and nothing to do with static screenshots.
    • No I agree. They look worse than Quake III. Games should be cartoony. Lots of better effects are in those type of games, since you have no expectation of that it should look real. You never hear people saying that Mario doesn't look Mario enough. Wheras, those monsters looked like computer monsters with lots of effects. Graphics haven't improved vastly since the half-life engine. That was a big jump. Halo is a good looking game also, and that plays on a regular tv.
    • 2 things make these shots "next generation"

      Bump mapping. VERY FEW games up until this point have used it, and I've always thought that was a real shame. A good bump-map can make a world of difference.

      Lighting! If you look at the dog-bull-beasty shot again, you'll notice that all the light is coming through in little bars. These bars show up on the beast, and it casts a shadow as well.

      The zombie-with-too-damn-many-eyes-beasty shot shows that it is casting shadows on itself. Another cool lighting thing.

      Go look again.
    • Don't forget, the engine's having to do a lot more than current FPS's, because the lighting is *all* dynamic, bump mapped, self shadowed, etc. Id's working on removing or reducing the differences between objects in the world and the world itself, and removing things like lightmaps.

      Basically this means that Doom III will be able to do things like have doors with lit rooms behind them cast light onto unlit rooms and for the lighting to actually change as the door opens while everything in the room lights up from it and casts shadows on themselves and everything else. But stills with lighting similar to what you'd get with a normal lightmap will take much more power to render, and hence need to have a lower level of detail.

      Basically it's trading freedom and clever lighting effects for polygons and performance. Eventually this will pay off, but don't expect the average screenshot to necessarily look better than anything else. Expect it to MOVE better in the right maps, though :)
      • > Basically it's trading freedom and clever lighting
        > effects for polygons and performance. Eventually
        > this will pay off, but don't expect the average
        > screenshot to necessarily look better than
        > anything else.

        I agree. Just like some actesses and supermodels... they look better in motion than in stills. It's a perception thing.

        I'm studying OpenGL myself at the moment and I can understand the phenomenal work that went into just the multi-eyed biped monster model. And, I can't wait to see it in action - in motion.
    • I agreed with you that the game didn't look that great graphics-wize until I downloaded the video on the making of Doom. Holy crap. It was a night and day difference, and I literally couldn't believe how good it looked as they showed short clips of the game. The jump was on the order of magnitude between Quake1 and Quake3, it was that impressive.
    • Am I alone in thinking this?

      Nope, I'm not blown away by the graphics too. What I do like about the Doom III (that you can't tell from still shots) is what they do with shadows, if you see the video of Carmack speaking at some Mac conference there's some nice footage of dynamic shadows moving and overlapping and casting shadows on characters.

      But the models disspoint me, I was much more impressed with the screen shots of Dragon's Lair 3d [dragonslair3d.com], not because of the polygons it's pushing, but because it looks like the most realistic attempt yet at imitating the cell animation look in 3d (even better than the upcoming Zelda game). Hopefully in a few years we'll be able to play games that look as impressive as animes like Ghost in the Shell or Akira. Also I was impressed by the PS2 game ICO, whose shadow monsters look and move like nothing I've seen in a game before. The models in Doom III look just like higher polygon models from other games.

      What impresses me more than a "next generation" engine is creative and new effects. Like the rain falling in MGS2, or the deforming snow in VF4, or the beautiful planetscapes in Unreal Tournament. So, I think the game looks pretty good, but I'm hoping they add more interesting environmental effects than Quake II and III had.

  • Looks exactly like (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Donkey Kong Country

    What's the big deal?

  • (cue jaded geek naysayers) (Score:5, Funny)

    by dave-fu ( 86011 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:11PM (#4079008) Homepage Journal
    It's a gorgeous game engine. I don't know why people act like it's an atrocity that this game looks beautiful and plays like a dream simply because there's no attempt at putting on a backstory or developing a character for them.
    Jeebus christ. Here's the backstory: you're a geek, you can remember playing Doom and Doom 2 single-player and being in awe of how cool it was to run around when you weren't jumping out of your skin because a cacodaemon popped out of nowhere in the strobe light to chomp your ass and you remember how cool it was to deathmatch your friends over a 2400 bps modem. Almost a decade after (has it really been that long?) you blew the shit out of Carmack's head, he's back with a JAW-DROPPINGLY GORGEOUS engine.
    You want backstory and character development? Read a fucking book. You want innovation in the FPS world (what sort of goddamned criticism is that?)? No one's stopping you from making your own game. Serious Sam has showed us that there's something to be sead for giving us a mindless adrenaline rush and who am I to argue with an even prettier mindless adrenaline rush? Sign me the fuck up.
    • Almost a decade after ... you blew the shit out of Carmack's head,

      It was romero's head dude.
    • u mmmm... because I'm not 22 anymore?
    • You beat me to the punch. I was about to say that we'll probably see 2300 posts about "how much more realistic can render engines go before there's nowhere left?" A hell of a lot more realistic, that's what. I enjoy RTCW as much as the next addict, but it's *not* fooling me. When I get a holodeck and crap in my pants after actually feeling the heat from the Panzer that just hit 100 feet away, *then* we'll talk about nowhere left to go.
    • Yeah, well. Quake ][ looked amazing for it's day, but after playing about 1/3 of it all the great graphics dissapeared and I was left with was nothing of interest. The monsters were all the same, the rooms all looked the same. No interest, no story, no progression == quick boredom. It was no wonder that Quake ]|[ came out with no single player. Id forgot how to make an interesting single player game. Now there is hope for Doom |||. Except we are already seeing signs of there not being a coherent story and the dissapointment is settling in for those of us that want at least a little adventure with our stunning graphics.

      In fact graphics take a back seat to good game play every time. Most fun 3d shooters I've played were all done on slightly older engine tech. The company focused on the game play, not the engine. Though the combination of jaw cropping graphics WITH great gameplay is far better still. But the gameplay quality in the end always wins out in my book.

      Well just have to wait and see though. I still hope to be pleasantly suprised.

  • those characters look like their from the original playststion, just with really awesom textures. unless they bump up the polys on the character models its not going to look good.

    if youve played resident evil for the GC youll know what im talking about. if doom can incorporaate all of the lighting tricks, textures and high poly models theyll be all set. i think doom has the textures and lights, but the models are horrible.

    but its still in pre prod. so...

  • DOOM III looks better... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by weird mehgny ( 549321 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:16PM (#4079034)
    Some say these screenshots don't look impressive. Well - in a way they don't, but the actual game does. And the reason why the screenshots don't make the game justice is that the animation, bumpmaps, lighting etc must be seen in motion to have any effect. DOOM III's *realtime* lighting is what makes it a game/engine of the next generation. Wait for official videos...

  • Doom3 video on G4.TV (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheHouseMouse ( 589773 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:17PM (#4079038)
    I was watching G4 (the video game channel) today, and they had some vid caps of Doom 3 in action. It is hands down the best looking game I've seen. Some of the things that really impressed me were the lighting effects and character movement. I think many video games suffer from an overall smoothness in motion. Even games that use motion capture extensively (i.e. footbal games), still have a certain soul-less motion to them. Think of when you try walking underwater...the water constricts you motion so that you can't make subtle movements. Video games I feel are very similar. And the lighting effects in the game really added to the realism. Sure, the character models have really high polygon counts; but i've always been a much bigger fan of high quality rendering. I think Doom 3 could really usher in a new level or graphics.

  • litter the hallways with corpses? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:17PM (#4079046) Homepage
    You know, that's one thing I really hope it will have: hallways full of tons and tons of monster corpses to mark the trail of where you've been (or where are the places not to stand in the case of a deathmatch)

    Seriously, that's what was so cool about the Doom and Doom II engines; because they were sprite based, they could leave the corpses lying about. Most polygon based shooters don't do that. I supposed some realistic ones might, but those aren't the ones that send hoardes of bad guys to be mowed down like wheat in the first place.

    So assuming they "have" to go full-Polygon, I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...
    • Or rats/big bugs that come and gradually eat away the fallen bodies. They don't need to attack you, but you could see how long something had been there by how large the corpse is, and how many scavengers are on/in it. eww.

      I can't wait. Will this run on my Pentium 60?

    • hallways full of tons and tons of monster corpses to mark the trail of where you've been

      Play Halo. Dozens of enemies at once, many of them clever, all of them messy and bloody when they die. They leave not just corpses, but blood stains, too. Yum.

      I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...

      There's an easy way to do beautiful, complex monster models and still have the corpses: use fewer polygons in the corpse models. They already use fewer polys in models viewed from a distance (levels of detail, or LOD), so why not scale back corpse complexity, too?

      • Cool, and the bodies stick around?

        Dang, if only I wasn't such a Nintendo fanboy ;-)

        Still (and not get into too much console advocacy here) that would be the only game I'd be getting the system for. As opposed to Nintendo, where there's maybe 6 or 7 games I bought the system for. (And still waiting for 4 or 5 of those)
  • Man those graphics are killer. As far as game innovation, since it's a retelling of the original DOOM storyline, I would imagine that it's much more immersive, like Deus Ex or System Shock 2.

    That imp(?) looks a lot more threatening then the old scaled jpegs from back in the day..

    /me patiently awaiting Sept 15th when I can go get a Radeon 9700...

  • urge to kill, rising!

  • Hopefully it will be as good (Score:4, Funny)

    by twocents ( 310492 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:19PM (#4079070)
    as the book based on the software titled: Knee-Deep in the Dead. Now that was a classic piece of fiction! It somehow captured the essence of moving forward, shooting, dodging, shooting again, and picking things up off of the floor.
  • Played JK2: Jedi Outcast? While it's your basic first person shooter for the first 3 levels, once Kyle gets to use the Force, and consequently the Lightsaber, its a whole new ballgame. The lightsaber duels are pretty cool to watch, especially in the "duel" multiplayer mode. Plus you have a 3rd person perspective while using it, yet is seemlessly transitions into 1st person for using regular blasters.

    Also, what about Command and Conquer: Renegade? that was pretty innovative, in that it had (if the reviews are correct, I have never actually played it) modes where you could play a pretty close C&C multiplayer game as a FPS.

    And then theres SoF2, which has game types not usually seen (AFAIK) in other FPS (demoltion, to name one).

  • or do those screenshots (the D3 ones)look an awful lot like halflife? I mean, it is really sad if that is what the next generation looks like. Not to be cruel, but I was expected a lot of innovation (perhaps some good use of the new top rate pixel shaders from ATI and nVidia) from the 'new generation' of FPS. Or maybe they just cheated and generated the screenshots from a special halflife MOD...hehe...
  • But looks aren't everything...

    I remember when unreal first came out... Yes, it had the best eye candy at the time. But the game play pretty much sucked, and don't get me started on the multi-player. It got boring after the first few levels.. The only highlight of the game (other then the graphics) was the point when all the lights start going out and your stuck in a little hall way with the skajhoweveryouspellit.

    This sort of sounds like the direction more single player games are going now (take the very still popluar half life, NOLF, and most all of the games based on the quake3 engine), with scripted events. Which we already know that doom3 is going to have. I hope they go more into the direction of do whatever you want to do, just get the job done... Not like you have to use some switch in some hidden room to kill so and so monster...

    Since I brought up half life, I also herd that they aren't going to tweak the multi-player much for this installment... I don't know about everyone else, but the multi-player support in doom was one of the best features of the game. Look at half life for instance. Do you think people would still be playing or even buying a game almost 4 years old, if all they could really do is play single player? I bet most people have never even played single player half life. I really didn't like the direction they went with quake3/ta. If I want to play human like players, why don't I just go online and play human players?!? The single player modes were pretty lame in that respect, don't waste my hard drive space with this ai crap...

    Don't get me wrong, I'm a very loyal id fan(I own them all but the orignal doom, since ult doom includes it :D). I just hope they don't get influenced by the direction the gaming industry has been going on about lately. They either want to focus on the single player, or multi-player game only. To do it right, you've got to get both balanced imo...

    In any case, I still can't wait to satisfied my sweet tooth for eye candy :D

  • That *little something* still missing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmccarty ( 152630 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @02:38PM (#4079125)
    Somewhere along the FPS industry's quest to make the photorealistic game, there are still two items in the 3D world that have never looked better than the old side-scrolling, sprite-based games:
    • Hard polygonal edges
    • Interactions between models and structures

    Hard Polygonal Edges
    It doesn't matter if the fingers are as round as a triangle or as round as a dodecahedron: it still doesn't look round. What the industry doesn't seem to realize is that the brain is much better at interpolating the details of a fuzzy image than Nvidia is at displaying a kazillion pixels at a gajillion frames per second. The cell structure of animals, humans and whatever twisted monsters come out of the minds of modelers these days should not look like they were drawn on graph paper, from point to point. Whether a face is displayed using 30 polygons or 3,000, there's still the awkward-looking, jagged edges and connections that the use of polygons dictate.

    Interactions between models and structures
    I'm tired of watching models claw their way across the ground with their feet sliding as if they were a hooved animal walking on butter in a country with a gravity coefficient of 0.5. I've not yet seen a game that shows REALISTIC movement of 3D models. At least in Doom, when the imps were clawing the walls, they were obscured enough that my mind could make up for the lack of detail. But the basic problem of "interacting" things that move vs. things that don't has never been solved very well.

    It's the details that really count. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great architect, when told by a frustrated subordinate, "The Devil's in the details!" cooly responded, "No. God is in the details." Details make or break the project. The last 10% of a project--the details part--usually takes as much effort as the first 90%. Perfection is impossible to attain, but to me it's perfectly obvious that a great game is complete when the details are properly completed.

    Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a realistic-looking lifeform that doesn't slide across the room.

    • Re:That *little something* still missing (Score:5, Funny)

      by G-funk ( 22712 ) <josh@gfunk007.com> on Thursday August 15, 2002 @08:24PM (#4080247) Homepage Journal
      Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a realistic-looking lifeform that doesn't slide across the room.

      Get the house carpeted, and trade in your cat for a dog.
    • What's your view of that, then?

      It's an interesting mix of high poly and low poly. Then there's the fact that the monsters walk, not slide :)
    • Doom3 looks like it has a full physics/sound effects engine. I was lucky enough to see the ingame booth-demo at Quake Con this year. First of all, Doom3 really will kick it up a notch as far as engines go. Second of all, during several points in the *entirely rendered on the fly* demo, they had swinging, flashing, multicolored, multi-angle lights (complete with self-shadowing bump-mapped, reflected and distorted into the glass that you're looking into enemy model/polygons). But also, remember those big burly monsters with the chainsaws in Quake1? The demo player shot one with a big shotgun while he was at the top of the stairs, and the guy's head knocked on the floor, rolled over a little bit, neck deformed, legs moved, etc. as he slid and *rolled* (with realistic looking torsion!) down the stairs. Empty barrels sound empty and bounce, ding, and dong realistically as they also fall down stairs. It'll be wild, and is definitely worth checking out. (hardware for the demo was 2.2ghz pentium, and the ATI 9700 (unreleased?) video card. Looked niice, and once again putting ID at the forefront of Why I Need to Upgrade my Computer(tm).

      --Robert
    • I don't understand what you are trying to say about hard polygonal edges?

      Polygons, decomposed into triangles, were chosen for a reason. What do you suggest?

      A gaussian blur pass over the image before it's put on the screen?

      Good lord. Imagine the headaches we'd all have after staring at that for a few hours.

      Justin Dubs

  • Nothing Matter to Me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @03:53PM (#4079251) Homepage
    You can tell me:

    1) It doesn't have a story line.
    2) I need a new PC to run it.
    3) It doesn't handle some graphical crap I don't understand.

    All I care about is the immersion. Do I feel like I am somewhere else. When Doom was released I felt that. The sounds, the sights, the gameplay all contributed to making you feel like you would die around the next corner.

    Fire up Doom ][ and if you feel your stomach quiver when you drop off a very high walkway into acid you'll know what I mean.

    I have a firm commitment from the CFO, read wife, that when Doom 3 comes out I get a brand new PC the next day. :-) I'm happy.

  • What all 3D games are really missing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xintegerx ( 557455 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @07:32PM (#4080037) Homepage
    is simple physics. FOR GOD SAKES If you are strafeing sideways and fire a ballistic weapon at a distant entryway, the "projectile" should propel not just forward but sideways, and end up MISSING the door.

    And if I'm riding the Half-Life train and jump up, the train SHOULD NEVER slide from under me. I should instead plop STRAIGHT back down in my seat (unless I bump into the ceiling or the train's speed changes.) How high I jumped doesn't matter. It's simple physics like this that would allow for NEW strategies and skills.

    This would be TRUE advancement because ALL games are missing this! (Even 360 games like the Descent(R) series) But yes, EVERY SINGLE GAMER would have to retrain their skills but why not! It'd be added realism that could be turned off with a real_weapon_physics switch for any multiplayer game...

    And Yes--one could still have "homing" missiles that fly to the exact spot your cursor was pointing at the time you pulled the trigger. (But even here, they wouldn't fly straight but at an ARC. The front of the projectile would try to point the opposite way of the sideway force, whipping the tail end back, etc.)
    • Most realistic physics causes the game to cease being fun. And that's what the entire point is after all.

      Most of what you mention is trivial to do. It's not a new graphics effect, it's just a minor calculation. And various designers have played around with more realistic physics models, only to discover that they made the game suck (this was mostly done around the Q2/Q3 timeframe, which well postdates Half-Life).

      A couple of specific points -- if you're going for real world physics, then your horizontal momentum is going to make nearly no difference to that rocket. It would put the aim off by a couple centimeters at most. Of course, we're playing with comic physics, where the players move nearly as fast as the projectiles, so it's another matter entirely at that point.

      As far as "real" space flight physics -- there was one game that implemented this. I don't recall the title anymore, because I played it once and said "wow, this sucks" -- because it did. It had a true vectoring physics model (sans gravity) where you had to counterthrust to cancel your momemntum. It was impossible to do dogfights, to fly anywhere, or get anything done. Could I have retrained myself? Sure. But it was too much of a pain in the ass, and just wasn't fun.

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