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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Doom 3 Programmer on OGG, Ultra, 60FPS Play 66

Posted by simoniker from the zoom-zoom dept.
Cryect writes "Appears that Doom 3 is making use of Ogg Vorbis to reduce memory usage for sounds. This comes from id programmer Robert Duffy's latest plan update where he says: 'When we started on memory optimization, most levels used between 80 and 100 megabytes of sound data. We made the choice to move to .OGG for quite a few sounds which effectively removed the problem for us.'" Duffy also comments on texture usage in 'Ultra' mode ("In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data") and framerate ("The game is capped at 60fps for normal game play. For render demos, like what was used for the HardOCP stuff, we run those at full tilt which is why you will see 60fps.")
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Doom 3 Programmer on OGG, Ultra, 60FPS Play More

Doom 3 Programmer on OGG, Ultra, 60FPS Play

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  • Cool (Score:4, Interesting)

    by I_Love_Pocky! ( 751171 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @06:59PM (#9807098)
    Does anyone know of any other high profile games using Ogg?

    • Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)

      by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @07:01PM (#9807115)
      The Unreal Tournaments, I believe.

      • Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)

        by MC Negro ( 780194 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @07:18PM (#9807258) Journal

        The Unreal Tournaments, I believe.
        You would be correct.

        From Vorbis website [vorbis.com] --
        I'm a developer. Why should I be interested?

        Epic Games (the makers of Unreal Tournament, et. al.) have used Vorbis in their games ever since releasing Unreal Tournament 2003 to compress game music without having per-game license fees sap profits from every game sold. Vorbis saves developers money by avoiding patent-license fees.

        Epic isn't alone; other Vorbis users include:

        * Crystal Dynamics (Soul Reaver 2, Blood Omen 2)
        * Croteam (Serious Sam: The Second Encounter)
        * Pyrogon (Candy Cruncher)
        * PopCap Games (Alchemy)
        * EA Games (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)
        • sweet, so not only did i get awesome games (2k3 and 2k4) i was supporting the use of Open source software without even knowing it.... though i should have guessed since Epic has been cool about alot of stuff (remove CD check in game patch a few months after release on both 2k3 and 2k4) and of course the great custom mutator interface

        • Re:Cool (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Kyouryuu ( 685884 )
          What's also remarkable is when you check out the size of some of Unreal Tournament 2003/2004's OGG files. Some are scarcely larger than a meg, but hold over 3 minutes of CD-quality music.
    • Doesn't Far Cry use Ogg as well?
    • Not quite "high profile", but Starshatter [starshatter.com] uses Oggs.

      More interesting I think is the number of games using Python, lua and other open source languages for scripting.
    • The best tacticshooter ever
      Operation Flashpoint [codemasters.com]
      uses ogg for all sound effects.

      Eagerly waiting for OPF2 coming out.
    • City of Heroes also uses ogg. The sounds folder contains .piggs, which are expandable into oggs. A thread (which can be found here [cityofheroes.com]) on the official City of Heroes boards discusses various methods of messing with these for the non-ogg-aware. Most welcome is the ability to get rid of the Targetting Drone and Forcefield sounds.

  • Wouldn't this add to the processor usage? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bergeron76 ( 176351 ) * on Monday July 26, 2004 @07:04PM (#9807139) Homepage
    If I'm not mistaken, doesn't this just shift the burden to the processor by adding more decoding time to it in exchange for memory savings?

  • Nitpicking (Score:1, Informative)

    by Oliver Lineham ( 12808 )
    OGG? What is OGG? I think these people mean Ogg. The developers themselves [vorbis.com] have decreed this, so give them a little respect.

    And how could Ogg possibly improve the size of their sounds? Ogg is a container format. I think they mean Vorbis [vorbis.com], the compression codec.

    I know I'm being anal retentive. I don't care.

    • Container format = Stupid (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hope Ogg isn't going to be the extension for both audio and video then. Because right now you can tell if a file is a sound file or a video file just by looking at it. It would be really stupid if people started distributing MOV files that were just sound encoded in a format that is the same as something that could be stored in a wav.
      • It already is being used for video. Look for the extension "ogm [google.com]"

      • Cool, is this ASF file I have here audio, or a video? Because apparently you can tell "just by looking at it." Never mind that nobody else can. :-)

        The truth is, file extensions mean DICK in the grand scheme of things. Operating systems should choose more intelligent ways to distinguish filetypes... it doesn't matter if you use metadata or a program like file(1), either option are better than using file extensions to leap to conclusions.

        And anyway, both audio and video open using the same application,

      • MOV is a container. It "contains" the metadata for the codecs (in addition to other information) and also contains the audio and video streams. It's possible to have a MOV file with only audio. Ogg is also a container. The audio in the Ogg file is called Vorbis. OGG containers can include video as well, which will most commonly be Theora based (off of the VP3 format) in addition to the Vorbis audio. OGM files are also containers, that typically have Divx video and Vorbis for audio (instead of the norm

  • Ogg is great for gaming (Score:5, Informative)

    by BillyBlaze ( 746775 ) <tomfelker@gmail.com> on Monday July 26, 2004 @07:16PM (#9807246)
    The Vorbis format really is a godsend for gamers, because in the game programming world, the roadblocks which otherwise hinder it are gone. For one, the no license fee argument becomes applicable - Vorbis doesn't help portable player makers much, because they have to support MP3 and WMA anyway. But since the consumer doesn't care what format game audio is in, programmers can go for a cheap (BSD licensed), easy (good APIs), and very good (high quality) solution without worrying about making the game less useful. Many games already use Ogg Vorbis, like UT2003/4 - here [xiph.org]'s a complete list. (Well, it would be there, if the Wiki was up.)

  • Here's a Related Question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <nahsei>> on Monday July 26, 2004 @07:21PM (#9807272) Homepage Journal
    Here's the question: Why don't game developers take care to run the game on a certain number of de-optimized systems and then release demos with those configurations as well?

    I mean, I think it would be nice to see exactly what the game looks like on the Min specs, and if recent games have proven anything, it ought to look incredible.

    I ran the UT2004 demo at what must have been hovering near the recommended mark (practically all the special spiffies were turned off), and the graphics still blew me away.

    If anything, this might convince me to buy the game or to upgrade hardware to "release" level, and it would also give people a *real* taste of what the game will look like.

    • Re:Here's a Related Question (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, I'd like to see this too. We've all seen screenshots of the high and/or ultra quality settings, and benchmarks for the latest ultra-expensive, bleeding edge systems. How about some info on what it'll look like on the systems us mortals have? Beyond the words "it'll look good and be playable", I mean.

    • Re:Here's a Related Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @08:24PM (#9807633)
      I think it would cause too much confusion : When people are blurring over reviews on sites : they don't tend to read all of the article, but skim over the screenies.

      Other than that, i think, as a developer, you would want the presentation of your product to be shown at its best. I do get your point, but I think demo's do quite a good , ifnot better job at determining if your rig is going to pull the game.

    • If you read the recent HardOCP article instead of just looking at the bench marks you'd see they do plan on making a "Doom3 hardware guide" in which they will (presumably) benchmark the game on a variety of available hardware.

    • More Related Questions (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I ran the UT2004 demo at what must have been hovering near the recommended mark (practically all the special spiffies were turned off), and the graphics still blew me away.

      This is completley true for me as well. I almost felt like I was getting something for free.

      Questions...

      Is it just me or are the developers of UT2004 not getting enough critical and community thanks for making a game that runs so well on crappy systems? I could be totally wrong, but it doesn't seem like they are. Methinks it's just
      • I have to agree with you, but I'm not convinced that digital extremes has done this by design, or at least that is a somewhat new mentality for them. Remember when Unreal came out? That game sold a LOT of first-gen 3D cards, because it NEEDED IT. It was a beast of a game in all ways at the time, really required bleeding edge hardware.

        Remember when Halflife came out shortly thereafter?
        It really doesn't get the credit it deserves in this area, totally playable fps that didn't look half bad - in software mode
    • This is what I found pretty cool about Ubi Soft [ubisoft.com]'s IL-2. It runs decently on not-so-super-duper-optimized gaming boxes with nice graphics in multiplayer.

      We've wondered whether the Russian coders super-duper trimmed down their code because they didn't have access to as high end workstations as a lot of western gamers.
  • Sounds like a sound card with 128MB of RAM and an Ogg Vorbis decoder would help with resource management significantly. Anything like this out there or on the horizon?
  • I'm still eager for D3 benchmarks on low and mid-end systems. Anyone knows of any? I'd love to know if it'll be playable on my FX5200.

  • Capped at 60 fps (Score:4, Informative)

    by zz99 ( 742545 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2004 @01:12AM (#9808855)
    "The game is capped at 60fps for normal game play. For render demos, like what was used for the HardOCP stuff, we run those at full tilt which is why you will see 60fps."

    This quote made no sense to me until I did RTFA, and realized that it was faulty. What really was written in the article was:
    "...which is why you will see > 60fps."
  • 500 MB???? EHEH .. i still remember when i bought 2 extra Mb for my 386@25Mhz so i could just play Doom1 in protected mode, in a small window ;) ...

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