Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

One more for Id tech 4...


Kiln

Recommended Posts

Human Head has been working on Prey 2 for some time, it's an Id tech engine game but not ID 5 and not due out until 2012. (See the comment in italics)

 

 

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/115/1155349p1.html

 

 

I don't do facebook but there's apparently more here:

 

 

http://facebook.com/prey2

 

 

Drag - I figure this is pretty Dark Mod related so I'll post here, if not feel free to move it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From my understanding, the only thing holding back idtech4 from going open source at this point is the release of Rage. Prey 2 is supposed to be using a 'heavily' modified version of idtech4, so open sourcing the original D3 version of the code doesn't really have much effect on Prey 2.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The neat thing is we might get a preview of what is possible with Id Tech 4 when you can modify the renderer. I know that the original Prey broke the unified shader system a little to let certain shaders be processed only in specific scenarios. (One of JC Denton, Rebb, and Sikkpin's greatest frustrations with Id tech 4 if I recall correctly).

 

It'll be interesting if the expand on this concept and make the system even more modular. Will they keep shadow-volumes but perhaps use deferred shading? Or will they use Shadow Maps like Wolfenstein and leave the renderer alone mostly?

 

The big thing that keeps being brought-up is Megatexture but I have a feeling that Human Head aren't as interested in that as Splash Damage are with Brink. (Or there would be more noise about Megatexture in the Prey 2 press material we've seen thus far?)

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

No idea, all I get is:

 

"This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as determined by the video uploader."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

lol at the top rated comment:

 

it was like watching an amateur porno movie for the frist minutes

 

I've said it before, but I think I'll be happy when engines reach a performance ceiling in all the major systems -- lighting, textures, shadows, poly pushing, sound prop -- so games start becoming more about great game design and that's where all the resources go, rather than spending more time on systemic improvements beyond the point you can even physically tell it's getting better. You could still work on them, of course, but then it's just tweaking this way or that for aesthetic reasons. There's not an engine that will come 6 months later that would be any fundamentally different. We're not quite there yet, but we're getting closer.

 

(Then I hope that engine gets open sourced and it becomes the de facto standard in game-making, so we can all work on it and it's all about time spent on assets and game design and making the best game you can dream up. But that's another issue.)

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

maybe when moore's law finally calls it quits, eh?

 

It doesn't have to be quite *that* far. I'm sure they'll still be able to make technical improvements for a long time to come. But I just imagine there's a point where no matter how much extra power they pump into it, it will be less and less noticeable how different it even is ... not as a technical limitation but at the limits of our own eyes and brains. Moore's law can happily keep trucking along after that point, but games won't be looking much better than they already are.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ATI demonstrated film quality Image Based lighting on their 5000 series cards for one high-poly human head a year and a half ago. If that can be expanded to the amount of AI and world geometry as in a game like Assassin's Creed then by most people's definition that is real-time photo-realism.

 

If we extrapolate 1.5x performance jump per GPU generation per year (the performance jumps have slowed due to process shrink problems lately). And we presume that a 6970 is about 2x a 5870:

 

2 heads (now)

 

then

 

13yrs later 519 heads (probably enough with LOD and tricks to get to Assassin's Creed world density)

 

But this is not counting the possible double revolutions of Megatexture and Mega-Voxel foreshortening this process.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://agtb.wordpre...%E2% 80%99s-law/

 

Everyone knows Moore's Law – a prediction made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the density of transistors in integrated circuits would continue to double every 1 to 2 years. (…) Even more remarkable – and even less widely understood – is that in many areas, performance gains due to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased processor speed.

 

The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It's difficult to quantify the improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time.

 

In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure the power increases. But with game development taking 2+yrs, rarely catering to the high-end and almost never focusing on the PC, we are very unlikely to see the hardware utilized to its full potential very often :(

-Trunks0

Asus Maximus Formula(X38) - Intel Core2Quad 8400 @ 3.2Ghz - 4Gb PC2-6400 OCZ Gold XTC/Corsair XMS2(@800mhz) -

16X8X16 DL 8X Pioneer DVR-111D DL DVD±RW - 320GB HD(Seagate 7200.10) - 640Gb Westerm Digital w/16Mb Cache -

2 x Crossfired PowerColor Radeon HD 5770's - Audigy2 - Windows 7 64

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I think we're at least 10 years away from having games with near photo-realistic graphics. Look how long it took to be able to render the original Toy Story in real-time on a high-end PC.

 

Imagine a Thief game with that level of detail, lighting and shadows with an ultra-fine level of precision, nuance and granularity; Hammerite cathedrals that are so real you can almost smell the incense burning, sigh... :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think photorealistic graphics are a red herring. Sure, they would be very pretty to look at... and that's about as far as they go. Graphics quality does not make or break atmosphere, in my opinion. Just look at thief - you exist in a world of walking chess pieces, and it's loads more atmospheric than most cutting-edge games today. I'm more excited about advancements that open up new level-design possibilities, like the large, densely-populated worlds of Assassin's Creed.

 

But honestly, I think all you need are the basics in order to create the best possible atmosphere - thief is a perfect example. And judging by how un-atmospheric most AAA games are (in my opinion), better graphics aren't much of a crutch. It's all about level design and interactive storytelling. I mean, you can get utterly drawn into the world of a paper roleplaying game or a book, with no visuals at all.

 

Also, we may already be past the point of diminishing returns, in terms of graphics quality and atmosphere. The last hurdle to suspension of disbelief dwarfs all graphical flaws in terms of its detrimental effect on immersion. Of course, that last hurdle is the fact you're sitting in a chair watching the world on a screen, and not, you know, actually there walking around in it. When I think about incremental improvements to graphics, I imagine someone trying get over a castle wall by standing on the retail box for a graphics card, then standing on a slightly larger graphics-card box, then a slightly larger graphics-card box... Seriously, would the same dark mod mission be hugely more immersive even if the graphics were 100% photorealistic?

 

The only way the player is ever going to get over that wall is if the game engages their imagination and makes them transcend the purely visual experience. Then it's as if they can fly into the air - there are no technical limits to how much they can suspend disbelief using their imagination. Of the different hooks drawing the player into the game world, the visual hook is nowhere near as powerful as when the player meaningfully interacts with the story, in my opinion.

Edited by eigenface
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think photorealistic graphics are a red herring. Sure, they would be very pretty to look at... and that's about as far as they go. Graphics quality does not make or break atmosphere, in my opinion.

 

My original point wasn't wishing for photorealistic graphics per se, but a point where the engine arms race fades from relevance, and it becomes a matter of making the best game on a "standard" or "universal" tech.

 

As it is now, like if you're an enthusiastic modding crowd like us, by the time you really get your game up and running you're already pushing into the next generation of engines and it's looking and feeling a bit dated. If it's a great game (as ours is) then that's fine, don't get me wrong. But in 10-15 years or whenever, once engines have reached the limits of photorealism, you know if you make a game on it, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years later it will still be just as photorealistic, and you can keep working on that same engine without worrying some later engine is going to come 5 years later and make it look dated. (Edit: Actually I was thinking more about losing its following than looking dated per se. People stop building on dated engines. Stop the dating, then your engine and game and support can last. That's the theory anyway.)

 

Other engines and new tech can still come out, but then they're just making the same-looking assets and gameplay in different ways. The end of waiting out engine generations, and a standard game engine that becomes like the universal standard from then on, that's what I was thinking about -- like the perspective techniques of post-Raphael painters or the Dutch masters; they're the same now as then because the "tech" is settled. Or no one can make a "better" oil painting than what they could already do by the Renaissance period, but of course there has been great variation and development in styles and techniques. I'm thinking about games reaching that kind of point, where everyone has the same universal-potential canvas and brush (engine), but it's up to what style and design you build on it. Edit: So I'm not actually really disagreeing with your general point either.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Music is like that now - no such thing as more accurate/realistic sounding music technology any more, we reached perfection maybe ten to twenty years ago

shadowdark50.gif keep50.gif
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My original point wasn't wishing for photorealistic graphics per se, but a point where the engine arms race fades from relevance, and it becomes a matter of making the best game on a "standard" or "universal" tech.

 

That would be cool. In the meantime though, I wonder if there's a way to circumvent the race altogether. I've been thinking about this for a while. In a paper RPG, the DM can draw a crude sketch of a dungeon map or a dragon or a piece of equipment, and the players don't say "Yuck, what terrible graphics." They know the sketch isn't supposed to look real at all - it just prompts them to imagine the real-life version. Quite immersive worlds can be created this way.

 

What if there's an equivalent for video games? It could be something as simple as a post-process effect like the "chalk and charcoal" filter from photoshop, which makes the screen look like a crude drawing. I wonder, as the game progressed, would this continue to be jarring, or remain a mere novelty, or would the player eventually start seeing the game like the DM's sketch, that is, as a springboard for imagination? Would they start imagining how the game world would look "in real life" - more photorealistc than (current) game engines can render?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm 100% in agreement with eigenface's posts, but that may be because I also come from a P&P roleplaying background. I also get what demagogue is saying, and believe the respective points aren't contradictory. Transcending simple graphical sophistication will be an important milestone in computer game design. Sometimes I think we are getting close to that point, since there is a lot of experimentation even in mainstream titles -- Team Fortress, for example, has a stylised look instead of striving for photorealism, and even if you look at DX3, it is trying to do something of its own with the gold-and-black colour scheme. Of course, there is significant inertia in thinking due to the immense costs of modern game development (something that makes computer games more like Hollywood superproductions than paintings), but, especially as "people who play computer games" become a more and more diverse demographic WRT age, sex and so on, there is bound to be a change in thinking towards recognising that high-budget photorealism is only one of possible approaches. Maybe the most lucrative one, but not the only one.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@eigenface, there's an indie game, the name of it is slipping my memory now, where there's like a sandbox world and one game-master, and then other players are just in the world, and the GM triggers events for all the other players to see. (So the GM's screen has all these icons for summoning objects, speaking as NPCs, triggering events, etc, but all the players see are the objects, NPCs, & events themselves.) It's good for a kind of free story telling or role playing, and since the GM is in control of everything with a free hand, it ends up being like a P&P role-playing kind of experience, What the GM says is the final rule, and the world and storytelling can be much richer and dynamic than any real game could ever handle. You can say anything you want to an NPC and it will always give a meaningful response! First time I saw that (not knowing the GM behind it), I was literally stunned. I watched a video of it; it could be polished, it's kind of coloring-book style now; but all the pieces are there to do the kind of thing you're talking about.

 

Wish I could remember the name now. Might be cool if they could rig that into a 3D open world too.

 

Edit: Aside: have you guys ever tried Matrix Gaming? It's a style of F2F role playing that's like free storytelling, and the game part is a judge measuring the probability of each branch suggestion and players roll the dice. (Examples of actual games.) Just occurred to me it might work pretty well in this indie game as the platform.

 

Edit2: I remembered. It's called Sleep is Death, download.

 

.......................

 

Komag also got some of my feeling. I use the same Paint Shop today that I got from like 2002, and it doesn't really matter since the formats are standardized; same with Audacity & Frooty Loops, and my video editor, less so modeling & animation. But for an open FPS game engine, it's still very much a moving target every year.

 

Now some games I feel like I can build on forever ... like Operational Art of War III or Steel Panthers MBT... Since they're war games where it's just about moving icons around. They're pretty much at an apex as they are now to simulate any modern battle scenario you'd want, the first at the operational level, the other at the tactical level. You could add features and improve AI, but you can hardly improve the basic format. Or other engines I have, GNU chess, GNU Go, GNU backgammon, Vassal or Cyberboard boardgames, TADS Interactive Fiction... those might stay on my harddrive forever and they'll always get the job done. I guess you could say the same about C++ and Java, Flash to an extent. But there isn't an FPS engine there yet. I may stick with Doom3 & TDM for a long time though, as it goes open source.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd say if there is one characteristic that would make a less advanced engine more immersive than a newer engine is animation.

 

Unfortunately, the TDM team appears to be severely short-handed on animators. This is the same thing that Solarspace (from Arx - End of the Sun) has complained about... the lack of a large pool of Doom 3 animation experts.

 

Doom 3 has a decent animation framework as evidenced by the motion-captured player animations when in 3rd person mode. But it is a daunting to learn compared to other engines from what I've heard and animation is another aspect where Doom 3 is more CPU heavy compared to current engines with GPU skinning (etc).

 

Still, I think the sheer library size of Thief's animation collections rather than their actual quality is what lends Thief such an emotional connection. When the TDM animation library has been built-up further, I think it will easily be seen as more convincing than Thief's both visually and emotionally.

 

Just look at a puppet show as precedent. If the puppeteer is really good, no matter how primitive the marionette people will connect with the performance and characters.

 

~~~~~~~

 

With regard to a "sketch post-process shader", this is probably feasible to some degree but no matter how abstracted if the underlying poly-count is relatively low the lack of natural silhouette curves will spoil the aesthetic. I have the same issue with game "Dragon's Lair 3D" it is a 3D toon-shader game that tries to capture the look of the LaserDisk arcade original but was made at least a generation too soon (XBOX, GC, PS2) so the underlying models are too low-poly and the effect is spoiled.

 

I suppose, however, if combined with LOD you could do something like:

 

1) Up close, really detailed artistic sketch look

2) Far away, scribbles and blur representing a typical vague rough sketch made by an artist. (Ultra low-poly LOD models).

 

For my own curiosity, I'd like to see a game that looks like a real-time impressionist painting but I think the hardware is still too weak to do that in real-time.

 

I don't think that TDM really suffers from the typical visual asymmetry of many modern games where elements have either too much realism or not enough and there is a poorly managed variety of visual consistency. TDM really just needs more of what it already has. The need to stylize TDM to keep it timeless looking has already been mitigated by good art direction. We just need more mappers that know how to show-off what can be done with what TDM has in it's arsenal. Those old Dromed masters need to visit... ;)

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer  »  DeTeEff

      I've updated the articles for your FMs and your author category at the wiki. Your newer nickname (DeTeEff) now comes first, and the one in parentheses is your older nickname (Fieldmedic). Just to avoid confusing people who played your FMs years ago and remember your older nickname. I've added a wiki article for your latest FM, Who Watches the Watcher?, as part of my current updating efforts. Unless I overlooked something, you have five different FMs so far.
      · 0 replies
    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
×
×
  • Create New...