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Doom Eternal / id Tech 7


jaxa

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I am really excited for Doom Eternal. Doom (2016) was amazing, mostly because of its soundtrack and the way it makes you feel while playing the game. I am expecting it to get even better with Doom Eternal, since the composer, Mick Gordon, assembled a whole metal choir to push the boundaries of this unique type of music even further. Soundtrack aside, the new grapling hook and dash mechanics are bound to make the experience even more intense!!

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Of all idsoftware games (made by or published) that I played, I've yet to finish Doom 2016 one time, just has a example I played Doom 3 start to finish a gazillion times, Prey 1 and quake 4, three or four times, Rage 1 two times, wolfenstein 2004 two times has well, etc. I don't know but the new Doom is just not appealing to me. And what is really strange is that I liked the Serious Sam and Painkiller games...perhaps this shows how old i'm really becoming, my attention span for some games is just limited. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

So yeah, Doom Eternal is out and as expected, it is FREAKIN' AMAZING!!! The new precision shots (take out critical parts of your opponent to weaken him), the enhanced movement set (dashes, bar hops, grapling hook) and the Flamethrower mechanics (regain armor) together with the already previously implemented glory kills (regain health) and chainsaw (regain ammo) create a really nice flow. The game also clearly states which weapons work well in what situations, so you quickly become a gun juggling super slayer.

It feels unbelievably rewarding to finally beat an optional slayer challenge on the highest difficulty.

And the soundtrack is also crazy good! For me, this is a strong game of the year contender.

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On 3/6/2020 at 4:04 PM, HMart said:

Of all idsoftware games (made by or published) that I played, I've yet to finish Doom 2016 one time, just has a example I played Doom 3 start to finish a gazillion times, Prey 1 and quake 4, three or four times, Rage 1 two times, wolfenstein 2004 two times has well, etc. I don't know but the new Doom is just not appealing to me. And what is really strange is that I liked the Serious Sam and Painkiller games...perhaps this shows how old i'm really becoming, my attention span for some games is just limited. 

Doom and Doom Eternal are rather modern games. With all the bad stuff I relate with them. Dunno, games really changed, from something challenging, relevant (like... no tasks which repeat themselves for 100 times, and all feel the same...), with good ideas around every corner, to professional products, which are being developed according to a static master plan, to recoup the hundreds of million $ production costs.

Don't want to sound too negative, I still enjoy some modern games too, and, Doom is alright really, for me. But, it's pretty apparent what they did there, and what all the others do. It just kills creativity. Which is a shame, because, visually, and also sound technically, those games are really absolutely awesome. Just a shame that it's always the shiny surface, and when you dig deeper, you find nothing but a black hole underneath it.

Edited by chakkman
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Doom and Doom Eternal are about it's gameplay mechanics just as Doom 1 and 2 were. Other than that, there is really nothing special about any Doom game.

The mechanics of Doom Eternal are brilliant and add a lot of depth to an otherwise rather stale shooter-genre.

And if you think that Doom Eternal is not challenging, you clearly haven't tried it on its highest difficulty. 😉

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30 minutes ago, STiFU said:

Doom and Doom Eternal are about it's gameplay mechanics just as Doom 1 and 2 were.

Hmmm... glory kills, RPG elements, weapon upgrades? ;)

Not that I played Doom 1 and 2 much, back in the days... only ever played the first few levels, I think. I still stick to my statement about Doom and Doom Eternal being modern games, though. They are, of course. The only thing oldschool I feel about them is the rather fast action gameplay. In contrast to the rather slow, more horror themed gameplay of Doom 3.

Edited by chakkman
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39 minutes ago, duzenko said:

You can't 'stream' .jpg textures :)

Yeah, I know. The way I understand it, you'd need Mipmaps and stream the higher resolution mipmaps later. I just figured you might be interested in this.

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14 hours ago, STiFU said:

A mostly technical review about Doom Eternal and Id Tech 7 and why that engine is so amazing. @stgatilov @duzenko there is also a lot of detail about their texture and LOD streaming and why it is so crazy fast.

Yeah, looking at this all is a bit sad, especially when you compare idStudio to Radiant. Although looking closer, it seems that they did not drop their old habits completely... like if some of this is still rooted in idTech4 and earlier.

I wonder if this engine still uses brushes 😄 Nothing yet made me think otherwise: they can still use brushes for basic level structure, and then use it for high-level culling. They showed editing geometric detail in realtime, but it does not contradict anything. The brushes can be used only for large hard walls, but they did not show realtime editing of map layout on global scale.

1 hour ago, duzenko said:

You can't 'stream' .jpg textures :)

Why not? It is possible to start loading and decoding jpg file prematurely in background, and then drop it from memory when you are far away from it (or based on other criteria).
It is of course less efficient than taking raw texture data and pushing it to GPU. And it is hard to do any LOD, since the whole image must be kept in memory.

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6 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Why not? It is possible to start loading and decoding jpg file prematurely in background, and then drop it from memory when you are far away from it (or based on other criteria).

It is of course less efficient than taking raw texture data and pushing it to GPU. And it is hard to do any LOD, since the whole image must be kept in memory.

Texture upload takes a long time when source format is RGBA but internal is compressed

It has to happen on the main thread

So you either drop frames when textures need to load or defer loading textures for later frames which may cause missing textures for a few seconds

Remember texture loading issues in Rage?

Yet, if you need to load many textures from a spinning drive then even precompressing won't help you :(

I was thinking about allowing to specify a temporary loading placeholder color but there's too many materials and nobody is really interested in it

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10 hours ago, duzenko said:

Texture upload takes a long time when source format is RGBA but internal is compressed
It has to happen on the main thread
So you either drop frames when textures need to load or defer loading textures for later frames which may cause missing textures for a few seconds

It is possible to compress on CPU with SSE/AVX.
Uploading a texture takes time anyway, so texture streaming usually goes through some sort of async stuff like PBO, to avoid locking main thread.

Quote

Remember texture loading issues in Rage?

As far as I remember the game did not block or lag, it just showed low-resolution textures when you rotate camera (although I did not notice it when I played, perhaps I tweaked some config to avoid the issue). That's why the best idea is to start loading assets beforehand, so that you can show them in full glory when the time comes. All those delay-loading techniques will inevitably cause popping.

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  • 1 month later...

So I hear that id has dropped the megatexture approach despite it becoming more feasible with the next-gen consoles (using very fast SSDs and dedicated I/O features that are like adding mulitple cores beyond the nominal 8x Zen 2 core count found in both XSX and PS5).

Next-Gen SSD Tech Could Mean the Resurgence of Megatextures Technique, Says Splash Damage VP of Tech

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Interestingly, though, id Software just finished moving away from it with the brand new id Tech 7 engine, in an attempt to increase texture fidelity. Here's what DOOM Eternal Executive Producer Marty Stratton recently said ahead of the game's launch:

We really completed the departure from Megatextures, which allowed us to do more instance geometry, more instance texture tiling textures, which also allowed us to have higher fidelity texture. So for the first time, I would say we've really gotten away from that. I think in the last several games, you could criticize our texture fidelity to be a little blurry. And I think DOOM Eternal is the first one where we really are again at the top of the heap when it comes to texture fidelity.

Could Megatextures really make a comeback now that hardware has caught up with Carmack's original vision? Not only are the SSDs in PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X much faster, both consoles also feature a fully customized Input/Output interface and onboard compression/decompression blocks whose purpose is to virtually eliminate any run-time decompression overhead. The PS5 supports both zlib and the slightly faster Oodle Kraken protocol from RAD Game Tools, while the Xbox Series X supports zlib for general textures and a new, reportedly very fast compression system called BCPack, tailored specifically to handle GPU textures.

All of this may do wonders for a revised Megatextures-like technique. Will any major studio make this bet, though? Time will tell, but the possibility is certainly intriguing.

 

Inside PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech that deliver Sony's next-gen vision

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The controller supports hardware decompression for the industry-standard ZLIB, but also the new Kraken format from RAD Game Tools, which offers an additional 10 per cent of compression efficiency. The bottom line? 5.5GBs of bandwidth translates into an effective eight or nine gigabytes per second fed into the system. "By the way, in terms of performance, that custom decompressor equates to nine of our Zen 2 cores, that's what it would take to decompress the Kraken stream with a conventional CPU," Cerny reveals.

A dedicated DMA controller (equivalent to one or two Zen 2 cores in performance terms) directs data to where it needs to be, while two dedicated, custom processors handle I/O and memory mapping. On top of that, coherency engines operate as housekeepers of sorts.

 

 

Edited by jaxa
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The biggest downsides to megatexture was the massive compile times whenever they wanted to make even small changes.

I remember Carmack saying that they have a server farm just for doing the megatexture work and it still take several minutes. A personal computer would take hours or days.

And that's with the huge downscale in image quality they compromised on with Rage.

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I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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I always thought megatexture was bit too extreme approach. I know that engines prefer as few textures as possible, and there's nothing wrong with making texture atlases for several models per UV space, I do that myself as often as possible. But I wouldn't want to work with megatextures in the long run, the balancing act most engines use today is an okay compromise IMO.

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On 5/30/2020 at 12:28 PM, The Black Arrow said:

This is the best engine I've seen in 2020, the game is good too but...Not replayable at all, sadly.

Guess it's part of the "new games" these days; All fun, not replayability.

I'm just glad I still enjoy the old Doom and Thief.

I never understood why games must have this replayability factor? What's wrong with an awesome one-time experience (especially so for shooters)? Take survival-exploration game "The Outer Wilds" for instance. An absolutely brilliant game (that every serious gamer should play), but the 2nd or even 3rd playthrough of it will never be as magical as the first one, not by a long shot.

That being said, I feel like Doom Eternal actually offers quite a bit of replayability. There is so much to master in this game. If you haven't finished it on Nightmare yet, then you haven't really experienced the game at its fullest potential. And if you've done that, you can still try your hand at Ultra-Nightmare, i.e., highest difficulty and perma-death. I will definitely do another Nightmare-Run eventually, but Ultra-Nightmare is too much for me, I think.

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13 minutes ago, STiFU said:

I never understood why games must have this replayability factor? What's wrong with an awesome one-time experience (especially so for shooters)?

Never had any problems with one-time games, really. If it fits the purpose, like the story, type of gameplay, or what authors wanted to say in general, then it's fine for me. I gladly pay for 4-hour games that know exactly what they want to say in given amount of time, than titles that add replayability options or some ingame chores just for the sake of the length (hello Ubisoft).

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On 6/3/2020 at 11:37 AM, STiFU said:

I never understood why games must have this replayability factor? What's wrong with an awesome one-time experience (especially so for shooters)? Take survival-exploration game "The Outer Wilds" for instance. An absolutely brilliant game (that every serious gamer should play), but the 2nd or even 3rd playthrough of it will never be as magical as the first one, not by a long shot.

I also agree. With the limited time you have as an adult, I usually play games only once anyway. And then I rather have a great game with the intention of only being played once than a game that requires several runs to expereince it wholly. The same is true for length. I rather play a great but short game than a mediocre (or right now even good) game that requires me to play it for 100s of hours. The ingame chores for gamelength sake that peter_spy mentioned make it even worse. I often have completionist tendencies, which I have to actively repress in these cases.

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