Doom 3 Outdated?

[sparhawk]

I was looking at our moddb entry and I saw some comment that I found pretty strange.

 

By -Alone_In_The_Dark | Sat 11th Feb, 2006 @ 6:11:57am

Doom 3 is pretty dated, so it's naturally cheap, you can get it for like 13$ here where i live...

 

Maybe this is refering to the game itself, because it already seem to be in the bargain bin. Apparently it didn't sell so well, because HL2 is still quite expensive. If this is related to the engine though, then I'm pretty stunned. Do people consider D3 already to be outdated?

[New Horizon]

I was looking at our moddb entry and I saw some comment that I found pretty strange.

Maybe this is refering to the game itself, because it already seem to be in the bargain bin. Apparently it didn't sell so well, because HL2 is still quite expensive. If this is related to the engine though, then I'm pretty stunned. Do people consider D3 already to be outdated?

 

I'm not too concerned. For some, a week old game is considered 'dated'.

[Fingernail]

It's not outdated.

 

The only thing is that people see all these high-quality trailers for stuff like the UT3 engine and CryEngine 2 and all sorts of other games that won't be released for months, and they think that that is the future.

 

Well, it is, but everyone without a system capable will be pretty fucked; Unreal 3 probably won't look much better than Doom 3 on the average system these days.

 

The game itself was outdated the day of release

[Gildoran]

As far as I'm concerned, there's only two things that could make the D3 engine be considered outdated: the lack of real depth-sorting and inability to use fragment shaders except as post-process effects. (I might be wrong about this last limitation) The lack of depth-sorting makes it pretty much impossible to do any kind of realistic windows if the player can see one through another. Applying fragment shaders as post process effects makes it impossible to do realistic water without obvious graphical glitches.

 

Aside from those two major deficits, I really love the D3 engine, and I think it can scale up quite nicely as time goes on.

[SneaksieDave]

According to JC, it has sold quite well from the outset, at least well enough for him. I don't have the direct quote, but he said Armadillo (aerospace program) is costing him a lot, so it's a good thing that D3 is selling a lot of units. Also, id products tend to sell well enough that,

 

1. they employ very little copy protection, and

2. they give the source away and go on with further development down the road - this alone ensures the game isn't, and won't be dated

 

I wouldn't let the fact that something is available cheap somewhere worry you. HL2 still costs a lot because Valve are controlling the price instead of a publisher. I'll just throw in the fact that they are also liars, saying that avoiding a publisher would reduce the price - what happened to that, Gabe, did ya forget that, Gabe?

[drumple]

i dont see the d3 engine as being outdated, i mean its pretty cheap to buy here in winnipeg also, but i think

that for most gamers its the fps style thats getting outdated. while games like hl2, fear, cod2 are fps also, but

its the style of thier gameplay and storylines that made them shine and keep the genre alive.

 

i was all hyped when d3 was to be released, and when i got it and went about 10 lvl's in.. it got boring pretty

quick. all repetitve with no end in site. reminded me of the very first castle wolfenstein games when they

came out, very enjoyable for a time, but then the repetive nature kicked in. its things like great story lines,

new twists and turns that draw people into the game, and thats the main reason i loved thief so much. when

it first came out, i had never seen a game like that with so many enjoyable aspects.

 

as for the d3 engine itself, its a very powerful engine, with a few more years in it to go, before i would consider

it outdated.

[sparhawk]

pplying fragment shaders as post process effects makes it impossible to do realistic water without obvious graphical glitches.

 

That's strange though, because we have pretty realistic water. Including mirroring. Of course light fracture is not supporte, don't know if you mean this though.

 

Aside from those two major deficits, I really love the D3 engine, and I think it can scale up quite nicely as time goes on.

 

Don't know about other engines, but at least form the coding and modding I have done so far for it, I really like it.

[sparhawk]

I wouldn't let the fact that something is available cheap somewhere worry you.

 

Oh, I'm not worried because of that. I'm just surprised, because the engine is now released little more than one year, and it seems people already consider it outadet. Not this particular guy, that was just the spark that caused me to write the posting.

 

HL2 still costs a lot because Valve are controlling the price instead of a publisher.

 

The price is dictated by the market. If a game sells bad it will be sonner in the bin then others. So that HL2 can still be sold at high price means that it is indeed sold pretty well and continues. Not sure though, because I seem to remember that I read in the last Gamestar issue that it is alos going to the bin now. I totally forgot about this. Just remembered this because they complained that Steam is not removed now.

 

I'll just throw in the fact that they are also liars, saying that avoiding a publisher would reduce the price - what happened to that, Gabe, did ya forget that, Gabe?

 

Did you EVER see a copyprotection mechanism that worked well and caused prices to drop? We heard the same for CDs, for DVDs and we hear it all the time. "If people wouldn't pirate we could sell at lower prices." but when CDs came out it was claimed that the previous titles had to be recovered so the prices couldn't drop. That's just a marketing crap to give people a bad feeling.

[sparhawk]

i was all hyped when d3 was to be released, and when i got it and went about 10 lvl's in.. it got boring pretty

quick. all repetitve with no end in site. reminded me of the very first castle wolfenstein games when they

came out, very enjoyable for a time, but then the repetive nature kicked in.

 

Same for me. I played it though in god mode though, because I wanted to see if there are some effects usefull for our mod. The gameitself was pretty boring though.

 

its things like great story lines, new twists and turns that draw people into the game, and thats the main reason i loved thief so much. when it first came out, i had never seen a game like that with so many enjoyable aspects.

 

Yeah. That was the reason why I liked HL2 as well. Even though I don't support steam and for that reason wont buy the game, I played it through. And as a game it was much more enjoyable, even though the eninge is definitely inferior to Doom 3.

 

as for the d3 engine itself, its a very powerful engine, with a few more years in it to go, before i would consider it outdated.

 

Not that I really mind, personally. After all, it's gamemechanics that make a game and not the engine.

[OrbWeaver]

The lack of depth-sorting makes it pretty much impossible to do any kind of realistic windows if the player can see one through another.

 

I haven't heard about this - what is the problem exactly?

 

Applying fragment shaders as post process effects makes it impossible to do realistic water without obvious graphical glitches.

 

The funny thing is, I haven't seen the "water distorts stuff in front of it" effect for some time now, perhaps this is a fluke or maybe I am using some shader configuration that does not cause the problem.

[drumple]

when id announced they were going to have a new quake based on the d3 engine, i was so hoping it would have

been a sequel to quake1, and not quake2. and how they made the leap from quake1 to quake2 anyways i cant understand... q1 was so gothic, that medieval look would have just owned with the d3 engine.

[Darkness_Falls]

I don't think it's outdated. Maybe by 'upcoming games' standards... but for the Thief universe? I don't think it matters. If The Dark Mod is done right, Thief fans will hopefully like and be able to use it to create Thief-like Fan Missions for years to come; just as they've done with the Dark Engine of Thief 1/2, which is way more outdated by today's standards. Thief fans are typically more concerned with having good gameplay than uber-cool graphics, which is why many of us still play Thief 1/2 and the related fan missions.

 

Doom 3 gives a good amount of room for ramping up the graphics/framerate as you improve your system. I can only run on 800 x 600 currently, but look forward to the day when I can start using the higher resolutions with faster framerates. This gives it more longevity, imo.

 

A mod has to start somewhere, right? It's not like it's possible to start working with the latest and greatest game engine one week and then see a better one is coming 6 months down the road so you wait and then switch to that... only to see that 12 more months down the road an even better one is coming out, so you wait for that, etc. You'd never finish

 

The fact that buying Doom 3 is cheap is actually good for us, imo. It means people will more easily be able to try out The Dark Mod. And they won't have to go through the hassle of Steam or any other such "service."

[Domarius]

That it's cheap is working in our favour - people have been saying that thief players won't buy Doom 3, but now they have no excuse not to.

[sparhawk]

I never meant this to be some kind of excuse that we could switch to another engine. I know that there is no point in trying to keep up to date with current engines, whatever they are over time.

[Darkness_Falls]

Yep, I know you weren't saying that, Sparhawk. I was just mentioning for those in the public who might expect us to switch to the latest/greatest engine every time a new one comes out.

[Gildoran]

(about lack of depth-sorting:)

I haven't heard about this - what is the problem exactly?

Here's a screenshot of two slightly translucent windows. Their triangles are always drawn in a specific order, regardless of your position. They don't sort things so that the nearest translucent triangle is rendered last. From one direction things look fine, but from the other it becomes obvious what's going wrong.

Needless to say, this is bad if you want to have a lot of transparent surfaces.

 

(team members & beta mappers: this gas-arrow screenshot is another example of lack of depth-sorting; it's why the windows look so dark and out-of-place)

[Domarius]

Yeah I noticed that about the gas arrow screenshot...

 

Why does that shortcoming exist, and only for transparent things?

[Gildoran]

(about graphical glitches with realistic water, due to how fragment shaders are post process:)

That's strange though, because we have pretty realistic water. Including mirroring. Of course light fracture is not supporte, don't know if you mean this though.

Here's a screenshot of a quick testmap I put together.

 

Since most people don't seem to notice the effects, I tripled the depth of the waves to make it more obvious. The most apparent graphical glitch is the fact that things in front of the water are sampled by the fragment shader because they've already been rendered by the time it's applied. In this screenshot, the effect is mistakable for reflections, but in game it's often apparent that's not the case.

 

Another effect that tends to bug me a lot is that nothing outside the screen in rendered, which means when the distortion effect tries the sample outside of the screen, the position sampled is clamped into screenspace, resulting in banding at the edges of the screen.

[Gildoran]

Yeah I noticed that about the gas arrow screenshot...

 

Why does that shortcoming exist, and only for transparent things?

 

D3 renders triangles in an arbitrary order, as do a lot of engines. (ok, technically speaking the order isn't entirely arbitrary, I've heard that visportals tend to affect it) With opaque triangles, this is perfectly fine, because the depth buffer is used to ensure that only the pixels nearest to the player are rendered. In general, the order in which you render opaque triangles has pretty much no effect on the resulting images.

 

With translucent surfaces, however, that doesn't work. Translucent surfaces need to know what's behind them in order to be properly rendered. For this reason they're rendered after all the opaque surfaces have been drawn. However, there's still the problem of overlapping translucent surfaces. Consider the image of the two windows. If the far window is rendered first, then by the time the near window is drawn, everything behind it has already been drawn, allowing it to be properly rendered. The image will look correct. If the far window is drawn last, it will be rendered over the near window, causing the near window to look like it's behind the far window.

 

Hence, it's important to make sure that translucent triangles are rendered in descending order of distance to the camera. (arguably it's not that simple, since translucent surfaces may intersect, but I'll ignore that) Doom 3 renders them in a more-or-less arbitrary order (probably for performance reasons) resulting in overlapping translucent surfaces looking wrong.

 

With the gas arrow screenshot, the gas is being rendered first, and the window is being rendered in front of the gas, despite being behind it.

[Domarius]

Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I assumed this is for performance reasons.

 

I think mappers will just have to design with this quirk in mind. Even if we could access the renderer, it might be a huge performance decrease to change this. Just thinking.

 

Regarding the water effect - both the artifacts you pointed out I have noticed in the Serious Sam 2 engine too. Personaly speaking, I don't mind these small discrepencies if its for performance reasons, since I barely noticed them, only when I was specifically looking for them.

[OrbWeaver]

I wondered what was wrong with the gas arrow screenshot.

 

That water looks cool apart from the distortion artifacts - are you using a foglight to make the water look green underneath?

[sparhawk]

In this screenshot, the effect is mistakable for reflections, but in game it's often apparent that's not the case.

 

At least I didn't notice this until no that you told me. And even there I have a hard time noticing it.

[Gildoran]

@OrbWeaver: Yep, I used a fog-light.

 

@Sparhawk: The effect constantly drives me nuts enough that I've actually considered not making levels with water, despite my belief that levels with water are far more interesting.

 

I just keep on hoping that by the time the sourcecode is released, computers may have enough computational power that fixing the bugs is feasable. (actually, I think it's already feasible for the water effects once we get the rendering backend - with the limitation that there would need to be an area portal at the water surface, so water that changes depth wouldn't be possible)

[Kristus]

Do people consider D3 already to be outdated?

 

 

I've seen people say Doom3 engine was outdated already when it was released 1.5 years ago. But I usually dismiss those people as people that don't know what they are talking about.

 

I can't think of a single game released yet that has bested Doom3's engine. And with ET: Quake wars around the corner, I don't see this changing. Of course there's other games coming with very impressive engines such as Oblivion and Gears of war etc. So we'll see what happens. But I would never call the Doom3 engine outdated (yet).

Edited February 12, 2006 by Kristus

[god_is_my_goldfish]

I just keep on hoping that by the time the sourcecode is released, computers may have enough computational power that fixing the bugs is feasable. (actually, I think it's already feasible for the water effects once we get the rendering backend - with the limitation that there would need to be an area portal at the water surface, so water that changes depth wouldn't be possible)

 

How much of a performance hit are we talking about here? Shouldn't it be possible to tell the renderer (once we have the source maybe, maybe before that, I don't know) to do most textures and object arbitrarily, but reserve certain ones for ordering from the camera viewpoint?