The City From Thief In Tdm.

[sparhawk]

I wonder when anyone will stop this ridiculous hunt for detail and make an engine that can render massive levels, massive views, loads of stuff all on screen at once.

 

That's not a problem of the engines but of the hardware. Obviously games would do exactly this and not bother to come up with all kind of clever tricks, if the hardware could do it without any such tricks.

[Dram]

Yes, there would be no need for normalmaps and parallax maps as you could do it all with polygons much better. Hardware limitations is the reason why we have these things.

[OrbWeaver]

There is little or no difference at the implementation level between "massive views" and "massive detail". It is merely a matter of scale.

 

All the engine cares about is how much rendering work it has to do. Whether that is because a single room contains lots of detailed objects, or because you are looking out over a large vista of low-poly objects is not all that important.

[bob_arctor]

???

 

I thought that the problem was not hardware which can do anything you want it, it's got the raw power, but the engines which are specialised for good performance with small rooms of high detail with lots of texture overlays and lighting and what have you.

 

People said "Doom3 engine can't do outdoors, it can only do indoor detailed stuff", and the opposite was said of Source.

 

I thought if you made an engine which lacked a lot of the new features I could live without and focused on raw polygon power spread out over lots of lower polygon models, you could have a giant city, with no tricks.

[Dunedain]

The problem is, how much image quality are you willing to give up? The DOOM III engine

is state-of-the-art, so naturally if you go for high quality levels it's going to take more

processing power to render it at a decent speed. But the DOOM III engine also makes

for gorgeous highly immersive levels.

 

And considering how much effort it will take to recreate Garrett's city, at least the parts we

know about already from Thief I, II and III, you might as well go for a recreation that looks

awesome anywhere go you go in the city. As this would be something used in FM's for years

and years to come, so it's best to aim high on detail and let the hardware catch up. It'll run

a little slow on average hardware when it first comes out, but fast gaming systems will run

it quite well. And as faster and faster computers become available it will become commonplace

for Thief fans to have systems that can run the full city level at super fast frame-rates. Then

everyone will be glad that the city was made to look so good in the first place.

[OrbWeaver]

I thought that the problem was not hardware which can do anything you want it, it's got the raw power, but the engines which are specialised for good performance with small rooms of high detail with lots of texture overlays and lighting and what have you.

 

People said "Doom3 engine can't do outdoors, it can only do indoor detailed stuff", and the opposite was said of Source.

 

The Source engine is basically lower-tech than the D3 engine (with a couple of exceptions, such as the ability to use dynamic cube maps to produce real reflections), but by using pre-rendered static shadows (like T1/T2 did) it takes load off the GPU and allows very large scenes to be displayed.

 

The D3 engine by contrast does everything dynamically, which requires MUCH greater performance from the hardware. You can have expansive outdoor areas in D3, you just have to build carefully and accept that it may require tomorrow's hardware to run smoothly.

[Domarius]

???

 

I thought that the problem was not hardware which can do anything you want it, it's got the raw power, but the engines which are specialised for good performance with small rooms of high detail with lots of texture overlays and lighting and what have you.

 

People said "Doom3 engine can't do outdoors, it can only do indoor detailed stuff", and the opposite was said of Source.

 

I thought if you made an engine which lacked a lot of the new features I could live without and focused on raw polygon power spread out over lots of lower polygon models, you could have a giant city, with no tricks.

Heh, okay you have the wrong idea;

 

The engines are specialised to make the most of the raw power of the hardware. They use up ALL the raw power to do specialised things really well.

 

Like how one person will spend all their life studying painting, and another will study architecture. They have all used up their total potential, they are just using it for different things.

[Gildoran]

People said "Doom3 engine can't do outdoors, it can only do indoor detailed stuff", and the opposite was said of Source.

That is a load of bull.

 

The following are maps made in D3:

 

Screenshots of a released multiplayer map: (original thread)

 

 

 

Screenshots of an outdoors showcase map: (original thread)

 

 

 

D3 and Source use similar methods of visibility testing (they both rely on dividing the level into chunks, and figuring out which chunks are visible from a perspective) so they can generally handle the same sorts of areas. (unlike Farcry, which is far better than either D3 or Source at outdoor areas, though more clumsy for indoor areas) Admittedly, since Source mappers can spend hours prerendering the lighting, they can have some really nice looking radiosity, which can make outdoor daytime lighting look better in Source. However, D3 can have some pretty decent looking outdoor lighting, and it can even have day/night cycles. Also, D3 has the advantage that since lighting is calculated in real-time, the mapper doesn't have to sit and wait for hours for the map to compile every time they tweak a light. And since Thief-style maps usually take place at night, the lack of radiosity isn't such a huge issue, and can be more effectively simulated with D3's lighting.

[Domarius]

I'm not saying D3 can't do outdoors (the word is a very generic and relative term), but graphical examples like that don't really prove much unless they are actually being played as a game, with AI running around it in etc.

 

The size and number of the polygons are all dependant on the graphics card - its how well the rest of the game processes that geometry that dictates how good a game engine is at that sort of thing.

 

Best example is that other "city" screenshot where the big cyberdeamon is dwarfed by the huge huge buildings in the map. Sure, ran fine like that, but someone threw a couple of AI in and the map framerate dropped down to unplayability like a lead balloon.

[Gildoran]

True, but the path-finding algorithms aren't part of the renderer... It would be feasible to rewrite the AI to be more efficient in open spaces.

[Ishtvan]

Some kind of clustering the AAS nodes into supernodes, and then only worrying about navigating the finer grid once you're inside the desired supernode would probably help.

[sparhawk]

I thought that the problem was not hardware which can do anything you want it, it's got the raw power,

 

That's true. It can do whatever you want, but not with the speed you want. As you can easily see the 3D capabillities are there. Movies use computer renderings all the time for special effect, but for one image you have to wait several hours in worst case. Don't know if you would like such a game.

 

People said "Doom3 engine can't do outdoors, it can only do indoor detailed stuff", and the opposite was said of Source.

 

Well, this is wrong of course.

 

I thought if you made an engine which lacked a lot of the new features I could live without and focused on raw polygon power spread out over lots of lower polygon models, you could have a giant city, with no tricks.

 

You could have easily massive levels, but if you don't have the eyecandy, nobody wants to play it.

[bob_arctor]

Their loss!

 

Okay so the engine specialisation is not actually anywhere near as extreme as I was lead to believe.

 

And having made some (pretty shoddy) CSS maps in Hammer once I am glad Doom3 Editor doesn't need to recompile lighting.

 

Also Hammer seemed pretty bug ridden, you could glitch the map quite easily.

[Gildoran]

I think D3ed is about as buggy as Hammer, though it usually just crashes instead of destroying maps. Then again, people have lost maps to D3ed, so I guess backups are still a good idea.

[OrbWeaver]

I have never encountered a game editor that wasn't a bug-ridden pile of crap that crashed without warning on a regular basis. These things are written quickly in order to allow a development team to get their commercial game out before a deadline, and don't go through the rigourous testing procedures that would be expected for a mainstream app.

[Dram]

D3ed creates backups of maps automatically, hammer didnt...oooooh i hate hammer.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Crashes less often than Dromed? If so, I'm happy.

[sparhawk]

Definitey! And since we have the code, we can fix crashes.

[DopeFishhh]

Could you stack that skyportal idea in order to create multiple levels of detail? and do objects (like people/furniture) placed in the skyportal area show up? it would be nice to look down a long street and have a seemless transition of the detail levels and not have things suddenly appear as you get closer to them.

[Gildoran]

Not really... It's just an extension of the Thief method where the cities are a series of tunnels. The problem with the Thief method is that you can't see a large clock tower or something overlooking the city, or tall nearby buildings. So what you do, is you set up the skyportals to look into a very low-poly low-light (in terms of lightcount, not brightness) version of the city. Anything the player could see with a Thief-style city will be seen in full detail. Any buildings seen by looking up at the sky will be low-poly.

 

BTW, I've just discovered that it's possible to have arrows flying over buildings while using the skyportal method! *cheers*

[Domarius]

Yes it does deserve a toast! Cheers!

[Dram]

Hehe yeah, actually th\e first time I tested the sky portal I accidentally left a tree model in the place. It was quite funny to see it in the city just up there like a moon...

[slavatrumpevitch]

all technical aspects set aside, altough I don't doubt that if The City could be done well, it would be to say the very least unbe-f-ing-leivably awesome, there are some gameplay issues that I think could make it tricky. The first thing that comes to my mind is black-jacking; Chances are, that if the map is gonna be all 30 maps from TG, and T2 combined, interspersed with quadrants of T3, it will be a level where a significant amount of time is spent. Probably a single level that would be equivalent to a short game, say 7-12 hours? could b more, or it could be less.... But the point is, if you stayed in the same level for 10 hours, wouldn't a black-jacked guy wake up? from a technical standpoint that could be tricky to make the rag-doll --> functioning AI transition. But also, in terms of gameplay, it would defeat the purpose of blackjacking instead of back-stabbing. Presumably, a gaurd who wakes up in a dark corner a storage room of a mansion he's supposed to be gaurding is gonna b mighty suspicious when he comes to. He may be a little too woozy to be a dangerous foe at first, but he could easily alert everyone else to make for a difficult thieving experience. And if there were a strong police force across the entire map, it wouldn't be just the mansion that was alert, soon everyone would be on the lookout. On the other hand, if gaurds didn't wake up, the level would soon become boring, b/c gradually everyone would dissapear, which is OK for the typical thief game, b/c very shortly after the vast majority of 'bad-guys' were desposed of, the next level would start, and the map would b full of them again, but that would not be the case in an enormous city. I feel like I probably could have said all that in about 15% of the words, but at this point it would be more work to go back and revise it, so i'm sorry if I wasted you're time because you read all of this. --Matt

[Komag]

That's why in TDS they had respawning AI. I generally hate the idea of respawning, but I think it worked out okay in the city sections of TDS because it made me mostly ghost, but occasionally blackjack someone if I needed to for that immediate area for that moment.

 

In a much larger city area the respawning effect would work better (sometimes in TDS you'd see the new AI very soon or immediately after offing the old one), because they respawned AI could be set to only spawn far away from the player.

Edited June 18, 2006 by Komag

[slavatrumpevitch]

That's why in TDS they had respawning AI.

 

but didn't the AI only respawn when you went through a load portal? I could easily be mistaken, but I thought that it was only during pauses in gameplay that the AI respawned, which makes some sense. But i thought the idea behind making the whole city was that it would be totally seemless with no load-zones, and that's why people were brainstorming ideas about skyportals and whatnot.

 

secondly, AI respawning is a different thing altogether, a, may I say, remdial version of waking up from being knocked out. A person waking up would be suspicious about why they were lying on the ground curled in a ball with a huge pain in the back of their head, but a respawning AI would start with a clean slate which is a bit of a cop-out if you ask me, but that's just my opinion