Doom 3

[Arumakani]

Fair enough with regards to the engine, however, a time when games aren't complex are really for retro gaming or handhelds/mobile phone stuff. Halo for instance especially on the harder settings, shows how much good AI for enemies has really progressed. Half Life has shown how story telling in a FPS has progressed. We only have to look at Thief or Deus Ex, even Oblivion to see how complex the genre for FP games have begun. Doom3 is really a no brainer game.

[OrbWeaver]

To tell you the truth I enjoyed the game (after the first...10 boring bits) though I did change the weapons to be a bit more powerful *whistle*

 

Yeah I did that as well actually - the shotgun is cool but it has such an unrealistic spread-factor which makes it almost useless at distances of more than 10 feet.

 

I changed the spread from 22 to 2 to get a much more accurate and usable weapon.

[Unstoppable]

I thought Doom 3 was a no brainer, then I started looking. The enviroments are gorgeous. There are tricks you can do to use the enviroment to your benefit. Like blowing up things when enemies are near them, or crouching and hiding in a heated firefight.

 

Plus every enemy has a different way of being defeated. If you don't know how to defeat them then you will have a hard time in Doom 3. Then you throw all that together in one action pack level and you have variety.

 

Doom 3 is about endurance and knowing where to shoot. It takes skill once you crank up the difficulty meter. I think i'm playing it on normal right now.

[Arumakani]

I just don't see the point in it, except the engine being showcased...

[Komag]

I just don't see the point in it, except the engine being showcased...

 

A lot of people said that about Far Cry as well, but I liked both games for themselves, very fun in different ways, and both very different from Thief as well.

[Gildoran]

I thought Far Cry was a wonderful game. It allows you to play rambo-style or stealthily in most places. You can really take the game at your own pace: I was watching with boredom and annoyance as my brother plowed through enemies like a normal FPS, but he was having difficulty on one island and always dying soon into it. I bet him that I could clear the entire island without being hit by a single bullet, and succeeded on my first try (he was playing on normal difficulty) by using stealth. Admittedly, there are plenty of areas that can only be played rambo-style, but overall I found the game very enjoyable.

[Dram]

What I also loved about farcry was the last "boos". The doctor guy that is. I really liked how they did'nt uberize him, he only had a good gun, not million health. I actually expected him to be uber so I threw 2 grenades in and wouldve kept throwing had it noit been for him dying after the first one lol.

 

I actually had the German version (don't ask why) and played half of it in german. I then downloaded an english patch and had to replay it to see wtf had gone on lol.

[Arumakani]

I was wondering like what you were saying about Quake 4 possibly being able to run the DarkMod. Would that apply with FEAR too as it uses the Doom3 engine, but with a lot of tweaks, looks better than Doom3 and they've released their SDK too. http://games.softpedia.com/get/Tools/FEAR-SDK.shtml

[sparhawk]

I doubt that it would run on FEAR. Q4 would be more likely, but I guess not without porting it. Still my guess is that it would take less effort to port it to Q4 then to FEAR.

[BlackThief]

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think that FEAR uses the d3 engine...

[Arumakani]

That's odd I read loads of places that it does, but I just looked at this forum which is quite interesting and it seems you may be right BlackThief:

 

http://www.pclincs.co.uk/Forums/showthread.php?threadid=8683

 

Also GameSpy collaborates what you say.

 

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/fear/513626p1.html

Edited June 20, 2006 by Arumakani

[Denny]

Monolith uses their own Lithengine which has been in development since NOLF (if I remember correctly). You can even license it. I don't remember the URL to it though.

 

 

Edit*

http://www.touchdownentertainment.com/jupiterEX.htm There you have it.

 

And no, it wasn't Lithengine as I so wrongly remembered. It's by Touchdown Entertainment, which I honestly think is a subsection of Monolith or something, but that's only my speculation.

Edited June 20, 2006 by Denny

[Arumakani]

Cool. Yeah the SDK may be useful. Would it be difficult to import DarkMod to it?

[sparhawk]

If you have three or four years time, nope.

[Arumakani]

To import it or for the source code to become available?

[Dram]

Well the advantage of using Doom 3 is that the engine will be open source in like 4 or so years. Which means we can update the graphics and whatnot if we so desire.

 

With fear engine we don't know whether there'll be a source code release. But yeah, the coding is different, the format is different so it would take quote a while to port to that engine anyways.

[Arumakani]

Cool Man. Do you reckon when it goes opensource, some folk will make the DarkMod look as good as Unrel3 stuff like Gears of War?

[New Horizon]

Cool Man. Do you reckon when it goes opensource, some folk will make the DarkMod look as good as Unrel3 stuff like Gears of War?

 

I'm sure someone will. That's why we chose doom 3, so the community could continue to improve, update and otherwise maintain an open source Thief inspired engine.

[Denny]

Also an engine like Doom3 is not so performance heavy on the computers of today like the FEAR engine. That means most of us will be able to start the game and play it on quite high settings without buying the newest computer around.

 

A thing like open-source just makes it better as mods for the mod will be released, updating the game and making it live longer.

 

Gameplay is the only factor which the team should need to concentrate on, there's no need to swap engine as soon as a better one turns up. I don't think they wanna make another DNF.

[Komag]

Yeah, to me Doom 3 engine seems pretty much perfect when all things are considered. It's almost a no-brainer situation

[sparhawk]

That's why we selected and sticked to it.

[Arumakani]

How come the SDK for FEAR is very large and the other ones much smaller? Does this mean that you can do more in it?

[sparhawk]

Maybe. It could also mean that the programmers were not so good and wrote more bloated code. Without looking at it, you can hardly say anything about it.

[Arumakani]

Even if I personally looked, I wouldn't be able to tell. I was reading the easiest game to mod and design levels etc for is Far Cry. I only played the outdoor part to it. Were the indoor parts any good? How did they stack up next to Doom3?

[Gildoran]

In my experience, Far Cry is wonderfully easy for outdoor areas, but I found it very tedius and limiting for indoor areas. In Far Cry, all indoor areas have to be built from props. If you want to make a wall, you can't just create the right sized brush and texture it however you want. You have to find a pre-existing model that's the size and texture you'd like. And if you need something oddly shaped, or you'd like to use a new texture you created, or you'd just like to use an existing texture in an odd way, you're out of luck unless you have modelling software. The overall appearance to the player looks good (perhaps comparable to D3), but it's a pain for mappers, and to me felt a little cookie-cutter in places. If you like making maps in TDS out of mostly props/models, you might not have a hard time getting used to Far Cry.

 

D3 on the contrary excels at indoor areas, and at least for high-tech bases, you can make surprisingly nice looking maps even without using any models at all. D3 supports patch meshes which allow for mappers to easily create high-poly arches, pipes, hills, etc without needing to purchase and learn expensive modelling software. Many of the bloody tendrils throughout D3 were done with patch meshes, as were the railings, pipes and most wiring.

 

PS, about Far Cry, I must admit that I had great fun sledding down mountains in a rubber-dinghy in the editor.