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Doom III
Ahiles ::
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Tole je isto iz quakecona2003 sam pac so mal pozni.
DOOM III
PC
id Software
Activision
32
First Person Shooter
PC Zone plays Doom 3 multiplayer and shoots questions at id's Tim and Todd, all at the same time
22 Oct 03 Trust is in short supply in the games business these days. We've been hoodwinked by mocked-up and touched-up and sexed-up screenshots so many times we barely even trust our own mothers. If Lord Hutton thought he had a sticky web of intrigue on his hands with one dodgy dossier, oh boy, do we have some doozies for him. Who remembers the early screenshots for PlanetSide? Or how about FIFA? I could go on all day...
Luckily, not everyone sinks to unscrupulous behaviour to get attention for their game. Luckily, not everyone needs to, as Doom 3 looks very much like the incredible screenshots we've been pushing at you all year. If anything, it looks twice as good in the flesh.
Perhaps more surprising, Doom 3 also manages to offer one of the most distinctive Deathmatch experiences in years. We had a damn good play at QuakeCon and were hooked within minutes. Even though on paper it's the most basic vanilla DM imaginable, it's possessed of a truly unique atmosphere, thanks largely to the capabilities of the new engine. The intensive use of ambient sound, the cavorting shadows, the pools of darkness, the dynamic, hazard-filled environments - it's quite magnificent. No game has managed to create quite such an intense, furiously alive and often disorienting atmosphere before - certainly not with such conviction and fidelity - and the resulting effect is profoundly novel.
MEASURED BLOODSHED
Only one of the multiplayer maps is deemed playable at this stage, and at least three weapons are still missing, but it's enough to give a very strong impression of the final product. For a start, it's a slower game than we're used to in any current shooter. In terms of character movement it feels slower than Quake II, and with support for only four players, it's hardly a manic frag-fest. A winning score in the ten-minute games we were playing at QuakeCon tended to be around 11 frags.
As for the playmodes, these remain stubbornly fixed on four-way DM and a few basic variations. "We plan on having Free For All, 2-on-2 Deathmatch, Last Man Standing, Tournament and 1-on-1," affirms lead designer Tim Willits. "We're not planning on having CTF." However, Tim did mention that the limit on four players is a design decision not a hardware limitation, and the id boys expect an eight-player mod to appear online almost immediately.
The gameplay is also very much focused on close combat, with claustrophobic spaces and frenzied, confused firefights in narrow corridors. Disorienting graphical effects compound the confusion - whenever you take damage, you get a powerful kick and blurred vision, throwing your aim off and making it difficult to return fire. Somewhat shamefully, I also literally jumped at the sight of my own shadow the first few times it danced across the wall in front of me.
You can also cast entire rooms into pitch darkness with the flick of a switch, which is slightly disconcerting in a four-way match, but takes on much greater significance in tense 1-on-1 battles, when hiding in the shadows is a much more tempting option.
HELL IN A WELL
"We've contracted Splash Damage to construct the maps, the guys that did such a great job on Enemy Territory," continues Tim. "We're still doing all the programming in-house - the special effects programming, the gameplay programming and so on - but they're doing the map design. They actually started the map that we showed at QuakeCon - they brought it to a certain point and then we finished it off."
The map in question has no name at present, but it's a classic small-scale affair with a central hub and several branching corridors. The central room is the power chamber pictured in the background here, featuring a bloody great laser cannon that fires periodically into a cylindrical well. Two platform levels ring the outer edge of the room, inviting rocket jumps and death-defying leaps, but you can also jump down into the bottom of the central hole via a series of rotating three-quarter platforms (though time it right or the laser will fry yo' ass). This is the key to the entire map, as the sinkhole houses a teleporter and the crucial power-up of the map: the Berserk.
Harking back to Dooms 1 and 2, the Berserk doubles your speed and damage, and sends you (literally) screaming around the map on a killing spree. Most importantly, it gives you 30x damage with melee weapons, allowing one-hit kills with fists or, presumably, the flashlight and chainsaw. It's quite a disorientating experience, especially when you don't know your way around the map, but the agonized screams are sure to panic any nearby opponents.
Other pick-ups in the level include combat armour (+50), armour shards (+5), health packs, ammo and, of course, weapons (see boxout on previous page).
PRETTY POLYS
One of the really significant new technical features in Doom 3 is the per polygon hit detection, which does away with the invisible hitboxes of old in favour of accurate collision detection for every projectile. "This feature had a lot more an impact than we were expecting," admits id CEO Todd Hollenshead. "We've had per poly detection in single-player for a year, but we never realised the full impact of it, of the player no longer being, effectively, a big rectangular cube. A bullet can now go under someone's arm or between their legs, or just whiz by their head. It definitely puts a premium on aiming. The first thing we realised was like: 'Damn, people are hard to kill in Doom 3 multiplayer. Why is that?' And we looked at the damage values, the hitpoints, the armour, but eventually we realised - we're just missing. We're lousy shots."
Clearly, Doom 3 is a different breed of multiplayer experience than anything we've played before. Despite not fundamentally changing the pure design brief behind the game, id has found themselves with an exceptional gaming experience simply by virtue of the new technologies at work. Frankly, we don't care why it works. But it does, and we can't wait to play it again.
CARMACK-EDDON
PC ZONE scores a rare audience with programming legend John Carmack, and gets the raw truth about Doom 3, the future of graphics engines and why he hates ragdolls...
Some say he's the greatest programmer alive. Others call him a visionary genius who single-handedly drags games technology into the future with his audacious talent. Since we wouldn't know a string of C-code from a string of lean beef snarlers, we could hardly comment on that, but we do know one thing - John Carmack has coded some of the best games ever made. Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake - hell, he practically invented the FPS.
These days, the Mack Daddy of rendering doesn't emerge from his subterranean lair very often, and PC ZONE was the only UK magazine to secure an interview at QuakeCon 2003. It's too big for one magazine, so we've had to split it across a couple of issues. Part one starts right here, so without further ado, over to the big man...
PCZ: HOW CLOSE IS DOOM 3 TO COMPLETION?
JC: We're really close. The last level was completed recently, but there's a huge amount of tuning that needs to be done. We've got a few levels, like the ones shown in the demo that are pretty much at the level of polish we're looking for throughout the game. But the other 20-some odd levels are not there yet.
PCZ: HOW CRITICAL ARE THE NEXT FEW MONTHS GOING TO BE?
JC: In some ways this is the most important time of development. The tools are all there, everything's at our disposal, everything's basically working. Now's where it goes from being an interesting demonstration of all the technologies to being a fabulous game, and that really does all happen at the end.I recently counted up the number of things we have to tune between pulling a trigger and hitting something with a projectile, and there's 32 effects that we have going on between there. There's the muzzle flash model, the light from there, the kick of the gun, the kick on the view, the sound on the muzzle flash, the sound on the projectile, the light on the projectile, the particles from the projectile, the pain animation that the monster gets hit by, the knock-back that he gets, the blood spray that comes off of it, the decal that gets put on it, the pass-through that goes on to the wall, the shell that comes out of the gun - you know, it's this huge list. You look back at the really early games where it's like, OK, you had an animation that happened there as a little muzzle flash and then the guy went into a pain animation, and that was it. So, there are a lot of dimensions that we have at our disposal for tuning, and you're not going to get everything perfect, but you feel an obligation to at least try and explore the solution space a little bit to try and hit on the really good things.
PCZ: So is it at the stage now where your personal involvement on the game is a little bit less?
JC: Actually this entire past year I haven't been the most critical person on the team, because the development of the rendering engine went smoother than really any I've ever done before. It turns out that the decisions I made at the very beginning about how the implementation was going to be, what the features were going to be, what the interface was going to be - they were all really good. Normally there's lots of evolution and major changes that go on, but the original architecture for the Doom 3 renderer has stayed pretty damn constant. Two years ago it was rendering pictures that look basically like our pictures today. One year ago it was feature-complete. This past year has been adding tweaks and some optimisations to things, but really at this point I'm hesitant to make too many major changes because it's really good right now, I don't want to screw it up.
PCZ: WHAT'S YOUR MAIN RESPONSIBILITY ON THE GAME NOW THEN?
JC: I've actually been back in recently doing some more of the game code, which is not what I ever intended to do, but I'm almost sort of twiddling my thumbs sometimes. It's more difficult now, because in previous games all the code was spawned by me. I wrote the base of everything and then other programmers would take over and extend the things, but I still put everything in its original places so it was easy for me to jump in and quickly diagnose any problems or add any feature. Doom 3 is the first game that started out with multiple programmers writing brand new code.In Quake III we wound up pulling in a big block of code that Jan Paul [van Waveren, the Dutch programming whiz headhunted by id from the Quake editing community] wrote for the bots, but that was an emergency measure at the end, because of the way that whole thing worked out. So there's this block of stuff in Quake III that I really know nothing about. But with Doom 3 we had many programmers writing brand new sub-systems, and I don't necessarily always agree with how some of the things are implemented. So I'm not in a position where I can just jump in and grab anything off the 'to-do' list and go and fix a problem in the game code. But I did recently finally start getting back into carving off some sections of the game code and fixing it up and making it more the way I'd like it to be. I'll probably be doing some more of that. But there's a huge loss in productivity once you go from a project that one person basically created the bulk of to something that has lots of people working on it. We've had five programmers working almost from the beginning on Doom 3, and it might have twice as many features as if I had done everything, but it has like ten times the problems. You pay more labour for more features, but you get features that you wouldn't have got otherwise. The classic case that I'll hold up, as a perfect example of something I wouldn't have done that turned out really good, is the ragdoll physics for deaths that Jan Paul really pushed for. That's the type of feature that I never would have implemented.
PCZ: Why's that? We can't get enough of those kooky ragdolls...
JC: Physics code is among the twitchiest stuff to put into a game engine, because it's not as deterministic and able to be nailed down. It is a pretty significant performance drag, and for two years now in Doom 3 we've had cases where it's like, 'the game is stuck at seven frames per second, what the hell?' and it's because a ragdoll is stuck and not going into a quiescent state. There's all these sets of problems that I knew would be problems, and were. But they were able to be solved, and now the ragdolls are a good feature.
PCZ: Do you fret a bit about losing a certain level of control over the development process?
JC: I'm at peace with the situation. It was a known strategic decision. For one thing I'm not spending all my time at id anymore, because I'm doing the Armadillo stuff with a good chunk of my time [Armadillo Aerospace, John's rocket science project]. So the company has to get by without me, and even if I was still spending 80 hours a week at id, you'd just eventually reach a point where one person functionally cannot do all the features that you want to have on there.
PCZ: I was talking to Tim and Todd earlier about the involvement of UK developer Splash Damage on the Doom multiplayer. How's that working out?
JC: Well, we always knew that we were going to be, intentionally, giving multiplayer short shrift in Doom 3. It's a single-player game, that's what we're building everything around, and the multiplayer is going to be present, but not a focus. So it's probably a good thing that we're getting an outside team to go ahead and make it their focus. Otherwise it would have been essentially the level of capability that Quake II had, where you had like five levels that were hashed out in a week from somebody. So now we're going to get some good stuff with really good playtesting in it.
PCZ: You've been doing this stuff for more than a decade now, making dark and disturbing first-person shooters. What keeps you going and what keeps it interesting?
JC: Well, to some degree we are trapped by our success. Because we're a single-product company, and we have 20-some odd employees that we pay very well, we don't have the freedom to go off on some complete lark and try some random thing. The products that we spend time on have to have a high probability of success, and they also have to use the same mix of artists, level designers and programmers that we have. It's not in our cards to go and say, 'well, we really only need one designer for this project, we'll fire four level designers'. We just wouldn't do that.
PCZ: Are you ever tempted to try something completely different?
JC: Well, I'm doing Armadillo Aerospace, so yes, you could say the temptation is there on some level [laughs]. Game-wise, I'll occasionally have some random thoughts about doing something different, but the first-person shooters have been good from a technical-challenge level, with the combination of networking and sound with the graphics and the structuring and architecting of the things. It's been rewarding on that level. And that's my primary motivation really - the engineering challenge. Making interesting things work as new capabilities arrive, as the hardware provides it to us.
PCZ: Are you anticipating any media controversy to follow the release of Doom 3, as you've suffered with many of your previous games?
JC: I would have thought that stuff had been played out. The media every once in a while is like, 'Hmm, what are we going to do now... Let's pick on violent videogames.' I wouldn't be surprised though. External events again are going to be the driver. If there's any other... ah, Columbine sort of thing, I'm sure it will come up again. I don't think we're going to get too much of it, but I could be wrong. It's not my area.
PCZ: We noticed one undiscussed item on the multiplayer weapons menu - the Soulcube. Can you tell us about this item and any other power-ups we don't know about?
JC: The Soulcube is a hell artifact from the later part of the game. There are some other power-ups that you haven't seen yet, but the multiplayer is not going to have all the power-ups that people expect on there - it's not hugely focused on that. There will be a few other things with some interesting effects, but that's not a focus in the multiplayer.
Tole je isto iz quakecona2003 sam pac so mal pozni.
DOOM III
PC
id Software
Activision
32
First Person Shooter
PC Zone plays Doom 3 multiplayer and shoots questions at id's Tim and Todd, all at the same time
22 Oct 03 Trust is in short supply in the games business these days. We've been hoodwinked by mocked-up and touched-up and sexed-up screenshots so many times we barely even trust our own mothers. If Lord Hutton thought he had a sticky web of intrigue on his hands with one dodgy dossier, oh boy, do we have some doozies for him. Who remembers the early screenshots for PlanetSide? Or how about FIFA? I could go on all day...
Luckily, not everyone sinks to unscrupulous behaviour to get attention for their game. Luckily, not everyone needs to, as Doom 3 looks very much like the incredible screenshots we've been pushing at you all year. If anything, it looks twice as good in the flesh.
Perhaps more surprising, Doom 3 also manages to offer one of the most distinctive Deathmatch experiences in years. We had a damn good play at QuakeCon and were hooked within minutes. Even though on paper it's the most basic vanilla DM imaginable, it's possessed of a truly unique atmosphere, thanks largely to the capabilities of the new engine. The intensive use of ambient sound, the cavorting shadows, the pools of darkness, the dynamic, hazard-filled environments - it's quite magnificent. No game has managed to create quite such an intense, furiously alive and often disorienting atmosphere before - certainly not with such conviction and fidelity - and the resulting effect is profoundly novel.
MEASURED BLOODSHED
Only one of the multiplayer maps is deemed playable at this stage, and at least three weapons are still missing, but it's enough to give a very strong impression of the final product. For a start, it's a slower game than we're used to in any current shooter. In terms of character movement it feels slower than Quake II, and with support for only four players, it's hardly a manic frag-fest. A winning score in the ten-minute games we were playing at QuakeCon tended to be around 11 frags.
As for the playmodes, these remain stubbornly fixed on four-way DM and a few basic variations. "We plan on having Free For All, 2-on-2 Deathmatch, Last Man Standing, Tournament and 1-on-1," affirms lead designer Tim Willits. "We're not planning on having CTF." However, Tim did mention that the limit on four players is a design decision not a hardware limitation, and the id boys expect an eight-player mod to appear online almost immediately.
The gameplay is also very much focused on close combat, with claustrophobic spaces and frenzied, confused firefights in narrow corridors. Disorienting graphical effects compound the confusion - whenever you take damage, you get a powerful kick and blurred vision, throwing your aim off and making it difficult to return fire. Somewhat shamefully, I also literally jumped at the sight of my own shadow the first few times it danced across the wall in front of me.
You can also cast entire rooms into pitch darkness with the flick of a switch, which is slightly disconcerting in a four-way match, but takes on much greater significance in tense 1-on-1 battles, when hiding in the shadows is a much more tempting option.
HELL IN A WELL
"We've contracted Splash Damage to construct the maps, the guys that did such a great job on Enemy Territory," continues Tim. "We're still doing all the programming in-house - the special effects programming, the gameplay programming and so on - but they're doing the map design. They actually started the map that we showed at QuakeCon - they brought it to a certain point and then we finished it off."
The map in question has no name at present, but it's a classic small-scale affair with a central hub and several branching corridors. The central room is the power chamber pictured in the background here, featuring a bloody great laser cannon that fires periodically into a cylindrical well. Two platform levels ring the outer edge of the room, inviting rocket jumps and death-defying leaps, but you can also jump down into the bottom of the central hole via a series of rotating three-quarter platforms (though time it right or the laser will fry yo' ass). This is the key to the entire map, as the sinkhole houses a teleporter and the crucial power-up of the map: the Berserk.
Harking back to Dooms 1 and 2, the Berserk doubles your speed and damage, and sends you (literally) screaming around the map on a killing spree. Most importantly, it gives you 30x damage with melee weapons, allowing one-hit kills with fists or, presumably, the flashlight and chainsaw. It's quite a disorientating experience, especially when you don't know your way around the map, but the agonized screams are sure to panic any nearby opponents.
Other pick-ups in the level include combat armour (+50), armour shards (+5), health packs, ammo and, of course, weapons (see boxout on previous page).
PRETTY POLYS
One of the really significant new technical features in Doom 3 is the per polygon hit detection, which does away with the invisible hitboxes of old in favour of accurate collision detection for every projectile. "This feature had a lot more an impact than we were expecting," admits id CEO Todd Hollenshead. "We've had per poly detection in single-player for a year, but we never realised the full impact of it, of the player no longer being, effectively, a big rectangular cube. A bullet can now go under someone's arm or between their legs, or just whiz by their head. It definitely puts a premium on aiming. The first thing we realised was like: 'Damn, people are hard to kill in Doom 3 multiplayer. Why is that?' And we looked at the damage values, the hitpoints, the armour, but eventually we realised - we're just missing. We're lousy shots."
Clearly, Doom 3 is a different breed of multiplayer experience than anything we've played before. Despite not fundamentally changing the pure design brief behind the game, id has found themselves with an exceptional gaming experience simply by virtue of the new technologies at work. Frankly, we don't care why it works. But it does, and we can't wait to play it again.
CARMACK-EDDON
PC ZONE scores a rare audience with programming legend John Carmack, and gets the raw truth about Doom 3, the future of graphics engines and why he hates ragdolls...
Some say he's the greatest programmer alive. Others call him a visionary genius who single-handedly drags games technology into the future with his audacious talent. Since we wouldn't know a string of C-code from a string of lean beef snarlers, we could hardly comment on that, but we do know one thing - John Carmack has coded some of the best games ever made. Wolf 3D, Doom, Quake - hell, he practically invented the FPS.
These days, the Mack Daddy of rendering doesn't emerge from his subterranean lair very often, and PC ZONE was the only UK magazine to secure an interview at QuakeCon 2003. It's too big for one magazine, so we've had to split it across a couple of issues. Part one starts right here, so without further ado, over to the big man...
PCZ: HOW CLOSE IS DOOM 3 TO COMPLETION?
JC: We're really close. The last level was completed recently, but there's a huge amount of tuning that needs to be done. We've got a few levels, like the ones shown in the demo that are pretty much at the level of polish we're looking for throughout the game. But the other 20-some odd levels are not there yet.
PCZ: HOW CRITICAL ARE THE NEXT FEW MONTHS GOING TO BE?
JC: In some ways this is the most important time of development. The tools are all there, everything's at our disposal, everything's basically working. Now's where it goes from being an interesting demonstration of all the technologies to being a fabulous game, and that really does all happen at the end.I recently counted up the number of things we have to tune between pulling a trigger and hitting something with a projectile, and there's 32 effects that we have going on between there. There's the muzzle flash model, the light from there, the kick of the gun, the kick on the view, the sound on the muzzle flash, the sound on the projectile, the light on the projectile, the particles from the projectile, the pain animation that the monster gets hit by, the knock-back that he gets, the blood spray that comes off of it, the decal that gets put on it, the pass-through that goes on to the wall, the shell that comes out of the gun - you know, it's this huge list. You look back at the really early games where it's like, OK, you had an animation that happened there as a little muzzle flash and then the guy went into a pain animation, and that was it. So, there are a lot of dimensions that we have at our disposal for tuning, and you're not going to get everything perfect, but you feel an obligation to at least try and explore the solution space a little bit to try and hit on the really good things.
PCZ: So is it at the stage now where your personal involvement on the game is a little bit less?
JC: Actually this entire past year I haven't been the most critical person on the team, because the development of the rendering engine went smoother than really any I've ever done before. It turns out that the decisions I made at the very beginning about how the implementation was going to be, what the features were going to be, what the interface was going to be - they were all really good. Normally there's lots of evolution and major changes that go on, but the original architecture for the Doom 3 renderer has stayed pretty damn constant. Two years ago it was rendering pictures that look basically like our pictures today. One year ago it was feature-complete. This past year has been adding tweaks and some optimisations to things, but really at this point I'm hesitant to make too many major changes because it's really good right now, I don't want to screw it up.
PCZ: WHAT'S YOUR MAIN RESPONSIBILITY ON THE GAME NOW THEN?
JC: I've actually been back in recently doing some more of the game code, which is not what I ever intended to do, but I'm almost sort of twiddling my thumbs sometimes. It's more difficult now, because in previous games all the code was spawned by me. I wrote the base of everything and then other programmers would take over and extend the things, but I still put everything in its original places so it was easy for me to jump in and quickly diagnose any problems or add any feature. Doom 3 is the first game that started out with multiple programmers writing brand new code.In Quake III we wound up pulling in a big block of code that Jan Paul [van Waveren, the Dutch programming whiz headhunted by id from the Quake editing community] wrote for the bots, but that was an emergency measure at the end, because of the way that whole thing worked out. So there's this block of stuff in Quake III that I really know nothing about. But with Doom 3 we had many programmers writing brand new sub-systems, and I don't necessarily always agree with how some of the things are implemented. So I'm not in a position where I can just jump in and grab anything off the 'to-do' list and go and fix a problem in the game code. But I did recently finally start getting back into carving off some sections of the game code and fixing it up and making it more the way I'd like it to be. I'll probably be doing some more of that. But there's a huge loss in productivity once you go from a project that one person basically created the bulk of to something that has lots of people working on it. We've had five programmers working almost from the beginning on Doom 3, and it might have twice as many features as if I had done everything, but it has like ten times the problems. You pay more labour for more features, but you get features that you wouldn't have got otherwise. The classic case that I'll hold up, as a perfect example of something I wouldn't have done that turned out really good, is the ragdoll physics for deaths that Jan Paul really pushed for. That's the type of feature that I never would have implemented.
PCZ: Why's that? We can't get enough of those kooky ragdolls...
JC: Physics code is among the twitchiest stuff to put into a game engine, because it's not as deterministic and able to be nailed down. It is a pretty significant performance drag, and for two years now in Doom 3 we've had cases where it's like, 'the game is stuck at seven frames per second, what the hell?' and it's because a ragdoll is stuck and not going into a quiescent state. There's all these sets of problems that I knew would be problems, and were. But they were able to be solved, and now the ragdolls are a good feature.
PCZ: Do you fret a bit about losing a certain level of control over the development process?
JC: I'm at peace with the situation. It was a known strategic decision. For one thing I'm not spending all my time at id anymore, because I'm doing the Armadillo stuff with a good chunk of my time [Armadillo Aerospace, John's rocket science project]. So the company has to get by without me, and even if I was still spending 80 hours a week at id, you'd just eventually reach a point where one person functionally cannot do all the features that you want to have on there.
PCZ: I was talking to Tim and Todd earlier about the involvement of UK developer Splash Damage on the Doom multiplayer. How's that working out?
JC: Well, we always knew that we were going to be, intentionally, giving multiplayer short shrift in Doom 3. It's a single-player game, that's what we're building everything around, and the multiplayer is going to be present, but not a focus. So it's probably a good thing that we're getting an outside team to go ahead and make it their focus. Otherwise it would have been essentially the level of capability that Quake II had, where you had like five levels that were hashed out in a week from somebody. So now we're going to get some good stuff with really good playtesting in it.
PCZ: You've been doing this stuff for more than a decade now, making dark and disturbing first-person shooters. What keeps you going and what keeps it interesting?
JC: Well, to some degree we are trapped by our success. Because we're a single-product company, and we have 20-some odd employees that we pay very well, we don't have the freedom to go off on some complete lark and try some random thing. The products that we spend time on have to have a high probability of success, and they also have to use the same mix of artists, level designers and programmers that we have. It's not in our cards to go and say, 'well, we really only need one designer for this project, we'll fire four level designers'. We just wouldn't do that.
PCZ: Are you ever tempted to try something completely different?
JC: Well, I'm doing Armadillo Aerospace, so yes, you could say the temptation is there on some level [laughs]. Game-wise, I'll occasionally have some random thoughts about doing something different, but the first-person shooters have been good from a technical-challenge level, with the combination of networking and sound with the graphics and the structuring and architecting of the things. It's been rewarding on that level. And that's my primary motivation really - the engineering challenge. Making interesting things work as new capabilities arrive, as the hardware provides it to us.
PCZ: Are you anticipating any media controversy to follow the release of Doom 3, as you've suffered with many of your previous games?
JC: I would have thought that stuff had been played out. The media every once in a while is like, 'Hmm, what are we going to do now... Let's pick on violent videogames.' I wouldn't be surprised though. External events again are going to be the driver. If there's any other... ah, Columbine sort of thing, I'm sure it will come up again. I don't think we're going to get too much of it, but I could be wrong. It's not my area.
PCZ: We noticed one undiscussed item on the multiplayer weapons menu - the Soulcube. Can you tell us about this item and any other power-ups we don't know about?
JC: The Soulcube is a hell artifact from the later part of the game. There are some other power-ups that you haven't seen yet, but the multiplayer is not going to have all the power-ups that people expect on there - it's not hugely focused on that. There will be a few other things with some interesting effects, but that's not a focus in the multiplayer.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
Tr0n ::
En SS, ki verjetno ni nov, ampak vkup spacan iz dveh drugih SSjev :).
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Gandalfar ()
Tr0n ::
Ta podatek se ni znan. Ponavadi idjevci stestirajo svoj engine, ko je igra koncana do te mere, da so rezultati avtenticni, na vec konfiguracijah in rezultate objavijo javno.
Minimum je pa 1 GHz, 256 RAM in GeForce 1 / Radeon 7 serija.
Minimum je pa 1 GHz, 256 RAM in GeForce 1 / Radeon 7 serija.
Ahiles ::
Neki so omenjal GF2 rang za min sam to se bo sele pol vedl tocn ko koncajo spil. Vrjetn bo potrebna graficna v rangu GF4/FX za spodobno igranje.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
Ahiles ::
Slika je nastala se mi zdi na uni predstavitvi pred nekaj dnevi/tedni ko je mela nvidia predstavitev nove graficne.
Over lunch, Jen-Hsun and Todd discussed the current state of the graphics card industry and where things were heading as we looked towards the future. Here, each identified the trend that both R&D budgets and lead times would be increasing dramatically as the technology and games become more and more complex. Todd then went on to discuss some of the most interesting aspects of Doom3. Although no release date was provided (albeit he did hint that it was at least four months away), he confirmed that Doom3’s installation size would likely exceed 3GB. In addition, the game would be locked with a hard-coded 60fps ceiling. Given how taxing this engine has proven to be in the early glimpses we have seen, that limit will still be difficult to reach by most hardware. Speaking of hardware, Todd informed the audience that the development platforms for Doom3 were all using GeForce FX graphics cards. This should erase any doubts of NVIDIA cards and their ability to run Doom3.
Over lunch, Jen-Hsun and Todd discussed the current state of the graphics card industry and where things were heading as we looked towards the future. Here, each identified the trend that both R&D budgets and lead times would be increasing dramatically as the technology and games become more and more complex. Todd then went on to discuss some of the most interesting aspects of Doom3. Although no release date was provided (albeit he did hint that it was at least four months away), he confirmed that Doom3’s installation size would likely exceed 3GB. In addition, the game would be locked with a hard-coded 60fps ceiling. Given how taxing this engine has proven to be in the early glimpses we have seen, that limit will still be difficult to reach by most hardware. Speaking of hardware, Todd informed the audience that the development platforms for Doom3 were all using GeForce FX graphics cards. This should erase any doubts of NVIDIA cards and their ability to run Doom3.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Gandalfar ()
Gandalfar ::
Speaking of hardware, Todd informed the audience that the development platforms for Doom3 were all using GeForce FX graphics cards.
Ne zdi se mi ql. Boljse bi bilo, da bi bilo se kej Radeonov vmes, da bi razvijalci se kaj trpeli ob ATIjevem HWju :>
In addition, the game would be locked with a hard-coded 60fps ceiling.
Kdo ugane kaj bo prvi neuradni patch naredil? :>
Ahiles ::
COPY/PASTE ker je potrebna registracija
URL
DOOM 3
PC
id Software
Activision
32
First Person Shooter
31 Oct 03 The year is 2145. Id Software, along with the most powerful computers on earth, has been performing secret experiments in its base on Mars. Tapping into the very fabric of the universe itself - and beyond - id scientists have made discoveries that will forever change human existence. Then something went terribly wrong...
Actually, we're lying. Nothing went wrong. Indeed, every time we travel forward in time to see this titanic shooter sequel we're reminded how goddamned stunning it's going to be. Last time we traveled to Mars (or was it Texas...?) for a full hands-on with the new deathmatch modes. Now, we're unloading the other barrel, with a look at the magnificently horrific single-player campaign.
For those who've been lost in a time vortex, Doom 3 is a loose re-telling of the original Doom story, pitting a lone space marine against the encroaching forces of Hell, rather embarrassingly unleashed by some boffins tampering with forces beyond their ken. This time, however, id is aiming for a decidedly cinematic, story-driven experience, roping in sci-fi writer Matthew Costello (The 7th Guest) to flesh out the script, and using the tasty new graphics engine to render the most immersive and menacing visuals ever seen in a game.
As lead designer Tim Willits puts it: "With Doom 3 we are fortunate in that we have this totally new engine; this great technology to create the game around. It means we can deliver an atmosphere and intense, scary nature that has not been seen in a shooter before, and really set a new bar with what a game looks like and feels like."
FACE TO FACE
Before we actually played Doom 3, all that was just words. Now that we've experienced it first-hand, however, it's a very different story. Doom 3 is not just an incredible-looking game, it's the best horror film you'll ever play. From the swinging light strips and starkly cavorting shadows to the shockingly forceful demonic ambushes, the whole thing is meticulously constructed to generate an atmosphere of terror. It works bloody well too, and it wasn't long into our playtest before we were shifting our weight nervously and leaping at every stray growl - just as in the original all those years ago.
And yet in gameplay terms, Doom 3 is very much a typical first-person shooter. There's little we haven't seen here before - the weapons are all remakes of the old Doom arsenal (except for the flashlight, which doubles as a club), and most of the monsters are revisions of old favourites as well (see boxout). In fact, the most innovative device is the new interface system. Basically, it allows you to operate switches and computer interfaces simply by looking at them, your crosshair automatically switching to a cursor pointer when you hover over an interactive panel. Beyond this, Doom 3 is a bog-standard corridor shooter - on paper at least.
Let me describe a typical scene. You've entered an area of the UAC base that's been overtaken by Hell, the metallic walls and grey fittings ceding to a Dantean vision of blood-red walls and viscera-strewn caverns. All seems quiet as you locate the item you were looking for - a data stick or some such trifle, to be uploaded to a PDA-like device that holds all your mission information. However, as soon as you make to leave, you somehow awaken a demon, and right on cue all hell breaks loose. Frenzied imps spawn in a dozen places at once, emerging from pentagram-like portals in a burst of magma, pelting you with fireballs and blocking your exit.
UNDERWORLDS APART
There's nothing remotely novel going on here, and yet so intense and mesmerising is the atmosphere created that even this straightforward scene left us in a nervous sweat. It's almost like the amazing visual design renders moot any questions of originality. In his own way, Tim agrees: "I find it really funny in interviews when people ask, what's the difference between Doom 1 and Doom 3? It's like, dude, have you seen it?"
Certainly, however, there's more going on in Doom 3 than just shooting zombies. In one sequence you come across a terrified NPC trapped in a part of the base with no power - and no lights. He strikes a deal with you: he'll lead you through the darkness with his wavering, failing lamp in return for your bodyguard services. Of course you agree, as you can't hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time (though this may change in the final game), and it is really dark out there. Of course, the brutal demonic attacks begin almost immediately, and you're forced into a desperate battle to keep their attention focused on you and not the defenseless NPC, all the while struggling to stay close to the light. Again, nothing we haven't seen before (even Donkey Kong 64 featured a similar sequence almost four years ago), but effective nonetheless.
Other change-of-pace moments come through the application of the new global 'look and click' interface, as described above. One scene tasks you with removing some poisonous gas canisters from a room by picking them up remotely with a crane arm and dumping them in a disposal unit. Thus ensues a brief mini-game that works like a UFO-catcher machine in an arcade, though with rather less frustrating results.
hese, however, are exceptions to the rule - moments designed to break up the move-and-shoot carnage that makes up the bulk of the game. And we can only assure you that this is no bad thing.A lot of people are concerned there's no game behind Doom 3's stunning visuals - it's just a 'tech demo' for id's new 3D engine. This, however, is totally missing the point. The new engine is the new game. Yes, it's a stunning showcase for the new rendering tech, going out of its way to create an atmospheric and immersive environment with an unprecedented level of detail. And that's exactly why it's going to be great.
CARMACK-EDDON 2
In part two of PC ZONE's exclusive interview, we conclude our chat with legendary id programmer John Carmack, getting the dirt on
DOOM 3, BASKETBALL AND THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING
Last month, we kept it simple. We shot the breeze with John about ragdolls and hell artifacts, how happy he is with the game and how things have changed since the olden days. But really, we were just warming up. This month, we give the world's most-famous code-jockey the reins, hanging on for grim death as he vents his views on innovation, graphics technology and manned space flight...
PCZ: So, John, id's games have signalled generational leaps in gaming technology more than once. Do you see Doom 3 as an equally big leap as Doom or Quake?
JC: Yes. We had a few evolutionary steps where we had Quake II and III - obvious evolutions of Quake. Even though Quake III was a completely different rendering engine, it was still in the same paradigm, which was light-mapped worlds and single point-shaded characters.Before each new game, I take stock of where I think the hardware's going, what we've got now and what's coming out in the time until we release the game. That's what drives the decision of when it's time to write a new engine. It's not like I've got some brilliant new way of structuring things, it is driven by the external forces. And people who ignore that suffer miserably, like the people who were doing voxel engines right as 3D hardware engines were coming on. So as we went through Q2 and Q3, I was like OK, we're starting to get hardware acceleration here, but can we rely on it, does it fundamentally change the way we do the rendering? And it didn't. With Q3 we were able to say 'hardware accelerated only', but the things we could do with that hardware were still basically the things we were doing in previous generations. We could just do it more concisely, faster, higher colour, all those various things. When it was time to look at the Doom 3 stuff, I investigated five different directions for rendering post-Quake III. Some of them would have given much higher quality renderings of static environments. It's not an exaggeration that we can do photo-realistic renderings of static environments and move through them. But, when you then paste dynamic objects on to those static scenes, they're clearly in this separate plane. You've got your moving thingy and your environment. And I thought it was more important as a game technology, which is about interactive things, that we followed this other opportunity. Instead of pursuing ultimate detail on the environments, we could unify all the lighting and surfaces, which is the big thing for Doom 3. So that was the core decision to be made, and I look back at that and, more than any other game I've done, I think those initial decisions and the initial technology layout were exactly right. Looking at things today, there's a clear generational step.
PCZ: WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP THEN?
JC: The next step is actually ready to be written now. Again, driven by external hardware things, we had a couple of important inflection points happen in hardware with the latest generation - the floating-point pixel formats and the generalised dependent texture reads and flexible fragment programming. Those three things combine with floating point buffers to allow us to synthesise any equation by decomposing it into multiple passes.
PCZ: COME AGAIN?
JC: Previously, without the floating-point you would always start losing lower order bits of precision because you've done so many calculations on some of these things. Even in Doom 3 it's a significant problem - it starts showing up as some artifacts that can be pointed out in the game. Even if you had infinitely fast hardware of previous generations, you couldn't do a hundred-pass computation because you've only got eight bits of precision and it'll turn to mud after a certain number of combinations. But with the floating-point calculations you can then arbitrarily decompose this and do, if necessary, hundreds of thousands of calculations. And this is hugely interesting.
PCZ: IT IS?
JC: Yes. There was an important paper that came out at SIGGRAPH a few years ago by someone at SGI [Silicon Graphics]. He presented one real-time renderer and he presented something that showed the decomposition of Renderman shaders into multi-pass stuff that required floating-point and pixel stuff. It was amusing because I remember people completely discounting that paper, which I think is going to be looked back at as one of the most seminal things in interactive graphics. People were saying the Renderman shader was ridiculous - it took 500 passes to do this simple shader. People just hit this number - 500 passes, and clicked it out of their brain as not relevant. But a pixel in Doom 3 may have 80 textures combined on to it. Depending on whether things are done completely in calculations or not, it may have up to seven textures per light on each surface. You may have a surface with three lights shining on it, that's 21 textures, and you might have three levels of things drawn behind that, and then you might have 50 shadow planes going between them, so we can pile up over 100 operations per pixel right now. So suddenly 500 for every surface layer is maybe a generation or two away, but it's not that far off. Exponential paces are difficult to come to grips with.
PCZ: OK... So, do you think Doom 3's gameplay would be as interesting if it wasn't for the new technology?
JC: We decided Doom 3's gameplay is not going to be some wild innovation - it's a first-person shooter. There are a lot of arguments that can be made about game design, and I prefer simplicity and elegance. There are big arguments that happen inside id over 'do we wanna have an additional control for something like this?', and I'm always the one saying we want the minimum number of everything, because I want it to be simple and fun to play. I think the GUI interaction in the game is really powerful as an interactive paradigm. It doesn't require additional controls; you're interacting with something people are familiar with. Allowing you to interact with complex displays is powerful, much more than adding three more keys to do something.In terms of the basic gameplay, the first-person shooter is a genre that will probably be around forever now, like flight sims and driving games. There are plenty of branches you can take within that, like pure realism, tournament play, comic action. And I think the push for people to innovate in gameplay - I'm not sure that I particularly agree with it. You don't go around constantly coming up with new basketball games. What we have the ability to do is improve the playground you're playing on in these fundamental ways, and it's a good thing. We've got some neat things where you can control some big machines and do some cool stuff, but it is still a 'running a person around, shooting at things in the world' game, and I didn't want to make it anything other than that. We have vehicle code in there that I know Splash Damage is playing with and making buggies and stuff fly around, but I'm most mistrustful of adding that sort of thing.
PCZ: Now you've got the per-poly hit detection in the game, will all player models have to comply to a strict surface area in multiplayer matches?
JC: It's going to be a factor, because yes, that matters. When we first put it in the game, we took the same damage levels from Quake III, and we started playing against it - you just couldn't kill people! They occupy like one-third the surface area of their bounding box, and it just takes a long time to hit people. The damage levels have been upped a lot - it probably makes aiming for splashes more important. But yes, it probably will have some effect on the models. People who are playing competitively will probably play with the lock-down original models. But because the multiplayer is peer-to-peer, where you join together at the start, it will have a different general dynamic from the Quake servers. You won't see people randomly joining in the middle of a game.
PCZ: From Doom to rockets, what's the latest on your experimental rocketry project, Armadillo Aerospace?
JC: We're probably six months behind because of the propellant situation. Here I am, trying to buy $150,000 worth of rocket-grade peroxide, and here is a big chemical company that's losing money, but are more scared of something happening and being sued. But our sub-scale vehicle is ready to fly and our big vehicle is very close to flight form as well. We bought a Russian space suit off Ebay and we're going to modify that.
PCZ: WHAT'S THE GOAL THEN? ORBIT?
JC: We're aiming for the X PRIZE. It's a $10million prize to launch three people to 100km. You go up, you get 10 minutes of weightlessness in space, and you go through re-entry - it's basically the world's tallest roller-coaster, and you have to repeat it twice in two weeks.
PCZ: ARE YOU GOING UP?
JC: It would be fun, but it's not something I'm really driven to do. And my wife is vigorously opposed to the concept.
JOHN CARMACK JARGON BUSTER!
He may be the greatest programmer alive, but Johnny C can't half spew out the technical gobbledygook. In fact, we lost three work experience kids when their brains melted trying to transcribe this interview. As a courtesy to their families (especially the third one - we really should have known by then), we've compiled this patented John Carmack Jargon Buster in conjunction with our resident geek-speak explainer-guy Phil 'Magic' Wand...
* RENDERMAN The rendering standard invented by Pixar (the blokes who made Toy Story), used to make blockbuster movie effects in Jurassic Park, Finding Nemo, etc.
* PASSES A 'pass' in rendering terms is a stage in the process of drawing an image - much like the various stages of painting a watercolour, where you start out with a wash and then gradually fill in all the details. No card can render complex scenes in one go, hence multi-stage rendering. More passes equals more detail and greater realism.
* SHADER A shader is a bit of code that describes a specific visual effect applied to a texture when it is rendered in a game. Since modern 'T&L'-enabled 3D cards handle the transformation and lighting of every polygon drawn on screen at any time, shaders are uploaded to the card and allow the game code to customise the way the polygons are handled. Hence, you have vertex shaders, which manipulate the transform calculations (equals better animations), and pixel shaders, which allow the lighting of every pixel to be customised (equals Shrek-like visual effects in real time).
* GENERALIsED DEPENDENT TEXTURE READS A new feature of next-gen 3D cards, dependent texture reads allow the results from one texture render to be treated as an input to the second. In simpler terms, the colours from one are treated as the coordinates for the next. You might use this in rendering something deeply complex such as cloth or skin. The results: greater speed and realism.
* FLOATING-POINT PIXEL FORMATS A float is a number with a fraction after it. So where 239 is an integer, 239.109507 is a float-point number, and as such allows a greater precision. A pixel is traditionally represented in byte (8-bit) format, that is, it's represented by a number from 0 to 255. A floating-point pixel gives a much wider range of values. The DX9 Radeon cards, for example, support up to 128-bit floating-point pixel format. The results: a move towards photo-realism.
* FLEXIBLE FRAGMENT PROGRAMMING A per-fragment programming model, unlike a vertex model, which relies heavily on estimating appearances, allows you to apply bump mapping, reflection and lighting effects to 'fragments' of objects for much higher realism.
URL
DOOM 3
PC
id Software
Activision
32
First Person Shooter
31 Oct 03 The year is 2145. Id Software, along with the most powerful computers on earth, has been performing secret experiments in its base on Mars. Tapping into the very fabric of the universe itself - and beyond - id scientists have made discoveries that will forever change human existence. Then something went terribly wrong...
Actually, we're lying. Nothing went wrong. Indeed, every time we travel forward in time to see this titanic shooter sequel we're reminded how goddamned stunning it's going to be. Last time we traveled to Mars (or was it Texas...?) for a full hands-on with the new deathmatch modes. Now, we're unloading the other barrel, with a look at the magnificently horrific single-player campaign.
For those who've been lost in a time vortex, Doom 3 is a loose re-telling of the original Doom story, pitting a lone space marine against the encroaching forces of Hell, rather embarrassingly unleashed by some boffins tampering with forces beyond their ken. This time, however, id is aiming for a decidedly cinematic, story-driven experience, roping in sci-fi writer Matthew Costello (The 7th Guest) to flesh out the script, and using the tasty new graphics engine to render the most immersive and menacing visuals ever seen in a game.
As lead designer Tim Willits puts it: "With Doom 3 we are fortunate in that we have this totally new engine; this great technology to create the game around. It means we can deliver an atmosphere and intense, scary nature that has not been seen in a shooter before, and really set a new bar with what a game looks like and feels like."
FACE TO FACE
Before we actually played Doom 3, all that was just words. Now that we've experienced it first-hand, however, it's a very different story. Doom 3 is not just an incredible-looking game, it's the best horror film you'll ever play. From the swinging light strips and starkly cavorting shadows to the shockingly forceful demonic ambushes, the whole thing is meticulously constructed to generate an atmosphere of terror. It works bloody well too, and it wasn't long into our playtest before we were shifting our weight nervously and leaping at every stray growl - just as in the original all those years ago.
And yet in gameplay terms, Doom 3 is very much a typical first-person shooter. There's little we haven't seen here before - the weapons are all remakes of the old Doom arsenal (except for the flashlight, which doubles as a club), and most of the monsters are revisions of old favourites as well (see boxout). In fact, the most innovative device is the new interface system. Basically, it allows you to operate switches and computer interfaces simply by looking at them, your crosshair automatically switching to a cursor pointer when you hover over an interactive panel. Beyond this, Doom 3 is a bog-standard corridor shooter - on paper at least.
Let me describe a typical scene. You've entered an area of the UAC base that's been overtaken by Hell, the metallic walls and grey fittings ceding to a Dantean vision of blood-red walls and viscera-strewn caverns. All seems quiet as you locate the item you were looking for - a data stick or some such trifle, to be uploaded to a PDA-like device that holds all your mission information. However, as soon as you make to leave, you somehow awaken a demon, and right on cue all hell breaks loose. Frenzied imps spawn in a dozen places at once, emerging from pentagram-like portals in a burst of magma, pelting you with fireballs and blocking your exit.
UNDERWORLDS APART
There's nothing remotely novel going on here, and yet so intense and mesmerising is the atmosphere created that even this straightforward scene left us in a nervous sweat. It's almost like the amazing visual design renders moot any questions of originality. In his own way, Tim agrees: "I find it really funny in interviews when people ask, what's the difference between Doom 1 and Doom 3? It's like, dude, have you seen it?"
Certainly, however, there's more going on in Doom 3 than just shooting zombies. In one sequence you come across a terrified NPC trapped in a part of the base with no power - and no lights. He strikes a deal with you: he'll lead you through the darkness with his wavering, failing lamp in return for your bodyguard services. Of course you agree, as you can't hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time (though this may change in the final game), and it is really dark out there. Of course, the brutal demonic attacks begin almost immediately, and you're forced into a desperate battle to keep their attention focused on you and not the defenseless NPC, all the while struggling to stay close to the light. Again, nothing we haven't seen before (even Donkey Kong 64 featured a similar sequence almost four years ago), but effective nonetheless.
Other change-of-pace moments come through the application of the new global 'look and click' interface, as described above. One scene tasks you with removing some poisonous gas canisters from a room by picking them up remotely with a crane arm and dumping them in a disposal unit. Thus ensues a brief mini-game that works like a UFO-catcher machine in an arcade, though with rather less frustrating results.
hese, however, are exceptions to the rule - moments designed to break up the move-and-shoot carnage that makes up the bulk of the game. And we can only assure you that this is no bad thing.A lot of people are concerned there's no game behind Doom 3's stunning visuals - it's just a 'tech demo' for id's new 3D engine. This, however, is totally missing the point. The new engine is the new game. Yes, it's a stunning showcase for the new rendering tech, going out of its way to create an atmospheric and immersive environment with an unprecedented level of detail. And that's exactly why it's going to be great.
CARMACK-EDDON 2
In part two of PC ZONE's exclusive interview, we conclude our chat with legendary id programmer John Carmack, getting the dirt on
DOOM 3, BASKETBALL AND THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING
Last month, we kept it simple. We shot the breeze with John about ragdolls and hell artifacts, how happy he is with the game and how things have changed since the olden days. But really, we were just warming up. This month, we give the world's most-famous code-jockey the reins, hanging on for grim death as he vents his views on innovation, graphics technology and manned space flight...
PCZ: So, John, id's games have signalled generational leaps in gaming technology more than once. Do you see Doom 3 as an equally big leap as Doom or Quake?
JC: Yes. We had a few evolutionary steps where we had Quake II and III - obvious evolutions of Quake. Even though Quake III was a completely different rendering engine, it was still in the same paradigm, which was light-mapped worlds and single point-shaded characters.Before each new game, I take stock of where I think the hardware's going, what we've got now and what's coming out in the time until we release the game. That's what drives the decision of when it's time to write a new engine. It's not like I've got some brilliant new way of structuring things, it is driven by the external forces. And people who ignore that suffer miserably, like the people who were doing voxel engines right as 3D hardware engines were coming on. So as we went through Q2 and Q3, I was like OK, we're starting to get hardware acceleration here, but can we rely on it, does it fundamentally change the way we do the rendering? And it didn't. With Q3 we were able to say 'hardware accelerated only', but the things we could do with that hardware were still basically the things we were doing in previous generations. We could just do it more concisely, faster, higher colour, all those various things. When it was time to look at the Doom 3 stuff, I investigated five different directions for rendering post-Quake III. Some of them would have given much higher quality renderings of static environments. It's not an exaggeration that we can do photo-realistic renderings of static environments and move through them. But, when you then paste dynamic objects on to those static scenes, they're clearly in this separate plane. You've got your moving thingy and your environment. And I thought it was more important as a game technology, which is about interactive things, that we followed this other opportunity. Instead of pursuing ultimate detail on the environments, we could unify all the lighting and surfaces, which is the big thing for Doom 3. So that was the core decision to be made, and I look back at that and, more than any other game I've done, I think those initial decisions and the initial technology layout were exactly right. Looking at things today, there's a clear generational step.
PCZ: WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP THEN?
JC: The next step is actually ready to be written now. Again, driven by external hardware things, we had a couple of important inflection points happen in hardware with the latest generation - the floating-point pixel formats and the generalised dependent texture reads and flexible fragment programming. Those three things combine with floating point buffers to allow us to synthesise any equation by decomposing it into multiple passes.
PCZ: COME AGAIN?
JC: Previously, without the floating-point you would always start losing lower order bits of precision because you've done so many calculations on some of these things. Even in Doom 3 it's a significant problem - it starts showing up as some artifacts that can be pointed out in the game. Even if you had infinitely fast hardware of previous generations, you couldn't do a hundred-pass computation because you've only got eight bits of precision and it'll turn to mud after a certain number of combinations. But with the floating-point calculations you can then arbitrarily decompose this and do, if necessary, hundreds of thousands of calculations. And this is hugely interesting.
PCZ: IT IS?
JC: Yes. There was an important paper that came out at SIGGRAPH a few years ago by someone at SGI [Silicon Graphics]. He presented one real-time renderer and he presented something that showed the decomposition of Renderman shaders into multi-pass stuff that required floating-point and pixel stuff. It was amusing because I remember people completely discounting that paper, which I think is going to be looked back at as one of the most seminal things in interactive graphics. People were saying the Renderman shader was ridiculous - it took 500 passes to do this simple shader. People just hit this number - 500 passes, and clicked it out of their brain as not relevant. But a pixel in Doom 3 may have 80 textures combined on to it. Depending on whether things are done completely in calculations or not, it may have up to seven textures per light on each surface. You may have a surface with three lights shining on it, that's 21 textures, and you might have three levels of things drawn behind that, and then you might have 50 shadow planes going between them, so we can pile up over 100 operations per pixel right now. So suddenly 500 for every surface layer is maybe a generation or two away, but it's not that far off. Exponential paces are difficult to come to grips with.
PCZ: OK... So, do you think Doom 3's gameplay would be as interesting if it wasn't for the new technology?
JC: We decided Doom 3's gameplay is not going to be some wild innovation - it's a first-person shooter. There are a lot of arguments that can be made about game design, and I prefer simplicity and elegance. There are big arguments that happen inside id over 'do we wanna have an additional control for something like this?', and I'm always the one saying we want the minimum number of everything, because I want it to be simple and fun to play. I think the GUI interaction in the game is really powerful as an interactive paradigm. It doesn't require additional controls; you're interacting with something people are familiar with. Allowing you to interact with complex displays is powerful, much more than adding three more keys to do something.In terms of the basic gameplay, the first-person shooter is a genre that will probably be around forever now, like flight sims and driving games. There are plenty of branches you can take within that, like pure realism, tournament play, comic action. And I think the push for people to innovate in gameplay - I'm not sure that I particularly agree with it. You don't go around constantly coming up with new basketball games. What we have the ability to do is improve the playground you're playing on in these fundamental ways, and it's a good thing. We've got some neat things where you can control some big machines and do some cool stuff, but it is still a 'running a person around, shooting at things in the world' game, and I didn't want to make it anything other than that. We have vehicle code in there that I know Splash Damage is playing with and making buggies and stuff fly around, but I'm most mistrustful of adding that sort of thing.
PCZ: Now you've got the per-poly hit detection in the game, will all player models have to comply to a strict surface area in multiplayer matches?
JC: It's going to be a factor, because yes, that matters. When we first put it in the game, we took the same damage levels from Quake III, and we started playing against it - you just couldn't kill people! They occupy like one-third the surface area of their bounding box, and it just takes a long time to hit people. The damage levels have been upped a lot - it probably makes aiming for splashes more important. But yes, it probably will have some effect on the models. People who are playing competitively will probably play with the lock-down original models. But because the multiplayer is peer-to-peer, where you join together at the start, it will have a different general dynamic from the Quake servers. You won't see people randomly joining in the middle of a game.
PCZ: From Doom to rockets, what's the latest on your experimental rocketry project, Armadillo Aerospace?
JC: We're probably six months behind because of the propellant situation. Here I am, trying to buy $150,000 worth of rocket-grade peroxide, and here is a big chemical company that's losing money, but are more scared of something happening and being sued. But our sub-scale vehicle is ready to fly and our big vehicle is very close to flight form as well. We bought a Russian space suit off Ebay and we're going to modify that.
PCZ: WHAT'S THE GOAL THEN? ORBIT?
JC: We're aiming for the X PRIZE. It's a $10million prize to launch three people to 100km. You go up, you get 10 minutes of weightlessness in space, and you go through re-entry - it's basically the world's tallest roller-coaster, and you have to repeat it twice in two weeks.
PCZ: ARE YOU GOING UP?
JC: It would be fun, but it's not something I'm really driven to do. And my wife is vigorously opposed to the concept.
JOHN CARMACK JARGON BUSTER!
He may be the greatest programmer alive, but Johnny C can't half spew out the technical gobbledygook. In fact, we lost three work experience kids when their brains melted trying to transcribe this interview. As a courtesy to their families (especially the third one - we really should have known by then), we've compiled this patented John Carmack Jargon Buster in conjunction with our resident geek-speak explainer-guy Phil 'Magic' Wand...
* RENDERMAN The rendering standard invented by Pixar (the blokes who made Toy Story), used to make blockbuster movie effects in Jurassic Park, Finding Nemo, etc.
* PASSES A 'pass' in rendering terms is a stage in the process of drawing an image - much like the various stages of painting a watercolour, where you start out with a wash and then gradually fill in all the details. No card can render complex scenes in one go, hence multi-stage rendering. More passes equals more detail and greater realism.
* SHADER A shader is a bit of code that describes a specific visual effect applied to a texture when it is rendered in a game. Since modern 'T&L'-enabled 3D cards handle the transformation and lighting of every polygon drawn on screen at any time, shaders are uploaded to the card and allow the game code to customise the way the polygons are handled. Hence, you have vertex shaders, which manipulate the transform calculations (equals better animations), and pixel shaders, which allow the lighting of every pixel to be customised (equals Shrek-like visual effects in real time).
* GENERALIsED DEPENDENT TEXTURE READS A new feature of next-gen 3D cards, dependent texture reads allow the results from one texture render to be treated as an input to the second. In simpler terms, the colours from one are treated as the coordinates for the next. You might use this in rendering something deeply complex such as cloth or skin. The results: greater speed and realism.
* FLOATING-POINT PIXEL FORMATS A float is a number with a fraction after it. So where 239 is an integer, 239.109507 is a float-point number, and as such allows a greater precision. A pixel is traditionally represented in byte (8-bit) format, that is, it's represented by a number from 0 to 255. A floating-point pixel gives a much wider range of values. The DX9 Radeon cards, for example, support up to 128-bit floating-point pixel format. The results: a move towards photo-realism.
* FLEXIBLE FRAGMENT PROGRAMMING A per-fragment programming model, unlike a vertex model, which relies heavily on estimating appearances, allows you to apply bump mapping, reflection and lighting effects to 'fragments' of objects for much higher realism.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
Tr0n ::
"We have vehicle code in there that I know Splash Damage is playing with and making buggies and stuff fly around, but I'm most mistrustful of adding that sort of thing."
Bruuummmm, brrrruuuuuummm, wiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
Bruuummmm, brrrruuuuuummm, wiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
AtaStrumf ::
Vse lepo in prav samo tole da bo pa gameplay čist typical FPS pa sux. Glih to je cool pr HL2 k je tolk dober gameplay, da je grafika šele v drugi vrsti, čeprav je seveda fenomenalna. Upam, da ne bo D3 samo en neskončen temen hodnik poln zombijev.
Ahiles ::
Dlih to je najbol. Pri hl1 sem zivce zgubu ko so se zacele une bedne jump fore z minami in me niti 1x ni prijel da bi su se kdaj skoz. Pri iD spilih pa me vsake tolk cajta prime da skocim v spil pa odspilam 2-3 mape. Vse iD spile(wolfa3d do q2) sem vsaj 100x obrnu pa se zmeri je fun.
Mavrik ::
Se strinjam z AtaStrumfom pri špekulacijah, da bo Doom spet nadaljeval "tradicijo" Idjevih iger, kjer je bil superiorni 3D pogon ter podn Single Player način. Eh, bodo vsaj MultiPlayer zadeli.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Tr0n ::
Jaz pa menim, da bo Doom III dosedaj najboljsi idjev single player spil, kar se tice zgodbe, vzdusja, atmosfere in stvari, ki jih bos pocel.
No, cez kake 4-5 mesce bomo vedeli vec.
Sicer je pa 10. decembra 10 obletnica Doom-a, tak da bi se znalo kaj zgodit na ta dan. Kaksen test/demo ali kaj podobnega ;).
No, cez kake 4-5 mesce bomo vedeli vec.
Sicer je pa 10. decembra 10 obletnica Doom-a, tak da bi se znalo kaj zgodit na ta dan. Kaksen test/demo ali kaj podobnega ;).
Tr0n ::
Activision Announces Second Quarter Results
Activision also announced that the company is modifying its full fiscal year 2004 and third and fourth quarter outlook. The company is raising its outlook for net revenue for the full fiscal year by $30 million to $780 million, while at the same time it is moving DOOM 3™ into its next fiscal year for planning purposes.
Activision also announced that the company is modifying its full fiscal year 2004 and third and fourth quarter outlook. The company is raising its outlook for net revenue for the full fiscal year by $30 million to $780 million, while at the same time it is moving DOOM 3™ into its next fiscal year for planning purposes.
G0lden ::
Hmm..glede na to da bo prostorski zvok 5.1 v igri sami...pričakujem da me bo odpihnilo..sicer pa itaq bom mel plenice gor ko bom špilal..
Ahiles ::
http://www.computergaming.com/article2/0,4364,1398556,00.asp
Carmack on the Tarmac
As part of CGW's newly redesigned January 2003 issue (now dry leprosy free), there will be a full and complete hands-on preview of DOOM 3. Darren, our only in-office editor with an alcohol problem that's actually in-check, played through a fair bit of the game, grabbed new screenshots, and thoroughly embarrassed himself in a multiplayer match. Look for that bit of informative hilarity on newsstands December 3 (it's the magazine called Computer Gaming World -- the one with DOOM 3 on the cover and a fat DVD loaded with five free games tacked onto the back). Additionally, please find an extended DOOM 3 preview here at 1UP later in December. It'll be all flashed up and super neat. But what about today?
Carmack on the Tarmac
As part of CGW's newly redesigned January 2003 issue (now dry leprosy free), there will be a full and complete hands-on preview of DOOM 3. Darren, our only in-office editor with an alcohol problem that's actually in-check, played through a fair bit of the game, grabbed new screenshots, and thoroughly embarrassed himself in a multiplayer match. Look for that bit of informative hilarity on newsstands December 3 (it's the magazine called Computer Gaming World -- the one with DOOM 3 on the cover and a fat DVD loaded with five free games tacked onto the back). Additionally, please find an extended DOOM 3 preview here at 1UP later in December. It'll be all flashed up and super neat. But what about today?
Ahiles ::
No zdele se bo pocas zacel naval novih slik pa clankov.
Tole so scani iz nemske revije "GameStar" - Doom3 Preview
Tole so scani iz nemske revije "GameStar" - Doom3 Preview
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Gandalfar ()
undefined ::
Naj mi nekdo pove, ki mu je to bolj podrobno znano, kako se te glave mutirajo v pajke. V filmu The Thing je blo to jasno, tukaj pa se mi zdi tole kot kopija tega klišeja in nič kaj povezano z dejstvi v Doomu 3, kaj šele da bi bilo izvirno.
Ahiles ::
Pa se en clanek je na obzorju sam trenutno je sam ustni opis.
I bought the January 2004 Computer Gaming World Magazine. They had a pretty decent preview in it that skipped the stuff we know and pretty much went for what their impressions were plus some new information. Included:
1) New plot information. Interesting, and includes a few spoilers, actually.
2) New pictures of weapons, including the plasma gun. They look good. Still no soulcube.
3) A neat look at some new zombies, including one Kenneth Scott creation affectionately called "Burnie." He is a mangled-up, tallish zombie with some chunks taken out of him. Set on fire by the mischevous demons of hell, he continuously smolders in agony and has flames coming out of several places in his body. A real "crispy critter." Great stuff.
4) Some more story boards that looked interesting. They depicted some interaction with a Non-Player Character.
5) Kenneth Scott apparently showed CGW a secret creature "by mistake" that was HUGE and SCARY. But they only got a glimpse before he quickly scrambled to take it off screen. Because of its massive size, they could only see part of it while it was there. But Scott said it WASN'T the final boss creature. Yikes.
6) There was a picture of the flashlight in use. It apparently will have a volumetric lightbeam coming from it that you can see besides the illumination on the surface it is pointing at. Cool.
Poudarek na 5 tocki.
I bought the January 2004 Computer Gaming World Magazine. They had a pretty decent preview in it that skipped the stuff we know and pretty much went for what their impressions were plus some new information. Included:
1) New plot information. Interesting, and includes a few spoilers, actually.
2) New pictures of weapons, including the plasma gun. They look good. Still no soulcube.
3) A neat look at some new zombies, including one Kenneth Scott creation affectionately called "Burnie." He is a mangled-up, tallish zombie with some chunks taken out of him. Set on fire by the mischevous demons of hell, he continuously smolders in agony and has flames coming out of several places in his body. A real "crispy critter." Great stuff.
4) Some more story boards that looked interesting. They depicted some interaction with a Non-Player Character.
5) Kenneth Scott apparently showed CGW a secret creature "by mistake" that was HUGE and SCARY. But they only got a glimpse before he quickly scrambled to take it off screen. Because of its massive size, they could only see part of it while it was there. But Scott said it WASN'T the final boss creature. Yikes.
6) There was a picture of the flashlight in use. It apparently will have a volumetric lightbeam coming from it that you can see besides the illumination on the surface it is pointing at. Cool.
Poudarek na 5 tocki.
AtaStrumf ::
Nekam mal je različnih monstrumov! Upam, da ne bomo cel cajt strelal samo ene 5 različnih zombijev in pošastkov. To je bil recimo en večjih problemov pri HALO-tu, k ti rata dolgčas skoz ene in iste strelat. Ni motivacije za iskanje novih, če se skoz pojavljajo isti!
Ahiles ::
Se 3 scani iz cgw revije sam so bol bogi upam da bo ker drug mal lepse poskeniral pa po moznosti cel clank.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Predator ()
Ahiles ::
Tole je pretipkan se mi zdi iz CGW revije
ROBERT DUFFY MUST DIE.
I'll let him finish working on Doom 3 first, but his day is coming. The programmer is tap-dancing around my rocket fire...and when I'm just about to get the drop on him, the lights go out. How did I come to be so owned, you ask? After three years of development with minimal press information (and hundreds of stories for every gib-sized morsel of information), Id promised CGW a behind-the-scenes peek at the latest progress on Doom 3, no holds barred. In a single day, they'd show everything: All the big questions would be answered, all the weapons would be revealed, and previously unseen levels would be explored. Welcome, gentle readers, to your Doom.
HELLFIRE, TEXAS
In the same building that houses the office of the mayor of Mesquite, Texas, sits the unassuming headquarters of Id Software. Once inside, it's obvious these offices aren't for selling insurance. There's a 6.1 THX-certified conference room equipped with a plasma monitor and a Falcon Northwest PC with Doom 3 emblazoned in neon lights on the side. Our demo driver for today is lead designer Tim Willits. He fires up the single-player game, talking about how he "wants to scare the shit out of people." Since the only thing scary about the original Doom for me was the multiplayer competition, I take Willits' warning with a grain of salt.
Do we really need to go into the proprietary physics, shadows, and A.I. being poured into the Doom 3 engine? It's been praised, it looks good, and everyone has said their two cents. Seeing it firsthand however, makes me feel like I'm on the set of Aliens. The slow pacing, claustrophobic environments, and use of shadows all add a great deal to the game's palpable tension.
"The pacing is intentionally slow," says Willits. "After all, we put all this work into [the environments] and we want to give people the opportunity to explore them. Otherwise, what's the point?" He says this while unloading buckshot into a zombie commando. A whip-like tentacle snakes out from its right arm and lashes at the screen.
There are plenty of other details in the carnage, including a bloody handprint on the wall and a disemboweled body hunched over a table. Wait. Was that the sound of a cracked pipe hissing...or something else?
Willits opens his in-game PDA for the next mission objective. The PDA contains maps, goals, e-mails retrieved from bodies, and so on. It's a cool little window into the world, but if you read some information carefully, you'll find hints to secret areas, inside jokes, and other minutia. For example, at one point you read an email that you've downloaded to your PDA from a supervisor. In it, you're asked to fix the loose floor panels in the Alpha Labs before someone falls through and is injured. If you read the e-mail, you'll know where to find the broken floor panels, which lead to a secret underground passage. You can then sneak up behind a number of demons and zombies and kill them before they can ambush you.
Back in the game, a stray shot at a window suddenly breaches the base's atmosphere. Oxygen is getting sucked out to the Martian surface. You'll die from suffocation if you're not careful, but the developers, unfortunately, had to kill the visual effect of getting sucked out along with the air. "The calculations for physics of shattering glass are bad enough, but trying to factor in [getting sucked out a window] is just too much," says Willits.
Now, we're walking in the dark and escorting the NPC Ed through some corridors. Lit only by Ed's lantern, imps pop out from the shadows, and I jump back for a second, laughing. These aren't come pixilated little buggers. They are detailed and coming right at you. It feels like a movie. Don't want to know what this "movie" is about yet? Skip the next section if you don't want the story line spoiled.
*Spoilers!*
You start the game as a marine walking through a research outpost on Mars. " you don't jump into the action right away. As soon as you want to begin, you report for duty and go out on patrol," Willits says. Before long, a gateway to hell opens, leaving g you as one of the few survivors. Ah, but seeing as how you played the original Doom, you already knew that. But did you know that there's an ancient civilization buried deep in the heart of Mars? Did you know that this had also happened centuries ago and the demons were beaten back with some ultimate weapon?
While the folks at Id didn't have any artwork to show of this nifty bit of alien gear, we can give you a hint: the new weapon, called the soul cube, has nothing to do with hell raiser. This contraption, though, was powerful enough to beat back the demonic hordes once. Realizing it's power, the hordes grabbed it and brought it back to hell to make sure it couldn't be used again-which means you're going to have to go down into the bowels of the underworld, where this super weapon is being guarded, retrieve it, and stop the inevitable invasion of Earth. OK, end of major spoiler.
*Minor Spoilers Ahead!* (but some good non-spoiler info too...)
HOT POCKETS
Deep in the caverns of Mars, at an excavation site, we start seeing signs of a previous culture. A huge temple with writings on the wall means more secrets for you to uncover. Little pockets of hell are busting through the walls. Normal areas meld with brimstone, and pentagrams appear on the ground. But there's no time to see the sights, as a couple of revenants start launching plasma balls and a demon floats overhead. Next come waves of zombie security guards armed with shotguns. A couple shots connect, sending you reeling.
This is one part of the game that surprised me-the visceral feel of each blow. Whether you get slashed by a zombie or take a shotgun blast to the grill, your "head" snaps away, making it tough to focus and aim properly for a few seconds. And, thanks to the per-poly hit detection, the strength of that shot and the subsequent blow varies. Some bits hit your armor, but the strays that actually connect with flesh are going to do more damage!Śand every projectile is precisely calculated with the physics engine, whether you're taking potshots or just knocking out the glass from a window.
Some creature/boss spoilers ahead!
VISIONS OF HELL
The art in Doom 3 looks like an H.R. Geiger nightmare. Lead artist Kenneth Scott starts by showing the cast of prezombified characters, each with different types of head and effects. He uses a blending technique to shift a woman from the normal state to a sallow zombie. "Early shots we've sent out only have a couple zombies in them. People are probably thinking they all look alike, but they don't," says Scott. There are lots of gruesome ways to die, and they'll all be on display. Various chunks from a body could be missing, an exposed skull here, no stomach there. Then there are some personal favorites, like the security guards who still wear cracked goggles after their eyeballs have burst. There are effects also being added to some, like "Burnie," for example. This zombie model has flames licking off parts of his body, and you can see the charred flesh underneath.
But this is saying nothing of the bigger, tougher denizens of hell: fearsome hell knights, Thing-inspired trites that make Half-Life's headcrabs look like the catch of the day, and lots of as-yet-unnamed creatures. There's a spidery demon boss that skitters around and has a pouch in the back that looks like it'll spawn little tritelings. Scott's favorite: the sinister hell cherub. "Hey, heaven's got !Žem," he says. Not like this though: Twisted baby faces top tiny, disfigured bodies that fly around with insect wings.
A huge monstrosity fills the screen for a split second. "Oops, I don't think I was supposed to show you that!" The unarmed Jurassic demon is so big it can't be seen in it's entirety in one screen. While Scott can't go into detail on what it is, he assures me that this isn't the final boss. Now that's a scary thought.End creature spoilers
If you want scary, though, you also need to get a feel for the animation work being put into doom 3."The trick is to add little sequences in the game engine that don't pull you out of the game," says lead animator Fred Nilsson, who was one of the animators for Shrek. So how does creating that movie's gingerbread man torture sequence compare to working on a game like doom 3? "Games are a lot more creative. You've got to do a lot of things, like creating models and setting up the character and skeletons."
The large number of bones in each character allows for detailed animation. Whether you're observing a marine's face contorted in pain, seeing a mouth form words, or simply noticing sets of eyes darting around the room, it all sells the realism beyond the graphics. And, after a two-day motion capture marathon, it's easy to overlay mannerisms, staggers, and the like.
But the really creative part is being able to place cameras, down and edit the scene. Using Maya, and the in-game engine, Nilsson briefly yanks the camera out of your control. The next 10 seconds in one scene focus on a pinky demon knocking over a railing, jumping down, and ramming a door. Only then do you get control back. Finally, Nilsson gets to be the director.
Technically, you'll get to be one as well, since the editing software will be available when Doom 3 ships. This is Rob Duffy's domain, programmer and the keeper of the tools.
"The fact that we include all the tools, source maps, and textures on the disc is big. This is the first time this has been done." You won't get the 3d modeling (Lightwave) and animation (Maya) tools that we used, but there are light versions and free programs available on the Web. "Because of the things the engine can do, we can expect to see some great things [from the modding community]".
You see, Doom 3 may be intentionally slow-paced, but that doesn't mean you can't get some serious speed. The physics engine allows for vehicles, if desired. You can also get fast and furious combat, as in the upcoming Quake 4. (Duffy confirmed that Raven Software is working on Quake 4 right now in tandem with the id folks, but other than that, mum's the word.) What's Duffy looking forwarded to? More single-player mod offerings. "All the mods lately have been multiplayer. If you have a team that wants to break into the business with a commercial venture, a single-player mod is the best way to get noticed."
In order for those coders to get crankin', though, the game has to come out. "Early ads said that Doom 3 was coming in 2003," says id CEO Todd Hollenshead, "but we knew that probably wasn't going to happen." People are getting anxious, though-anxious enough to distribute the game early. A year ago, the E3 build was leaked to the public, and the recent news of the Half-Life 2 source code leak brought up some painful memories.
So when will Doom 3 ship? Hollenshead gives the stock answer on cue: "It'll be done when it's done," Looks like we're going to have to settle this with a deathmatch before I hit the road.
"Let's get ready to Giiiiib!"
The single-player game may be intentionally slow, but the pace is kicked up for multiplayer. No adrenaline meters required on the six to eight maps that'll come with the game when it ships. You'll be able to manipulate switches, activate security cameras, move objects, close shutters, and turn off lights. There may only be four people playing at a time, but Hollenshead explains, "We knew we were onto something because we started lining up to play it in the office."
Imagine moving a canister in front of a doorway and turning off the lights. You hide in a corner and-whoosh-the door opens. All you can see is the silhouette of your enemy in the doorway and it's time to open fire. Just pray your target isn't in berserker mode.
Scott describes the berserker mode as the sci-fi drug "red-eye" that was seen in an episode of Cowboy Bebop. As you slap the berserker helmet on, the world goes crimson; you run uncontrollably at a full sprint, and you're only able to punch or club someone with your flashlight for ridiculous amounts of damage. And all the while, you're maniacally screaming.
Which catches us up to where we are now: I've already been brained twice with a flashlight by a berserking Marty Stratton, and Duffy once again has me in his sights. Click. I forgot to reload. His shotgun blast catches part of my armor and sends my "head" reeling. The visceral screen shake, combined with the 6.1 surround sound, makes me feel the impact of every bit of buck-shot. It's over. I come in second place with seven kills. The sad part? I know they were going easy on me.
There's always next time-especially since Nilsson waits in the wings like some sinister end boss. Everyone in the office fears his deadly aim, but not me; not yet, at least. I'll be in training until I head back down to see whatever's next from Id.
While id has only a few renders available, we learned about all the weapons that will be in the final game. Not pictured here are the flashlight, grenades, the rocket launcher, the infamous BFG, and the soul cube.
Fun Facts: The face of the space marine you control in the game is that of Kevin Cloud, artist and co-owner of Id Software. Nobody has told him yet.
Fun Facts: The shotgun from the original Doom was actually modeled on a plastic toy gun. It still sits in Id's lobby.
Carmack Quotes:
- It's funny at 33 years old being an old man in the [game] industry. I wrote my first game for the Apple II, Shadowforge, about 16 years ago.
- "I'm not nearly as big of a game player as a lot of the guys [at id]. Part of taking a step back from being a designer to the directorial role is that I may not be the best person to design games. I can code certain aspects, but I'd rather have passionate people that have a vison they want to get in. I'm more the engineer and technician who wants something to work well."
ROBERT DUFFY MUST DIE.
I'll let him finish working on Doom 3 first, but his day is coming. The programmer is tap-dancing around my rocket fire...and when I'm just about to get the drop on him, the lights go out. How did I come to be so owned, you ask? After three years of development with minimal press information (and hundreds of stories for every gib-sized morsel of information), Id promised CGW a behind-the-scenes peek at the latest progress on Doom 3, no holds barred. In a single day, they'd show everything: All the big questions would be answered, all the weapons would be revealed, and previously unseen levels would be explored. Welcome, gentle readers, to your Doom.
HELLFIRE, TEXAS
In the same building that houses the office of the mayor of Mesquite, Texas, sits the unassuming headquarters of Id Software. Once inside, it's obvious these offices aren't for selling insurance. There's a 6.1 THX-certified conference room equipped with a plasma monitor and a Falcon Northwest PC with Doom 3 emblazoned in neon lights on the side. Our demo driver for today is lead designer Tim Willits. He fires up the single-player game, talking about how he "wants to scare the shit out of people." Since the only thing scary about the original Doom for me was the multiplayer competition, I take Willits' warning with a grain of salt.
Do we really need to go into the proprietary physics, shadows, and A.I. being poured into the Doom 3 engine? It's been praised, it looks good, and everyone has said their two cents. Seeing it firsthand however, makes me feel like I'm on the set of Aliens. The slow pacing, claustrophobic environments, and use of shadows all add a great deal to the game's palpable tension.
"The pacing is intentionally slow," says Willits. "After all, we put all this work into [the environments] and we want to give people the opportunity to explore them. Otherwise, what's the point?" He says this while unloading buckshot into a zombie commando. A whip-like tentacle snakes out from its right arm and lashes at the screen.
There are plenty of other details in the carnage, including a bloody handprint on the wall and a disemboweled body hunched over a table. Wait. Was that the sound of a cracked pipe hissing...or something else?
Willits opens his in-game PDA for the next mission objective. The PDA contains maps, goals, e-mails retrieved from bodies, and so on. It's a cool little window into the world, but if you read some information carefully, you'll find hints to secret areas, inside jokes, and other minutia. For example, at one point you read an email that you've downloaded to your PDA from a supervisor. In it, you're asked to fix the loose floor panels in the Alpha Labs before someone falls through and is injured. If you read the e-mail, you'll know where to find the broken floor panels, which lead to a secret underground passage. You can then sneak up behind a number of demons and zombies and kill them before they can ambush you.
Back in the game, a stray shot at a window suddenly breaches the base's atmosphere. Oxygen is getting sucked out to the Martian surface. You'll die from suffocation if you're not careful, but the developers, unfortunately, had to kill the visual effect of getting sucked out along with the air. "The calculations for physics of shattering glass are bad enough, but trying to factor in [getting sucked out a window] is just too much," says Willits.
Now, we're walking in the dark and escorting the NPC Ed through some corridors. Lit only by Ed's lantern, imps pop out from the shadows, and I jump back for a second, laughing. These aren't come pixilated little buggers. They are detailed and coming right at you. It feels like a movie. Don't want to know what this "movie" is about yet? Skip the next section if you don't want the story line spoiled.
*Spoilers!*
You start the game as a marine walking through a research outpost on Mars. " you don't jump into the action right away. As soon as you want to begin, you report for duty and go out on patrol," Willits says. Before long, a gateway to hell opens, leaving g you as one of the few survivors. Ah, but seeing as how you played the original Doom, you already knew that. But did you know that there's an ancient civilization buried deep in the heart of Mars? Did you know that this had also happened centuries ago and the demons were beaten back with some ultimate weapon?
While the folks at Id didn't have any artwork to show of this nifty bit of alien gear, we can give you a hint: the new weapon, called the soul cube, has nothing to do with hell raiser. This contraption, though, was powerful enough to beat back the demonic hordes once. Realizing it's power, the hordes grabbed it and brought it back to hell to make sure it couldn't be used again-which means you're going to have to go down into the bowels of the underworld, where this super weapon is being guarded, retrieve it, and stop the inevitable invasion of Earth. OK, end of major spoiler.
*Minor Spoilers Ahead!* (but some good non-spoiler info too...)
HOT POCKETS
Deep in the caverns of Mars, at an excavation site, we start seeing signs of a previous culture. A huge temple with writings on the wall means more secrets for you to uncover. Little pockets of hell are busting through the walls. Normal areas meld with brimstone, and pentagrams appear on the ground. But there's no time to see the sights, as a couple of revenants start launching plasma balls and a demon floats overhead. Next come waves of zombie security guards armed with shotguns. A couple shots connect, sending you reeling.
This is one part of the game that surprised me-the visceral feel of each blow. Whether you get slashed by a zombie or take a shotgun blast to the grill, your "head" snaps away, making it tough to focus and aim properly for a few seconds. And, thanks to the per-poly hit detection, the strength of that shot and the subsequent blow varies. Some bits hit your armor, but the strays that actually connect with flesh are going to do more damage!Śand every projectile is precisely calculated with the physics engine, whether you're taking potshots or just knocking out the glass from a window.
Some creature/boss spoilers ahead!
VISIONS OF HELL
The art in Doom 3 looks like an H.R. Geiger nightmare. Lead artist Kenneth Scott starts by showing the cast of prezombified characters, each with different types of head and effects. He uses a blending technique to shift a woman from the normal state to a sallow zombie. "Early shots we've sent out only have a couple zombies in them. People are probably thinking they all look alike, but they don't," says Scott. There are lots of gruesome ways to die, and they'll all be on display. Various chunks from a body could be missing, an exposed skull here, no stomach there. Then there are some personal favorites, like the security guards who still wear cracked goggles after their eyeballs have burst. There are effects also being added to some, like "Burnie," for example. This zombie model has flames licking off parts of his body, and you can see the charred flesh underneath.
But this is saying nothing of the bigger, tougher denizens of hell: fearsome hell knights, Thing-inspired trites that make Half-Life's headcrabs look like the catch of the day, and lots of as-yet-unnamed creatures. There's a spidery demon boss that skitters around and has a pouch in the back that looks like it'll spawn little tritelings. Scott's favorite: the sinister hell cherub. "Hey, heaven's got !Žem," he says. Not like this though: Twisted baby faces top tiny, disfigured bodies that fly around with insect wings.
A huge monstrosity fills the screen for a split second. "Oops, I don't think I was supposed to show you that!" The unarmed Jurassic demon is so big it can't be seen in it's entirety in one screen. While Scott can't go into detail on what it is, he assures me that this isn't the final boss. Now that's a scary thought.End creature spoilers
If you want scary, though, you also need to get a feel for the animation work being put into doom 3."The trick is to add little sequences in the game engine that don't pull you out of the game," says lead animator Fred Nilsson, who was one of the animators for Shrek. So how does creating that movie's gingerbread man torture sequence compare to working on a game like doom 3? "Games are a lot more creative. You've got to do a lot of things, like creating models and setting up the character and skeletons."
The large number of bones in each character allows for detailed animation. Whether you're observing a marine's face contorted in pain, seeing a mouth form words, or simply noticing sets of eyes darting around the room, it all sells the realism beyond the graphics. And, after a two-day motion capture marathon, it's easy to overlay mannerisms, staggers, and the like.
But the really creative part is being able to place cameras, down and edit the scene. Using Maya, and the in-game engine, Nilsson briefly yanks the camera out of your control. The next 10 seconds in one scene focus on a pinky demon knocking over a railing, jumping down, and ramming a door. Only then do you get control back. Finally, Nilsson gets to be the director.
Technically, you'll get to be one as well, since the editing software will be available when Doom 3 ships. This is Rob Duffy's domain, programmer and the keeper of the tools.
"The fact that we include all the tools, source maps, and textures on the disc is big. This is the first time this has been done." You won't get the 3d modeling (Lightwave) and animation (Maya) tools that we used, but there are light versions and free programs available on the Web. "Because of the things the engine can do, we can expect to see some great things [from the modding community]".
You see, Doom 3 may be intentionally slow-paced, but that doesn't mean you can't get some serious speed. The physics engine allows for vehicles, if desired. You can also get fast and furious combat, as in the upcoming Quake 4. (Duffy confirmed that Raven Software is working on Quake 4 right now in tandem with the id folks, but other than that, mum's the word.) What's Duffy looking forwarded to? More single-player mod offerings. "All the mods lately have been multiplayer. If you have a team that wants to break into the business with a commercial venture, a single-player mod is the best way to get noticed."
In order for those coders to get crankin', though, the game has to come out. "Early ads said that Doom 3 was coming in 2003," says id CEO Todd Hollenshead, "but we knew that probably wasn't going to happen." People are getting anxious, though-anxious enough to distribute the game early. A year ago, the E3 build was leaked to the public, and the recent news of the Half-Life 2 source code leak brought up some painful memories.
So when will Doom 3 ship? Hollenshead gives the stock answer on cue: "It'll be done when it's done," Looks like we're going to have to settle this with a deathmatch before I hit the road.
"Let's get ready to Giiiiib!"
The single-player game may be intentionally slow, but the pace is kicked up for multiplayer. No adrenaline meters required on the six to eight maps that'll come with the game when it ships. You'll be able to manipulate switches, activate security cameras, move objects, close shutters, and turn off lights. There may only be four people playing at a time, but Hollenshead explains, "We knew we were onto something because we started lining up to play it in the office."
Imagine moving a canister in front of a doorway and turning off the lights. You hide in a corner and-whoosh-the door opens. All you can see is the silhouette of your enemy in the doorway and it's time to open fire. Just pray your target isn't in berserker mode.
Scott describes the berserker mode as the sci-fi drug "red-eye" that was seen in an episode of Cowboy Bebop. As you slap the berserker helmet on, the world goes crimson; you run uncontrollably at a full sprint, and you're only able to punch or club someone with your flashlight for ridiculous amounts of damage. And all the while, you're maniacally screaming.
Which catches us up to where we are now: I've already been brained twice with a flashlight by a berserking Marty Stratton, and Duffy once again has me in his sights. Click. I forgot to reload. His shotgun blast catches part of my armor and sends my "head" reeling. The visceral screen shake, combined with the 6.1 surround sound, makes me feel the impact of every bit of buck-shot. It's over. I come in second place with seven kills. The sad part? I know they were going easy on me.
There's always next time-especially since Nilsson waits in the wings like some sinister end boss. Everyone in the office fears his deadly aim, but not me; not yet, at least. I'll be in training until I head back down to see whatever's next from Id.
While id has only a few renders available, we learned about all the weapons that will be in the final game. Not pictured here are the flashlight, grenades, the rocket launcher, the infamous BFG, and the soul cube.
Fun Facts: The face of the space marine you control in the game is that of Kevin Cloud, artist and co-owner of Id Software. Nobody has told him yet.
Fun Facts: The shotgun from the original Doom was actually modeled on a plastic toy gun. It still sits in Id's lobby.
Carmack Quotes:
- It's funny at 33 years old being an old man in the [game] industry. I wrote my first game for the Apple II, Shadowforge, about 16 years ago.
- "I'm not nearly as big of a game player as a lot of the guys [at id]. Part of taking a step back from being a designer to the directorial role is that I may not be the best person to design games. I can code certain aspects, but I'd rather have passionate people that have a vison they want to get in. I'm more the engineer and technician who wants something to work well."
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Tr0n ()
morphling1 ::
Ahiles, vsakič ko vidim tvoje ime napisano kot zadnji pošiljatelj, vem da me čakajo nove poslastice
You rock
You rock
http://www2.arnes.si/~mlivak/ Nekaj kar naj bi bila moja domača stran, pa nikoli ne bo :)
Ahiles ::
No se 3 slikce ena prikazuje fiziko druge 2 sta pa mal bolsa kvaliteta prejsnih.
Fizika
In mal bolsi scan:
Fizika
In mal bolsi scan:
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Gandalfar ()
morphling1 ::
Zdaj če sem malo pikolovski, je edina zadevica, ki me malo moti, premalo poligonov po modelih, sej to če se ne motim je nastavljivo right, samo ne vem če tako za okolico kot tudi za modele.
http://www2.arnes.si/~mlivak/ Nekaj kar naj bi bila moja domača stran, pa nikoli ne bo :)
Ahiles ::
Nazalost ne sam v spilu se ne opazi teh robov to se sam na slikah opazi. Ker v spilu je vse skozi v gibanju in se pac zmeri popravi na slikah pa capa 1 frame in pol se vidjo robovi zato je doom3 v zivo veliko lepsi in to vsi pravjo k so ga vidl.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
morphling1 ::
To pa tudi drži, po najnovejših slikah sodeč, bo igra totalno nora. Pravi visual tour d'force :)
http://www2.arnes.si/~mlivak/ Nekaj kar naj bi bila moja domača stran, pa nikoli ne bo :)
Ahiles ::
Kje pa mas Burnie na gameplay slikcah vse kar so tega novga zombija pokazal je una slika kako je z poligoni sestavlen drugje ga pa ni.
morphling1 ::
Crazy
btw. je zdaj že malo bolj znano, kdaj točno naj bi zadeva izšla in če je on-track.
btw. je zdaj že malo bolj znano, kdaj točno naj bi zadeva izšla in če je on-track.
http://www2.arnes.si/~mlivak/ Nekaj kar naj bi bila moja domača stran, pa nikoli ne bo :)
Fury ::
hudo.. zdele k gledam tele slike opazam da je carmack spremenu sence.. in so lepo zablurane po robu! zlo dobr to! k prej te je kr mal pekl ce si predolg gledu not k je blo ibr ostro
morphling1 ::
Ja soft shadows, zgledajo dosti bolj realne kot tiste ostre (sicer v določenih situacijah ob močni svetlobi, morajo sence bit tudi takšne)
http://www2.arnes.si/~mlivak/ Nekaj kar naj bi bila moja domača stran, pa nikoli ne bo :)
Ahiles ::
Kokr se spovnem se je nekdo bunu zakaj se ne da baterije skoz uporablat.
Ohh christ not the flashlight again........
Look:
Why can't marine fire two pistols at once? NOT PART OF GAME
Why can't marine lob a grenage whilst shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine use night vision all the time? NPOG
Why can't marine operate machinery while shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine throw barrell back at zombie while shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine shoot while using flashlight? NPOG
Why can't marine have a wank while using flashlight? NPOG
Just a game folks, better and scarier this way? Yes.
I bet the logic behind the situation was.....
"It's a shame we have a flashlight 'cos the really creepy areas kinda get ruined by it....enemy surprise factor kinda suffers"
"Lets get rid of flashlight?"
"No, we need it for this bit and that bit....and anyway...it looks cool cutting through shadows"
"Okay then what do we do about it...how do we increase scariness while played is using flashlight?"
"I know, how about this: The player can't use weapons when using flashlight"
"Good idea but what happens if they are attacked, we can't leave them totally defenseless"
"How's about we turn flashlight into melee weapon....they can give enemy a good whollop of the flashlight giving them a second or two to switch back to their weapon..."
"Great idea....lets run with that"
Ohh christ not the flashlight again........
Look:
Why can't marine fire two pistols at once? NOT PART OF GAME
Why can't marine lob a grenage whilst shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine use night vision all the time? NPOG
Why can't marine operate machinery while shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine throw barrell back at zombie while shooting? NPOG
Why can't marine shoot while using flashlight? NPOG
Why can't marine have a wank while using flashlight? NPOG
Just a game folks, better and scarier this way? Yes.
I bet the logic behind the situation was.....
"It's a shame we have a flashlight 'cos the really creepy areas kinda get ruined by it....enemy surprise factor kinda suffers"
"Lets get rid of flashlight?"
"No, we need it for this bit and that bit....and anyway...it looks cool cutting through shadows"
"Okay then what do we do about it...how do we increase scariness while played is using flashlight?"
"I know, how about this: The player can't use weapons when using flashlight"
"Good idea but what happens if they are attacked, we can't leave them totally defenseless"
"How's about we turn flashlight into melee weapon....they can give enemy a good whollop of the flashlight giving them a second or two to switch back to their weapon..."
"Great idea....lets run with that"
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
Fury ::
morm najt kako se nardi soft shadowse s stencil shadowsi (k jih doom uporabla kokr jest vem) - kksn hint sentinel? :)
sicer sem najdu tole .. ampak ni ravno najbolsi efekt :)
sicer sem najdu tole .. ampak ni ravno najbolsi efekt :)
Ahiles ::
Tole mal z rezervo uzamte k zdi se mi da gamestar revija ni dlih zlo tocna ponavad pa si ksno stvar po svoje zamisl/napise.
Yesterday I bought the new issue of the German magazine GameStar. There is a big preview about DOOM III in it. There isn't really something new except some new screenshots I haven't seen before. But there is also an interview with Tim Willits. In the last question
GameStar asked:
Is it true that Doom III uses a peer-to-peer network for multiplayer?
Tim Willits:
First we tested a peer-to-peer network but it didn't work out. So we switched to a client/server system.
I haven't read that anywhere else. Is that true? That would be great news for all who wants to play DOOM III in multiplayer mode.
p.s.: Sorry about my English it's not my native language.
Yes, yesterday I bought the magazine as well (contains some really beautiful screenshots), and that note also catched my attention.
It´s great news actually, because that means you can have unlimited multiplayer fun just like in Q2 / Q3, if your hardware is strong enough.
Some other news bits from the article:
- Later in the game you will establish contact to some other surviving marines, who barricaded themselves somewhere below in a subterran tunnel system (or something like that). You can team up with them, but you will not giving them orders.
- More "barrels of fun": let a explosive barrel roll towards some demons, then shoot it... there are more examples mentioned where you can use the physics in creative ways to your advantage. In fact, the physics will play a major role for the replay value of the game, because it´s up to you how you interact with all the movable stuff inside the levels.
- The last 1/4 of the game will take place in hell.
Yesterday I bought the new issue of the German magazine GameStar. There is a big preview about DOOM III in it. There isn't really something new except some new screenshots I haven't seen before. But there is also an interview with Tim Willits. In the last question
GameStar asked:
Is it true that Doom III uses a peer-to-peer network for multiplayer?
Tim Willits:
First we tested a peer-to-peer network but it didn't work out. So we switched to a client/server system.
I haven't read that anywhere else. Is that true? That would be great news for all who wants to play DOOM III in multiplayer mode.
p.s.: Sorry about my English it's not my native language.
Yes, yesterday I bought the magazine as well (contains some really beautiful screenshots), and that note also catched my attention.
It´s great news actually, because that means you can have unlimited multiplayer fun just like in Q2 / Q3, if your hardware is strong enough.
Some other news bits from the article:
- Later in the game you will establish contact to some other surviving marines, who barricaded themselves somewhere below in a subterran tunnel system (or something like that). You can team up with them, but you will not giving them orders.
- More "barrels of fun": let a explosive barrel roll towards some demons, then shoot it... there are more examples mentioned where you can use the physics in creative ways to your advantage. In fact, the physics will play a major role for the replay value of the game, because it´s up to you how you interact with all the movable stuff inside the levels.
- The last 1/4 of the game will take place in hell.
Zgodovina sprememb…
- spremenilo: Ahiles ()
Ahiles ::
Mal so updejtal http://www.doom3.com/
Ni un Hires ampak je pa ta updejtan 40mb http://www.doom3.com/video/trailer_large.mov
Ni un Hires ampak je pa ta updejtan 40mb http://www.doom3.com/video/trailer_large.mov
Zgodovina sprememb…
- zavaroval slike: Predator ()
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