DooM3 Graphics Engine

[vss1980]

Firstly:

Welcome matman326 to the forums.

Yeah, I know I am being a bit picky, but come on...... if the GF 6800 can pull that many FPS, then to be honest a reflected torch light is hardly gonna break the bank...... it will require a tiny bit more thought really from the CPU and shaders but it would only be acting on a small area.

As for the general light off of a torch..... come on, at least carry through some real physics into the game....... its all well and good having thousands of polygons for a character which has a near perfect digital skeleton so it will die realisticly, so why is what I'm suggesting too much. And anyway, the idea of Doom is that you are fighting the demons from hell with what you have around you, ie. shotgun, machine gun, laws of physics, etc.

I've not seen one point in the game where I can fool a zombie into walking under a platform to get squashed...... booooo!

Edit: Keeping in context with the thread, I hope the ability to do these things is in the game and can be applied to future titles once the graphics hardware is available to run it (NV5x, R500) otherwise I would say it is lacking ability and features which may be available in other games in not so many years to come.

 

[BlvdKing]

I agree vss1980, the game is too dark and needs some ambient light from the flashlight to brighten it up some.

 

[BFG10K]

This is washing out a lot of textures that should be looking quite a bit better if the game wasn't so dark.

I don't think the gamma is the issue, it's that fact that many textures themselves are quite low resolution. Also the polygon counts for monsters and environments are quite low compared to other games such as Far Cry, UT2003/2004 and Painkiller. With so many heavy shadow calculations being used ID basically had to save performance absolutely everywhere they could.

In general terms this is probably the first time ID haven't produced an engine that is ahead of everything else that is out there. Far Cry looks better and runs faster plus many other games such as Painkiller have far superior physics. The Doom III engine is good but it's not outstanding like we're accustomed to seeing from ID.

For newer hardware enabling MSAA takes away 'zixel' fill so the performance hit will likely be comparable to normal levels.

Not on the R420 it doesn't.

 

[BenSkywalker]

It hasn't been like that for me. I've kept everything gamma/brightness-wise at default, and there are times when it is very dark, but it's pretty obvious to me that this is how it is meant to be played.

Where do you have the brightness slider? Mine is all the way up which is ~1.5 on the gamma scale. Even using that setting there are a lot of times where I can't see anything at all in the earlier levels(by that I mean even taking a screenshot there isn't a visible pixel of any objects on screen in terms of background or enemies).

Is it possible that, if it can't find enough memory between the card AND the AGP Aperture (that is, card memory + AGP Aperture << 512MB), it silently drops back to High or Medium settings? I don't have the hardware (or software, yet ) to prove it either, just a thought...

That sounds possible, although I don't currently have the hardware sitting around to prove that that is the case.

Also, in the bathrooms in Doom3, shine the torch into the mirror and NO light bounces back off onto the walls......

Realisticly speaking, the flashlight just isn't good enough and doesn't do the job in the game that would happen in real life, and the shame of it is that the game engine more than likely does possess the ability to do this.

What you are talking about is radiosity, and it bring Crays to their knees. Radiosity will likely be the last major feature implemented on graphics cards that we see(maybe by the end of the decade we will have a decent solution).

Yeah, I know I am being a bit picky, but come on...... if the GF 6800 can pull that many FPS, then to be honest a reflected torch light is hardly gonna break the bank...... it will require a tiny bit more thought really from the CPU and shaders but it would only be acting on a small area.

I had this old scene I was working with that ran an animation through a room using the Lightworks render system. It was a quick clip that only lasted just over three seconds and took about an hour to render out without radiosity(it was 100 frames, a bit under a minute per frame). With radiosity it took about three hours per frame to render.

BFG-

I don't think the gamma is the issue, it's that fact that many textures themselves are quite low resolution.

Gamma aplifies the issue considerably. The same textures opened up in an image editing app frequently look quite a bit better then they do in game, unless you crank up the gamma where they appear as washed out as they do in engine.

Also the polygon counts for monsters and environments are quite low compared to other games such as Far Cry, UT2003/2004 and Painkiller. With so many heavy shadow calculations being used ID basically had to save performance absolutely everywhere they could.

And yet they still appear significantly more detailed then they do in any of those games.

In general terms this is probably the first time ID haven't produced an engine that is ahead of everything else that is out there.

How is not ahead of everything else?

Far Cry looks better and runs faster plus many other games such as Painkiller have far superior physics.

I'm a bit shocked hearing this from you, FarCry isn't even close to the quality of Doom3 on the visual front. Firing them up back to back FC looks dated, and its engine isn't performing nearly as well given like(well, not quite) visuals on my setup(nor has it ever). The lighting engine in FarCry looks fairly comical, the shadowing in particular is pretty pathetic compared to D3. The low rent alpha textures for foliage, the extremely low detailed shaders they are using for attempted surface detail simulation in most areas and the complete lack of environmental complexity in any of the interior levels pales in comparison to D3. The performance in shader heavy areas in FC is also significantly behind that of D3, despite have a significantly lower quantity of shaders and lower quality ones on display(I am sticking to interior comparisons here). The enemies in FarCry, while being of higher poly counts, appear significantly less detailes then those in D3, I wouldn't put them in the same league honestly.

The physics engine comment I'm also a bit confused on, is it the amount of interactive objects that's throwing you off? For me, having to pay attention in close quarters when I'm using the shotgun so I don't nail myself with ricochet is something that I'm not used to seeing in games(the Flak Cannon's slow moving projectiles don't compare). The level of accuracy in the physics engine for the elements that are interactive easily exceeds that which I've seen in any other title and there are several 'HL2' style sequences in the game that show other physics displayes later in the game.

Not on the R420 it doesn't.

I can't find anything anywhere that's showing the R420 hitting the equivelant of 12Tzixels or anything close to it for that matter, do you have any links to any tests that are showing this in action? If they could run 4x MSAA and not lose any of their stencil fill in 32x0 mode then I don't see why they wouldn't be able to operate as a 128x0 part.

 

[VIAN]

There are some fairly noticeable artifacts from normal map compression comparing medium to high quality, and there are other artifacts that may be compression related on high quality although I can't get ultra to work at the moment so I'll hold off passing judgement there until I can figure out a setting that allows me to enable it.

Are you sure, because I didn't notice any difference close up or a decent distance. Don't confuse the quality of Normal Maps and the 8xAF High quality provides.

The OP is saying he sees *no* difference between Ultra and High (in quality or performance), implying that it's not really running in Ultra Quality mode.

There is barely a difference between Ultra and High. Except maybe light glare will a little more pronounced. It's not gonna be easy to tell the difference and Ultra quality is a stupid hyped setting. So is High as I didn't notice any difference. The only two settings for me are Medium Quality and Low Quality where it actually lowers the resolution of the textures. You'll notice something there.

I would actually have to say that the lighting engine has some fundamental flaws which help to make the game too dark.

Definitely does. No soft shadows. And the lighting system doesn't seem to reflect lights off of objects to lightly light the shadows produced by other objects. Under a light, an object can make a pitch dark shadow.

I've gotten light bugs too where my light wouldn't light up the area, but you could tell it was on. That even happened when I was following that guy holding the light. When the light would go out, all the lights, even independent of the power system would go down with it. Big bug.

Also, in the bathrooms in Doom3, shine the torch into the mirror and NO light bounces back off onto the walls......

That too. your face looks a little lit up, but not the walls.

There was this one time where I ran quickly to look behind this dark area with the light and there was nothing, and a split second later, zombies popped out of nowhere.

What you are talking about is radiosity, and it bring Crays to their knees.

But Cray is just a bunch of CPUs, meaning that it is being done in software where it takes much longer. Damn graphics cards should have it, if they don't get it in hardware soon.

I had this old scene I was working with that ran an animation through a room using the Lightworks render system. It was a quick clip that only lasted just over three seconds and took about an hour to render out without radiosity(it was 100 frames, a bit under a minute per frame). With radiosity it took about three hours per frame to render.

Even so, I think it should have it and you should be able to turn it off or it should define one of the qualities.

 

[vss1980]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

Also, in the bathrooms in Doom3, shine the torch into the mirror and NO light bounces back off onto the walls......

Realisticly speaking, the flashlight just isn't good enough and doesn't do the job in the game that would happen in real life, and the shame of it is that the game engine more than likely does possess the ability to do this.

What you are talking about is radiosity, and it bring Crays to their knees. Radiosity will likely be the last major feature implemented on graphics cards that we see(maybe by the end of the decade we will have a decent solution).

Yeah, I know I am being a bit picky, but come on...... if the GF 6800 can pull that many FPS, then to be honest a reflected torch light is hardly gonna break the bank...... it will require a tiny bit more thought really from the CPU and shaders but it would only be acting on a small area.

I had this old scene I was working with that ran an animation through a room using the Lightworks render system. It was a quick clip that only lasted just over three seconds and took about an hour to render out without radiosity(it was 100 frames, a bit under a minute per frame). With radiosity it took about three hours per frame to render.

Ahhhhh, but you see your thinking about it the wrong way. Your thinking of a true reflection, which of course would be the best purest way of doing it, but obviously not the fastest. The 'cheating' way of doing it which would sacrifice far less power would surely be to have a light source that activates and shines out away from the mirror once the flashlight is on it. So when you are say 45' to the mirror, it creates a light source that shines the opposite 45' away from the player (ie. 90' to the platyer) onto the walls or whatever gets in its way.
This of course can be used to create other realistic effects for example if you look dead on into the mirror, the reflected torch light would shine back into the players face and washout the display with more brightness, etc.

This would essentially only require another light source which from your accounts would compare a lot better to radiosity.

Technically speaking (once GPU's are available with enough power), this technique (or similar) could be used across the whole game/maps using a light source that moves with the player to create the low-level ambient light created from the flashlight shining onto anything even mildly reflective, with the output intensity of the light source causing the ambient light effect changing depending on the material the original flashlight is shining on.

Yeah ok, some people might say I've been smoking something to come with this idea, but I don't see why its that impossible.

 

[vss1980]

Also, some of the other things that bugs me about the overly dark nature of the game / poor lighting effects is what can be observed in the following picture.

The light just above and left of the crosshair does not actually light anything up on the floor in front of the light (around the area where the gun / crosshair are pointed) OR on the panel perpendicular to the light (to the right of the crosshair). Now if it is that dark in that small area, that light will have an effect (even if it was a tiny one) which should be easily visible.

 

[Childs]

Originally posted by: vss1980
Also, some of the other things that bugs me about the overly dark nature of the game / poor lighting effects is what can be observed in the following picture.

The light just above and left of the crosshair does not actually light anything up on the floor in front of the light (around the area where the gun / crosshair are pointed) OR on the panel perpendicular to the light (to the right of the crosshair). Now if it is that dark in that small area, that light will have an effect (even if it was a tiny one) which should be easily visible.

Maybe I don't really understand what you're trying to show us, but the light is lighting up the floor underneath it.

And judging by everyones benches, do we really want to try and render perfect light on our 6800s/x800s or less? God knows I dont. Its good enough so that people with high end hardware get a playable experience in high quality. Any more features and we simply would not be able to play it. I rather have it like it is now then wait 10 years for the GPUs that can do true light and true physics.

 

[Regs]

To explain this cut and dry, D3's engine uses a lot of Geometry and Bump-Mapping instead of high-polygon counts and hi-res texture backgrounds. Instead of stressing out memory bandwidth, the game stresses out the GPU with loads of math. Bump-Mapping has it's performance advantages, but as you can see in the game, the textures don't compare to Far Crys or UT2K4. The game evens it out with dynamic lighting witch was pretty much the poster child or corner stone of Doom 3's engine.

Cryteks engine stole a lot of glory from D3's engine that came out months to late. Still very impressive though. It gives developers one more way of coding the next major hit game.

 

[Shinei]

Actually, VIAN brought up a good point with this quote:
"I've gotten light bugs too where my light wouldn't light up the area, but you could tell it was on. That even happened when I was following that guy holding the light. When the light would go out, all the lights, even independent of the power system would go down with it. Big bug."

I thought that was just my Ti4200 telling me that it sucks too terribly to play D3 at 10x7 with medium quality, and that my punishment was that it wasn't going to render anymore light sources. Quitting out of the game and then starting it up again solves the problem, but the problem is still very real. The first time I had it happen I was fiddling around with the config file outside of the game and set player shadow to "1" (enabling it ingame for singleplayer; adds a whole new realm of scaring yourself, sometimes you forget the shadow's there until you see something black moving to the side of you); going into the game, the flashlight wouldn't work for the entire level I was playing, but worked fine after that level. The second incident occurred towards the end of the game (Caverns 2); I was searching for a PDA in a high shaft that generated a lot of shadows from the ambient light, and the system locked up for a few seconds (given that it's D3, I didn't try to quit out since that wouldn't help anything), and when it came back, the lights were gone and wouldn't come back on until I quit and restarted the game. I wonder if id knows about that bug...

Anyway, about the mirror thing, it's technically possible (and something I noticed myself when I was playing, since I stopped at just about every mirror to admire my bad ass self toting a plasma rifle), but not really practical for a radiosity run. The separate light source trick may work, but that won't allow you to display a light on, say, the ceiling and light up the room a little. Unless you want to clip the map and spawn an ambient lightsource into the ceiling, which would probably take up more CPU power to calculate than GPU power just to do radiosity runs.
I'm fully aware of how long it takes to run radiosity as well, since making Halo maps requires you to run a 3dS Max-type radiosity render before the map can be fully completed; the most complex of the maps released so far took eight full days to render at "quality 1" in the render tool that Halo uses. Complex shadows like trees add a lot more to a radiosity run, which may be why your example is somewhat flawed. The idea is to take the radiosity inherent to the scene, and modify it based on the intensity of the added light source; a mirror's radiosity would take the light you shine on it, add it to the ambient radiosity, and project the light back at an angle perpendicular to the projection source (in the case of 90 degrees, it just reflects straight back at the projection). Of course, I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea if any of the crap I just said is possible, or even being done. So, eh.

 

[eklass]

Originally posted by: Shinei
Actually, VIAN brought up a good point with this quote:
"I've gotten light bugs too where my light wouldn't light up the area, but you could tell it was on. That even happened when I was following that guy holding the light. When the light would go out, all the lights, even independent of the power system would go down with it. Big bug."

I thought that was just my Ti4200 telling me that it sucks too terribly to play D3 at 10x7 with medium quality, and that my punishment was that it wasn't going to render anymore light sources. Quitting out of the game and then starting it up again solves the problem, but the problem is still very real. The first time I had it happen I was fiddling around with the config file outside of the game and set player shadow to "1" (enabling it ingame for singleplayer; adds a whole new realm of scaring yourself, sometimes you forget the shadow's there until you see something black moving to the side of you); going into the game, the flashlight wouldn't work for the entire level I was playing, but worked fine after that level. The second incident occurred towards the end of the game (Caverns 2); I was searching for a PDA in a high shaft that generated a lot of shadows from the ambient light, and the system locked up for a few seconds (given that it's D3, I didn't try to quit out since that wouldn't help anything), and when it came back, the lights were gone and wouldn't come back on until I quit and restarted the game. I wonder if id knows about that bug...

Anyway, about the mirror thing, it's technically possible (and something I noticed myself when I was playing, since I stopped at just about every mirror to admire my bad ass self toting a plasma rifle), but not really practical for a radiosity run. The separate light source trick may work, but that won't allow you to display a light on, say, the ceiling and light up the room a little. Unless you want to clip the map and spawn an ambient lightsource into the ceiling, which would probably take up more CPU power to calculate than GPU power just to do radiosity runs.
I'm fully aware of how long it takes to run radiosity as well, since making Halo maps requires you to run a 3dS Max-type radiosity render before the map can be fully completed; the most complex of the maps released so far took eight full days to render at "quality 1" in the render tool that Halo uses. Complex shadows like trees add a lot more to a radiosity run, which may be why your example is somewhat flawed. The idea is to take the radiosity inherent to the scene, and modify it based on the intensity of the added light source; a mirror's radiosity would take the light you shine on it, add it to the ambient radiosity, and project the light back at an angle perpendicular to the projection source (in the case of 90 degrees, it just reflects straight back at the projection). Of course, I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea if any of the crap I just said is possible, or even being done. So, eh.

my head just exploded

 

[BFG10K]

The same textures opened up in an image editing app frequently look quite a bit better then they do in game,

That's because they're being stretched and also looking at an image by itself doesn't look as bad as a blurry image compared to a sharp image. There's no denying a lot of the textures are quite low resolution and look a bit like the belong in Quake 2/HL days.

And yet they still appear significantly more detailed then they do in any of those games.

No they don't. The faces look good because of extensive bump mapping but the bodies and general environment is completely inferior to games like Far Cry and Painkiller. Doom's darkness is used to mask this fact.

The game would look superb in 2002; in 2004 it's above average but certainly not excellent by any means.

How is not ahead of everything else?

Its per-pixel lighting, shadowing and bump mapping techniques have already been done for the past 12 months or so. Also AFAIK it doesn't even use soft shadows which Far Cry, Painkiller and other titles do. Also other games like Far Cry have far superior shading and lighting effects.

FarCry isn't even close to the quality of Doom3 on the visual front.

You must be sh!tting me. Far Cry is almost movie quality. Tell me, what in Doom III compares to Far Cry's rippling water and wave effects? What in Doom III compares to Far Cry's foliage and lighting?

and its engine isn't performing nearly as well given like(well, not quite) visuals on my setup(nor has it ever).

Far Cry runs far faster than Doom III does. Far faster. It's also pumping out a hell of a lot more polygons and running a lot more shaders across the scenes.

The lighting engine in FarCry looks fairly comical, the shadowing in particular is pretty pathetic compared to D3.

No it doesn't. In fact Far Cry has a bathroom level like Doom III and...well...there's just no comparison.

The performance in shader heavy areas in FC is also significantly behind that of D3, despite have a significantly lower quantity of shaders and lower quality ones on display(I am sticking to interior comparisons here).

Lower amounts of shaders? I think not. Shaders are almost tacked on as an afterthough to Doom III while Far Cry was built around them to begin with. Far Cry has a tonne more shaders and shader effects than Doom III has.

The physics engine comment I'm also a bit confused on,

What's the confusion? Doom III has no physics to speak of. Absolutely no ragdoll effects, barrels explode with near-zero shockwave, and objects such as boxes barely even notice when you push/touch them.

The level of accuracy in the physics engine for the elements that are interactive easily exceeds that which I've seen in any other title

Good Lord, you must've not played any other titles then. Almost every game out there now uses ragdoll physics and it looks far better than Doom 3 does. Painkiller is what I'd consider the pinnacle of physics at the moment and it's simply in a different league to Doom III.

If they could run 4x MSAA and not lose any of their stencil fill in 32x0 mode then I don't see why they wouldn't be able to operate as a 128x0 part.

It's not 128x0, it simply stays as a 32x0 part even while performing MSAA, unlike nVidia that cannot operate in 32x0 when performing MSAA.

 

[Xentropy]

Can't delete messages? Pity. Bad post. Move along...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: vss1980
Ahhhhh, but you see your thinking about it the wrong way. Your thinking of a true reflection, which of course would be the best purest way of doing it, but obviously not the fastest. The 'cheating' way of doing it which would sacrifice far less power would surely be to have a light source that activates and shines out away from the mirror once the flashlight is on it. So when you are say 45' to the mirror, it creates a light source that shines the opposite 45' away from the player (ie. 90' to the platyer) onto the walls or whatever gets in its way.
This of course can be used to create other realistic effects for example if you look dead on into the mirror, the reflected torch light would shine back into the players face and washout the display with more brightness, etc.

This would essentially only require another light source which from your accounts would compare a lot better to radiosity.

Technically speaking (once GPU's are available with enough power), this technique (or similar) could be used across the whole game/maps using a light source that moves with the player to create the low-level ambient light created from the flashlight shining onto anything even mildly reflective, with the output intensity of the light source causing the ambient light effect changing depending on the material the original flashlight is shining on.

Yeah ok, some people might say I've been smoking something to come with this idea, but I don't see why its that impossible.

Actually, that sounds like a very good idea, and it's probably do-able. I mean, UT used a portal-based rendering engine, and I was always impressed by the mirror reflections that they did of the level itself. I don't see why that couldn't be done for the lighting. I vaguely wonder, though, if possibly that is difficult to do, if they are doing incremented/decrement-style shadow volumes, which don't lend themselves that well to "reflection" properties. You would sort of (I think) have to clip the geometry along the plane of the reflective portral, and basically render the entire scene twice, in different directions based on the lighting and shadow-volume stencil calcs. I think, anyways. It's been a long time since I've been directly involved in any 3D game projects, so take my evaluation with a grain of salt. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually played D3 yet, so I can't comment on any first-hand visual impressions of the game.)

 

[PhoenixOrion]

Doom 3 is superior with its multiple light source and true dynamic lighting effects as compared to Far Cry.

My friend and I were comparing it between my two game boxes last night.

The most obvious is to load farcry levels "archive", "steam" and "regulator" maps and use the flashlight.

spot the flashlight on a shadow created by a box or refrigerator and the shadow stays. with doom 3 flashlight, the shadows go away ones you put the light behind the object creating the shadow.

same thing goes with moving light source overhead. farcry has "fixed" moving light on the floor from this light source. doom 3 light reflections move and stop as the source moves and stops. it's more realistic IMO.

water effects and pixel/vertex shading of individual leaves and thousands of leaves in a foliage-covered outdoor map is hands-down breathtaking in farcry.

 

[BenSkywalker]

BFG

That's because they're being stretched and also looking at an image by itself doesn't look as bad as a blurry image compared to a sharp image. There's no denying a lot of the textures are quite low resolution and look a bit like the belong in Quake 2/HL days.

As opposed to what game? Have some nice screenshots of FarCry with the highest quality settings I can run and some shots that look like 8bit palletized textures, Quake1 era. The overly high gamma makes the textures in D3 look a lot more washed out then they should, although not nearly as bad as some of the ones I have shots from in FarCry.

No they don't. The faces look good because of extensive bump mapping but the bodies and general environment is completely inferior to games like Far Cry and Painkiller. Doom's darkness is used to mask this fact.

Have you seen the game yet? If so, was it running on a Voodoo3 or some other comparable card? I'm comparing them back to back and have to question if you aren't making things up as you go along here, there really is no comparison between the two. FarCry's clipped to hell p!ss poorly skinned disjointed character models over D3's....?

Its per-pixel lighting, shadowing and bump mapping techniques have already been done for the past 12 months or so. Also AFAIK it doesn't even use soft shadows which Far Cry, Painkiller and other titles do. Also other games like Far Cry have far superior shading and lighting effects.

Move back to light maps is progress? D3 actually uses shadows, not the single light sourced hack on some objects some of the time BS that FC and the like use. I've just exited FC after being dumbfounded by your post and played through numerous different areas, the game is a joke visually compared to D3. Turn on your flashlight and shine it on a pillar and look for the shadow. If you come back when you find it we will never finish this conversation because it isn't there. FC uses the old mid 90s lightmap style shadows with the exception of some shadows on certain characters from a single light source- it isn't remotely in the same league as DooM3. The 'per pixel lighting' that has been done in other games is not remotely comparable to D3's unified lighting system. Layered overlapping shadows from every light source on every object- nothing else is remotely close.

You must be sh!tting me. Far Cry is almost movie quality.

I just exited the game, and last I knew I still had a slight edge on you in terms of what I see in the game. It looks dated compared to DooM3.

Tell me, what in Doom III compares to Far Cry's rippling water and wave effects?

Nothing comes across as quite that retro to me in D3. I've seen better water effects on the consoles then on FC in years past(SMS for ripple effects and WR for waves).

What in Doom III compares to Far Cry's foliage and lighting?

Compares to alpha textures you clip through and lightmaps? Nothing for certain. Maybe if I had a GF4MX I could see something resembling those particular aspects which I've considered FC's biggest weaknesses all along.

Far Cry runs far faster than Doom III does. Far faster.

No by much, not according to FRAPS and not even close to doing it with the same level of visual quality.

It's also pumping out a hell of a lot more polygons and running a lot more shaders across the scenes.

More polys yes, shaders not even close. There are hardly any pixels in D3 that aren't touched by multiple shaders.

No it doesn't. In fact Far Cry has a bathroom level like Doom III and...well...there's just no comparison.

You are absolutely right, there is no comparison. I don't know what you would recall the bathroom in D3(nothing all that interesting happens there), unless you are talking about that old press image that there isn't anything like in the game.

Lower amounts of shaders? I think not. Shaders are almost tacked on as an afterthough to Doom III while Far Cry was built around them to begin with. Far Cry has a tonne more shaders and shader effects than Doom III has.

Did someone else get ahold of BFG's handle? FarCry's shaders are used for some water effects and on certain interior elements and that's about it. D3's entire engine revolves around shaders of varrying complexity. FC uses a few moderately to reasonably complex shaders while D3 use simple to moderate shaders for everything. Look back to Carmack's plan updates on the engine going back to '99/2K timeframe when he talks about needing the programmability of the register combiners/NSR to start work on D3- nothing with straight fixed functions would work(R7000 has no support while the NV1x core does).

What's the confusion? Doom III has no physics to speak of. Absolutely no ragdoll effects

To start with- the no ragdoll effects. D3's ragdoll goes quite a bit further then I've seen in any game with a proper IK system to go along with it. Besides simply making a dead body flail around living targets are also thrown around when being hit including you. Has someone swiped your password or perhaps are you seeing a significantly older build of the game?

barrels explode with near-zero shockwave, and objects such as boxes barely even notice when you push/touch them.

Another area of confusion for me. When the barrels explode besides having the obvious shockwave effect on all the inanimate objects in the area(which is fairly standard now) they also toss the living objects in a proper trajectory not to mention a series of explosions will send the smoke and heat wave rippling out in proper proportion to the blast. I honestly am at a total loss here as to what it is you are seeing.

Good Lord, you must've not played any other titles then. Almost every game out there now uses ragdoll physics and it looks far better than Doom 3 does.

In D3 you suffer from the proper physical effects of 'ragdoll' physics(which sucks when you are in a heavy fire fight) along with all of the living characters, not just corpses. What's more, not only do the models simply show the physical impact of the shot, they have the bullet wound to show for it and they bleed from it also. You can also do things like shoot their jaws off, or their hands(haven't played around to see how far this goes yet).

It's not 128x0, it simply stays as a 32x0 part even while performing MSAA, unlike nVidia that cannot operate in 32x0 when performing MSAA.

If you are talking about zixels then it would need to be 128x0 to be performing 4x MSAA and running 32 stencil ops per clock. I don't have Painkiller yet but I'm tempted to go pick it up just to see what you are talking about here. You mention FarCry numerous times and I have run them back to back numerous times and they aren't in the same league, FC looks U2ish to me compared to D3.

Vian-

Are you sure, because I didn't notice any difference close up or a decent distance. Don't confuse the quality of Normal Maps and the 8xAF High quality provides.

I am certain, and there are 'issues' with ATi's "High Quality" AF in DooM3, but that is a problem with the board and not the engine(not related to the normal map compression artifacts btw).

Definitely does. No soft shadows.

We need radiosity to pull off the kind of dynamic lighting we are seeing in D3 with soft shadows properly, nothing is on the drawing board at any company that can handle that at the moment.

And the lighting system doesn't seem to reflect lights off of objects to lightly light the shadows produced by other objects. Under a light, an object can make a pitch dark shadow.

That is radiosity.

I've gotten light bugs too where my light wouldn't light up the area, but you could tell it was on. That even happened when I was following that guy holding the light. When the light would go out, all the lights, even independent of the power system would go down with it. Big bug.

Didn't have issues with it, not sure if it's driver related or not but nothing here with the Cat 4.7s(and trust me, I don't hesitate to bash for a driver bug if I see one ).

But Cray is just a bunch of CPUs, meaning that it is being done in software where it takes much longer. Damn graphics cards should have it, if they don't get it in hardware soon.

Read the IHVs comments on future features- real time radiosity is the last one anyone expects as it is the most complex by far. Even with state of the art CGI, radiosity remains hands down the most system intensive(as the rest of CGI gets more complex, radiosity needs to increase its accuracy also).

vss1980-

Technically speaking (once GPU's are available with enough power), this technique (or similar) could be used across the whole game/maps using a light source that moves with the player to create the low-level ambient light created from the flashlight shining onto anything even mildly reflective, with the output intensity of the light source causing the ambient light effect changing depending on the material the original flashlight is shining on.

Here's the problem with that- by simulating reflection bouncing lights off of objects that already have shaders you need to take into account the light interaction from the other sources and what simulated textures they have created on the object first and then cross reference that with the incoming reflected/simulated ambient light. Of course, doing that you then need to take into account the fact that the light is also bouncing back the other way so you need to figure out that interaction and have that on hand first too....... Gets tricky real quick and is the reason why noone has come up with a good substitution for real time radiosity yet.

 

[vss1980]

Yeah Ben, I can see how it can spiral out of control but I think it would be far lighter on the CPU/GPU to calculate the reflected light than perform a true real-time radiosity calculation. I'm thinking a method of application which applies a sort of lighting/reflection map to certain surfaces/textures just like the way HL2 applies a similar map for the sound off of certain surfaces when hit by bullets, etc.

Also to lower the amount of light reflections off of surfaces, a distance limit could be applied to the light so that it wouldn't be infinitely calculating the lighting.

I dunno, I'm just using conjecture - as you say, nobody has actually done anything on it yet.

As for the flashlight not lighting up some things problem, yeah I've noticed it too and I'm using a Radeon and I've seen people with Geforce's saying the same thing so I would tend to think its a game issue. In fact there is a point in the game where you can purposely go outside of the base out of one of the broken windows and the flashlight does not work properly and only on certain surfaces.

Childs

What I'm talking about in this picture is that although the light appears to be reflecting on the surface directly under it, it is not reflecting off of the grated flooring or the panelling around the bottom of the column on the far right of the image.
Effectively, the light is there and on, but doing absolutely nothing which is just plain wrong. I don't care how advanced the lighting in Doom3 is, that is just plain wrong.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Just posting quickly, decided since you were making a big deal about it I'd go buy Painkiller and see what the fuss was about BFG, have it installing now. My better half went with me and I ended up with four games instead of the one I was intending to buy...... d@mn EB and their deals....

 

[Regs]

Far Cry used minimal shaders actually. And the shader programs used were short in length.

 

[BenSkywalker]

I think I may have bought the wrong game. It says Painkiller on the box 'Heaven's Got a Hitman', made by Dreamcatcher but it looks kind of Unreal1 ish, very poor textures, nothing for lighting, no shaders anywhere and a fairly poor gimmicky implementation of the Havoc engine from what I've seen so far. This can't be the game you were talking about, Unreal2 is vastly superior to this in every aspect based on what I've seen so far. Oh yeah, not impressed with their anti piracy technique. Only way I can get the game to run 'legit' is to DL about 100MBs worth of patches over a dial-up connection(due to their inept useage of SafeDisc). Gotta love it when anti piracy technology forces you to crack a game you just bought to get it to play.

 

[gururu]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
I think I may have bought the wrong game. It says Painkiller on the box 'Heaven's Got a Hitman', made by Dreamcatcher but it looks kind of Unreal1 ish, very poor textures, nothing for lighting, no shaders anywhere and a fairly poor gimmicky implementation of the Havoc engine from what I've seen so far. This can't be the game you were talking about, Unreal2 is vastly superior to this in every aspect based on what I've seen so far. Oh yeah, not impressed with their anti piracy technique. Only way I can get the game to run 'legit' is to DL about 100MBs worth of patches over a dial-up connection(due to their inept useage of SafeDisc). Gotta love it when anti piracy technology forces you to crack a game you just bought to get it to play.

i downloaded the painkiller demo before I bought it. i didn't like it. maybe you should have done that!

anyway, I think Farcry's ragdoll physics are the best I've ever seen, particularly when grenading. I especially enjoyed walking over to dead monster bodies and shooting them or pushing them off things. They actually bled! Dooms monster fizzle up...that's no fun!

 

[Drayvn]

I have to admit, that D3 doesnt use physics extensively, it uses it for bodies and thats it, all the other objects within the game dont use physics whatsoever, the only few games that i have used physics properly and extensively to good use is Deus Ex 2, and from what i can see, HL2 also, as supposedly ablsolutely everything in the game has a phyics model...

 

[Cat]

Originally posted by: Drayvn
I have to admit, that D3 doesnt use physics extensively, it uses it for bodies and thats it, all the other objects within the game dont use physics whatsoever, the only few games that i have used physics properly and extensively to good use is Deus Ex 2, and from what i can see, HL2 also, as supposedly ablsolutely everything in the game has a phyics model...

Doom 3 uses physics for far more than bodies. There's a 'claw game' sequence early on, a crane loaded with objects falls, boxes can move, chairs can move. There's a scene where physics is used to smash a chair through a shattering window..etc.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
BFG

What's the confusion? Doom III has no physics to speak of. Absolutely no ragdoll effects

To start with- the no ragdoll effects. D3's ragdoll goes quite a bit further then I've seen in any game with a proper IK system to go along with it. Besides simply making a dead body flail around living targets are also thrown around when being hit including you. Has someone swiped your password or perhaps are you seeing a significantly older build of the game?

barrels explode with near-zero shockwave, and objects such as boxes barely even notice when you push/touch them.

Another area of confusion for me. When the barrels explode besides having the obvious shockwave effect on all the inanimate objects in the area(which is fairly standard now) they also toss the living objects in a proper trajectory not to mention a series of explosions will send the smoke and heat wave rippling out in proper proportion to the blast. I honestly am at a total loss here as to what it is you are seeing.

Good Lord, you must've not played any other titles then. Almost every game out there now uses ragdoll physics and it looks far better than Doom 3 does.

In D3 you suffer from the proper physical effects of 'ragdoll' physics(which sucks when you are in a heavy fire fight) along with all of the living characters, not just corpses. What's more, not only do the models simply show the physical impact of the shot, they have the bullet wound to show for it and they bleed from it also. You can also do things like shoot their jaws off, or their hands(haven't played around to see how far this goes yet).

Ok, this "difference of opinion" intrigues me. Either both of you were playing a different game, or someone is delusional, or ... possibly this answers the question of whether the physics engine in D3 "scales" with the hardware that it is run on? I don't know, I don't like that answer, because it seemingly goes against what Carmack has said prior, that the physics engine should run the same for everyone, providing the same gameplay experience.. but I wonder if he was really meaning only in MP games?

 

[BFG10K]

As opposed to what game?

Almost any made in the last three years. Hell, 1999's SOF has sharper textures than some of D3's.

Have some nice screenshots of FarCry with the highest quality settings I can run and some shots that look like 8bit palletized textures,

Which areas?

Have you seen the game yet?

I've almost finished it.

I'm comparing them back to back

So am I.

Move back to light maps is progress?

AFAIK D3 is using shadow maps too and doesn't even use soft shadows like many other games already do.

Turn on your flashlight and shine it on a pillar and look for the shadow.

Now turn on the flashlight in D3 and look for reflections/shine across the whole areas. You won't see them apart from a few areas if you're lucky.

Far Cry has reflections from static lights and shining the flashlight on them makes then dynamically shiny - pipes, walls, floors - everything.

Nothing comes across as quite that retro to me in D3.

And that means what exactly?

Compares to alpha textures you clip through and lightmaps

So what foliage does D3 have? What terrain effects does it have?

And since you're bent out of shape about the alpha textures (which don't take effect until a very long range anyway) then turn up the render plane and they'll all be 3D objects that can be manipulated by geometry instancing. Does D3 support geometry instancing? Does D3 support SM3? Does D3 have as many render paths as Far Cry?

I think not, yet you still claim it's more advanced than Far Cry. Interesting.

No by much, not according to FRAPS and not even close to doing it with the same level of visual quality.

Far Cry is quite playable at 1024x768 on my rig though it does drop a bit indoors. D3 is frequently a slideshow at that setting and I need to run it at 800x600. Also it doesn't look as good as Far Cry.

There are hardly any pixels in D3 that aren't touched by multiple shaders.

I sincerely doubt it. Look at the game on DX7 hardware and check for differences. Now do the same for Far Cry.

I don't know what you would recall the bathroom in D3(nothing all that interesting happens there),

Exactly - nothing happens there because there's no lighting. No lighting or reflections to begin with and none when you shine the flashlight on tiled floors and walls that should do something. Now take a look at FC's bathroom level and experiment with the flashlight.

Did someone else get ahold of BFG's handle? FarCry's shaders are used for some water effects and on certain interior elements and that's about it.

What are you talking about? The lighting is all done by shaders which is plainly visible since changing the shader path you use changes the lights. Also AFAIK all of the moving vegetation and water effects are done by shaders too.

To start with- the no ragdoll effects. D3's ragdoll goes quite a bit further then I've seen in any game with a proper IK system to go along with it.

I don't know what you think you're seeing but you'd be the only one out there who does. Every single review I've read has complained about the lack of physics in the game. Basically bodies keel over generically (if even that; sometimes they just collapse) and then disappear. Now go back to even 2002's UT2003 and look at what happens when you kill someone.

When the barrels explode besides having the obvious shockwave effect on all the inanimate objects in the area(which is fairly standard now) they also toss the living objects in a proper trajectory not to mention a series of explosions will send the smoke and heat wave rippling out in proper proportion to the blast. I honestly am at a total loss here as to what it is you are seeing.

Actually they do not such thing apart from producing a cartoonish wall of grey smoke (you slammed FC's vegetation but are quite happy with that smoke cartoon?). Again I'm not sure what you think you're seeing but I'm guessing you'd be the only one who sees it.

In D3 you suffer from the proper physical effects of 'ragdoll' physics(which sucks when you are in a heavy fire fight) along with all of the living characters, not just corpses.

I've seen zero evidence of this except in rare cases when something does happen to move a little. That's certainly not even remotely ragdoll and has already been done for the last five years or so.

What's more, not only do the models simply show the physical impact of the shot, they have the bullet wound to show for it and they bleed from it also.

That's been done since 1999's SOF. That's your idea of cutting edge? Shoot someone in Painkiller with a stake gun and look at its effect - knockback, body wound and they'll often get impaled to the wall or to another enemy. Tell me, where does D3 do anything remotely similar?

If you are talking about zixels then it would need to be 128x0 to be performing 4x MSAA and running 32 stencil ops per clock.

Why? I'm not sure what tangent you're approaching this from but it's a fact (verified by an ATi rep) that the R420 can operate in 32x0 (or 24x0) mode while performing MSAA.

You mention FarCry numerous times and I have run them back to back numerous times and they aren't in the same league, FC looks U2ish to me compared to D3.

I really have no idea what you're seing but fire up any review of the game and you'll see that they agree with me on the graphics, physics and performance aspects. I can't help but think you're looking at D3 with seriously rose coloured glasses or something. From Xbit:

While geometry of characters? faces impresses much, the remaining objects, including the world and body-parts are not as smooth as those in other games, namely FarCry and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Textures, in ?high quality? settings, are also not that impressive. We cannot say they are blurry, but just they do not amaze much in terms of level of details.

Id decided not to implement a complex physics model into the Doom III ? boxes and barrels fall down like they were made of tin and are empty, not steel and filled with gasoline or some other things.

I'm not slamming the game because it's great, I just vehemently disagree with your comments so it might appear that I hate the game. But let me make it clear that's not the case at all.

a fairly poor gimmicky implementation of the Havoc engine from what I've seen so far

Yep, rose coloured glasess. Definitely. If you can't see the extensive physics in Painkiller but you put the non-existant physics in D3 on a pedestal then that's the only explanation I can come up with.

Only way I can get the game to run 'legit' is to DL about 100MBs worth of patches over a dial-up connection(due to their inept useage of SafeDisc). Gotta love it when anti piracy technology forces you to crack a game you just bought to get it to play.

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and I suspect nobody else does either.