Why the doom3 engine completely sucks…

[inphlict]

I was trying to play through ROE and it hit me, the game completely blows. Then I realized that it’s not only the gameplay but the whole engine. The engine is way too dark and having sharp dark shadows is annoying and not realistic, in reality you can see in shadows but in doom3 you can never see anything under the dark shadows.

[lvlshot]http://satanael.free.fr/doom3/shot00011.jpg[/lvlshot]

This is a good example, how the hell can something cast a shadow so dark close to a light source? Anyway I uninstalled doom3 and ROE, disappointed and frustrated.

[Psyche911]

I'll buy RoE from you for $5.

[inphlict]

I never said I owned it...

[Grudge]

oh noes, Doom3 is not realistic!!!

[4days]

I was trying to play through ROE and it hit me, the game completely blows. Then I realized that it’s not only the gameplay but the whole engine. The engine is way too dark and having sharp dark shadows is annoying and not realistic, in reality you can see in shadows but in doom3 you can never see anything under the dark shadows.

This is a good example, how the hell can something cast a shadow so dark close to a light source? Anyway I uninstalled doom3 and ROE, disappointed and frustrated.

you're absolutely right, i don't know why iD even fucking bothered. actually, after i've had some lunch, i might knock out an engine that handles lighting more realistically than d3.

[r3t]

I never said I owned it...

but it obviously owned you

[nyxs-uk]

Its the FIRST game to do real time stencil shadows & if you watched the gf3 launch video of the G5 mac you would of heard john carmack saying that for the first time hardware was starting to come out which could handle real time stencil shadows.

iD wouldn't program a ray tracing game engine if there is NO hardware out there to play the bloody thing on would they!
To show that better lighting is possible look at the link below. It was done at a uni for research purposes, knowing they couldn't sell it as nobody has the spec to do it. http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/ This link shows a ray traced 3d world (using quake3 media) N.B. For some reason^misantropia^ has also posted this link below.

Try and think what the developers were thinking before you point out the obvious. Otherwise you make yourself look dimmer than the shadows your talking about.

[^misantropia^]

someone had to take the next step and exclude lightmaps completely. we're just not at a point where hardware can cope with realtime radiosity. hopefully with the next engine or unreal3...

Makes me wonder... it shouldn't be too hard (relatively speaking) to create a hybrid engine that combines lightmaps with per-pixel lighting. That would give you soft shadows at low cost. I can think of a (theorethical) implementation already.

iD wouldn't program a ray tracing game engine

It isn't ray-tracing, strictly speaking. This is, though (do check the specs required to run this mama).

[Eraser]

Christ inphlict, your post just oozes with ignorance

[o'dium]

Someone already did that exact thing, check out the q3map2 forums @ splashdamage. 'deluxemapping' it's called

The way it works is that you use your normal maps to get the data etc etc for the textures, so that lights look correct on walls etc etc blah blah yaddle yaddle... It looks good when you get ingame.

However, once you start firing, walking around and looking at things in depth, you notice that it is indeed, quite ugly

[R. Tetzlaff]

in reality you can see in shadows but in doom3 you can never see anything under the dark shadows.

You can see in shadows outside when there´s enough diffused light to lit the shadowy areas. But for enclosed indoor scenes Doom3´s lighting is as realistic as you can currently get. Also, you actually aren´t limited to maps full of dark shadowed places in the Doom3 engine. It´s currently more of an hardware issue. If you have a computer strong enough to run the Unreal Engine 3 for example, it will also be strong enough to render luxuriously lit environments with high-res textures in the very same Doom3 engine we have now.

[o'dium]

This guy is kinda right... Doom 3 might be lacking a lot of the cool toys UE3 has, like the new tree stuff, smart bloom and "decent" physics. But, when it comes down to it, Doom 3 only looks shit because of what id had to do to get it to run on PC's out when it was released.

Doom 3 looks like plastic? Solution; Make new textures. This was id's fault here, but they had never really worked with specular maps before I guess. Thats why Doom 3 looks, for the most part, cartoony.

Doom 3 looks low detail, those textures are ugh? Solution; Make new textures again. Doom has to use very low res textures, because they had to make sure the game would run on lower end PC's. Thats why everything looks so dull and ugly, its because of how low the textures are. When you are used to looking at HL2/UT2k4 faces which use 1024x1024 texture maps, then you look at doom 3's 128x128 or, if we are lucky, 256x256 textures, you start to see WHY the face looks so poor. Image loading 1024x1024x4 MINIMUM textures just for one head? and then the same again for the body? Thats abig hit for low end PC's. Of course if you can run doom 3 60 frames locked NOW, then thats not a big hit at all. I did a quick resize of all the "model" textures up to 1024x1024. No detail boost obviously, but because i have a 256meg card, i hardly lost any performance. But still, it needs to be played on lower end machines...

Doom 3's models are pointy, ugly, and just shit looking? Solution; Make new models. Obviously, the models have to cast an infinite number of shadows dependi9ng on how many lights in the scene, as well as cast shadows on itself. Thats a big drop in performance. But again, an Imp is only 1.5k polies, and i have upped said imp with mesh smooth to 6k polies there abouts, had about 5 of them on screen by spawning them, and still stayed above 50 frames a second in your average doom 3 map. So again, its more down to system specs and "needing the game to run" than technology.

Doom 3's map are dark, i cant see jack shit? Solution; Make new maps. Doom 3's real time lighting is quite the performance killer and at the end of the day, the biggest drop in frame rate comes from the lights. You can have 400 lights in a room and it will drop a little obviously. But you can have 2 large lights in a room that cross over eachothers paths, and that will kill performance. Its just the way it is. Better computers will allow more lights to be placed, but ATM, it really does kill your PC when you have a bright room.

None of these are limits of the doom engine, just limits imposed by id when the game was released. I think they were a tad too low myself. I shouldn't be playing a next gen, amazing, brand new tech game at 60frames solid at 1280x1024, but thats what they wanted. If you want all of the above fixed, you need to do it yourself or wait for a pro team to buy the engine and do said things.

Unfortunatly, the biggest name to use the engine next is raven with quake 4, and it looks like they are gonna be just as bad as doom 3 with ALL the above. But hey, they know best.

[seremtan]

It isn't ray-tracing, strictly speaking. This is, though (do check the specs required to run this mama).

"about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA" :lol:

And the screens still look pretty horrible.

[MKJ]

It isn't ray-tracing, strictly speaking. This is, though (do check the specs required to run this mama).

"about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA" :lol:

And the screens still look pretty horrible.

watch it running. youll be amazed.
although most people are more amazed by hard shadows than subtle lighttraces but thats beside the point

[Eraser]

watch it running. youll be amazed.

There's download links for a video on their site, just in case no one else had noticed

[redfella]

realtime radiosity.

umm, that sounds yummy

[Scourge]

watch it running. youll be amazed.

There's download links for a video on their site, just in case no one else had noticed

I've had it on my hard drive for a while. Pretty impressive. I used to play around with povray some and to see raytracing in real time was a treat. I remember it taking 12+ hours to render a single image on a 386 in povray.

[Eraser]

I've had it on my hard drive for a while. Pretty impressive. I used to play around with povray some and to see raytracing in real time was a treat. I remember it taking 12+ hours to render a single image on a 386 in povray.

lol yeah povray I remember using that with that program that allows you to play around with LEGO on your computer and render it with povray. People made amazingly realistic looking this with LEGO.
If I'm not mistaken, povray is still used very much and updated as well.

[SOAPboy]

It isn't ray-tracing, strictly speaking. This is, though (do check the specs required to run this mama).

"about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA" :lol:

And the screens still look pretty horrible.

watch it running. youll be amazed.
although most people are more amazed by hard shadows than subtle lighttraces but thats beside the point

no shit, its fucking amazing honestly..

id like to get ahold of that thing and tinker with it.. ^_^

[^misantropia^]

You might just want to wait a little longer for the prices of 36Ghz processors to come down just a little more.

[Scourge]

I've had it on my hard drive for a while. Pretty impressive. I used to play around with povray some and to see raytracing in real time was a treat. I remember it taking 12+ hours to render a single image on a 386 in povray.

lol yeah povray I remember using that with that program that allows you to play around with LEGO on your computer and render it with povray. People made amazingly realistic looking this with LEGO.
If I'm not mistaken, povray is still used very much and updated as well.

Yeah, it's fairly well updated. I've got the latest version and still play with it a bit. They changed a bit of the language, but still basically the same with updated features.

[Furtive]

Why in the hell would you say the Doom 3 engine sucks? Maybe multiplayer wasn't that great, but that doesn't mean you should hate the whole engine.

dam..everyone is always changing thier minds..
first they're all hyped up about doom 3...
then when it actually comes out they turn around on it and utterly crush it..

and so what if it's dark??
wtf?? that's the point. its supposed to be scary.
and thats why they included a FLASHLIGHT moron...
imagine how id must feel about the feedback they get from a game they've worked so hard on...:icon19:
poor fellas.

well i loved doom 3 myself.

[SOAPboy]

You might just want to wait a little longer for the prices of 36Ghz processors to come down just a little more.

Even if i could only get it to run for 1 second at 1fps, id be happy

[Eraser]

I was trying to play through ROE and it hit me, the game completely blows. Then I realized that it’s not only the gameplay but the whole engine. The engine is way too dark and having sharp dark shadows is annoying and not realistic, in reality you can see in shadows but in doom3 you can never see anything under the dark shadows.



This is a good example, how the hell can something cast a shadow so dark close to a light source? Anyway I uninstalled doom3 and ROE, disappointed and frustrated.

[lvlshot]http://www.gamer.nl/images/content/Erwie/200505/1116269168_0.jpg[/lvlshot]

......*me points and laughs at inphlict* :lol:

[^misantropia^]

They've been hacking away at the engine so ET:QW might not be the best example. Besides, I have yet to see the first first-person demo. Until then, we can't be really sure how it'll look like.