Id Software and nVidia

[Nystul]

I was looking for Doom 3 news today and I got a chuckle out of this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nzone_doom3_home.html

In short, video cards will be shipping to retailers with large stickers on them that say they can handle Doom 3. In a way it makes perfect sense, but it strikes me as funny that a single game is that influential. It would be akin to seeing a Sony boombox with "Metallica approved" stamped on the side. This makes me wonder, though... Doom 3 has been in the works since what, sometime in 2000? nVidia and ATI release new cards on a yearly basis. Who really has the most influence on the pace of technology in the GPU industry: nVidia/ATI, Microsoft, or John Carmack?

Another funny thing about Carmack... After Quake 3 was essentially finished, his team wanted to do a Doom project, but the majority ownership of Id kept shooting them down. So they made an ultimatum: do a new Doom game now or fire us. Then they did a new Doom game. I wonder if that's where the guys at Blizz got the ultimatum idea, before they all got canned.

While I'm on the Doom 3 topic, this is very old news (by now it may even be implemented in other existing games) but I think it's still pretty interesting. The Doom 3 graphics engine is always using two version of each model. The first model may have on the order of a million polygons... the kind of thing you might expect to see in a cut scene where rendering isn't done in real time. No textures are applied to these first models (good luck finding a PC to handle that), but their geometry is used to calculate things like shading and bumpmapping. Those calculations are then applied to the textures of the visible model, which is maybe a few thousands polygons. The implication here seems to be objects that will look obscenely realistic (well, this reallly has more to do with the artists than the technology though, doesn't it?) but still have obviously polygonal outlines (you can see what I mean here in any Doom 3 screenshot).

[AtomicKitKat]

There was a really crappy game called Messiah, a couple years back. It's main claim to fame was that they used 2 maps for each model(something like that), the "regular use" one had fewer polygons. The game itself was supposedly rather buggy though. Personally, I despise having to get a new card of any kind every few years. Especially cos a lot of things are less and less likely to be backward compatible, resulting in "old-school" gamers like myself, who are less swayed by flash, and more swayed by a good story, in the lurch(for instance, some old DOS games no longer work with the latest Sound Blaster cards)

[Occhidiangela]

I appear to have come a cropper on figuring out what the min spec machine will be for that game.

Bother. I am not a real fan of FPS, but those screen shots look awfully nice. :)

[kandrathe]

Minimum: 1Ghz CPU 256 DDR RAM GeForce 3/Radeon 7xxx
Recommended: 2.4Ghz CPU 712 DDR RAM GeForce FX 5950/Radeon 9800

http://www.planetdoom.com/

[AtomicKitKat]

Ugh. At our current rate, by 2050, we're gonna need TerraHz(is that correct?) speed CPUs with memory in the Terrabytes to play the latest games...

Shows what THIS idiot knew:

Bill Gates: 640kb is all you ever need.

And Windows 2050 will take up 3/4 of THOSE resources...

[--Pete]

Hi,

"Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away."

--Pete

PS Of course, given the quality of new games, we've been doing fine with four year old systems. After all, when every game review has a phrase like "It's just like XXX but with better graphics." and XXX is something we were playing on our Trash 80s and Apple ]['s it hardly seems worthwhile dumping $50 when there's lots of classics we've missed in the bargain bin for $10 ;)

[AtomicKitKat]

Me um big fan of www.theunderdogs.org

Plenty of old-school things to amuse old-timers like us. :P

[Nystul]

"It's just like XXX but with better graphics"... To an extent it's true, but to an extent it's actually a falsehood resulting from the short amount of play a reviewer would do. I pulled out Quake the other day, and I came to a surprising realization: the most striking improvements in FPS since Quake (well, at least since GLQuake) are not graphics. I kept ducking behind cover to reload my weapon, only to realize there was no extended reloading to be done. And the "ducking" couldn't be done in a literal sense since Quake had no crouching, crawling, prone stance, etc. Stealth? Non-existant as a single player theme back then. Sniper rifles? Not until conversions like TF introduced them into multiplayer action. Squad-based tactics in team play? Even with the conversions, very limited and poorly implemented. AI? Not very impressive in single player. Story line? You must be joking. Weapon physics? Very limited.

Quake is still very fun. It is fast-paced, intense, skill-demanding to the extreme, fun. The shortcomings I noticed will not keep me from playing it again in the near future. And some games that are far more refined are boring by comparison. But in the better games of today, the themes from games of the 80s are refined in ways that allow very interesting additions to the gameplay. Wolfenstein 3D was once an extremely fun game, but that one-dimensional gameplay seems like a frustrating joke to me after playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

That Doom 3 will raise the bar for graphics and sound quality is nearly a certainty. Whether it will bring anything else to the table remains to be seen. If not, there are always plenty of games in the bargain bin that may be more worthwhile.

[Nystul]

Minimum: 1Ghz CPU 256 DDR RAM GeForce 3/Radeon 7xxx

Homebuilt NystulRig doesn't have this beat by all that much. It's pretty funny to think that if I get this game, I may be playing Quake at 1600x1200 and Doom 3 at 800x600 or lower! Funnier still that the Doom 3 will still look a lot better, for all the people who complain about games that don't support a certain resolution.

[yangman]

The implication here seems to be objects that will look obscenely realistic (well, this reallly has more to do with the artists than the technology though, doesn't it?) but still have obviously polygonal outlines (you can see what I mean here in any Doom 3 screenshot).

Actaully, you need both.

Imagine trying to represent a human being, as close to reality as possible, using sixteen colours of origami. You just can't do it.

It may be an extreme case, but the same concept applies here as well. You can't replicate Toy Story with the stock QuakeIII engine no matter how hard you try: it's just not capable of it.



On a slight tangent, IIRC, one technological selling point of Messiah was the fact that it utilized a full voxle engine. In a voxle engine, pictures are rendered as "dots" instead of polygons. A long explanation short, when done right, volxle technology gives you stunning graphics with no "blockiness" what-so-ever. AFAIK, before Messiah, assuming it does use voxle technology, the only games to use this alternative was Tiberium Sun, and Delta Force, although only for rendering foilage.

[Quark]

I'm not sure of the game names, but I'm pretty sure some flight simulators before that time were using voxel engines already. I remember all the hype about them in PCGamer and then when the games actually came out people were no longer impressed. Voxels were supposed to be the future, you know ;)

[Quark]

The nVidia/id connection has two causes that I know of. First, ATI had just sprung a deal for Half-Life 2. Their high end card that was just coming out became the "official" card of Half-Life 2, and was going to be bundled with it. Funny thing is, HL2 is nowhere near out and a bunch of people are ticked that their "bundle" has turned into a preorder. nVidia wasn't too happy that they lost out on that deal, so they looked for other options.

Id has been biased for some time now. Why? Because Carmack is still ticked off about ATI letting the DOOM3 Alpha demo leak. If you look at his talks before and after the leak, it seems to me that he emphasises the nVidia cards' benefits alot more after the leak. I wouldn't blame him, though. Up until that point ATI was bumbling at anything it did except the actual hardware. So Id was certainly more than open to a deal to get back at nVidia.

Business, gotta love it.

[Lord_Olf]

Hi Quark,

I remember something along those lines... wasn't it a helicopter simulation? Not sure of the name either, but I think it was around the time that Microprose was still doing it's series on the AH-64 Apache. Apache was supposed tp be more simulation-oriented, while the voxel game was geared towards the "action" side... I also remeber that you could call in artillery strikes and such, if that helps your memory. Might have been called "Comanche", but I wouldn't bet my cracked sash on it.
Still, I think that the engine was pretty good, not too great for detail, but very nice in a manner of "landscape". It would sure be interesting to see what voxel is up to today, especially because the titel I remember ran pretty fast compared to other flight sims, IIRC.

Take care,
Lord_Olf

[NiteFox]

On a slight tangent, IIRC, one technological selling point of Messiah was the fact that it utilized a full voxle engine. In a voxle engine, pictures are rendered as "dots" instead of polygons. A long explanation short, when done right, volxle technology gives you stunning graphics with no "blockiness" what-so-ever. AFAIK, before Messiah, assuming it does use voxle technology, the only games to use this alternative was Tiberium Sun, and Delta Force, although only for rendering foilage.

I think the first game to take advantage of voxels to any degree was Outcast.

Hah. I have in my magazine pile (Somewhere around the '98-'99 strata) an interview with the developers of said game who were quite adamant that Outcast would run fine on low-end P133s and 166s and it was these machines they were aiming the recommended (NOT minimum) spec at.

Somehow, they managed to produce one of the most processor-hungry games of that time.

The reason why voxels were said to be the future was not due to the graphical loveliness within, but because every single producer and their dog claimed that the specs for said games would be lower than polygon graphics with associated GFX card. All huff and smoke, naturally enough, and the fact that it took the hardware companies some time to produce graphics cards that could support voxel graphics, easing the burden on strained processors.

Lack of support and overzealous producers killed off voxel technology, and I for one am glad to see it gone.

Oh. And Tiberium Sun came out after Messiah. Outcast came first. I'm not sure about Delta Force...