Doom 3 anybody?

[AIM]

Those new pics look amazing:

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/screens/0,10865,2876082,00.html?page=1

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/screens/0,10865,2876082,00.html?page=2

I'm sure mostly everyone here has seen these pics.

They do look amazing.

I'm thinking a P2 400 mhz and a voodoo 8 mb. card should do the trick.

:lol:

[Greg Kasavin]

I actually thought that those new screens looked a little rough around the edges, and was surprised that more-flattering-looking shots weren't released instead. You can see some obvious clipping, texture seams, low-res textures, glitchy shadows, and other messed-up stuff like that.

I'm sure it's all stuff that they're keenly aware of and intend on addressing; which is why I'm surprised those are the new shots that got out.

They do look really, really good otherwise. It's just this is one game that defies you to nitpick over its visuals.

[Erik]

I'm with Greg on this one, those shots are kind of fugly.

[Ben Sones]

Heh. I find it funny that we all hold id to so much higher a standard when it comes to technology. Having seen the lengthy game demo at E3, I'll readily agree that those shots fall pretty far short of seeing the game in motion (they show off the detail in the character models, but feature little in the way of environment detail or lighting effects). Still, they look a hella lot better than anything else on the market today, so it seems kind of odd to call them "fugly"... ;)

[Xaroc]

If you look at the one guy with the goggles on you can see the reflection of the room in them. You can also see he needs to invest in some teeth whitener.

-- Xaroc

[Greg Vederman]

"I'm sure it's all stuff that they're keenly aware of and intend on addressing; which is why I'm surprised those are the new shots that got out."

While I'm sure id is aware of all those things, my guess is that they won't change much. The low-res textures, for example, are likely a byproduct of the memory and bandwidth limitations of existing 3D card technology. It's the price we pay for those flashy new, high-precision bump maps and effects (at least on today's 3D cards). As for wonky shadows, enable hardware shadows in Jedi Knight II and check out that glitchy horror show -- the effect is not dissimilar -- speaking, perhaps, to an issue with the hardware rather than the software itself.

-Vede

[Jason Becker]

"The low-res textures, for example, are likely a byproduct of the memory and bandwidth limitations of existing 3D card technology."

I've read that DOOM III would be using around 80MB of textures on average. Also whats up with the 'wonderful' technology texture compression(remember S3TC, and DXTC). I'd think that would be pretty common by now.

[Alan Au]

One of the upcoming shooters was boasting that they had the ability to build mix-n-match monsters so that you didn't feel like you were fighting clones. I imagine this effect must be amplified when the monsters have so much detail. I mean, wouldn't it be annoying if every monster you encountered had scars in the exact same spot? Most shooters these days have the presence of mind to swap out the head textures on enemy soldiers so you see some variety, and I'm wondering if the Doom III developers plan on implementing something along those lines.

- Alan

[Raph Koster]

All the current realtime shadow algorithms have severe limitations. Jedi Knight II (and SWG, and NWN) use "stencil shadows", which extrude polygons then shadow where the polygons hit things. But this calls for rendering the whole scene multiple times. Then there's also shadowmapping, which it looks like Doom III uses (based on what I have seen). This doesn't let the light get too far away from the shadows or else it will pixelate (tho there was a SIGGRAPH paper on how to fix that this year. It looked slow though).

Everyone can use texture compression; but part of the problem is that now you have to burn more memory to do a "high quality" texture too. Not only higher res textures, but also the bumpmaps. Most of the visual effect in Doom III appears to be the use of bumpmaps and specular highlighting to get more dramatic lighting.

-Raph

[xahlt]

Not to pick on an amazing looking engine for no good reason, but what's the technical mumbo jumbo on why the zombies look so plasticky? On the one hand, I think it's amazing that those screenshots of game footage look like the photorealistic pre-rendered backgrounds of Myst and Resident Evil days. On the other hand, I always felt those photorealistic pre-rendered backgrounds always looked a bit odd and overshiny... is that a factor of the bump mapping or the diffusion maps or what?

[leedim]

Well, when I hit the links I get a horribly rendered page with a big blank where the pic should be, but since we're linking to PA tonight:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-05-24&res=l

[Jason Cross]

On the "Why things look like plastic" question:

In the real world, when light strikes an object, it bounces off, and that's what we see. (No DUH Jason, get one with it...) Okay...


On some materials, some of the light passes into the object and is scattered around just below the surface. Sometimes FAR below the surface, depending on the material.

Marble is a great example. If you take a 3D model and slap on a marble texture, it doesn't look like real marble. But if your 3D modelling program can simulate the light penetrating it a bit and scattering around, it does: you get things like thin areas "glowing" as the light passes through from behind, small grooves lose their hard shadows, etc.

An easier example is a glass of milk. Without the light penetrating and scattering, it looks like a glass of white paint.

Right now, it's really hard for a 3D card to run a shader that can simulate this sub-surface scattering effect. I'm not sure it can be done (without complicated multiplass junk that would kill the speed) on DirectX 8 class stuff.

DirectX 9 allows for pixel shaders with enough instructions to do sub-surface scattering, and the first DX9 hardwares - Radeon 9700 and NV30 - have enough muscle to use it.

This is what's necessary to make skin look "correct." Just like marble (or milk), skin absorbs and scatters light, making it look soft. It's not as dramatic as those two examples, but it's important.

I doubt if they'll bother to add a skin shader to Doom3 just for the NV30/Radeon 9700 and above owners, so it'll probably be some time yet before games feature soft-looking skin.

[Jason Cross]

I busted out the google-fu and found a few examples:

Milk glass
http://www.cgfocus.com/articles/subsurfacescattering/a2-Milk.jpg


Face and marble - compare the first two faces
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html


When graphics cards can all do simple subsurface scattering shaders (say that times fast!) with ease, we'll also get some realistic looking stuff like sand and cloth.

[Erik Andersson]

Doom III uses stencil shadows, just like Jedi Knight II. The actual algoritm might be different, but I think both use Carmack's algorithm. A lot of the graphics quality in Doom III seems to come from the large amount of textures per polygon, especially the bump maps.

DXTC (texture compression) works but I'm not sure if it's wonderful. It is a 4:1 compression but it only supports 16 bit textures and this might not be acceptable for those demanding high quality graphics. I think S3TC supported 24 bit, but I don't think anyone uses it anymore.

All this technical stuff doesn't matter much of course, as long as the end result is good.