nbohr1more
Warming Up
Posts: 21
Registered: 06-11 |
Maes said:
I wouldn't expect any major engine or gameplay breakthroughs, and as others said, any extensions will be more bug and performance fixes, and perhaps some mods using a slightly modified engine.
TL; DR version: compare to the extent of (user-made, non-commercial) source modding that Quake 1-3 went through. Not even comparable to Doom's, is it?
Comparing the Doom 3 and Doom source releases is a bit like comparing a modern car laden with a ton of electronic gizmos (or even a small passenger helicopter) that require a super-specialized and specifically trained professional to even dare touch under the hood, vs a VW Beetle that any backyard mechanic can mod to incredible levels, exactly because it's so much simpler and the mods usually leave little of the original car.
It's not like you can e.g. change the renderer dramatically (unlike Doom's, which was brought from low resolutions, to higher ones, added previously inexistent effects etc. and that was even before OpenGL and 3D accelerated ports were introduced. This was also done with the first Quake, to a degree, but much less so with the second one, and practically nothing of relevance happened to Quake 3 (outside of commercially licensed "mods").
There's no reason to believe that Doom 3 will be any different.
As far as game-play changes, those can already be done in the current SDK which already provided all the Source Code for AI, and Game-Play areas. There simply hasn't been much interest in Doom 3 as a platform because the Art Assets are all so specific to the game. Nobody but a few dedicated Mod teams wanted to make boat-loads of new textures and models for their mods and the community wasn't too interested in re-using the cramped Alien themed environs of Doom 3 they way they LOVED re-using HL2's environments and art assets.
Now, performance is another stumbling block for this engine but you must realize what you have here. A fully dynamically lit engine. We did not see another until UE3 and even there it has lots of gotchas and problems to the point where most UE3 content is light-mapped. With the Source Code release, there is the chance to make Doom 3 a real competitor to UE3.
It needs the following ingredients:
1) Deferred rendering
2) Object LOD and Occlusion tech (better Mesh management)
3) GPU calculated shadows
All those are well known tech and have public academic example implementations.
The real question is not whether Doom 3 could fly with some neat community added rendering features. The real question is whether OpenGL will actually render those features with good performance. John Carmack himself was gonna use Shadow Maps for the shadow tech instead of Stencil Shadows but OpenGL's poor driver support for buffers caused Shadow Maps to be so slow they were worse than Stencil Volumes. So the same might be true of other OpenGL features. The community could try adding Tessellation, Geometry Instancing, etc and find that these features perform horribly.
It is fortunate that games like RAGE are coming soon so that ATI and Nvidia have reasons to pay more OpenGL driver staff to fix stuff. But there are many questions... I suppose Chronicles of Riddick DA's engine has helped there too.
Quake 3's engine was majorly overhauled in the form of Xreal. Not many game developers have jumped in to build for it nor has the Quake 3 mapping community committed to a full source port. It seems that those interested in the Q3 engine took it and extended it without any care for the Q3 game. Nobody did the nasty (tedious) work of making sure that engine extensions were compatible with stock Quake 3 assets. The Quake 3 community is now focused on some extension tech called "Entity Plus" but they really need someone to re-write the engine or port Q3 to Xreal so that it doesn't live with old CPU bound limitations.
Doom 3 may see more care than that. If you think about it, Sikkmod already is a radical upgrade to the Doom 3 engine that works for the existing game. If the same changes were made without the poor performance of having to use hacks like z-buffer capture it would already be a bigger step up than Quake 3 was ever given.
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08-09-11 19:09 
