Water

Zaldron I heard it's impossible with today's technology to use Flowing volumetric water!
Do u think Carmack will be able to do it?

I think Carmack could do it. It would be pain staking and take shit load of time (reminding you guys the quad damage effect took forever to do). But if he does do it, you would have to have like 400 mhz to make it run fairly good. And you would need a very good 3d accelarator. But the time they have to do this, doom has to come out next year, so I dont think volumetric water will be in doom3. Mabye in there next game.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which uses a modified Q3: Arena engine) has volumetric fire (and EXTREMELY nice it looks too), so it's a step in the right direction...

Perforator said:

I think Carmack could do it. It would be pain staking and take shit load of time (reminding you guys the quad damage effect took forever to do). But if he does do it, you would have to have like 400 mhz to make it run fairly good. And you would need a very good 3d accelarator. But the time they have to do this, doom has to come out next year, so I dont think volumetric water will be in doom3. Mabye in there next game.

Next Year? dont get your hopes up

When is d3 supposed to come out, Malum.

what do ya mean volumetric water?

Malum Archon said:

Next Year? dont get your hopes up

i here there is a game called red faction that will have that in it. i bet it will be at least 3 years before doom3 is released at all, look how long it took some other games to be made and they still did a piss poor job on them, hope they dont do it to the new doom

Well, it´s not impossible. I know 2 ways to code the system, but both are very time consuming. First, you can use a heavily-condensed particle system to simulate thousands of "drops".
Obviously, this only works for water in motion effects (falls, broken pipes, subwater explosions). The main drawback is the physics system, you´ll have to make inter-particle collision detection, per particle level collision, gravity, friction, particle bounce & Newton Law´s. All this big pile of shit is calculated in the processor, wich already is very bogged on 3D interpretation (non T&L cards only), sound sampling, and AI.

About Red Faction, it uses this system, but fluids doesn´t look like an object, it´s just some hundreds of particles, wich aren´t enough to simulate dense water/lava.

The other way is to code a special FFD mesh, where every vertex is gravity-binded, and let it wrap around the level as calculations predict. Tesselating could improve "roundness" on some tough areas. This is WAY more difficult to code, it´s like (for 3DSMAX users) to link Melt & Dynamics, and you know how long it takes for Dynamics to prerender.

I don´t see a good solution still, so don´t expect wonders. Maybe a Red Faction like system would be included, but i can´t tell the truth. DooM never was known by his waters, slimes, and lava (no FPSs, by the way). I don´t see any really good reason to code such thing in a game where fluids never represent a big part of the game.

NiGHTMARE said:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which uses a modified Q3: Arena engine) has volumetric fire (and EXTREMELY nice it looks too), so it's a step in the right direction...

The main drawback is that fire ins´t a solid, or a liquid, wich simplifies in great amount the calculations.
Anyway, they have archieved a very cool effect.