Just curious....

...but what the hell happened here? I know it's not my place to judge people, but damn, some of the posts around here have been made thousands of times before.

And I'm not talking about the throwing objects or kicking down doors ideas either, both of those are still good and valid.

What I'm talking about is when practically any newbie opens his yap someone rolls around and asks Ling to ban him. WTF? We all know that Marilyn Manson has poor lyrics and boring, slow music and only has fans from shock value. Still, should he be banned from the music industry? No. Of course not. It's censorship and that's simply ethically wrong. It sounds like you're saying, "Please mommy take the bad man away."

Then there's the engine specific talk, which I'm always up for... except that Zaldron could spin off pages of shit and for all I know he could really be talking about airplane mechanics and I'd never know. :P

The big things that I would appreciate from the engine are:
- Lighting better than Unreal, the current lighting champ
- Higher levels of interaction than Duke Nukem Forever
- One player model, not the 3rd person view model and a floating gun
- Gravity affecting bones of skeletal animations*
- High quality lip syncing**

*What happens when a skeletally animated object dies? It plays the animation for it and just lays there until something else happens to it to trigger an animation. Meaning, you kill something on a staircase and most of it's body could end up floating in thin air. When dead animation bones should count as 'limp' so then can slouch down stair cases. You can't tell me that if you blast a zombie in a corner you don't want to see him half-propped against the wall as it dies instead of just hitting the wall and continuing to the floor unrealistically.

**Half-Life had what, one bone? Duke Forever has somewhere around 22 I think. This is definitely important, especially in a game with very little actual 'talking'. Picture an Imp shrieking at you... the eyebrow lines drop, the upper lip curls to reveal the incisors, the sides of the mouth draw downwards into a scowl, the muscles in the throat tensen as it expels it's lungs... and all of this done automatically by the engine.

Then there's the game specific talk, which is always good.

As usual I'm for immersive detail:
- Shell casings actually fly from the ejection port
- Better smoke than SoF, and wisps of smoke from the ejection port
- Must be at least 20 different kinds of blood splats for walls/floors
- Wounded demons dragging themselves towards you
- As few keys as possible, more realistic obstacles
- Destructable lights (c'mon, please, for the love of God!)
- Thousands of other little things I've already mentioned but fail to remember for this completely meaningless post.

Everyone seems to want lots of physics. Every brick in a wall is a defined object. Every lamp on a table can be interacted with. Brushes move according to how fast you were running when you hit them. Yadda yadda yadda...

All I'm saying is, is it time yet or would this cause some of the same trouble that Trespasser had?

deadnail said:

Then there's the engine specific talk, which I'm always up for... except that Zaldron could spin off pages of shit and for all I know he could really be talking about airplane mechanics and I'd never

... so like I was saying before deadnail interrupted me, 2 cups of anisothropic filtering combined with texel mip-mapping sharpening algorythms could help the rotor sensors to archieve optimal flare reduction effects. Probably community-oriented bacteria and algae could benefit the GPU by adding class-oriented vertex color correction (using 23 bits as mantissa and the rest as exponent). This will surely attract a lot of the pork consumers, since the stippled alpha will engage the clorethemytelum in a combustion effect...

No, seriously. I think you´re right, deadnail, but you know how hard is to keep the mouth shut when a new newbie (duh!) arrives.

OK, so let´s add good stuff in an already good post.

First I will engage the most-engine specific features.

# Lighting. Well, obviously, everyone here is aware of American McGee´s comments. But for those who don´t really understood what he meant, here´s an explanation.

Since the days of Quake, the most powerful FPS engines (Quake, Unreal, LithTech) have used what we know as "multiply blending" for accurate lighting rendering. This is just a fancy name for to simply say : paste the lightmap (pictures equal to the shadows over each surface) onto the level´s surfaces, where darker pixels make texture pixels darker, and white pixels leave the texture pixels in it´s original intensity.
With a few lines of code fixed, they archieved colored lighting, improving dramatically the scenery. Then they added realistic light calculations (where lightrays bounce from each wall several times), and this made ultra-realistic rooms. But let´s face it, lightmaps are a thing from the past.
If you open a door, does the light enters the new room and lightens up everything it catches? nope. If you take an elevator, does the elevator box projects a moving shadow while you´re going up? nope. When you start firing a machine gun in a column-infested room, does new shadows spread in a radial shape? nope.
Lightmaps are horrific static. In fact, several games had started to discard this solution. Take for example Severance, where you can see fantastic shadows all over the level, changing dinamically.
So, what meant McGee´s with the lighting statement? I think the best way to explain it is with several examples :

* When you start firing the chaingun, with each fire muzzle from the cannons, your shadow will be casted behind you, all over the floor and walls.

* When you approach to the single lamp in a very poorly iluminated room. Your shadow will increase in size until it covers in darkness the whole room.

* If Cacodemon flew nearby a ceilling lamp, his big fat circular shadow will darken the floor of the level.

* Each Imp will cast dinamically their shadows, while your rocket flew trought them. When it impacts, dozens of black shadows will fill the room, shadows of each corpse and chunk.

I guess you have the picture by now. This isn´t just a fancy improvement over Q3A engine, it´s a whole new level of inmersiveness, imagine how will be multiplied the "fear effect" in a game where every shadow is painfully real.

Before going into the rest of deadnail´s topics, I will make a little explanation about bumpmapping. Many people believe that this feature was already implemented in FPS, and they got it wrong, cause the true name for that effect is "detail texturing".
What´s detail texturing, I´m sure everyone here have noted that in modern games if you approach too much to a wall, you´ll see a whole new level of detail (that tiles across the wall way too much). This is archieved by simple "multiply blending" just as the lightmap.
Bumpmapping is a whole new feature, imagine, each little pixel of the wall will have it´s own Z position (as Z being distance from the original surface). That means that iD will archieve ultra realistic irregularities, combined with the new lighting scheme.
Here´s some examples more :

# If you look closely at the weapon you´re holding, you´ll see the serial number "embossed" in the metal.

# Look at the bricks, the bricks will pop out of the wall instead of being at the same level than the cement.

# Approach with NOTARGET to an Imp. Check the irregularities in his brown skin.


Now, back to deadnail´s post...

Interaction : something that every gamer loves. Imagine an upgraded E1M1. Would not be nice to approach to one of those barrels? Open it, and threw the top flying. It will impact on a wall and realistically fall & set to rest in the floor. The seargents will be surprised by the noise, and they will want to check. After being dispached, the Marine grabs the barrel and kick it. The green goo will fall to the ground, doing some smoke and sound. Fire a shot to the pool, boom. A nice flaming poodle.
Take another example, you hear a lot of Daemons down the hall. In fact, you see how they´re bashing the walls & doors in an attempt to get to you (they smell you). You run to a locked room, and blew apart the lock with your gun. Inside you find some (gasp!) crates that you quickly stack in front of the doors. You hear a great noise and the Daemons starts running to you. The recently made barricade stops them in their running. Giving you some time to reload your guns. But things get screwy when an Imp comes down the hall and jumps over the crates, looking at you with those evil eyes, like if it were wondering how nice you taste...

Model : Definetely. In fact, most of the nice lighting effects are acomplished by having a properly done shadow of your character.

Gravity on IK-ed bones : Check Hitman : Codename 47. Drag a dead body, and see how the shape adapts perfectly to the ground. It´s truly amazing. I want to see deads rolling down the stairs, loosing their foots in a slope and falling to an abyss, etc...

High Quality Lip Synching : Just thinking of the Imp expressions, or the exagerated Daemons mouth eating stuff gives me shivers...

It´s the perfect time to do believable world interaction/physics, since the engine is being modified with portal technollogy to archieve dynamic worlds. What´s that, you´ll ask?
Look at Quake and Unreal... the only things the brushes (objects) can do is move and rotate, boring...
DooM 3´s being designed to have lot of cool effects on the levels, like scaling, breathing, skewing, twisting, destructable geometry (possibly), physically logic friction, falling, collapsing, melting, collisions, etc.

People, keep posting great stuff here. Let´s make this post a great Archive for the newbies : "Da Encyclopaedia o´ DooM3"

deadnail said:

What I'm talking about is when practically any newbie opens his yap someone rolls around and asks Ling to ban him. WTF?

Hey dude. If I remember this correctly. This only happened once... Ok, maybe twice, but that's it. I don't see any reason to be pissed about this...

deadnail said:

- Thousands of other little things I've already mentioned but fail to remember

Argh! you forgot to mention the return of the 'use' button!!

Actually in No One Lives Forever enemies fall from balcons and roll on staircases!

I KNOW this has been said 1,000,000,000 times in the past, but there NEEDs to be smarter enemies. Also, monsters should never be 'asleep' unless it's part of the game, like they're actually sleeping or something. They should always be moving around, making guard circuits, etc. And, I would love some more interaction, similar to the style in Pixel Rex's recently released Temple.wad.