Best ca. 2004 engine?

Seeing the Doom 3 2004 Benchmarking thread gave me an idea: what do you think was the best rendering engine of the ca. 2004 era in your opinion? (Separate answers for original version and latest update to engine, if applicable.)

For me, it's a toss-up between IDTECH IV and Jupiter EX(used in every Condemned game and every F.E.A.R. game except the newest). Source looked nice on release like the rest, but IDTECH IV and Jupiter EX handle lighting and shadows and bump mapping much, much better and have aged far more nicely. The only thing I can hold Source over the other engines for is the custom Havok physics and the dynamic flashlight-cast shadows(which it really only holds over Jupiter EX since as I understand Doom 3 had it to an extent from the get-go).

Unreal 2 is an honorable mention for me, since it did pump out some nice visuals for its time (Republic Commando looked pretty good even on xbox).

idtech4 carries the CoD games to this day, as I understand it (new one is going to be different though, I've heard) and Source is still being updated and recently was behind Portal 2.

If we're going by looks and staying power, I'd say Source is better. The games its used for tend to be nicer, more open ones and I think the current version of it is fantastic. idtech4 meanwhile is all ready to be superceded by idtech5 and whatever is behind MW3.

Functionally they're all different, so I'd have a hard time saying.

I like the Unreal Engine 2, but thats only because I've got some good experience working with it from a couple of years ago.

Fuck it, I'll be decisive. Source.

What, no love for the original CryEngine (Far Cry)? It's obviously since been supplanted by CryEngine 2 & 3, but it certainly stole Doom 3 and HL2's thunder at the time in the visuals department.

However, no game engine presentation before or since has blown me away in quite the same way idtech4 did when it was first shown off. For 2001 that was simply astonishing, and there hasn't been quite the same leap in quality over the past decade imo.

Phobus said:

idtech4 carries the CoD games to this day, as I understand it (new one is going to be different though, I've heard)

CoD is actually on IDTECH 3, funnily enough.

@DoomUK I guess I never really bothered to look at FC's visuals all that much. Too busy bitching about the ridiculous/random spikes in difficulty, how annoying the aiming system was, and things like AI seeing and shooting at me through walls I guess.

Xeros612 said:

@DoomUK I guess I never really bothered to look at FC's visuals all that much. Too busy bitching about the ridiculous/random spikes in difficulty, how annoying the aiming system was, and things like AI seeing and shooting at me through walls I guess.

Or maybe it melted your computer at the time so you couldn't crank all the details up and therefore appreciate how good it looked. You could almost hear my geforce 5600 groaning under the strain.

Side note: Is it a little sad that I can remember precisely what video card and other hardware I had in my computer in 2004?

@Xeros612: idtech3 still? Wow, that is amazing...

@DoomUK: I got FarCry free with a new graphics card back in the day. Whilst it was very visually impressive and I enjoyed the game quite a lot at the time, the engine didn't seem to do much outside of look good and have wide open spaces to me.

DoomUK said:

Or maybe it melted your computer at the time so you couldn't crank all the details up and therefore appreciate how good it looked. You could almost hear my geforce 5600 groaning under the strain.

I didn't have it back in the day. I didn't have a computer with better tech for gaming than low-mid end 1998 stuff til about 2008, and I've only had the game since last year, but I think I do have it maxed out at 1366x768 on my laptop aside from maybe AA. I stand by my thoughts that I'm too busy getting pissed off about stupid shit (mostly things like OH LOOK THE AI CAN SEE ME AND SHOOT ME THROUGH A SOLID WALL) to notice the graphical quality for ca. 2004. It's that sort of thing that keeps me from liking the game. It's otherwise pretty good, even on "realistic" difficulty. EDIT: Also, fuckin' thing sucks. I don't like having to unplug my computer to get it to shut off because the engine crashed and broke my entire computer up.

@Phobus It really is amazing to see how far they've pushed the engine. Still looks pretty good... for console games.

I always liked the Source engine more than id tech 4.

id tech 4 gives the impression of being a testbed for new, unproven technology that just makes things look worse. Any older engine (like id tech 3) looks better because it's built on proven and polished technology, while any newer engine (like UE3 or Crytech2) looks better because it actually makes that kind of technology look decent.

Somehow, Doom 1 and Quake 1 had the artists to make everything look good with new engine technology. Doom 3 did not.

For instance, id tech 4's sharp, unsmoothed shadows gave everything an artifical, contrasty look that made my eyes hurt. Kind of reminds me of The Sky May Be, now that I think of it.

Also, I dunno what they did, but all the levels in id tech 4 looked like they were made of plastic. This happens in Doom 3, Quake 4, *and* Prey. For some reason this doesn't happen in any other engine that I know of.

It's not surprising that they continue to make CoD in id tech 3 and not id tech 4, considering id tech 4 would just make CoD look even worse.

Source Engine was one of the later to bloom, but that it's used in flagship titles even today is a testament to its quality and longevity. Somehow I feel like it isn't even fair to mention source though, because the change between 2004 source and 2011 source is pretty drastic, IMO.

Now in terms of my favorite, and an engine that had very nice qualities that I treasure, I'd take Unreal 2. We're talking IN 2004 here. It was much faster than Source, at the time I feel like the netcode was better, it tends to be easier to mod for, and the games which it spawned were generally more colorful and bright, yet perfectly graphically passable.

Idtech 4: Just... no. Nope nope nope. Enjoy your shadows, bumpy bald heads, and fucking trash netcode that could only support 4 players in 2004. And even then, it supported those 4 players very, very poorly. Idtech 4 was just a trash engine back then, period.

Cryengine had pretty water. Otherwise, just, lol. Cryengine. Yep.

Doom Legacy v1.42! It seemed they would keep on developing at that point, so there were a pile of guys mapping for it in some capacity. It already sucked for DM, so half of us just liked it for the shiny bits.

Modern engines? I dunno. Source gave me the most bang for my buck then. Both it and idTech4 were awfully slow on the machines I had at the time. Source played ok once a map was loaded, but always driving off a ledge and waiting for a map load sucked. Parts of the design of Half-Life 2 were so brilliant I had dreams about it.

I'm going to go with whatever engine Battlefield Vietnam was built on. That shit blew me away, huge and good looking spaces. It was fast too. It also avoided looking sparse like the games before it.

Honorable mention to the original Cryengine. I saw that shit at a netcafe and was like WOAH

Unreal 2 powered a lot of games, and once developers figured out how to make the level loads not take forever, it produced some pretty damned impressive stuff, from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to SWAT 4 and Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Mr. T said:

I'm going to go with whatever engine Battlefield Vietnam was built on. That shit blew me away, huge and good looking spaces. It was fast too. It also avoided looking sparse like the games before it.

That would be the Refractor engine, which originated in 1999 according to wikipedia.

On a related note, I'm kind of surprised that Battlefield Play4Free is running on Refractor2 engine instead of Frostbite or something. I suppose that would explain why I've heard a number of people saying it looked like BF2.

DoomUK said:

What, no love for the original CryEngine (Far Cry)? It's obviously since been supplanted by CryEngine 2 & 3, but it certainly stole Doom 3 and HL2's thunder at the time in the visuals department.

Loved FarCry, even liked the Trigens (though some felt they were unfairly hard). The expansive areas blew me away as well.

this guy was working on a campaign co-op mod for it, but still has some work to do evidently:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/assault-coop

Source, damnit! ;)

I was always impressed by how well it ran even on less-than-optimal systems. Where I could barely get a shite 20fps with idTech4, I was always able to make HL2 run smooth with comparatively little detail loss.

This was the pre-HDR days, though. That tech made my comp shit a brick when I tried to use it.