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Rancid-Radio

...but will it last!?

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ok, saying that doom3 might not fun is probably not a good idea so i will take a different approach. i remember the original doom way back in the 3rd grade and how i had never played it but it was my favorite game just because it was doom. and look at it now. there is still a strong doom community going with new stuff allways coming out. now it makes you wonder, will doom3 be the same? and if so will it be just because it's part of the doom series, or because it is a good game. if doom3 was called quake 4 but everything else was the same would you all be as excited as you are? lets get some comments.

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A rose by any other name as it were? A good question. Doom is unquestionably Doom, but is Doom 3 Doom? Only the guys at id know the answer at this point. I'm not questioning the quality of the product id will put out, and Im not saying that Doom 3 won't be great in it's own right, but I dare say that anyone who expects is to be "Doom" will be sorely mistaken. You can call it Doom, but it will only be "Doom" to those unfamiliar with the classic Doom. The same would apply if you named it "Quake 4". "Doom 3" will be it's own game and it would seem that the title "Doom 3" has been given to it in order to generate hype (because as we all know, even the best games can be overlooked if not hyped enough). As to the question of longevity: only time will tell.

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Well, it'll certainly be a great game, I'm confident about THAT, as the game looks so realistic (this is a greater revolution than Quake 2 or Quake 3 Arena graphic wise). I haven't been this impressed by only the graphics since I first saw the original Doom (Quake didn't impress me that much as I'm no tech-guy like Zaldron - I just expect things to look more realistic and Quake didn't look realistic in my eyes because of the pointy models)!

So in my eyes "Doom 3" is already a revolution, but whether the gameplay would appeal to everyone is another thing. If the gameplay doesn't have a lot of action, then it may not be Doom to me, unless they've found a very entertaining gameplay aspect that surpasses killing baddies.

I know that the gameplay won't be the same ol' thing, because id knows that "it's gettin' ol'", and id have before been able to make games with superior gameplay (just look at Doom - This game offered the BEST gameplay experience available back then!), why shouldn't they be able to do that? Now they are at last focussing on SP rather than MP, which means more innovation.

Focussing on MP = tweaking the net code and balancing weapons, focussing on SP = looking for things that are entertaining without the need of other human players --> Innovation.

So I'm confident that the game will be fun, but it might be different from Doom.

Will it last? - Hmm, if the game is fun and immersive enough and has superior tech (which we KNOW it'll have), then I'm sure it'll last.

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I just can't understand why most people never find Quake 1 graphics breathtaking. I was literally wetting my pants when I realized there were lightmaps all around the levels.

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I just can't understand why most people never find Quake 1 graphics breathtaking. I was literally wetting my pants when I realized there were lightmaps all around the levels.


Guess the reason why I didn't find that too impressive, was that I had already imagined that this would happen in the near future (and it did!).

The macworld presentation blew me away, because I hadn't expected movie-like quality this early - I had imagined that one day an FPS that would look like a movie would show up, but I never expected it to show up within the following ten years (I think i foresaw this after experiencing Doom - it's the irony of fate that the game that came to live up to that "profecy" of mine would turn out to be a new Doom game).

I had read about Doom 3 having "real" lightning before the macworld video was unleashed upon us, but I guess that I just didn't realize what it would actually MEAN for the graphical quality of the game.

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Same thing happens in 3D software packages, still shots may look crappy, but once you animate, it's a whole different world.

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Quake was a great game with great effects and visuals (for its time), but after a while of playing it, it gets kind of annoying. Grey, brown, grey, tan, brown... I've given up playing that game all the way through on multiple occasions just out of sheer boredom. But its a great game nonetheless.

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why the quake was so brownish,coz id aimed it to run on 486 .at that time there are not 3d-acclerator card yet.to make it render as fast as possible,they have to use those shade of color(brown,gray,blue) in the game.

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why the quake was so brownish,coz id aimed it to run on 486 .at that time there are not 3d-acclerator card yet.to make it render as fast as possible,they have to use those shade of color(brown,gray,blue) in the game.


The reason they did that was the simple fact that Quake was a game where everything was rendered TWICE, something that was considered heresy a couple of years ago. The first render draws all the pretty brushes and their textures, while the second one draws all those brushes with their greyscale lightmaps. Both renders are blended in a process called multiply-blending where the lightmap dark tones are converted into lack of illumination and the brighter tones make the texture's pixels retain the original brightness.

Since this game runs in a 8 bit display (256 colors), the id artists had to choose roughly 3, 4 general "tones" and work with their shades. Whoever made a mod for Quake1 where you had to change the pallette for something more diverse knows how bad lightmaps can look. This effect is generally called banding, where you can appreciate rough changes between colors, giving the light the look of several concentric rings. Even in this era of 32 bit displays, today and tomorrow engines can still produce banding, specially when many lights are on scene. That's why Carmack wants a 64 bit backbuffer, so he could store more decimal digits and improve the calculations.

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Yeah, but isn't Quake2 based on the same technology? Quake2 has an awesome color palette, lots of shades while still handles lighting.

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And Hexen 2 does that too. But if you use software rendering in both games you'll notice how dark areas don't look as good as it did in Quake (1).

But that's a thing from the past now. Now we're in Unreal's era of neo green vomit lighting and red/blue flickering stuff. :)

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I actually think working with palettes is better than working with the whole spectrum of colors when it comes to textures.

Why? Well.

To start with, a good 256-entry palette or two could cover up 95% of all colors you'd ever need in your textures (except special cases for skies, energy, water and similiar. Those 256 colors are enough for the color base.

Then you can apply true-color/hardware/mip-mapped/lit rendering. I recently refered to the Q2 palette in a post, and that one is a good example. Q2 is very snazzy in GL mode.

This far explained, palettes are almost equally good to 16m color textures. But why would they be better in some way? Except storage space?

Simple. You get matching hues. It is very noticable in many games with true-color textures how one texture next to another can have just a few shades different hue. And that is usually ugly. Very ugly.

With a palette, you avoid that problem. Colors are automatically sorted into the proper hues, and it makes things look good.

Of course, this doesn't suggest that a game like DOOM3 should have paletted textures (from what we've seen so far, id have managed to keep a consistent dark blue theme).

But games like Quake1/2 generally look better than true-color based games of the same technology base because the themes and hues of textures are consistent.

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palettes are almost equally good to 16m color textures.

Sheesh, try explaining that to Zaldron. He wanted to do a Zelda 1 (NES)-style game in 32-bit color.

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Oh yeah, the benefits from working in 8 bits is that you must learn to keep your art consistent. But I'm confident id artists can do that already :)

In the era of 64x64 textures 8-bit or truecolor doesn't really matter, since there's only 4096 pixels and it's unlikely you'll need more than 256 colors to draw it. But now we're dealing with 1024x512 textures :)

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Exactly. But I oppose people who say for example that there should be true color textures in DOOM source ports :)

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That wouldn't be useful unless you're planning to work with bigger textures. Of course that's not really useful, unless they code in a special feature that allows 256x512 and 128x256 textures fit into DOOM's 64x128 space (for example). This could lead to some interesting detail.

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