Things id got wrong

[Maes]

Perhaps id's more recent engines not being considered prime choices in the industry anymore, is somehow linked to the "killer apps" showcasing them not being "killers" enough, after all. Doom 3 rode on the glory of its predecessors, but after the dust had settled nobody could say that it was a game changer for its time, and it was used mostly in franchises owned or related to id.

After that, Rage similarly failed to make an impact for idTech 5 (despite it being a good game). Not a good situation, but that's life. Doom was really the perfect storm: good engine AND legendary game.

[june gloom]

Maes said:

But don't forget how many Quake I/II/III licensed-engine games there were before that, particularly before competitors like Half Life and Unreal really took off and started displacing idTech engines as a prime choice for new AAA games. Their core business having lost steam to the competition is nothing new, but it's par for the course in the business.

Quake 3 -> Return to Castle Wolfenstein -> Call of Duty 1 -> Call of Duty 2 and beyond

That's right -- the number one most popular game of all time that gets a yearly sequel well into the mid-2010s is running on a 15-year-old game engine that itself is based on even older code.

[Maes]

dethtoll said:

Quake 3 -> Return to Castle Wolfenstein -> Call of Duty 1 -> Call of Duty 2 and beyond

That's right -- the number one most popular game of all time that gets a yearly sequel well into the mid-2010s is running on a 15-year-old game engine that itself is based on even older code.

As much as I don't like the CoD series, and I'd like for this to to be true (milking the Q3 engine for all it's worth and beyond, with players still shelling out big $$$ for it), according to wikipedia CoD 2 is the last one using the Q3 engine :-(

CoD 3 used the Treyarch engine, and all the next installments moved on to the IW engine, though wiki says it's "based on the Q3" one. So maybe there's still "hope"?

[june gloom]

CoD3's engine was still based on Quake 3, and the IW engine is also based on Quake 3. They could've made an inhouse engine (they certainly have the money for it) but they've just been bolting stuff on the existing codebase for 10 years.

[Maes]

dethtoll said:

CoD3's engine was still based on Quake 3, and the IW engine is also based on Quake 3. They could've made an inhouse engine (they certainly have the money for it) but they've just been bolting stuff on the existing codebase for 10 years.

I wonder if id is receiving any royalties from those engines, though.

[snapshot]

BlueFeena said:

Half-Life is derived from a combination of the Quake, Quake 2, and QuakeWorld engines. It is very much id tech; there's even a credit to "id Software technology" on the original WON disc.

Yah classic Half-Life used GoldSrc engine,which is based on ID Tech as we know,but this is only noticeable between v1.1.0.6 - 1.1.0.8
EDIT : Huh ?? Quake 2 ?? How ?? Show me ....

[Koko Ricky]

Yeah, I thought everyone knew it was based on Q1, not Q2.

[june gloom]

If I remember right, Goldsrc used a few "fixes" from QuakeWorld and Quake 2, but they were minimal compared to the use of Quake 1 code.

[Pirx]

Maes said:

Perhaps id's more recent engines not being considered prime choices in the industry anymore, is somehow linked to the "killer apps" showcasing them not being "killers" enough, after all. Doom 3 rode on the glory of its predecessors, but after the dust had settled nobody could say that it was a game changer for its time, and it was used mostly in franchises owned or related to id.

doom3's engine was best for closed areas where it could do its shadow effects, which were spectacular for the time, but most successful games that followed required larger, open spaces instead, so its potential was lost.

from here

While id Tech 4 had taken a new direction with its dynamic per-pixel lighting, this unconventional feature had steeper hardware requirements and was initially only useful in "spooky games" (until the MegaTexture addition), whereas an increasing number of developers preferred conventional engines that could render large outdoor areas.
Also notable was id Tech 4's relative lack of downward scalability compared to competing FPS engines; id Tech 4 generally required a DirectX 8.0 compliant GPU such as a GeForce 3; the rival Source engine (which was developed from the previous GoldSrc engine) could still run on the older widespread DirectX 7 GPUs (albeit without shaders being used)."

After that, Rage similarly failed to make an impact for idTech 5 (despite it being a good game). Not a good situation, but that's life. Doom was really the perfect storm: good engine AND legendary game.

the perfect storm was the first of its kind... it's hard to bring something new in fps games, and if someone does, it takes an army of developers. but in 1993 there was nothing comparable. they were the right guys in the right place.

[BlueFeena]

DMGUYDZ64 said:

Yah classic Half-Life used GoldSrc engine,which is based on ID Tech as we know,but this is only noticeable between v1.1.0.6 - 1.1.0.8
EDIT : Huh ?? Quake 2 ?? How ?? Show me ....

Half-Life has colored lighting, something that Quake 1 did not support. It's extremely unlikely that Valve wrote their own colored lighting system, considering the broken development cycle that Half-Life went through. It's also equally unlikely that Half-Life uses merely a few fixes from QuakeWorld; Half-Life is client server based supporting dedicated servers, Quake 1 was TCP/IP or LAN only.

[Marnetmar]

I'm pretty sure they did write their own colored lighting system

[BlueFeena]

Marnetmar said:

I'm pretty sure they did write their own colored lighting system

Hehe, I had forgotten that. :P

[Da Werecat]

Half-Life supports a number of things that even Quake 2 can't do, at least in its vanilla state. 16-bit color in software mode, masked textures, lightmaps over masked textures.

The last is apparently a big deal. Daikatana displays masked textures fullbright, to name a late Q2-based game.

[Linguica]

Yeah the Half-Life software engine was quite impressive in 1998. I can't remember now but I think it even did things the hardware version didn't.

[Never_Again]

It's all becoming clear now: colored lighting was the main thing id got wrong in '93.

[glenzinho]

Fuck coloured lighting, it looks like crap e.g. PSX Doom... For those who were there, id got nothing at all wrong in 93, Doom was, and still is the bomb. Can I get an amen?

[Krazov]

I like coloured lightning. That is why I switched to GZDoom (after figuring out closest/linear texture setting).

[glenzinho]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against coloured lighting itself, per se, I just don't think it's genuine Doom.

[Krazov]

I believe that Doom is a personal experience of everybody. Some will choose vanilla way, some something more modern, some will go only for Brutal Doom, but deep down inside there’s not one and only Doom. Not anymore, at least. So I could say that coloured lightning worked surprisingly well in my case, but that still would be more like merely my opinion.

But to be fair, I recall John Carmack insisting on software renderer in case of . . . Saturn Dooom?

[Koko Ricky]

Colored lighting looked a bit crap in PSX Doom, but it looks great in PSX Final Doom and even better in Doom 64. I think it adds a ton of atmosphere, however garish it might sometimes come off.

[Da Werecat]

Linguica said:

I can't remember now but I think it even did things the hardware version didn't.

Well, it has nicer liquid effect(s). More importantly, it can display non-power-of-two textures without downscaling them into shit. It's not a unique feature for a software renderer, but Half-Life has a surprising amount of NPOT textures.

I wonder if they've added proper support for these textures in the Steam version's hardware renderer. It would be really embarrassing if they haven't.

[snapshot]

Linguica said:

Yeah the Half-Life software engine was quite impressive in 1998. I can't remember now but I think it even did things the hardware version didn't.

Yeah things like Skeletal Animations and few other things were not available in Qw till GoldSrc came out ..

[BlueFeena]

Linguica said:

Yeah the Half-Life software engine was quite impressive in 1998. I can't remember now but I think it even did things the hardware version didn't.

The software renderer is something of an enigma; most people aren't aware of all its hard memory limits that the Open GL renderer gets around, yet the software renderer can sometimes make broken maps bootable. A map plagued by allocblock: full is one of the most infamous.

Tommy of Escondido said:

Some brush-based entities have rendering properties that, when they interact in OpenGL/D3D video cards, they crash. Switch Half-Life to Software mode first, then load the map. If it loads you now know it is something that is handle different in software, then for Opengl/d3d check water, glows, additive, sprites, transparencies (illusionaries, windows, ect.), env_beams and so on.)

I think Sniper attributed it to some ram limitation that Valve hard coded to some bizarre value. (?)

[40oz]

the usage of colored textures does a great job of giving the illusion of colored lighting. There was a room in Bedlam, an E3-themed doom wad where there was a small room with litered textures beaming a lit sector with red floor and ceiling and red wall textures and it was pretty convincing IMO.

For something like Doom, the only other visual stimulation you get is recolored sprites. Is the lack of that really something Doom got wrong?

[june gloom]

I just chalk it up to the coding knowledge not being there at the time. The Build engine's method for coloured lighting was to tag a sector to colour it the way you wanted and it simply recoloured everything that passed through it. This led to some silly things like things that were recoloured for decoration purpouses (like, for example, turning a blue vehicle red) affecting the colouration of any sprite that happened to be over the affected texture. Curiously, it only happened if the floor texture was tagged.

[Worm]

Tarnsman said:

Don't forget the upperbody internal organ system map

Which one is this? The beginning of E3M4?

[scifista42]

Yes, it's E3M4.

[Playing With Fire]

Personally, I have no problem with the fact that Doom 2 was more or less a level pack for Doom 1. Sometimes you just want more of the same, without the developers completely changing the formula!

[The_MártonJános]

Hardcoding E4 music slots from previous episodes so it can't be rewritten on ports "simpler" than ZDoom.

[jmickle66666666]

yeahhhhhh. especially considering how nicely they made everything else for modders