Zaldron:

[Guest Lament]

I don't know, maybe you already wrote something about that, I haven't read all the threads :) Anyways here's the question: the lamp cartoon before Carmack's presentation. It looks good enough to me. I mean, it obviously not so cool, but they weren't showing off on that cartoon as Carmack was on his engine. Why is that cartoon's engine worse than the DoomIII engine? :) (And if it isn't, why we keep calling Carmack God?)

[Guest D-clone]

Because, dumbass, that "cartoon" is old, very old, and so is the engine. And if you could'nt tell they used an old animation, not cartoon, because the gf3 would not be able to render lets say, Toy story, in real time. From what i could see, the Luxo Jr. animation didnt have bumpmaping, and it used some kind of primitive raytracing tecnique. The Doom 3 engine ,on the other hand , is rendering way more complex, and vast enviroments, with more characters, and more detailed textures, not to mention that it is in 32 bit color, as where Luxo Jr. was probably 16 bit. The lighting in Doom 3 is REAL, its not a "technique" made to give you the impression that there is light there. There's probably many other reasons, and Zaldron should know, and correct me if im wrong.

[Zaldron]

Keep things clear. The Luxor Jr animation done in real-time by Nvidia artists is just a benchmark test. It´s 2 lamps of a very complex animation sequence, some decorative objects and 2 lights. That´s all. Everyone can do that. No, really, im serious... what you saw people´s just some OpenGL models being loaded into scene and 2 lights using pixel shaders, that´s all.
Sort like a tutorial.

An engine is a program hundreds of time more complex, it needs portal tech to make VIS calculatios, object-based controls to manipulate the world entities. A netcode tied to the core. A renderer using bumpmaps and algorythms that calculate WHEN and HOW each light must be drawn. Add to this a sound engine, a map format, the camera system, a console, the brush animation system, the collision system, physics, iD´s model format, optimization coding, T&L brush header system, and a lot more...

It´s like comparing a cinematic vs a game. One can look better or equal than the game, but it´s not flexible in any means.

[Guest Lament]

Ok, then the second part of my question: are you sure that what Carmack had shown was an engine and not a cinematic sequence? That's exactly what I wanted to ask :) I mean, the fact that he has some cool stuff there doesn't mean they have an engine at all. It might've been a cinematic sequence (and of course it _was_ a cinematic sequence, after all) without any "infrastructure" behind it.

[Zaldron]

It´s an engine. I saw some stuff that would be better calculated on a 3D software package. Even if the artist would have tried to hide that, they would have failed. Besides, why would iD make such a fake presentation on a big expo?