Wow ! Look ! A serious Doom 3-related post !

[Lord FlatHead]

I've been closely watching and pondering over the Macworld movie lately here in my lonely spaceship hovering above your blue-ish planet, and I've come to realise some very significant things.

Pre-rendered cutscenes are history. I remember some debate on this very forum about if id should include pre-rendered stuff in Doom 3, but in retrospect this all seems so irrelevant. Watch the marine guy talk. Closely. Now watch the Baron of Hell (or whatever it is) walking between the pillars and casting shadows. That footage looks ten times better than any pre-rendered footage I've ever seen in a game.

I was amazed when I first saw the intro movies for Quake 2 and 3, but they are nothing compared to the real-time display of this new engine. It's actually come to the point where I start to wonder if we haven't hit a limit of how realistic graphics can get.

I mean, the real-time lighting is like full 3D in 1996 - every FPS developer is going to struggle a while to catch up with Carmack (what else is new ?) and then every decent game will have it. I ask myself what the next big step in graphics technology is, and I can't find the answer. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps we are reaching the point where the technology is so advanced developers can finally concentrate on things like plot development, realism and interaction without worrying if their engine looks ugly when compared to the competition.
Perhaps I'm too dramatic here.
Perhaps I'm using the word 'perhaps' way too much.
Perhaps I should just shut up and let your waves of criticism wash over me.

[deadnail]

You're right. I've been saying since day one that FMV sucks and machinema is always the way to go.

If you look at the cutscenes to (dare I say it again) Parasite Eve 2 you'll see the epitome of video game graphics for me. Very realistic but at the same time you can easily tell it's computer generated. That's what I like. All the damn photo-sourced textures don't mean shit to me, they will NEVER hold the same aesthetic beauty of a pixel artist.

Same goes for the ol' 2D games. They just CAN'T stop making them dammit.

[MaCvILeWhOrE]

/me sends the OLAF (oompa loompa air force) up into space to bring Lord flathead's ship down
/me gets a big smile as I see the blazing remains of his ship crash to earth

HEHEHE

NO seriously, yeah your right I was thinking the same thing too man.


BTW sorry bout your space ship

[Guest CRiZ]

deadnail said:

You're right. I've been saying since day one that FMV sucks and machinema is always the way to go.

If you look at the cutscenes to (dare I say it again) Parasite Eve 2 you'll see the epitome of video game graphics for me. Very realistic but at the same time you can easily tell it's computer generated. That's what I like. All the damn photo-sourced textures don't mean shit to me, they will NEVER hold the same aesthetic beauty of a pixel artist.

Same goes for the ol' 2D games. They just CAN'T stop making them dammit.

More realism?

One of the things is really good physics. When everything moves juuust right you'll have some pretty realistic gaming. It's the subtleties, the things that you may not notice that'll make the game seem real. We need full conservation of momentum. That's probably the most relevant to the FPS category. With this there would be masses, forces, and accelerations. Gravity too. No more bodies extended over a ledge perfectly horizontal. We need to see their bodies hang over, and if the coefficient of static or dynamic friction isn't large enough, then they slide off and fall into a pile below.
Then again, there should be some exceptions because there isn't too much plausible physics behind surviving a missle hit.

I really think there's plenty of detail to clean up but maybe you're right. The lack of realistic lighting was the main factor holding back from realism before and it looks like carmack has totally conqured that. The rest may mainly be improving what will already be there(in doom3). Like higher res textures, and larger poly-count.

I would really like to see realistic water done somehow without needing a supercomputer. One of my professors is big in the Computational Fluid Dynamics area, and I know this stuff needs wicked computing power. The water in quake3 is nice but it's really so damn STILL. I'm not asking for splashing or individual drops but maybe circular wave patterns in the surface geometry that could interact with one another would do.

Because computers are getting more powerful, I think we are really approaching this real physics, simulations type stuff. Simulation generally involves fairly simple arithmetic that just needs to be done many, many times and so requires a lot of computing horsepower to be done in real time.

Actually, computers a decade from now may even be able to simulate pretty realistic water and smoke in real time. And a flame thrower too :). All fluids are difficule to simulate but they would really add to the realism if done properly.

Assuming a doom3 level is done to scale with reality eg, the characters are approximately 6ft tall, then maybe all the matter in the game could be analysed in real time at a resolution of around 1 cubic inch. I mean, in real life, the interaction go past subatomic but maybe we could simulate up to a cubic inch? maybe a cubic millimeter. I don't know. That would be incredible powerful though.

I don't think that cutscenes will be obsolete though. They will always be ahead of real time stuff. When we have 10,000 Ghz AMD K-25 and the GF1000 carmack will probably say, "shit, why not, let's throw in real-time radiosity lighting calculations." With that and all the physics, we would all have the power to simulate underground "nucular" explosions.

So there's a lot to be done but it may not be too far off before we can't descern between real and generated.

[Zaldron]

Months before the ASF I discussed what would it be the next gen graphics with Dima. You´re right, 3D games in the way we know them are hitting graphic quality limit. Yes, there´s still plenty to do in the physics/interaction area of the engine, but 3D polygonal games of the next years will look pretty much like Doom3, only with higher polycounts.

The next step? Well, technollogy is a really hard place to play fortune-teller, but I have my vision :

Voxels

Yes, the same from Comanche and the older Delta Forces. Now, those games are based on the idea of "particle" instead of "surface" wich if more realistic if we quote our Universe. The main problem of voxels is that they´re fixed. The next gen. engines will blend together the concept of texture and the concept of detail. How? Coding materials.

In the future, texture alignment and such will be a thing of the past. You´ll create a rock, for example, and choose the material "Blue Rock 3". The surface, made of voxels, will get distorted, creating something called "displacement map" wich is the upgrade of the bumpmap concept. Instead of having the illusion of bumpiness, with voxels you can make the imperfections a reality.

But wouldn´t this look all blocky?

Yes, the solution? : Fractal voxels.

Voxels that automatically subdivide into smaller ones, interpolating the positions to maintain the irregularities above the surfaces (and adding a little noise to mantain Mandelbrot´s ideas about the subject). With a dynamic quality calculator, you can make each pixel of the screen to be a single voxel. The result : Realistic (and I mean realistic as our world) looks based on the selected resolution.

Besides, this will allow the creation of new features. Levels could be compiled to alter the conditions of the texture based on geometry, and create rust, dirt and many other effects. You´ll make a statue in the middle of a park, and it will be automatically rusted taking in mind WHAT places of the statue are in contact with water, and it will get dirty based on from WHERE the wind comes from.

Voxels also allows us to make realistic water, since we´re talking about particle simulation.

As you can imagine, polys are the wrong way to go. The problem is that we´re far from having the tech for something like this. I think we´ll see this directly from iD´s hands in 4, 5 years more. The problem will be having the power necesary to make this work. As you can imagine, the GeForce3, for example, can draw millions of polys, but im sure it can´t draw 2 million voxels properly. You want to know how many will you need for a game? If you had the GREATEST VIS CALCULATION EVER i´ll say your resolution´s width * height. 1024x768 (a very, very low res in 4 years more) means 786,432 voxels as a minimum. Today´s hardware, a GF2 Ultra would spit 27 to 35 fps, with no pretty physics calculations at all...

[Lord FlatHead]

MACVILEWHORE said:

/me sends the OLAF (oompa loompa air force) up into space to bring Lord flathead's ship down
/me gets a big smile as I see the blazing remains of his ship crash to earth

HEHEHE

NO seriously, yeah your right I was thinking the same thing too man.


BTW sorry bout your space ship

Don't worry... By the way, ever seen what a .357 Magnum does to an Oompa Loompa face ?

*big grin*

[Guest route909]

You really have no clue what you´re talking about.

Voxels are dead. Try accellerating them with hardware.

Fluids are impossible for real-time games today. And tomorrow.
I work with 3d programs and I have made fluids with different programs. The basic thingie is you create a particle system and use metaparticles to create geometry with the particles. It´s done differently with different programs, but that´s the basic idéa. The worst part isn´t the geometry (about 1.000.000 polys to make a somewhat realistic waterpond) but the refraction and caustics of light and the computations involved in the rendering.
A raytraced image with a regular glass (transparent with 10000-50000 polygons) without anti-aliasing rendered in 640*480 takes 1 to 50 minutes to render depending on program on a 500 MHz dual processor machine. Imagine what it takes to render 1.000.000 polygons with geometry creation, refraction and dynamics in real time... It´s not even a thing to consider.

I have some experience in 3d both for games and profesisonal work and I have to give credits to John Carmack for creating such an awesome engine! Not only the engines of his revolutionize the entire gaming scene, they are quicker and more stable than any other engine around.

And about games being almost photo-realistic. NO WAY. We still miss depth of field, motion blur, radiosity, soft shadows, area lights, global illumination and a lot of other important ingredients. Doom 3 looks great thanx to the merging of light/shadow engines to one.
Though the real limit of photo-realism is actually the artist´s ability to fill the levels with things that make the game real. Just modelling and texturing a pair of headphones realisticly can take several days. Look around you. How many things can you count to? Probably over 50 objects. Imagine that kind of detail level in EVERY room of the level you´re playing... The scenes in the a-few-year-old-game Bladerunner took a month to model and texture. Each.

Sorry about my poor english, but I got so upset with the ignorance of yours that I just HAD to express my feelings.

[Zaldron]

You´re short-minded.

As I said, today´s hardware has not the power to create particle based worlds. There´s no raw power available, and no accelerated way to make it. Fractal voxels will add even more complications to the scheme, but If there´s something I learned through these years, is to never underestimate the exponential increase of the tech curve.

It´s true that metaballs are impossible to add to a real time game like a FPS. The geometry´s updated EACH frame, and the refraction/caustic rendering (raytraced or mapped) takes a gruesome time of calculation.

What´s the problem with accelerating voxels? As far as I know, there´s NO way to do it yet.