News John Carmack talks ray-tracing, PC gaming

Yeah they were cool. Was difficult not to hit the cheat button slow-mo on those dudes.

 

hmm ID softwares engines are always brilliant eg think of all the games that STILL use tweeked quake 3 engines (it's open sourced now which helps ). But they always seem to need somone else to make the best use of there engines. with the doom engine it was duke nukem and dark forces to me which while using the same underlying engine were far better games (although doom is decent).

 

You're right about other developers really making use of id's engines in a way they've struggled to do since Q3 really, but I'm afraid your mistaken about Duke 3D, the Build engine wasn't based on anything id had done. It is true how much of an influence the various Quake engines have had on the gaming world. Even the Source engine still has bits of the original HL engine in, which itself was a highly modified version of the Quake 1 engine (not the Q2 engine as many people believe).

The problem with the D3 engine is that it's way ahead of its time. It was the first engine to utilse 100% per-pixel lighting, which was really impressive, but it meant there was zero ambient light in the game, which not only is unrealistic, but is also a recepie for a very dark game. IIRC, even UE3 needs the old fashioned light-maps as well as per-pixel lighting to achieve ambient light, so in that respect it's actually taking a step backwards from the D3 engine. Personally I'm looking forward to the unique texturing in id tech 5, and having an engine that isn't as dark as D3, even if it did suit that particular game perfectly (which wasn't a bad game, really, scared the shite out of me on many occasions)

Edit: Funky diagrame of the Id tech family tree:

 

Bauul: How do you explain ETQW then? It uses the Doom 3 engine but doesn't seem dark to me.

 

id Tech 4 wasn't a dark engine - the games based on it were set inside because the engine couldn't handle massive wide open spaces. This is where MegaTexture Technology comes into play, as it introduced a means to create massive open spaces with terrain (not just the deserted areas found in some parts of Q4)

 

Doom3 waas a pants, HL2 kicked its arse.

However they did sort the engine issues with Q4 which was actually a good laugh and opened the engine up for more wide open enviroments.

the only thing i hate in carmacks engines is the "shiney" effect all the way thru on everything.

 

ETQW uses a massively updated D3 engine, they put HUGE amounts of effort into reintroducing light-maps in a meaningful way to enable decent outdoor lighting. The vanilla D3 engine's attempts at light-maps which, whilst they do exist, are pitiful. The problem is that every pixel in the game has a rather complicated set of lighting processes to work through when rendering, exponentially factorerd up when multiple lights hit the same pixel. Having more than about 3 light sources hit any one pixel completely kills the frame rate. Also, in reality, a single light source bounces light off surfaces, so any single point would be hit numerous times by a single light source. That's why if you shine a light at a wall, the rest of the room is lit up to an extent. D3 can't do that, if you shone a really bright light directly at a wall, the rest of the room would stay pitch black, as it simply lacks the horse power to calculate all the bounces. Light-maps can, as this is all worked out before hand and 'baked' onto the map, but it makes it static.

Ray-tracing would solve this because the rendering is not worked out from the light source and then bounced around the room, but instead from the viewer themselves, so every pixel is only rendered once (as you only see it once per frame), as I understand it.

 

i found D3 to be Boring after the first few mins "oh hey look i have my shotgun" that was pretty much the I win gun in the game.
the imps spawned to slow to make them the least scary not to metion i could see there portals and get my shotgun ready for them as they "spawned" in. and thats even on the harder difficulitys.

 

Hi, sorry for posting here, I can't send a PM yet, but this is not an epic thing so I'ma directly ask you. Are you Bauul who made Tower of Babel Redux for Doom 3? If yes I have a little request for ya