Holy bejeebus.
Any questions?
Is it more like Resident Evil, with a handful of slow monsters at a time, or is it more like Doom, with a horde of fast movers?
I know it is pretty, I’m concerned that id has forgotten to include a game with their engine again.
How was the food, good?
The pinkies move really fast, or rather they set themselves and jump all the way across the room at you. Just like in the original. It looks like there’ll be pretty intense moments.
They also gave the first public showing of the Revenant, and he has dual shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
It’s not Quake 3 speed, but it’s not slow, that’s for sure.
Also from QuakeCon
Looks like Carmack announced DOOM III is coming to the XBox.
“Id Software had previously expressed interest in doing an Xbox version of its upcoming first-person shooter, but hadn’t confirmed that there would be a console version of the game. Today during his keynote at QuakeCon, id’s John Carmack said that the Xbox is the only console platform that id is “completely committed” to releasing Doom III on. Carmack further commented that the Xbox version will have the “full graphics fidelity” of the PC version, which made a major debut at this year’s E3, where it won a number of awards.”
Wow, that’s big news. 64mb is going to make it tough, but I assume with this engine they can chunk up the memory footprint at the expense of more loading segments.
the Xbox version will have the “full graphics fidelity” of the PC version
I think we can assume this to mean full graphic fidelity of the PC version running on Xbox class hardware. (GF3, PIII 733, low memory and therefore low resolution)
I don’t know, but the game is designed around the feature set of a GeForce 1, as he explained in the keynote. I’d say it should run just fine at TV resolutions on X-Box hardware.
But the game running on a GF1 isn’t going to look nearly as good as the game running on post Radeon 9700/NV30 upon release. Which is what “full graphic fidelity” implies.
We’ll see.
They can also reduce texture sizes considerably. I mean, a TV screen has a pretty low screen resolution, so after a certain point, adding more texel resolution to models makes little noticeable difference.
“They can also reduce texture sizes considerably.”
Isn’t that what S3TC/DXTC is for. DO any devs bother with that stuff or do they not care since memmory on video cards keeps doubling every 1 year now it seems.
“I think we can assume this to mean full graphic fidelity of the PC version running on Xbox class hardware. (GF3, PIII 733, low memory and therefore low resolution)”
Consoles have shown before they can run ports and/or similar games that would require a more powerful PC. The Dreamcast(200mhz cpu, 16MB ram, 8MB video ram) ran ports of UT and Q3A descently. Maybe with some lower detail levels here and there but from my experience in trying UT on a DC it did a pretty good job. A similar level PC couldn’t have done that.
Aside from the PC, of course, is it an Xbox exclusive?
Bub, from the bits I read at Gamespot it wasn’t worded as an “exclusive” in the sense that there were agreements stopping it from being ported elsewhere, it just sounded like Xbox was the only console they actually had plans for at this point. Not sure though.
Isn’t that what S3TC/DXTC is for. DO any devs bother with that stuff or do they not care since memmory on video cards keeps doubling every 1 year now it seems.
Yes they do, because even though the high-end cards do double in RAM ever year or so, the developers still need to program for a lower common denominator.
Notice that in a lot of games that there is a video option for “compressed textures”. In a lot of cases, the compressed textures will also look better than the regular texture, because they were able to squeeze more detail into the compressed texture and not worry about it, because the compressed texture still took up far less memory than the non-compressed texture.
Texture compression works and it’s a useful tool. It’s no gimmick.
Virtually all 3D games on the PC use texture compression now, by default. In fact, turning it off in some games (Jedi Knight 2, SoF2) will make some levels have a good 250MB or more of textures at high detail settings, which will thrash on any card.
Sure, 128MB is common, but lately game textures have become a good 2-4 times as detailed and at the same time level designers are using more uique textures so everything doesn’t look repeated.
I think the Xbox will have no problem doing Doom3 that looks about as good as the screenshots released, except at TV resolution. As was pointed out here, they’ll use exclusively compressed textures and probably no texture larger than 128x128, because anything more detailed than that won’t look any better up-close on your TV.
And knowing exactly what the hardware is, they can make some special-case optimizations for Xbox that they can’t necessarily do on the PC (like optimize their physics system for a processor with SSE).
Except that Microsoft requires progressive scan support in all XBox games, right? I wonder how it will look on those HDTVs.
Alright, let me ask a question like this then:
If I can get the full graphics fidelity of DOOM 3 (which has alternately been described as “mind blowing”, “OMG”, and “you’re gonna need a new graphics card for this”) on a box that is essentially a P3 700, gf3, like Brad says, have other engines for games just been ludicrously underusing the tech? I mean, I’m looking at NOLF2 or Unreal 2 or 2k3, and granted, they are getting released sooner than Doom, but they look like 2 generations behind. Now I assumed it was because the new Doom engine was:
- coded by probably the best graphics engine people in the business
- was using next gen hardware that resulted in playable framerates
So, is 2 invalid then, and 1 is many time more true than I would have thought?
I’m just confused how they are doing it. I was sure the engine would be remarkably scaleable (as both the Quake III and Unreal engines were) so the game is always playable, but this full graphic fidelity thing is throwing me for a loop.
Well, the X-Box does have a GeForce 3. And anyway, John said at yesterday’s speech that the performance bottleneck for Doom 3 is not processor speed or fill rate, but the video memory bandwidth. Which makes sense, because he said that some pixels in a Doom 3 scene are going to have over 20 textures applied to them. Not even the latest cards can do that in one go.
Plus the framerate target is a meager 24 fps.