Doom 3 engine

[BioT3ch]

Carmack's engines have always been great, and every other one but this one has went a long way. But how come no developers are using the Doom 3 engine? It may not have HDR, but its an excellent engine to make games look good without requiring you to break the bank for hardware upgrades. Same with the also neglected Source engine.

Is it just that the Doom 3 engine is too primitive for what the developers are wanting? The Quake 3 engine was getting games for up to 5 years, and we've only seen 2 games on the Doom 3 engine, both of them ID Software titles.

 

[Waphlez]

Prey is going to use the D3 engine. It depends on what your trying to do with the game. You can either make your own engine, so that it is exactly what you want to do, or you can save time and buy rights to an engine created by someone else. There are some other great engines out there other then the D3 engine. You've got Source and Unreal Engine 2.0/3.0. Raven used D3 to create Quake 4, and Splash Damage is going to use a modified Doom 3 engine for it's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

It's just that not many developers want to pay the price of the Doom 3 engine that might not give them exactly what they want. The goal of the Doom 3 engine was to introuduce incredible lighting, that was first introduced with D3. IMO Doom 3 still has some of the best lighting out there. But now Unreal Engine 3.0 is coming out with very realistic lighting like the D3 engine, but it also has a lot more features. The physics in the D3 engine doesn't stand next to source or Unreal Engine 3.0.

Also some developers are engineering engines so that it can use Ageia PPU physics, which Doom 3 doesn't support. It also doesn't support all of the SM 3.0 features like HDR or whatever.

 

[BioT3ch]

Unreal Engine 3 looks great and will probably become a standard engine for quite some time, but it also means a broken bank because of all the upgrades it will require.

Unreal Tounament 2007 System Requirements
---------------------------------------------------------
Minimum:

* 2.8GHz, 512MB RAM, Geforce 6



For high detail:

* 3-4GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 7800GT-GTX SLI
* Dual-core Processor
* 64 Bit version available with better textures
* Renderers: Shader-3.0, Fallback-Mode for Shader 2.0
* HDR: yes
* Physics: Novodex-Physik-Engine.
* Ageias PhysX Processor supported.

Do you think Unreal Engine 3 will be worth the $700 or so I will have to drop to play it at decent settings?

 

[NathanM]

Do you mind providing a link to where you got those specs?

Looks like I'll need to upgrade my 6800GS before UT2007 comes out, because I want to play it in all its glory. Hopefully the 8 series will be out.

 

[BioT3ch]

Actually, I plan on playing UT2007 on Vista using DX10 and a GeForce 8 card. I dont know how many people know this, but the reason the XBOX/XBOX360 can run such stunning graphics on such minimal hardware is because of the way the graphics engine talks directly to the hardware without an OS to mediate. This is the way DX10 will work, providing much better performance and graphics capabilities. XP isn't capable of this direct communication which is why DX10 will be Vista only. My source is the latest issue of PC Magazine.

 

[Waphlez]

UT 2007 and Unreal Engine 3.0 is going to be rendered in DirectX 9, meaning no DX10 support. So Vista will have to simulate DirectX 9. Also make sure you get more then 2GB because Vista is going to hog a **** load of RAM, and if it takes 2GB to run the game on high, your definatlly should upgrade to 3 or 4GB of RAM with Vista.

And also, not having a full out OS on a console isn't the thing giving the consoles good graphics for the hardware. The developers know EXACTLY what the specs of the console are, and they can fine tune the game to run at those graphics. And if you didn't know, most games on consoles are locked at 30 or 40 fps max, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is great looking for a console game, but it is locked at 30 fps. Also the Xbox and PS2 also doesn't support SM 3.0, so there isn't anything rendered that will heavilly bog things down. So having no big OS helps, it really just comes down to the programming and development of the games.

As for the 360, IMO the games look pretty crappy for the "next generation". But I know it is like this for every console, and the games will start looking trully next generation once moregames start to come out. I mean look at the first PS2 games next to the PS2 games we have now.

 

[BioT3ch]

UT2007 will be DX9 and DX10. Of course, it will only use DX9 features, but it will have a DX10 compile for optimal performance under Vista. This comes from a very reputable source, I think it was Gamespot but i dont remember for sure.

 

[Mr_Threepwood]

I have a question Im hoping someone can answer. The only game that I am really looking forward to is Hellgate: London. Does anyone know what engine it will be using or what you will need to play it decently. I'm not upgrading anything on my computer for a while so I'm hoping it will run well on a 6800gs AGP version. From what I've seen hellgate london looks very nice, and I cant wait to get my hands on a copy. I'm just hoping it will look decent and run at ok speeds on my computer.

 

[BioT3ch]

Hellgate: London doesn't look like it will be a system killer from the screenshots, while the graphics are indeed convincing. We will have to wait and see how efficient the engine is, but from the looks of the screenshots, I would say it will probably be about as demanding as FEAR, if that.