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Comment by finikytou | Hacker News Reader

doom3 is a masterpiece of gaming. it represented a radical shift in how 3d was used in games, hardware shift, light shift in terms of how to light and reflect light in an environment. in terms of game design this is the pinnacle of the genre. it is to this day my favorite FPS by far.

beautiful talk by carmack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1q49GxsPWM&t=4s&ab_channel=...

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I don't know... it's definitely a masterpiece of rendering technology, but IMHO not as a game. Compared to classic Doom or the Quake games, it took too long until the action started, and everything felt so slow and sticky! It was the first Id game I couldn't really get into, and the first I didn't play to the end.

This was the first (only?) game that legit had me jumpy. I remember one part of the game where I was in this room and a monster walked across the window, saw me, then came around and started pounding on the door. Each time the door dented a bit more until it gave out.

I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.

The problem is that the whole "all doors close, light turns off, monsters spawn", or the lighter version of "door opens behind, monsters come from it", or sometimes "monsters teleport behind you" was the entirety of the gameplay. The first few times it made me jump, but then it just became boring. Pretty soon you could predict when it'd happen, too.

The other cheap trick was to make half of all maps so dark you need a flashlight, but make it so that you couldn't use a weapon while the flashlight was out. IIRC the very first Doom 3 mod was the one that fixed that, and it was called simply "duct tape".

The classic Alien vs Predator (I think?) had me literally falling out of the chair when a facehugger jumped at me :)

During the LAN party era my friends and I played the crap out of that series. The engine wasn't as sophisticated as what iD et all were doing, but worked perfectly fine for the gameplay. We'd spend hours trying to one up each other in deathmatch.

Another gem of a game I think a lot of people overlooked that has some similarities is Natural Selection 2. This is a sort of aliens vs space marines FPS and RTS hybrid. It never really blew up but still has a community.

My friends and I only bot bashed. NS2 was much desired but fell flat for us.

Only game I ever played where I remained unmoving in one corner for half an hour and was not bored.

Something I loved about that game was that stopping didn't make you safe - if you stopped for too long the aliens would come and find you. This lead to a intense experience where you had to keep going - even when terrified - because stopping was even scarier.

I think it might even be argued its rendering techniques either weren't that revolutionary, or turned out to be dead ends.

Don't get me wrong, it's a technical masterpiece, but one of execution rather than innovation.

It's main feature was dynamic lighting and shadows, which it accomplished with dynamic lights, normal maps and stencil shadows.

Dynamic lights and normal maps were nothing new even back then, I remember multiple titles using them, but not this well and not to this extent.

Stencil shadows were kind of unique, they worked by extruding the geometry from the light's perspective, and figuring out what was inside the light's shadow by counting front and back faces.

Unfortunately, since they used geometry, they looked really blocky and sharp, with no smooth edges unlike shadow mapping.

Imo they looked kind of bad, a step down from the beautiful pre-rendered lightmap shadows we enjoyed years before.

Yeah, the Doom 3 engine reflects sort of the last echo of the road Carmack hoped graphics cards would go down. But everything went down the other road.

From memory, what Carmack was advocating for in this period was like an updated version of SGIs hardware, fixed function and able to chew through a staggering number of simple triangles per second. Complex renderings would be built up by compositing lots of passes. Stencil shadows reflected that tradeoff. But shadowmaps with an increasing number of tweaks proved much more practical, and design wise no penumbra is indeed a tough one to swallow. And then GeForce came along and pretty much ended any debate on commplex shaders vs lots of simple triangles.

Using stencil shadows today, or their shader described equivalent, might be an interesting aesthetic choice for a horror game though.

I think the original Half-Life used stencil shadows - I guess that was the most advanced option available in 1998? Counter-Strike on the other hand rendered a grey circle sprite under players (looked okay enough - approximated the vague shadow you get when under multiple light sources).

Unfortunately the game didn't end up shipping with shadows despite shadows being on the box art screenshots.

I think early versions did but it was supposedly removed because shadows were cast through walls in multiplayer (which was unfair). The code is definitely still in the engine, behind a cvar which isn't exposed to players.

It's also a game that arguably was directly limited by its advanced rendering techniques; the number of enemies on screen at any one time rarely exceeds four IIRC, corpses vanish almost immediately to reclaim resources, most environments are quite small with few open or large spaces to explore. Id had to ship something that could actually run on customer computers of the era.

This is in sharp contrast to Half Life 2 released at a similar time, which had far more enemies and NPCs on screen at one time as well as much much larger maps to explore. I think in some ways Half Life 2s visuals have honestly dated better despite the less ambitious technology - the larger and more varied maps its lesser performance requirements permitted help a lot.

Doom 3 wasn’t the same kind of game as Doom and Quake were. Serious Sam was more on that line - Doom 3 was an entirely different game type even though it had the same lineage.

This is true, but unfortunately the game is a plodding horror linear corridor shooter with bare threads of sloppily integrated immersive sim/System Shock-style elements like NPC logs and safe codes, except all the supporting elements that facilitate player agency are removed.

It looks nice, when you can see what's happening, otherwise it's a collection of good ideas and tech executed badly.

Same for me, it looked nice, but never got into Doom 3. On the other hand the new Doom games, especially Doom Eternal, go back to the roots and are one of the best FPS games out there, at least for single player that is...

to this day it is for me the only fps that i felt was art. almost like a very good movie. better lit than most of what hollywood produce now. sound design was awesome, it had so much style and atmosphere, and it was really minimalist to an extent that each interaction was important each enemy was a strugle. defintly different from all the other doom games hence why it was never as popular as the others but there was so much depth in its shadows than it reminded me of how great composers use silence in music

https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php at the technicql level there were some cool advances and the game in its production definitly felt like a leap forward that only a few game matched after (i could say mgs 4-5 and death stranding are close ones, final fantasy 15 while very weak story wise had others, but definitly no fps did what doom3 did)

I got super annoyed at enemies popping in behind me out of thin air, too. Felt like a cheap way to surprise the player, and it got old really fast.

Doom 3 as a game sure looked cool, though. The flashlight blew my mind back in the day.

Stencil shadows were not particularly influential, everything now is either lightmaps or RT. If anything I'd argue that The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay did what Doom 3 did technology-wise (stencil shadows, normal mapped models and environments) and used it better since the lighting tech had real impact on gameplay systems other than "you can't see". Butcher Bay even released before Doom 3 did, on console hardware no less. Having played Butcher Bay before Doom 3, the latter was an deep disappointment.

Also I wouldn't put light reflection in the list of idtech 4's achievements if we're talking more than one bounce, it literally does not do that. idtech 2 did, precalculated of course.

> and used it better since the lighting tech had real impact on gameplay systems other than "you can't see"

Yeah, I always was perplexed by that tendency in Doom3… I mean, I get that lighting calculations aren’t tracing the effects of light past the first surface it hits, but does it have to be black when there’s no lights hitting a surface? Couldn’t they have done a cheap approximation of “ambient light” based on how many lights there are nearby, and use that light level as a minimum for totally occluded surfaces?

I remember reading that the choice to use black was literally a performance optimization because the renderer got to fully skip drawing surfaces that were fully occluded and it saved some render time. Then I also read that it was a design choice to give it a more panicked environment because you couldn’t see what’s in the shadows… but it always looked clunky to me, seeing fully black areas when there’s clearly a lot of reflective scattering surfaces around.

Have you ever played Prey (2006)? It used the same tech, had some extra capabilities like walking on walls and ceilings, and was probably even more intense in the body horror department

You forgot about the portals. It had portals before Portal. It also features some pretty cool weapons and other mechanics. Pretty cool game. Too bad Human Head never got to finish the second one

> It had portals before Portal.

Not entirely accurate. Narbacular Drop, the first prototype for Portal (that caught Valve's attention and they hired the devs to recreate the tech in Source engine) was released a year before Prey, in 2005.

I actually deleted the line I had written about Narbacular Drop. You're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, of course, but Prey was stuck in a development hell for what, 10 years? It had portals in the 90s!

Portal Rendering style engines were invented in the early 90s. I think several people had roughly the same idea at the same time in academia, as well as industry.

Descent was based on a portal and cell renderer that used a unit cube with limited orientations as the cell. This let them simplify and pre tabulate some of the rendering math.

The PVS precalculation done for quake levels is effectively a portal renderer.

Unreal's software renderer needed portal rendering to limit overdraw, so the engine was based around it.

Those portals are baked into the maps. I think we're specifically discussing dynamic portals, where the player has the ability to bridge any two spaces at runtime.

Descent can't do that.

The way the underlying engine works is what's significant, not that it's a dynamic game design element. Descent levels are just a graph of cubes where a portal rendering algorithm runs per cube instance in a flood fill that spreads from the camera origin until there's no more unclipped portals visible on the screen. You could totally make a portal gun mechanic in that engine, they just didn't want to. Well beyond the hatches that open and close, which do case an end to the portal rendering cell walk when closed.

There's nothing particularly novel about Portal (the game) style portals in rendering. Racing simulators did the exact same thing for rear view mirrors for decades prior. It's just another transform in the scene graph clipped to a subscreen area.

We are still not talking about rendering. Rendering portals is trivial, and as you say, is the basis of nearly all 3D engines as a means to figure out what to draw. But that info is compiled as the visibility graph into the game map data structure and cannot be modified in realtime.

Narbacular Drop is like, literally the first 3D game ever released that allowed dynamic creation of portals at runtime.

I am aware of what you're saying. Please reread what I wrote a bit more carefully and charitably. Dynamic portals are not a precedent worth talking about.

> Dynamic portals are not a precedent worth talking about.

Dynamic portals are literally the topic of this specific thread of comments. Here's the bit I originally replied to:

> [Prey] had portals before Portal.

Then you showed up conflating dynamic portals with compile-time map rendering, and now you're saying that dynamic portals, the very subject of this discussion, aren't worth talking about, because static portals, the preceding tech, existed earlier, even though dynamic portals clearly introduce fundamental design space as popularized by the critically-acclaimed game Portal.

The word "render" appears in your reply to my first comment six times, which is a lot in a discussion that is not at all about rendering.

Please correct any misunderstanding here on my part.

> Then you showed up conflating dynamic portals with compile-time map rendering,

I did not. Reread.

"Dynamic Portals" as you term them are nothing more than the combination of a transformation matrix and a screen space clipping region in the context of a recursive approximate depth first renderer, a combination that was utilized by MANY MANY games before the one you're apparently cheerleadering. And this is exactly what I'm talking about, but you're failing to catch the specifics of what I'm actually saying out of apparent defensiveness over this one game.

You still don't understand what a dynamic portal is, what it does, or why it's distinctly more useful than compile-time portals.

You are still stuck repeating "renderer", even though rendering is still not the topic of discussion here.

No amount of recursive matrix transformations will net you the gameplay design space of actual dynamic portals.

edit: nevermind, it's just not worth trying

I think I remember an old game CD having screenshots of Prey from the 1990s - in .pcx format no less!

Half-Life 2 came out around the same time and I think had better graphics, story, and realistic physics.

ehhh... Doom 3's limitations were painfully obvious when it launched. The shadows and pure blacks were a nice stylistic workaround for handling only a single light source, but later levels went crazy with filling the world with glowing fog to make larger rooms even remotely usable. It felt more like an elaborate tech demo than a game at times.

It was a significant leap, but it was the right time for it. In less than a year you saw other games doing the same thing or better - they had clearly been working on it as well. Doom 3 was just the first to come out, and Carmack did a lot to spread knowledge about it immediately (as he frequently does, which is wonderful).

A tech demo you say. Obvious. Doom, Doom2, Quake and Unreals and nothing more than FPS clones of the same concepts to sell engine features to third parties.

I'm not claiming that's their goal, but yes, Carmack often seems more interested in his craft than the end product. Which I very much enjoy, and the computing world benefits from. I wish more game companies were like that.

As to views on the end product as a whole: opinions differ, ridicule seems unwarranted.

The Doom 3 demo scared the crap out of me the first time I played it, that scene in Mars City Underground. It still does in some way.

It was the last true generational leap in PC gaming. It took consoles at least 5 years to catch up. Something we'll never see again now that all AAA games are exclusively built for console limitations, with PC ports as an afterthought.

Not really. It took less than a year for the Xbox version to release.

That same year Quake 4 launched using the same engine on Xbox 360.

Death Stranding is, in my opinion, another such leap.

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