Battle of the engines continued

[Kaftan Barlast]

The engine that impressed me the most was Doom 3(except for the boring gameplay). Alot of it its probably due to IDs talented modelers but they way they use the realtime shaders with bumpmapping and so on is really amazing, especially on the character models.

 

 

Hl2's source just feels like a hopped up version of their original engine(which wasnt original) which explains the high FPS. I took a close look at the details and alot of it is just basic low-poly a la late 90's with hi-res textures on it. The physics are nice though, but they dont really matter in an FPS.

 

 

 

I havent been able to install FarCry on the new comp(I played it with a 9700) so I cant really say anything until Ive reallty scrutinized it.

[Baley]

IE ...just IE

 

Man I love the arhitecture

[kirottu]

Unreal 3... When it comes out.

[Musopticon?]

Source for cityscapes and urban dystopia

 

Doom 3 for machine hell, Oneiros-like scenes and claustrophobia

 

Far Cry for organic enviroments, lush forests and contrast between extremes.

[Morgoth]

Actually, it's always the craft of the artists that makes graphics impressive to me. The engine just determines the limits.

 

Doom3 and Far Cry are bubble gum games compared to the realistically and at the same time artistically looking graphics of HL2. Good job Valve! :cool:

[Baley]

Yeah...it really looks like Romania :D

[Musopticon?]

You have headcrabs and hot techie chicks?

[Baley]

Nope just the buildings

[Morgoth]

Yeah...it really looks like Romania :D

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's at least something. City 17 was put together in a very believable way, the whole infrastructure of the city felt very realistically and well thought-out... Unlike Doom3, where I always thought they just copy & pasted lovelessly a map junk one after another. That destroys immersion.

[Musopticon?]

Pity.

[Kaftan Barlast]

I wasnt very impressed with the maps you can play in the Demo, pretty standard stuff, although it shure beats Doom3's endless corridor crawls.

 

 

I just played FarCRy at top settings, you notice some weird things like how an enemy soildier has a standard body texture but suddenly some little detail like a strap has a really detailed bumpmap and material.

 

 

What Ive seen of Unreal3 looks very much like a further advancement of what what done in the Doom3 engine. Itll be really interesting to see.

[Musopticon?]

That "added strap"-thingie is seen in many new games which have more reflexive engines. Like Dawn of War. Good engine feature.

[mEtaLL1x]

The physics are nice though, but they dont really matter in an FPS.

You're not into FPS much, are you?

Physics is much more important than gfx in sport-FPSs, like Quake or CS.

 

 

But on the topic, well, I was really impressed with Doom3. I've always liked ID, and their engines. And this one rocked hard.

Btw, the gameplay is also good in D3. A good horror.

 

Source is good, also. Physics, mainly.

 

So, I kinda love them both..... ^_^

 

 

BUt certainly NOT FarCry. Alright, the game is full crap, but the engine is not a match for HL2 or D3 etither.

[Musopticon?]

Ya'now nuthin' foo!

[angshuman]

I feel Doom 3 went a little overboard with the dynamic lighting thing. Without a doubt, the engine looks MAGNIFICENT, but it also looks a little artificial. Maybe it's the hard stencil shadows, maybe its the intense specular effects, maybe its the overuse of bumpmapping, I don't know; but somehow, the game mildly hurts my eyes and sometimes gives me a slight headache. And yes, I've heard the "It's a space station, it's supposed to look shiny and artificial" line, but it doesn't hold. Something about the visuals is *unnatural*. It's gorgeous, but unnatural.

 

HL2 (notice that I don't say Source), on the other hand, is totally different. Its immersive. You get lost the surroundings. The feeling of realism is intense. The textures are nowhere near as detailed as Doom 3, and the interplay of light and shadows is not even close. But it doesn't matter -- City 17 feels un-freaking-believeably real. It shows what it means for a game to be a "First Person" shooter. Maybe that has to do with the wide, expansive level design. Maybe it has to do with the choice of textures. Or maybe it's the Source engine.

 

While I know very little about game engine design, I do not think I would be very wrong in concluding that Source is the pinnacle of "traditional" 3D engine design and is hence an extremely refined product that artists know how to exploit and are able to express themselves completely in, while the Doom 3 engine is the first prototype of the next generation of 3D technology that, although breathtaking, has several hard edges (pun intended) that stick out and kind of take away from the overall experience.

 

For some reason, I wasn't too impressed with Far Cry.

 

Angshuman

[Kaftan Barlast]

 

 

Unreal 3 - model (not in-game)

 

Its fun to see that despite all the fancy stuff used with this model, they still skimp in on the polygons by making the gun barrels octagonal...

[mkreku]

Both Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 were more a success of the modellers and world designers. The Source engine sure is flexible and adjustable, but I never saw anything in Half-Life 2 that I hadn't seen before (graphically speaking). I had already seen (and awed over) the Havok physics engine in Max Payne 2. Half-Life 2 suffered from limited map sizes, but excelled (and beyond) in character modelling.

 

Doom 3 was mostly a playground for lighting effects and hardware shadowing. They too have some of the world's best monster modellers, so naturally the enemies were quite impressive. I never felt that what I saw on screen matched what my strained little graphics card had to go through, though. It was like seeing lots and lots of black, while setting the graphics card on fire. I don't believe the Doom 3 engine is capable of rendering large areas, but that's impossible to tell from the actual game since it all takes place in tiny cupboards and narrow corridors.

 

Far Cry, on the other hand, used the tropical island setting, so it's very easy to be impressed by the graphics. I mean, who doesn't think tropical islands are beautiful? But Far Cry also impressed me by incorporating believable physics (except destructable objects), HUGE maps, working real time shadowing and great character models in the same game. The one thing that really blew me away though, was when I was inside some old WWII bunker and walked up to a narrow slot in the wall and looked out, and I could see the island beneath me and, perfectly detailed, another island 2 miles away. The viewing distance was simply outstanding.

 

This is why Far Cry wins it for me (even though Half-Life 2's character models is probably a greater technological achievement).

[Llyranor]

The physics are nice though, but they dont really matter in an FPS.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

BURN THE HERETIC

 

Just out of curiosity, what levels did the demo have?

[angshuman]

Just out of curiosity, what levels did the demo have?

 

HL2 Demo? The intro sequence up until you enter the first apartment building, and Ravenholm (I didn't get to see how far it went into Ravenholm, I bought the game )

 

Angshuman

[Llyranor]

Ravenholm, eh? Cutting zombies in half with circular saws. Yeah, PHYSICS ARE USELESS IN A FPS

[Sarkus]

Unless a bunch of stuff gets announced at E3, I'd say Unreal 3 is going to win. The number of games already committed to it greatly outnumbers what's been announced for either Source or Doom 3's engine. I'm not sure Far Cry's engine is even being actively shopped.

[mkreku]

Ravenholm, eh? Cutting zombies in half with circular saws. Yeah, PHYSICS ARE USELESS IN A FPS

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm sorry, but that really has nothing to do with physics. No matter where you hit those zombies, they were always cut in half. It wasn't as if you could slice and dice them any way you wanted (like in BloodRayne). That would have been physics. The ragdoll effects when the two pieces fell were physics though.

[angshuman]

I'm sorry, but that really has nothing to do with physics. No matter where you hit those zombies, they were always cut in half. It wasn't as if you could slice and dice them any way you wanted (like in BloodRayne). That would have been physics. The ragdoll effects when the two pieces fell were physics though.

 

Hmm... true, the cutting up of the body in half has nothing to do with physics, but the circular blade flying through the air from your gravity gun sure does

 

Come to think of it (and please correct me if I'm wrong), even Blood Rayne's multi-dimensional slices wouldn't have anything to do with physics, they seem more to have to do with how you design your models, don't they? I mean, Physics define what happens when forces act on a certain rigid or deformable body, where typical forces are Gravity, the gravity gun's Antigravity, explosive airflow from a grenade, etc., and bodies are a dead Combine, half a split zombie, a saw blade, or each individual piece of a recently-deceased living entity you just butchered. Physics will tell you how those individual pieces of flesh are going to fly off, but the manner in which those pieces come together to form the complete model of the ex-living entity seems to me to be totally a geometric modeling issue.

 

Angshuman

[Child of Flame]

I accidentally killed myself with the tireswing in Ravenholm with rapid firing of the Gravitygun just going crazy seeing what all I could interact with the first time I came out of the tunnel. I was more careful the next time.

[Noceur]

Ravenholm, eh? Cutting zombies in half with circular saws. Yeah, PHYSICS ARE USELESS IN A FPS

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm sorry, but that really has nothing to do with physics. No matter where you hit those zombies, they were always cut in half. It wasn't as if you could slice and dice them any way you wanted (like in BloodRayne). That would have been physics. The ragdoll effects when the two pieces fell were physics though.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Actually, if you aim too high on the zombie, you cut the headcrab off the body. But that doesn't change the fact that it's just hit-zones.

 

On to the engines, I wasn't more impressed with the Doom 3 engine than I was with the Far cry engine. The difference is just how ID chose to do their game. They normalmapped everything. You can do that in Far cry's engine, or in the source engine if you so wish as well. The monsters in doom 3 also feel horribly low-poly compared to Far Cry and HL2... they should've worked more on the contours, since they were using normalmaps anyway.

I'm also more impressed with HL2's fake-radiosity in the lightning of the maps, as opposed to Doom 3's totally black shadows.

 

What is impressive about the doom3 engine is that it can have so much normalmapping onscreen and still run decently. Saying that it's high-poly, however, is incorrect. If you've seen the voodoo version of the game, you know what I'm talking about.

 

Also about that Unreal 3 model you posted, Kafkan... are you sure it's not ingame? That'd explain the octagon barrels on the gun. The other ingame models shown from that engine look about the same quality of that one you posted, you see.

 

EDIT: Myeah, checked their website and I do believe it's rendered in the unreal 3 engine. The screenshot on their own website shows that it's "low-poly" with normalmapping. Rendering ONE of those models in a game engine is no problems though, render 20+ of those bastards plus the geometry of a map is a whole different matter

Anyway, that's the problem with normalmapping. You can make surfaces look like they're high-poly, but as soon as you see the contours (like on the barrels there) you see through the illusion. (my point being, with normalmapping you skimp in on EVERYTHING, it's just more visible on things we know are clearly NOT octagonshaped but round. They could've skipped a few polys somewhere else on the model and used them on the barrels though)