ctrl_alt_del
A Year Closer To Heaven
Hey bro, I give up! You are simply refusing to understand a damn word that i am posting here. Sorry! I am fed up. Thanks for all the time you devoted!
Yo Man! hAlf life 2 graphicaly not that great
- Status
Ethan_Hunt
Aspiring Novelist
Well now just to add a final verdict....i guess its only a matter of personal choice and matter of gameplay level that one enjoys.....
here's a last words from my side
well while Hl2 is Aimed At gameplay and Doom3 at its realistic atmosphere and Lighting....So ppl who are wanting to get Doom 3 for this reason might not consider Hl2 on the same basis and Vice Versa....Both games are based on a Diff engine which is quite unique in its own place and both have its Pro and Cons.....So comparing both on this basis would mean sheer unjustice.....
here's a last words from my side
well while Hl2 is Aimed At gameplay and Doom3 at its realistic atmosphere and Lighting....So ppl who are wanting to get Doom 3 for this reason might not consider Hl2 on the same basis and Vice Versa....Both games are based on a Diff engine which is quite unique in its own place and both have its Pro and Cons.....So comparing both on this basis would mean sheer unjustice.....
G
gxsaurav
Guest
There are many other mods, showing the outdoor rendering of Doom3, like that KOTAR like mod, & many others
The thing is, HL2 uses a texture for skies, just like Far Cry uses blue textures for the sky, by default DirectX & OpenGL make a orange sky with no texture & just a model, u have to apply texture to it to make it look like a sky, in HL2 it is done, while in Doom3, well, we saw sky only while traveling via monorail & we know that Mars stmosphere is full of iron oxide so red sky
The thing is, HL2 uses a texture for skies, just like Far Cry uses blue textures for the sky, by default DirectX & OpenGL make a orange sky with no texture & just a model, u have to apply texture to it to make it look like a sky, in HL2 it is done, while in Doom3, well, we saw sky only while traveling via monorail & we know that Mars stmosphere is full of iron oxide so red sky
enoonmai
Cyborg Agent
WOWEE! I stay away one day because of personal work, and a volcano erupts in my face. 
Let's take this one at a time, shall we?
Simple and true, I couldn't have put it better myself. D3 indeed scales very well, and I've heard of people being able to play it 640x480 with all the effects turned off on a GeForce 2 class video card, and in some cases (ahem, cody!) without a video card at all. And in all these cases, its not like it doesn't really look good. It actually does! Sure, you won't have all the DX9.0 effects, but in the end, playing the game is enough for many people out there. But then, there is no point arguing about which is better, the Doom3 engine or Source, since they're both great in their own aspects and each have their own limitations.
(sigh) I dont know about Anidex, but I am NOT bashing Nvidia and Doom3. In case you haven't noticed my signature, I happen to running my games on a 5950U myself. And Doom3 remains, and will remain, one of my most favorite games of all times. What you seem to have missed is that I was talking not about the game, but the engine. I never said HL2 or Doom3, I said, the Doom 3 engine and Source.
So, I can totally understand the logic (and actually appreciate it) that Doom3 does not feature outdoor scenes. Of course, it makes it extremely believable when you're running from one airlock into another and barely have time to hunt for air canisters and strewn goodies before dying of asphyxiation. And I know HL2 is not THAT good as Doom 3 when it comes to "realistic indoor environments."
But then that reminds me of people who say that life cannot exist on planets that are not Earth-like and similarly, how cool it was that once you killed the monsters, they disintegrate and return to Hell, and your argument as to how smooth the outdoor environments looked like when you were travelling between airlocks.
a) Totally irrelevant now, but it sets the stage for the next explanations, kind of. It is WE who have evolved to take advantage of the Earth's environment, its not the Earth that has changed for us.
b) id Software knew that leaving the monsters lying around dead and tracking the objects in the gamespace was pretty demanding on memory, (I will explain more about Doom3's memory issues later) so they came up with the explanation that they returned to Hell once they were killed. Nice PR work there on their part.
c) Doom 3 (the game and not the engine) has pretty limited capabilities for rendering realistic outdoor environments without pushing up system requirements and making a lot of older cards unable to play the game (bad from a developer's perspective) so they came up with limiting your oxygen supply and using a Martian sandstom as a distance culling fog to limit your visibility of the outdoor environment. It looks so smooth because it requires lesser system resources.
So, in the end if you see, more than half of the entertainment industry, be it movies,animations or games, is focused on "tricking" your brain into completing the puzzle. Of course, you're learning Director MX, you will come to learn of this later, how to trick your users' brains and lessening your workload and filesize and keeping up framerates.
I don't know of a single game that doesnt tweak the hardware to its advantage, (and technically they'd be fools not to) so while HL2 took advantage of ATI cards, Doom 3 took advantage of Nvidias. While you might think Far Cry is platform-neutral, the fact is that its not. Nvidia cards use OpenEXR based technology in their cards ever since the FX series, and Far Cry uses that ability to run better on Nvidia cards, leaving the traditional rendering based ATis behind when it comes to benchmarks.
Half of what you see in Doom 3 are "illusions" - a sleight of hand that tricks you into believing something thats not there. Doom 3 boasts of extensive bump mapping, but did you know that for ALL their cry about bump-mapping, it uses just normal maps instead? Models in Doom 3 use normal maps to "emulate" high geometry details, simply by tying them up to textures instead of triangles.
The normal (not bump) maps are also responsible for the interaction of surfaces with their incident rays of light and the shadows are actually more detailed than the objects that cast them. So when counsellor Swann, (with a hexagonal skull, thats right, he's got a hexagonal skull) looks good in the final rendering sequence. Which is also why when an imp throws a fireball, it casts perfect shadows on the walls, also making the normal maps on textured surfaces look 3D though they are utterly flat.
When Doom 3 was being made, this process of using normal maps for emulation was considered the best because it saved on geometric processing, which could have meant that the engine would be hopelessly obsessed with rendering high-geometry, totally bringing it to a screeching, grinding halt if they had used bumpmaps instead. Also, it was using the poorer quality S3TC algorithm instead of the ATI-based 3Dc algorithm when it came to compressed textures. Which is why the main textures are extremely low detail and cannot even be compared with Painkiller, leave alone Far Cry or HL2. If you use bumpmaps in all the surfaces and try to put in high-detail for the main textures also, then you would need a 512MB video card to run the game. Nvidia cards have the ability to double the fillrate when writing to Z buffer and stencil buffer, which is something that the ATIs don't have in place, so thats why it performs better on Nvidias than on the ATis.
I hope that helps clear up things a bit.
What the... misguiding people?
You know, you're the first person to tell me that I don't know what I am talking about. Its been over two years since I got out of my obsession with being involved with game design and turn to coding enterprise systems and applications, but that doesnt mean I dont follow what's happening in the game design world or know whats being said. Please dont criticize me like that again.
Read this post entirely, the parts where I talked about the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine. All I said was this:
And I stand by what I say. All current mod developers, including the ones for Hexen, Icefields, the UAC Warface MP mod, etc. have said that the "current" avatar of the Doom 3 engine sucks when it comes to rendering realistic outdoor environments. Ask any Doom 3 mod developer and he will tell you how extensively he had to use either a night setting, heavy fog, snow swirls, sandstorms or anything with a lot of fog shaders to bring the distance culling point closer to the player position in the gamespace and cut the rest of the environment out. I dont think I need to actually show you how they use fog shaders overgenerously to hide the depth of the environment around the player. If you've seen the environment in its fullest before the complete rendering, you will only comment on how Quake II-ish it is.
Take the Doom3 engine based Quake 4, which will feature large open expanses and drivable vehicles. You dont really understand how bad the fillrate would blow up to render the objects realistically, that too when the gamespace has infinite shadows/objects where they are proportionately scaled to the view distance? It will look worse than Quake 1 with a lower class card, even from the GeForce FX series.
In a chat I had with Anidex aka Wysicon at the Skoar forums, he said:
The Doom 3 engine CAN render good outdoor environments, but NOT on the cards that are currently being used to play Doom 3. You would need at least the newer GeForce 6x00 cards to play Quake 4 properly in a way that doesnt alter the environment to affect gameplay and will probably be using the next gen- video cards that will be timed to release around the Quake 4 / RtCW2 launch. These cards will make full use of the capabilities of the engine, and thanks to the rush between Nvidia and ATI to roll out the 512MB cards, you can bet that by the time Quake 4 hits shelves every card that self-respecting gamers have will be loaded with at least 256MB of VRAM and can run Doom 3 in all its glory. The fact is that the Doom 3 engine supports a lot, (except shadow mapping, which will be available ONLY with the next id franchise) but no cards exist that can use all these features. The same engine that runs Quake 3 runs Call of Duty and Medal of Honor Allied Assault, but that doesnt mean they're the same. Ask anyone thats run Q3A on an i810 to run Call of Duty. The same way, no can say anything about the Doom 3 engine UNTIL Quake 4 and RtCW2 come out. The mods are not anything to predict the future by. Like I said in my "misguided" post - no one has seen what the engine can do when it comes to rendering large outdoor environments. I hope you got the point. And oh, refer to what I've said about Doom 3's "detailed bump mapping" earlier in the post for a rude awakening. BTW, every single screenshot of Quake 4 has been in a night setting, so my distance culling argument about the engine also still stands. I will revoke it when I see another daylight outdoor screenshot or when I play the game.
What HL2 and Source have managed to do is to marry the old and the new into something that looks and feels great and realistic. In the end, thats what good game design is about. No matter how you do it, it has to look good. When it comes to game design - the end really justifies the means. So what if Source had to use older, outdated radiosity-based techniques to make it "feel" better than Doom 3? They got the job done, period. The Doom 3 IS the most advanced engine on the planet right now, and its pretty much the standard benchmark now, how many benchmarks use Source? Doom 3 CAN be a lot of things, but its not the best when it comes to the Doom 3 game.
I am not a fanboy, just a casual observer and I don't take sides when it comes to ATI or Nvidia or Doom 3 or Source. I call 'em as I see 'em.
@allwyndlima: An American? Where on Earth did I say or do something that appeared that way? I'm a genuine "Made In India". But thanks a lot, buddy! Its not like you get appreciated every day, so ... As for the long posts, well, what can I say? I've got time and I'm not afraid to use it. 
@cody: Thanks for the vote of confidence! I owe you one, oh wait, I already owe you 3 DVDs! And oh, sorry to borrow your tag, but my fingertips hurt, no, they really do!
Let's take this one at a time, shall we? DKant said:
Simple and true, I couldn't have put it better myself. D3 indeed scales very well, and I've heard of people being able to play it 640x480 with all the effects turned off on a GeForce 2 class video card, and in some cases (ahem, cody!) without a video card at all. And in all these cases, its not like it doesn't really look good. It actually does! Sure, you won't have all the DX9.0 effects, but in the end, playing the game is enough for many people out there. But then, there is no point arguing about which is better, the Doom3 engine or Source, since they're both great in their own aspects and each have their own limitations.
gxsaurav said:
(sigh) I dont know about Anidex, but I am NOT bashing Nvidia and Doom3. In case you haven't noticed my signature, I happen to running my games on a 5950U myself.
And Doom3 remains, and will remain, one of my most favorite games of all times. What you seem to have missed is that I was talking not about the game, but the engine. I never said HL2 or Doom3, I said, the Doom 3 engine and Source.So, I can totally understand the logic (and actually appreciate it) that Doom3 does not feature outdoor scenes. Of course, it makes it extremely believable when you're running from one airlock into another and barely have time to hunt for air canisters and strewn goodies before dying of asphyxiation. And I know HL2 is not THAT good as Doom 3 when it comes to "realistic indoor environments."
But then that reminds me of people who say that life cannot exist on planets that are not Earth-like and similarly, how cool it was that once you killed the monsters, they disintegrate and return to Hell, and your argument as to how smooth the outdoor environments looked like when you were travelling between airlocks.
a) Totally irrelevant now, but it sets the stage for the next explanations, kind of. It is WE who have evolved to take advantage of the Earth's environment, its not the Earth that has changed for us.
b) id Software knew that leaving the monsters lying around dead and tracking the objects in the gamespace was pretty demanding on memory, (I will explain more about Doom3's memory issues later) so they came up with the explanation that they returned to Hell once they were killed. Nice PR work there on their part.
c) Doom 3 (the game and not the engine) has pretty limited capabilities for rendering realistic outdoor environments without pushing up system requirements and making a lot of older cards unable to play the game (bad from a developer's perspective) so they came up with limiting your oxygen supply and using a Martian sandstom as a distance culling fog to limit your visibility of the outdoor environment. It looks so smooth because it requires lesser system resources.
So, in the end if you see, more than half of the entertainment industry, be it movies,animations or games, is focused on "tricking" your brain into completing the puzzle. Of course, you're learning Director MX, you will come to learn of this later, how to trick your users' brains and lessening your workload and filesize and keeping up framerates.
I don't know of a single game that doesnt tweak the hardware to its advantage, (and technically they'd be fools not to) so while HL2 took advantage of ATI cards, Doom 3 took advantage of Nvidias. While you might think Far Cry is platform-neutral, the fact is that its not. Nvidia cards use OpenEXR based technology in their cards ever since the FX series, and Far Cry uses that ability to run better on Nvidia cards, leaving the traditional rendering based ATis behind when it comes to benchmarks.
Half of what you see in Doom 3 are "illusions" - a sleight of hand that tricks you into believing something thats not there. Doom 3 boasts of extensive bump mapping, but did you know that for ALL their cry about bump-mapping, it uses just normal maps instead? Models in Doom 3 use normal maps to "emulate" high geometry details, simply by tying them up to textures instead of triangles.
The normal (not bump) maps are also responsible for the interaction of surfaces with their incident rays of light and the shadows are actually more detailed than the objects that cast them. So when counsellor Swann, (with a hexagonal skull, thats right, he's got a hexagonal skull) looks good in the final rendering sequence. Which is also why when an imp throws a fireball, it casts perfect shadows on the walls, also making the normal maps on textured surfaces look 3D though they are utterly flat.
When Doom 3 was being made, this process of using normal maps for emulation was considered the best because it saved on geometric processing, which could have meant that the engine would be hopelessly obsessed with rendering high-geometry, totally bringing it to a screeching, grinding halt if they had used bumpmaps instead. Also, it was using the poorer quality S3TC algorithm instead of the ATI-based 3Dc algorithm when it came to compressed textures. Which is why the main textures are extremely low detail and cannot even be compared with Painkiller, leave alone Far Cry or HL2. If you use bumpmaps in all the surfaces and try to put in high-detail for the main textures also, then you would need a 512MB video card to run the game. Nvidia cards have the ability to double the fillrate when writing to Z buffer and stencil buffer, which is something that the ATIs don't have in place, so thats why it performs better on Nvidias than on the ATis.
I hope that helps clear up things a bit.
tarey_g said:
What the... misguiding people?
You know, you're the first person to tell me that I don't know what I am talking about. Its been over two years since I got out of my obsession with being involved with game design and turn to coding enterprise systems and applications, but that doesnt mean I dont follow what's happening in the game design world or know whats being said. Please dont criticize me like that again.tarey_g said:
Read this post entirely, the parts where I talked about the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine. All I said was this:
enoonmai said:
And I stand by what I say. All current mod developers, including the ones for Hexen, Icefields, the UAC Warface MP mod, etc. have said that the "current" avatar of the Doom 3 engine sucks when it comes to rendering realistic outdoor environments. Ask any Doom 3 mod developer and he will tell you how extensively he had to use either a night setting, heavy fog, snow swirls, sandstorms or anything with a lot of fog shaders to bring the distance culling point closer to the player position in the gamespace and cut the rest of the environment out. I dont think I need to actually show you how they use fog shaders overgenerously to hide the depth of the environment around the player. If you've seen the environment in its fullest before the complete rendering, you will only comment on how Quake II-ish it is.
Take the Doom3 engine based Quake 4, which will feature large open expanses and drivable vehicles. You dont really understand how bad the fillrate would blow up to render the objects realistically, that too when the gamespace has infinite shadows/objects where they are proportionately scaled to the view distance? It will look worse than Quake 1 with a lower class card, even from the GeForce FX series.
In a chat I had with Anidex aka Wysicon at the Skoar forums, he said:
Wysicon said:
The Doom 3 engine CAN render good outdoor environments, but NOT on the cards that are currently being used to play Doom 3. You would need at least the newer GeForce 6x00 cards to play Quake 4 properly in a way that doesnt alter the environment to affect gameplay and will probably be using the next gen- video cards that will be timed to release around the Quake 4 / RtCW2 launch. These cards will make full use of the capabilities of the engine, and thanks to the rush between Nvidia and ATI to roll out the 512MB cards, you can bet that by the time Quake 4 hits shelves every card that self-respecting gamers have will be loaded with at least 256MB of VRAM and can run Doom 3 in all its glory. The fact is that the Doom 3 engine supports a lot, (except shadow mapping, which will be available ONLY with the next id franchise) but no cards exist that can use all these features. The same engine that runs Quake 3 runs Call of Duty and Medal of Honor Allied Assault, but that doesnt mean they're the same. Ask anyone thats run Q3A on an i810 to run Call of Duty. The same way, no can say anything about the Doom 3 engine UNTIL Quake 4 and RtCW2 come out. The mods are not anything to predict the future by. Like I said in my "misguided" post - no one has seen what the engine can do when it comes to rendering large outdoor environments. I hope you got the point. And oh, refer to what I've said about Doom 3's "detailed bump mapping" earlier in the post for a rude awakening. BTW, every single screenshot of Quake 4 has been in a night setting, so my distance culling argument about the engine also still stands. I will revoke it when I see another daylight outdoor screenshot or when I play the game.
What HL2 and Source have managed to do is to marry the old and the new into something that looks and feels great and realistic. In the end, thats what good game design is about. No matter how you do it, it has to look good. When it comes to game design - the end really justifies the means. So what if Source had to use older, outdated radiosity-based techniques to make it "feel" better than Doom 3? They got the job done, period. The Doom 3 IS the most advanced engine on the planet right now, and its pretty much the standard benchmark now, how many benchmarks use Source? Doom 3 CAN be a lot of things, but its not the best when it comes to the Doom 3 game.
I am not a fanboy, just a casual observer and I don't take sides when it comes to ATI or Nvidia or Doom 3 or Source. I call 'em as I see 'em.
@allwyndlima: An American? Where on Earth did I say or do something that appeared that way? I'm a genuine "Made In India".
But thanks a lot, buddy! Its not like you get appreciated every day, so ... As for the long posts, well, what can I say? I've got time and I'm not afraid to use it. @cody: Thanks for the vote of confidence!
I owe you one, oh wait, I already owe you 3 DVDs! And oh, sorry to borrow your tag, but my fingertips hurt, no, they really do! Woooah!!! now that is one amazingly clear explaination. Either you have too much time on your hands or you are just way too smart for me. Personally I love games for the game play it provides. The most visually brillaint game that I had played was to Chrome before Far Cry came into the picture. Chrome was just visually brilliant with large outdoor gaming available. And best yet it even worked on my old geforce fx 440 card! but did stutter a lot when it came to rendering lots of enemies. I def loved your post. It takes an amzing amount of patience to sit and explain things so clearly. Thank you. Oh am in Bangalore too We should meet up sometime
We should meet up sometime
ctrl_alt_del
A Year Closer To Heaven
Whew! Thats an loooong post, and very, very informative! Didn't knew that about Doom 3 and bump-mapping. Guess I should search the net for some more such areticles as to whether id and Valve guys actually put in the things they claimed, in their respective engine.
@Prof: I sincierly hope you have a proper ergonomic keyboard. Dont wanna see you end with CTS!
@Prof: I sincierly hope you have a proper ergonomic keyboard. Dont wanna see you end with CTS!
Major-Minor
Broken In
Wowee, prof, that was one great post there, hats off to you again sir!
enoonmai
Cyborg Agent
Dont worry, cody, I've got the ultra-comfortable and cr@ppy costly Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop. My hands and brain are pretty much the only things that get me my daily food and my games for the PC and the PS2. (come to think of it, I think I can even skip food )
@icecoolz: Thanks man, sure, maybe we can catch each other sometime at Pizza Hut on Brigade Road. Actually, I could sit and type such a huge post because I am at home today when I am supposed be working on obscure Java code. I've heard a lot about Chrome, but never had the fortune to actually play it. And come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw the game on the shelves here. I pretty much get all my games at Glasgow Computers on Brigade Rd.
If I see either that or Escape From Butcher Bay again, I will definitely pick them up.
@Major: Nah, man, pretty much summed up everything in a nutshell. Anyway, thanks a lot man, and dont be TOO humble, I know how good you are with hardware and video cards and their capabilities.
Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop. My hands and brain are pretty much the only things that get me my daily food and my games for the PC and the PS2. (come to think of it, I think I can even skip food ) @icecoolz: Thanks man, sure, maybe we can catch each other sometime at Pizza Hut on Brigade Road. Actually, I could sit and type such a huge post because I am at home today when I am supposed be working on obscure Java code.
I've heard a lot about Chrome, but never had the fortune to actually play it. And come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw the game on the shelves here. I pretty much get all my games at Glasgow Computers on Brigade Rd. If I see either that or Escape From Butcher Bay again, I will definitely pick them up.
@Major: Nah, man, pretty much summed up everything in a nutshell. Anyway, thanks a lot man, and dont be TOO humble, I know how good you are with hardware and video cards and their capabilities.
Ethan_Hunt
Aspiring Novelist
Woahhhhhhhhhhh Woahhhhhh And Woahhhhhhhh again......Now enoo just one more question u possibly by any chance wouldn't be workin for Top Secret Projects Of ID And Valve Simultaneously would you????
Just an hour or so into my lunch time and a word of luck for cody for his exams and now i see this HUGEEEEEEEEE post again by you....now either i am a mind reader or an anticipator......was just thinkin that u would show up sooner or later with that oh-so long explaination of yours.....KUDOS to u bro......Now i dun wanna sound Fanboyish about your post and stuff but am just stunned to see so much time and talent dedication.....grt goin pal but remeber "with great talent comes grt responsibilities" also there are lots a ppl out here at digit with immense Knowledge as well So HAtttss off to all of em.....and just One more thing i oughta do before leaving as mark of respect
*deephousepage.com/smilies/respect.gif
Just an hour or so into my lunch time and a word of luck for cody for his exams and now i see this HUGEEEEEEEEE post again by you....now either i am a mind reader or an anticipator......was just thinkin that u would show up sooner or later with that oh-so long explaination of yours.....KUDOS to u bro......Now i dun wanna sound Fanboyish about your post and stuff but am just stunned to see so much time and talent dedication.....grt goin pal but remeber "with great talent comes grt responsibilities" also there are lots a ppl out here at digit with immense Knowledge as well So HAtttss off to all of em.....and just One more thing i oughta do before leaving as mark of respect
*deephousepage.com/smilies/respect.gif
gamefreak14
Journeyman
Fantabulous, enoonmai!! Three cheers to you for spending your time on a very informative post.
Judging from what you've written, I guess we can come to the conclusion that Far Cry's the the only game which can practically render "kilometers" on a decent card with no noticable framerate issues. But then this comes at a cost of some high res bump mapped textures. And possibly vice-versa?
I think its better if they went the way of reducing workload on gfx processors. It would be wrong if they went on to actually put such heavy textures when the industry isn't even ready for it. When valVe conducted a survey on which card the potential HL2 player owned, the surprising answer was the Ti4600.
But it won't be long before the attack of the $500+ 512 MB gfx cards begins.
Judging from what you've written, I guess we can come to the conclusion that Far Cry's the the only game which can practically render "kilometers" on a decent card with no noticable framerate issues. But then this comes at a cost of some high res bump mapped textures. And possibly vice-versa?
I think its better if they went the way of reducing workload on gfx processors. It would be wrong if they went on to actually put such heavy textures when the industry isn't even ready for it. When valVe conducted a survey on which card the potential HL2 player owned, the surprising answer was the Ti4600.
But it won't be long before the attack of the $500+ 512 MB gfx cards begins.
enoonmai
Cyborg Agent
@gamefreak: Yes, you're right, CryEngine is pretty much the only DX9.0 engine in existence that can render outdoor environments to the extent of it looking like reality. And with the newer Shader Model 3.0 support (GeForce 6x00 boards only), Pixel Shader 2.0b support (Radeon X800, GeForce 6x00 boards only), Geometry instancing (Radeon 9500 and above, Radeon X800, GeForce 6x00 boards only), Normal map compression (Radeon X800, GeForce FX, GeForce 6x00 boards only) and HDR support (GeForce 6x00 boards only) in the v1.3 patch, its currently the best looking game on the planet, period. HL2 or Doom 3 cannot even compare. (at least, not right now anyway)
But then again, its all an illusion. What the CryEngine does is that all of the detail, the hi-res bumpmapped textures, are all thrown into a single map and loaded simultaneously. The culling point in the game is actually the same as the ones in the other games, which means that if you take the culling point of a scene in Half-Life 2 and compare it with Far Cry, its the same, but the trick that the CryEngine uses is to pull off a hi-res skybox and hide the culling point underwater. Try this the next time you play FC. Turn off all effects in the game, enable cheats so you dont get killed by the chase helicopters if you go too far into the sea and then jump in and start swimming underwater. At one point, say about 1.5 kms in the gamespace, you will notice a thin, fine line underwater where the texture appears to change slightly. Anything beyond the culling point is just rendered as flat 3D and with Geometry Instancing in v1.3, this technique is perfected so well, it feels practically seamless, while reducing the processing workload for the card even more.
I remember taking the HL2 survey at the time I got Condition Zero, at which time I was running a GeForce 4 MX 440, and at that time, that was the top card on that list. They cruelly dumped the flagship cards of the game, the 9600 and 9800 series and plan to release Xx00-exclusive levels via Steam for the owners of those cards. Highly unfair!
@allwyndlima: ROTFL! No, I dont happen to be working for id or Valve or anyone in the game design industry. Just a poor hapless Java programmer who happens to type out "import java.lotof.cr@p;" in his sleep. Thanks man, you're making me squirm and blush now. Anyone with a bit of time and patience can learn all this, no big mumbo-jumbo to it.
But then again, its all an illusion.
What the CryEngine does is that all of the detail, the hi-res bumpmapped textures, are all thrown into a single map and loaded simultaneously. The culling point in the game is actually the same as the ones in the other games, which means that if you take the culling point of a scene in Half-Life 2 and compare it with Far Cry, its the same, but the trick that the CryEngine uses is to pull off a hi-res skybox and hide the culling point underwater. Try this the next time you play FC. Turn off all effects in the game, enable cheats so you dont get killed by the chase helicopters if you go too far into the sea and then jump in and start swimming underwater. At one point, say about 1.5 kms in the gamespace, you will notice a thin, fine line underwater where the texture appears to change slightly. Anything beyond the culling point is just rendered as flat 3D and with Geometry Instancing in v1.3, this technique is perfected so well, it feels practically seamless, while reducing the processing workload for the card even more.I remember taking the HL2 survey at the time I got Condition Zero, at which time I was running a GeForce 4 MX 440, and at that time, that was the top card on that list.
They cruelly dumped the flagship cards of the game, the 9600 and 9800 series and plan to release Xx00-exclusive levels via Steam for the owners of those cards. Highly unfair!@allwyndlima: ROTFL! No, I dont happen to be working for id or Valve or anyone in the game design industry. Just a poor hapless Java programmer who happens to type out "import java.lotof.cr@p;" in his sleep. Thanks man, you're making me squirm and blush now.
Anyone with a bit of time and patience can learn all this, no big mumbo-jumbo to it.bhaiyon aur behno srry
if maine tumhe sataya.......
pur maine to keval mr.47 huh
jo mujhe acha lagaey usey me SNIPE karta hui
aur Jo bura lagaey usey maine Sarge bhai (q3 walay baday dada ji) ke mutabiq FRAG ker deta huh
maine to nanha munha MR.47 huh.
when u play for KILLIN there are now rules
if maine tumhe sataya.......
pur maine to keval mr.47 huh
jo mujhe acha lagaey usey me SNIPE karta hui
aur Jo bura lagaey usey maine Sarge bhai (q3 walay baday dada ji) ke mutabiq FRAG ker deta huh
maine to nanha munha MR.47 huh.
when u play for KILLIN there are now rules
G
gxsaurav
Guest
hmm, so according to U the reason for the monsters disappear when they die is because id & Doom3 engine are unable to hold the monsters in the memory, & so they came up with this PR thing that when they die they return to Hell
Take a look at half life, kill a few zombies or combine soldiers in a room, go out of the room for a while, & come back to the room, what U find is that even the Source engine is making the soldiers disappear, so are the zombies, hmm, so now isn’t Source Engine doing the same thing.
Even in far cry, the same happens, U kill someone, go out of the room, come back & the corpse is gone, it is nothing fancy but a way to clear the RAM which each & every game out their uses, hell even, Unreal 2 the awakening uses it, another good looking engine, with really nice indoor scene
Ever heard of the back buffer in Doom3, it clears the back side of U theoretically, means when U face away from a side everything behind U or everything which is not in front of U, visible is cleared from the memory, if U say optimizing memory management is bad, then I don’t know what should I say U
We were playing a game, not researching for life on Mars, grow up man
How do U know that, there is no game or mod out there showing that D3 is bad or good in outdoor scenes rite now, soon there will be a lot of mods & expansion packs showing the beauty, or do U have access to the D3 Engine source code, increasing the system requirement, I guess the beta version of many mods which feature many outdoor scene require same hardware as D3, not anything more. What’s the problem in tricking the user to show him just what he needs to see, what’s the use of showing him the compilation of code, if he just can play the game
U should know that S3TC is a open standard, although 3Dc is also , but it’s new & only ATI cards use it, using normal maps instead of high geometrical bump maps is good & if U can emulate something that much perfectly providing same quality with more performance then what is the problem. Do U remember the Epic games representation of Unreal Engine 3.0, they showed a 1 billion polygons based model, extremely detailed & extremely close to real thing, but eating a lot of power, then they showed it again, with only 5000 polygons using virtual displacement mapping, theoretically they were also emulation, even 3Dc isn’t that perfect
Again how do U know that the textures were extremely low resolution, U must be having access to the D3 source code, even if U apply a high resolution texture, it is lowered by the gfx card in the end during game play to 1024X768 or whatever resolution U are playing at, So what is the use of making a model with ultra high resolution texture if it won’t show up.
Following what U had talked with anidex, U said that D3 engine can make good outdoor sceans, & we need a 6xxx series card to play it nice, hmm, let me tell U, what does ATI & Valve recommend HL2 to be played on, a Radeon card supporting PS 2.0 not even 3.0, isn’t that OEM bullshit, when Quake 1 came it stretched the hardware to the limits, even HL1 was based on Quake 1 engine. This is something U cannot change, at that point Valve will be releasing something again with a deal with ATI, business my man, u can’t change it
Let me tell U the business prospective, Valve knows clearly that HL2 is not the money maker for them, Counter Strike & Source Engine is, that is Y the system requirements of CS:S is even lower then HL2 itself, valve had to make it lower requirements based or they would have lost a lot of money, as the other companies which usually license the engines made by the big guns, look or simple yet effective, even Splinter Cell Part 1 was based on Unreal engine 1.0 while unreal engine 2.0 was out
When looking at the Far cry engine, hmm, let me point out it’s error, visually it is quite good as well as audio wise, but as a software engine it is really bad, dam long loading times, even with 512 MB RAM, which is said to be the recommended for the game, at 512 MB RAM, D3 looks good, loads good, if we take it as a reference, HL2 loads faster due to different engine, but Far Cry, man takes ages to load, I re-played Far Cry 3rd time with my FX 5900XT & the 1.3 patch, believing that it must be having some more optimization etc, but no, still same old long loading & in game pauses. I borrowed more 512 MB RAM from my friend, just to test & with 1 GB RAM, Far cry went smooth while they say 512 MB is recommended
In the end of this long post: Nothing is perfect
Take a look at half life, kill a few zombies or combine soldiers in a room, go out of the room for a while, & come back to the room, what U find is that even the Source engine is making the soldiers disappear, so are the zombies, hmm, so now isn’t Source Engine doing the same thing.
Even in far cry, the same happens, U kill someone, go out of the room, come back & the corpse is gone, it is nothing fancy but a way to clear the RAM which each & every game out their uses, hell even, Unreal 2 the awakening uses it, another good looking engine, with really nice indoor scene
Ever heard of the back buffer in Doom3, it clears the back side of U theoretically, means when U face away from a side everything behind U or everything which is not in front of U, visible is cleared from the memory, if U say optimizing memory management is bad, then I don’t know what should I say U
We were playing a game, not researching for life on Mars, grow up man
How do U know that, there is no game or mod out there showing that D3 is bad or good in outdoor scenes rite now, soon there will be a lot of mods & expansion packs showing the beauty, or do U have access to the D3 Engine source code, increasing the system requirement, I guess the beta version of many mods which feature many outdoor scene require same hardware as D3, not anything more. What’s the problem in tricking the user to show him just what he needs to see, what’s the use of showing him the compilation of code, if he just can play the game
U should know that S3TC is a open standard, although 3Dc is also , but it’s new & only ATI cards use it, using normal maps instead of high geometrical bump maps is good & if U can emulate something that much perfectly providing same quality with more performance then what is the problem. Do U remember the Epic games representation of Unreal Engine 3.0, they showed a 1 billion polygons based model, extremely detailed & extremely close to real thing, but eating a lot of power, then they showed it again, with only 5000 polygons using virtual displacement mapping, theoretically they were also emulation, even 3Dc isn’t that perfect
Again how do U know that the textures were extremely low resolution, U must be having access to the D3 source code, even if U apply a high resolution texture, it is lowered by the gfx card in the end during game play to 1024X768 or whatever resolution U are playing at, So what is the use of making a model with ultra high resolution texture if it won’t show up.
Following what U had talked with anidex, U said that D3 engine can make good outdoor sceans, & we need a 6xxx series card to play it nice, hmm, let me tell U, what does ATI & Valve recommend HL2 to be played on, a Radeon card supporting PS 2.0 not even 3.0, isn’t that OEM bullshit, when Quake 1 came it stretched the hardware to the limits, even HL1 was based on Quake 1 engine. This is something U cannot change, at that point Valve will be releasing something again with a deal with ATI, business my man, u can’t change it
Let me tell U the business prospective, Valve knows clearly that HL2 is not the money maker for them, Counter Strike & Source Engine is, that is Y the system requirements of CS:S is even lower then HL2 itself, valve had to make it lower requirements based or they would have lost a lot of money, as the other companies which usually license the engines made by the big guns, look or simple yet effective, even Splinter Cell Part 1 was based on Unreal engine 1.0 while unreal engine 2.0 was out
When looking at the Far cry engine, hmm, let me point out it’s error, visually it is quite good as well as audio wise, but as a software engine it is really bad, dam long loading times, even with 512 MB RAM, which is said to be the recommended for the game, at 512 MB RAM, D3 looks good, loads good, if we take it as a reference, HL2 loads faster due to different engine, but Far Cry, man takes ages to load, I re-played Far Cry 3rd time with my FX 5900XT & the 1.3 patch, believing that it must be having some more optimization etc, but no, still same old long loading & in game pauses. I borrowed more 512 MB RAM from my friend, just to test & with 1 GB RAM, Far cry went smooth while they say 512 MB is recommended
In the end of this long post: Nothing is perfect
enoonmai
Cyborg Agent
I was waiting for the brickbats, and here they are Here we go again, Professor Utonium Nice to have you show up.
My point was that every game makes the monsters or whatever it is that you've killed disappear. Every single game removes enemies' bodies from the gamespace once you're done with them. They HAVE to. id Software just made a cooler way of getting this done along with a story. And its not my opinion, Tim Willits said this in an interview. As did Carmack in a different way. When they asked him about this, he said that what id has done is eliminate the suddenly disappearing corpses with a "melting" effect and how it was better than leaving it in where every extra polygon rendered would inevitably lead to a drop in framerate. So, I never said Source doesn't do it, or CryEngine doesn't do it.
EDIT: Plus, you know that mod where it leaves the bodies and prevents the "melting"? Enable com_ShowFPS 1 and check how the framerates vary with and without the mod.
For the nth time, I am not bashing Nvidia or ATI or id or Valve or anyone on the face of this planet. I dont take sides and I am no fanboy. Let me make this really really simple - "I don't care. I love them all."
WHOA! I don't understand why you're misquoting me. I never said memory "management" is bad, all I said was that the game was memory "intensive" and they had to resort to a lot of industry-standard tricks to heighten the illusion that everything was what you thought it was. So I am lost as to why you're dragging the back buffer into this. And I know what a back buffer is, thank you! If you remember, all I said was:
And oh, BTW, front buffers, back buffers, Z-buffers, stencil buffers, depth buffers, etc. are for video cards, so Doom 3 cannot have a back buffer, it just uses the ones on the card. And, I only mentioned the word "memory" twice and that too in that one sentence. Search for it if you like.
I already said that it was totally irrelevant and it was there just to drive the point home for people who don't understand the context. No fair slapping me on the face when I've already slapped myself.
That was exactly the point I made and you're using my own point against me? Weird!
This is the third time I am saying it again. NO ONE except the people at Nerve and Activision has seen the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine when it comes to rendering outdoor environments.You can ask any one developing a mod for Doom 3 or visit the mod developer's sites and forums, and you will see how they tell you that they had to use a LOT of fog shaders to "hide" the environment and bring the culling point close to the player. In fact, Doom 3 is the only DX9.0 engine that has to resort to fog shaders to "hide" the environment. CryEngine and Source use fog shaders but they are for "enhancing" the environment, not hiding it. Maybe these pictures will help people get the idea. Please note how cloudy/foggy the environment is.
*img238.exs.cx/img238/309/hexenfog1g7js.th.jpg
*img238.exs.cx/img238/6740/icefields7or.th.jpg
*img238.exs.cx/img238/293/uacschneefallg5lc.th.jpg
Check the photos tarey_g posted on the previous page and check out the outdoor environment of Quake 4 in this screenshot. Like I said, it uses a night setting for culling.
*img238.exs.cx/img238/7259/quake4preview82vn.th.jpg
Hope that's enough to get my point across. The mods for the game require the same hardware as D3, and thats partly the problem. I am willing to bet my life (yes!) that Quake 4 WILL push up the hardware requirements from what D3 required, the same as Quake 3 Arena and Call of Duty. You have to remember that Quake 4 will use a heavily modified Doom 3 engine, so there's no saying what it can do with outdoor settings. I still say for the billionth time - the Doom 3 engine is capable of rendering large outdoor environments, but not in its current avatar and not with current hardware.
I hope what I took from my earlier post can clarify this.
There is nothing wrong with tricking people, in fact, if you don't, most developers would end up breaking their backs coding everything, dropping framerates, pushing up system requirements, etc. Like I said, you're learning Director MX. You will be taught how to trick people so that your workloads, filesizes and framerates are all maintained within acceptable parameters. (sigh)
I am not even going to be drawn into another DXT war, be it S3TC or 3Dc or BBC World or whatever. I know which card uses which, (I said "ATI-based 3Dc", didn't I?) and all I said was that Doom 3 uses the generally acknowledged poorer S3TC algorithm. Also, I never said using normal maps is bad or a problem. In fact, no one uses "true" normal maps, because of obvious reasons. I was just stating a fact, that Doom 3 uses normal maps instead of bumpmaps.
Pretty much every developer worth his salt knows this for a fact. Its been discussed to shreds for more than a billion lifetimes in thousands of threads in developer forums. The textures are lo-res, the models are low-poly and pretty much everything is low detail, but its amazingly beautiful when it all comes together, because you can hardly see these things. Like I said, the illusion that will put David Copperfield to shame. (You didnt miss that part about Swann's hexagonal skull in my earlier post, I hope)
To seal to argument, here's an excerpt from a Carmack interview.
And to be honest, I dont care how they pull it off as long as they pull it off. Which is why I like Source, because it uses extremely older technology in some of its core areas, and still gets away with it.
Please go through my post again, I never said that and you're quoting me out of context. All I said was that to take full advantage of the Doom 3 engine's capabilities (read as Quake 4 and RtCw2) you would need at least a 6x00 video card, because by the time they release, the engine would be so heavily modified that it would look nothing like Doom 3.
Amen, brother! I know that and I said so too. Games will always be aligning themselves to take advantage of a particular hardware to make things easier for them, and in fact, they would be bumbling idiots if they didn't. No one can claim to be hardware-neutral anymore.
Well, everyone knows Valve has only one game in their repertoire and thats Half-Life. Actually, the one thing that brings them the most money is engine licensing, not CS. That's only the second largest money making machine for them, and if they want, they can totally dump it and live off the engine licenses. In fact, that is how they could afford to stay in business for the 6 long years between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. They made so much money off the game engine that it fueled the entire development cost for Source and HL2. CS was a welcome break, but they didn't really need it. If you remember, they practically ignored it as a mod in the beginning, and only when they saw how popular it was, that they took it under their wing. The same goes for Source. Now that they've got it made with it, they can afford to kick back and wait for a couple of more years.
Like I told gamefreak, the problem with the long load times is because CryEngine loads the entire map, which is extremely huge when compared with even DX8.1 game maps, leave alone DX9.0 ones, so its obvious that it will drag it all down.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're wrong on both counts. Half-Life was based on Quake 2 technology and Splinter Cell was indeed based on Unreal Engine 2.0. You can Google for Half-Life and Quake 2 and see the truth for yourself. As for Splinter Cell, here's the info right from UnrealTechnology.com
*www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue2.shtml
See the screenshot of Splinter Cell there? It was previously known as the "Unreal Warfare" engine (slightly different from the engine that powered Unreal II - The Awakening.) before they pulled it all together under the Unreal Engine 2.0 name.
Hope this clears things up a wee bit more. BTW, thanks Professor Utonium, I really enjoyed talking about this with you.
Here we go again, Professor Utonium Nice to have you show up.My point was that every game makes the monsters or whatever it is that you've killed disappear. Every single game removes enemies' bodies from the gamespace once you're done with them. They HAVE to. id Software just made a cooler way of getting this done along with a story. And its not my opinion, Tim Willits said this in an interview. As did Carmack in a different way. When they asked him about this, he said that what id has done is eliminate the suddenly disappearing corpses with a "melting" effect and how it was better than leaving it in where every extra polygon rendered would inevitably lead to a drop in framerate. So, I never said Source doesn't do it, or CryEngine doesn't do it.
EDIT: Plus, you know that mod where it leaves the bodies and prevents the "melting"? Enable com_ShowFPS 1 and check how the framerates vary with and without the mod.
For the nth time, I am not bashing Nvidia or ATI or id or Valve or anyone on the face of this planet. I dont take sides and I am no fanboy. Let me make this really really simple - "I don't care. I love them all."
gxsaurav said:
WHOA!
I don't understand why you're misquoting me. I never said memory "management" is bad, all I said was that the game was memory "intensive" and they had to resort to a lot of industry-standard tricks to heighten the illusion that everything was what you thought it was. So I am lost as to why you're dragging the back buffer into this. And I know what a back buffer is, thank you! If you remember, all I said was:enoonmai said:
And oh, BTW, front buffers, back buffers, Z-buffers, stencil buffers, depth buffers, etc. are for video cards, so Doom 3 cannot have a back buffer, it just uses the ones on the card. And, I only mentioned the word "memory" twice and that too in that one sentence. Search for it if you like.
gxsaurav said:
enoonmai said:
I already said that it was totally irrelevant and it was there just to drive the point home for people who don't understand the context. No fair slapping me on the face when I've already slapped myself.
gxsaurav said:
That was exactly the point I made and you're using my own point against me? Weird!
enoonmai said:
This is the third time I am saying it again. NO ONE except the people at Nerve and Activision has seen the capabilities of the Doom 3 engine when it comes to rendering outdoor environments.You can ask any one developing a mod for Doom 3 or visit the mod developer's sites and forums, and you will see how they tell you that they had to use a LOT of fog shaders to "hide" the environment and bring the culling point close to the player. In fact, Doom 3 is the only DX9.0 engine that has to resort to fog shaders to "hide" the environment. CryEngine and Source use fog shaders but they are for "enhancing" the environment, not hiding it. Maybe these pictures will help people get the idea. Please note how cloudy/foggy the environment is.
*img238.exs.cx/img238/309/hexenfog1g7js.th.jpg
*img238.exs.cx/img238/6740/icefields7or.th.jpg
*img238.exs.cx/img238/293/uacschneefallg5lc.th.jpg
Check the photos tarey_g posted on the previous page and check out the outdoor environment of Quake 4 in this screenshot. Like I said, it uses a night setting for culling.
*img238.exs.cx/img238/7259/quake4preview82vn.th.jpg
Hope that's enough to get my point across. The mods for the game require the same hardware as D3, and thats partly the problem. I am willing to bet my life (yes!) that Quake 4 WILL push up the hardware requirements from what D3 required, the same as Quake 3 Arena and Call of Duty. You have to remember that Quake 4 will use a heavily modified Doom 3 engine, so there's no saying what it can do with outdoor settings. I still say for the billionth time - the Doom 3 engine is capable of rendering large outdoor environments, but not in its current avatar and not with current hardware.
gxsaurav said:
I hope what I took from my earlier post can clarify this.
enoonmai said:
There is nothing wrong with tricking people, in fact, if you don't, most developers would end up breaking their backs coding everything, dropping framerates, pushing up system requirements, etc. Like I said, you're learning Director MX. You will be taught how to trick people so that your workloads, filesizes and framerates are all maintained within acceptable parameters. (sigh)
gxsaurav said:
I am not even going to be drawn into another DXT war, be it S3TC or 3Dc or BBC World or whatever. I know which card uses which, (I said "ATI-based 3Dc", didn't I?) and all I said was that Doom 3 uses the generally acknowledged poorer S3TC algorithm. Also, I never said using normal maps is bad or a problem. In fact, no one uses "true" normal maps, because of obvious reasons. I was just stating a fact, that Doom 3 uses normal maps instead of bumpmaps.
gxsaurav said:
Pretty much every developer worth his salt knows this for a fact. Its been discussed to shreds for more than a billion lifetimes in thousands of threads in developer forums. The textures are lo-res, the models are low-poly and pretty much everything is low detail, but its amazingly beautiful when it all comes together, because you can hardly see these things. Like I said, the illusion that will put David Copperfield to shame. (You didnt miss that part about Swann's hexagonal skull in my earlier post, I hope)
To seal to argument, here's an excerpt from a Carmack interview.
And to be honest, I dont care how they pull it off as long as they pull it off. Which is why I like Source, because it uses extremely older technology in some of its core areas, and still gets away with it.
gxsaurav said:
Please go through my post again, I never said that and you're quoting me out of context. All I said was that to take full advantage of the Doom 3 engine's capabilities (read as Quake 4 and RtCw2) you would need at least a 6x00 video card, because by the time they release, the engine would be so heavily modified that it would look nothing like Doom 3.
gxsaurav said:
Amen, brother! I know that and I said so too. Games will always be aligning themselves to take advantage of a particular hardware to make things easier for them, and in fact, they would be bumbling idiots if they didn't. No one can claim to be hardware-neutral anymore.
gxsaurav said:
Well, everyone knows Valve has only one game in their repertoire and thats Half-Life. Actually, the one thing that brings them the most money is engine licensing, not CS. That's only the second largest money making machine for them, and if they want, they can totally dump it and live off the engine licenses. In fact, that is how they could afford to stay in business for the 6 long years between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. They made so much money off the game engine that it fueled the entire development cost for Source and HL2. CS was a welcome break, but they didn't really need it. If you remember, they practically ignored it as a mod in the beginning, and only when they saw how popular it was, that they took it under their wing. The same goes for Source. Now that they've got it made with it, they can afford to kick back and wait for a couple of more years.
gxsaurav said:
Like I told gamefreak, the problem with the long load times is because CryEngine loads the entire map, which is extremely huge when compared with even DX8.1 game maps, leave alone DX9.0 ones, so its obvious that it will drag it all down.
gxsaurav said:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're wrong on both counts. Half-Life was based on Quake 2 technology and Splinter Cell was indeed based on Unreal Engine 2.0. You can Google for Half-Life and Quake 2 and see the truth for yourself. As for Splinter Cell, here's the info right from UnrealTechnology.com
*www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue2.shtml
See the screenshot of Splinter Cell there? It was previously known as the "Unreal Warfare" engine (slightly different from the engine that powered Unreal II - The Awakening.) before they pulled it all together under the Unreal Engine 2.0 name.
Hope this clears things up a wee bit more. BTW, thanks Professor Utonium, I really enjoyed talking about this with you.
ctrl_alt_del
A Year Closer To Heaven
This is turning out to be so informative. Good going Prof! Thumbs up for you!
Major-Minor
Broken In
Yep, very informative posts and a healthy argument.
Ethan_Hunt
Aspiring Novelist
now theres a confusion here which Prof are we talkin about????? 
Is it Prof Utonium (Gxsaurav)????
or is it our very own new Prof (enoo)????
sure is getting too proffy in here.....i oughta take a hike here
btw nice going both of ya...keep it going....and i'll care to bring in my Popcorn and Coke in a jiffy
Btw before leavin enoo just going a lil off topic here....but since u own a Ps2 care to tell me if ya have ever heard of the Ethener adapter for Lan Connectivity????? if yes then care to spill a long post on it as well and yea lets not forget the games that we can play on it
Is it Prof Utonium (Gxsaurav)????
or is it our very own new Prof (enoo)????
sure is getting too proffy in here.....i oughta take a hike here
btw nice going both of ya...keep it going....and i'll care to bring in my Popcorn and Coke in a jiffy
Btw before leavin enoo just going a lil off topic here....but since u own a Ps2 care to tell me if ya have ever heard of the Ethener adapter for Lan Connectivity????? if yes then care to spill a long post on it as well and yea lets not forget the games that we can play on it
HellspawnLucifer
Right off the assembly line
About bumpmapping and normal maps
Dear enoonmai,
I'd like to correct you a little about the bump mapping and normals ...
According to Blinn, bump mapping is "a method of using a texturing function to perform a small perturbation on the direction of the surface normal before using it in the intensity calculations"
The perturbed normal is calculated using the partial derivatives of the surface parameters (typically the texture coordinates) and the height map values. The derivatives indicate the rate at which the underlying values change, so if the derivatives of the height are large, it means that the slope at that point in the height map is steep.
The problem with this method is that the per-fragment calculations required are quite steep. To this end, the perturbations are encoded in different ways.
One of the ways to encode the perturbations of the surface normal is called a normal map. This is a RGB texture, where each RGB triplet is a normalized vector indicating the current texels deviation from the straight up normal.
"Doom 3 boasts of extensive bump mapping, but did you know that for ALL their cry about bump-mapping, it uses just normal maps instead?"
Please do understand that the above information is incorrect, because all of the below are methods by which bump mapping is done.
*No modification of surface geometry*
1. Emboss bump mapping
2. Environment-mapped bump mapping (EMBM)
3. Normal mapping
*Modifies surface geometry*
4. Displacement mapping
A normal map, therefore, is just one lookup table given to a pixel shader that performs bump mapping in (mostly) tangent space.
So its more like "DOOM3 uses tangent space bump mapping with normal maps ....". Please feel free to look up any references on bump mapping if you feel I am incorrect.
"The normal (not bump) maps are also responsible for the interaction of surfaces with their incident rays of light and the shadows are actually more detailed than the objects that cast them. So when counsellor Swann, (with a hexagonal skull, thats right, he's got a hexagonal skull) looks good in the final rendering sequence. Which is also why when an imp throws a fireball, it casts perfect shadows on the walls, also making the normal maps on textured surfaces look 3D though they are utterly flat."
The normal maps also do not have anything to do with shadows, these are rendered by a method called stencil shadows. If you notice carefully enough, "Counselor Swann's hexagonal skull" shadow will STILL be hexagonal, since stencil shadows are pixel precise.
The reason the polycount has to be reduced, is because of the per fragment overhead of pixel shaders. This is also the reason the monsters disappear. Memory is hardly a problem, because all entities (meshdata) are only referenced. The fillrate, however represents a huge problem, because performing several passes running a vertex and pixel shader for each one imposes a serious fill rate drain.
"which is something that the ATIs don't have in place, so thats why it performs better on Nvidias than on the ATis."
At this point, I'd advise you to go look up John Carmack's point plans ... where he discussed the R300 and the NV30 pipelines ...
*doom-ed.com/john-carmack/nv30-vs-r300-current-developments-etc.html
Please note that this is just FYI ... I wouldnt want anyone to take offence.
--HellspawnLucifer
Dear enoonmai,
I'd like to correct you a little about the bump mapping and normals ...
According to Blinn, bump mapping is "a method of using a texturing function to perform a small perturbation on the direction of the surface normal before using it in the intensity calculations"
The perturbed normal is calculated using the partial derivatives of the surface parameters (typically the texture coordinates) and the height map values. The derivatives indicate the rate at which the underlying values change, so if the derivatives of the height are large, it means that the slope at that point in the height map is steep.
The problem with this method is that the per-fragment calculations required are quite steep. To this end, the perturbations are encoded in different ways.
One of the ways to encode the perturbations of the surface normal is called a normal map. This is a RGB texture, where each RGB triplet is a normalized vector indicating the current texels deviation from the straight up normal.
"Doom 3 boasts of extensive bump mapping, but did you know that for ALL their cry about bump-mapping, it uses just normal maps instead?"
Please do understand that the above information is incorrect, because all of the below are methods by which bump mapping is done.
*No modification of surface geometry*
1. Emboss bump mapping
2. Environment-mapped bump mapping (EMBM)
3. Normal mapping
*Modifies surface geometry*
4. Displacement mapping
A normal map, therefore, is just one lookup table given to a pixel shader that performs bump mapping in (mostly) tangent space.
So its more like "DOOM3 uses tangent space bump mapping with normal maps ....". Please feel free to look up any references on bump mapping if you feel I am incorrect.
"The normal (not bump) maps are also responsible for the interaction of surfaces with their incident rays of light and the shadows are actually more detailed than the objects that cast them. So when counsellor Swann, (with a hexagonal skull, thats right, he's got a hexagonal skull) looks good in the final rendering sequence. Which is also why when an imp throws a fireball, it casts perfect shadows on the walls, also making the normal maps on textured surfaces look 3D though they are utterly flat."
The normal maps also do not have anything to do with shadows, these are rendered by a method called stencil shadows. If you notice carefully enough, "Counselor Swann's hexagonal skull" shadow will STILL be hexagonal, since stencil shadows are pixel precise.
The reason the polycount has to be reduced, is because of the per fragment overhead of pixel shaders. This is also the reason the monsters disappear. Memory is hardly a problem, because all entities (meshdata) are only referenced. The fillrate, however represents a huge problem, because performing several passes running a vertex and pixel shader for each one imposes a serious fill rate drain.
"which is something that the ATIs don't have in place, so thats why it performs better on Nvidias than on the ATis."
At this point, I'd advise you to go look up John Carmack's point plans ... where he discussed the R300 and the NV30 pipelines ...
*doom-ed.com/john-carmack/nv30-vs-r300-current-developments-etc.html
Please note that this is just FYI ... I wouldnt want anyone to take offence.
--HellspawnLucifer
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