4 ms·

Poorly optimized 3d engines are a commodity. Quake 3, Painkiller and Serious Sam 1 were a piece of great engineering. Also there was nothing mediocre in the twi

Poorly optimized 3d engines are a commodity. Quake 3, Painkiller and Serious Sam 1 were a piece of great engineering. Also there was nothing mediocre in the twitch based era of id. Their decline began with Doom 3.

ekianjo 13y ago
Yeah, Doom3 was really bad and unlike any of their previous shooters. And Rage was a piece of garbage. Not even technically impressive despite the mega-texture tech.
- vacri 13y ago
  Doom 3's problem wasn't it's engine. It was just crap. No matter how careful you were to cover yourself and check each corner, you'd always cross a 'tripwire' of some kind and a section of wall would open up - something you could never check - and it would always been behind you. It was the laziest attempt at horror I've seen. Once that became apparent, sneaking around was pointless. Just barrel forward, because it doesn't matter what you do, there will always be an undetectable secret wall opening behind you. Compare to Dead Space, where the things that came through walls did so at reasonable points - ventilation ducts or similar. You'd be on your guard around those spots, but a solid wall was never something with a 'gotcha!' compartment. Being wary was useful in that game. Doom 3 could have had the sexiest engine in history, but it wouldn't have changed the poor gameplay design.
  - inDigiNeous 13y ago
    Sure, after a while Doom 3 became boring and self repeating, but hell, it was one scary motherfucker to play in the middle of the night with your headphones on. I remember playing Doom 3 on my original Xbox and I just couldn't do it many times, as it was so damn scary. Most of this had to do with the excellent sound design though, and this scary effect kinda ended when you got the bigger weapons in the game.
    - nsxwolf 13y ago
      I've tried to play it a couple times but the first half hour or so is walking around with no shooting and nothing happening and that's pretty unforgivable for an id shooter.
  - sseveran 13y ago
    Even Carmack admitted that in retrospect the lack of radiosity contributed to the poor gameplay. He also lamented that most of the art was never seen because it was too dark.
c0nfused 13y ago
So, a bit of a rant, I dislike the current game culture meme of "this engine is poorly optimized". I am tired of seeing the following statement: game x is poorly optimized because game y runs better on my box. This is akin to saying: I find apples delicious, Oranges are terrible. Get apples noobs. I would argue that the fact that you can drop in any one of a half dozen solid engines based on your programming language of choice speaks to the fact that they are commodities. At this point, for the vast majority of cases, it makes as much sense to write a 3d game engine as it does to write your own web server. You can do it, but you could spend the time doing something that directly relates to the product you want to sell instead.
- phaus 13y ago
  I think you misunderstand that for a long time, Id Software has made a lot of money turning 3d engines into a commodity. For John Carmack, the emphasis has always been on developing new graphics technologies that advance the entire gaming industry. He's first and foremost an engineer. He may have done a significant amount of game design back in the day, but for at least a decade he's primarily been focused on pushing the hardware to its limits. Since Doom 3, Id's games have pretty much been tech-demos for their engines. That's not to say that Doom 3, Quake 4, and Rage weren't good games, its just that none of them are truly memorable experiences like their older games were. There are only a handful of major players that are making meaningful contributions to the world of 3d engines. If companies like Epic, Id, Valve, and Crytek didn't continue to develop new 3d engines, they wouldn't be a commodity anymore. Also, the Source, Unreal, Cry, and Id Tech 5 engines are still differentiated from one another enough to warrant all four of them existing. In short, I don't think 3d engines are a "solved" problem. Of course an indie studio looking to publish its first 3d game should obviously use a readily available engine, but the major studios still have good reasons to roll their own.
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    I'd imagine that a lot of the need for new engines is driven by new hardware, and it seems that the video hardware has stopped evolving at a rapid pace. nVidia and AMD have been focused more on computation than graphics recently.
Smegger 13y ago
I just started to replay serious sam 1 last week those game engines were great especially considering the limited hardware of the era. I remember playing them on multi player on the school network with a few friends when the teacher were pre occupied.
tincholio 13y ago
> Their decline began with Doom 3. That was some 9 years ago, already...

ekianjo 13y ago

Yeah, Doom3 was really bad and unlike any of their previous shooters. And Rage was a piece of garbage. Not even technically impressive despite the mega-texture tech.

vacri 13y ago
Doom 3's problem wasn't it's engine. It was just crap. No matter how careful you were to cover yourself and check each corner, you'd always cross a 'tripwire' of some kind and a section of wall would open up - something you could never check - and it would always been behind you. It was the laziest attempt at horror I've seen. Once that became apparent, sneaking around was pointless. Just barrel forward, because it doesn't matter what you do, there will always be an undetectable secret wall opening behind you. Compare to Dead Space, where the things that came through walls did so at reasonable points - ventilation ducts or similar. You'd be on your guard around those spots, but a solid wall was never something with a 'gotcha!' compartment. Being wary was useful in that game. Doom 3 could have had the sexiest engine in history, but it wouldn't have changed the poor gameplay design.
- inDigiNeous 13y ago
  Sure, after a while Doom 3 became boring and self repeating, but hell, it was one scary motherfucker to play in the middle of the night with your headphones on. I remember playing Doom 3 on my original Xbox and I just couldn't do it many times, as it was so damn scary. Most of this had to do with the excellent sound design though, and this scary effect kinda ended when you got the bigger weapons in the game.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    I've tried to play it a couple times but the first half hour or so is walking around with no shooting and nothing happening and that's pretty unforgivable for an id shooter.
- sseveran 13y ago
  Even Carmack admitted that in retrospect the lack of radiosity contributed to the poor gameplay. He also lamented that most of the art was never seen because it was too dark.

c0nfused 13y ago

So, a bit of a rant, I dislike the current game culture meme of "this engine is poorly optimized". I am tired of seeing the following statement: game x is poorly optimized because game y runs better on my box. This is akin to saying: I find apples delicious, Oranges are terrible. Get apples noobs. I would argue that the fact that you can drop in any one of a half dozen solid engines based on your programming language of choice speaks to the fact that they are commodities. At this point, for the vast majority of cases, it makes as much sense to write a 3d game engine as it does to write your own web server. You can do it, but you could spend the time doing something that directly relates to the product you want to sell instead.

phaus 13y ago
I think you misunderstand that for a long time, Id Software has made a lot of money turning 3d engines into a commodity. For John Carmack, the emphasis has always been on developing new graphics technologies that advance the entire gaming industry. He's first and foremost an engineer. He may have done a significant amount of game design back in the day, but for at least a decade he's primarily been focused on pushing the hardware to its limits. Since Doom 3, Id's games have pretty much been tech-demos for their engines. That's not to say that Doom 3, Quake 4, and Rage weren't good games, its just that none of them are truly memorable experiences like their older games were. There are only a handful of major players that are making meaningful contributions to the world of 3d engines. If companies like Epic, Id, Valve, and Crytek didn't continue to develop new 3d engines, they wouldn't be a commodity anymore. Also, the Source, Unreal, Cry, and Id Tech 5 engines are still differentiated from one another enough to warrant all four of them existing. In short, I don't think 3d engines are a "solved" problem. Of course an indie studio looking to publish its first 3d game should obviously use a readily available engine, but the major studios still have good reasons to roll their own.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  I'd imagine that a lot of the need for new engines is driven by new hardware, and it seems that the video hardware has stopped evolving at a rapid pace. nVidia and AMD have been focused more on computation than graphics recently.

Smegger 13y ago

I just started to replay serious sam 1 last week those game engines were great especially considering the limited hardware of the era. I remember playing them on multi player on the school network with a few friends when the teacher were pre occupied.

tincholio 13y ago

> Their decline began with Doom 3. That was some 9 years ago, already...