On DOOM 3 Settings [Jul 26, 2004, 4:07 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Robert Duffy, id Software programmer,
updated his .plan about DOOM 3 settings and how they will work, discussing
specifics about the "ultra" quality setting as well as differences in how
certain data are handled differently by ATI and NVIDIA hardware. He also
mentions that the game is capped at 60 FPS (except when running demos as a
benchmark), discusses the software used during development, as well as a bit on
a hard drive nightmare encountered along the way. Here's a bit:
Image fidelity is dependent on what quality level we load the textures at.
In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic :-) and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.
High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.
Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.
Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.
Does anyone else find it intesreting that the ID team said they would release the demo when the "time is right."? How the hell do they know when the time is right and when is the right time? I think its NOW but what do you guys think?
In the beginning the "game demo" was considered an invaluable sales tool in the promotion of computer games, and the purpose of "the game demo" was to provide an appetizing, appealing, brief slice of the game designed to provoke the demo player to get off his rear and run out and buy the game ASAP. Lots of demos were built in the time between the gold-master code freeze and the official shipping of the title (6-8 weeks, generally), so that when the game hit the shelves you could find a downloadable demo of the game very readily (Prior to the rise of the Internet they used to be included in game magazines routinely.) That always seemed a very logical use of "the game demo" to me.
But these days...it's almost as if game devs and/or publishers are afraid to to ensure that demos are available when the game ships because they are afraid that if people don't like the demo they won't buy the game...;) Not a whole lot of inspiring confidence there, is there?
So that's why we see companies these days shipping a game and releasing a demo for it 4-6 months later. They are more afraid the demo will discourage sales of their game than they have confidence the demo will inspire people to buy it, imo. I think that's a mistake, and I think it boils down to game devs and publishers having lost sight of the original purpose for a game demo, as I outline it above.
I often hear developers and publishers say, "But we have this huge, 3-gig game--there's just no way to *represent it* accurately in a 256-mb demo, and we certainly don't want to misrepresent our game, so we're going to skip the demo."
They've lost sight of the fact that a game demo isn't supposed to provide a couple of dozen hours of play, and isn't supposed to "represent" the game from start to finish. Rather, to me, a decent game demo provides the introductary scenes included in the game itself, and maybe the intial one hour--or at the absolute most two--of game play. And that's it--game over--demo ends. The purpose of a demo isn't to be a "mini-game" in itself, and it isn't supposed to "represent the whole game"--it's supposed to *whet the appetite* of the people who run it so that they'll go out and buy the game. Evidently, game devs and publishers are at a loss as to how to go about doing that, these days. So, they just don't do it at all, anymore, and when they do it often seems like a matter of secondary importance to them. I agree with you that decent game demos are getting the shaft these days, and I don't think the publishers are benefitting, despite what they apparently think.
In the beginning the "game demo" was considered an invaluable sales tool in the promotion of computer games, and the purpose of "the game demo" was to provide an appetizing, appealing, brief slice of the game designed to provoke the demo player to get off his rear and run out and buy the game ASAP. Lots of demos were built in the time between the gold-master code freeze and the official shipping of the title (6-8 weeks, generally), so that when the game hit the shelves you could find a downloadable demo of the game very readily (Prior to the rise of the Internet they used to be included in game magazines routinely.) That always seemed a very logical use of "the game demo" to me.
But these days...it's almost as if game devs and/or publishers are afraid to to ensure that demos are available when the game ships because they are afraid that if people don't like the demo they won't buy the game...;) Not a whole lot of inspiring confidence there, is there?
So that's why we see companies these days shipping a game and releasing a demo for it 4-6 months later. They are more afraid the demo will discourage sales of their game than they have confidence the demo will inspire people to buy it, imo. I think that's a mistake, and I think it boils down to game devs and publishers having lost sight of the original purpose for a game demo, as I outline it above.
I often hear developers and publishers say, "But we have this huge, 3-gig game--there's just no way to *represent it* accurately in a 256-mb demo, and we certainly don't want to misrepresent our game, so we're going to skip the demo."
They've lost sight of the fact that a game demo isn't supposed to provide a couple of dozen hours of play, and isn't supposed to "represent" the game from start to finish. Rather, to me, a decent game demo provides the introductary scenes included in the game itself, and maybe the intial one hour--or at the absolute most two--of game play. And that's it--game over--demo ends. The purpose of a demo isn't to be a "mini-game" in itself, and it isn't supposed to "represent the whole game"--it's supposed to *whet the appetite* of the people who run it so that they'll go out and buy the game. Evidently, game devs and publishers are at a loss as to how to go about doing that, these days. So, they just don't do it at all, anymore, and when they do it often seems like a matter of secondary importance to them. I agree with you that decent game demos are getting the shaft these days, and I don't think the publishers are benefitting, despite what they apparently think.
It is well known that I cannot err--and so, if you should happen across an error in anything I have written you can be absolutely sure that *I* did not write it!...;)
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