You are Tim Willits and I claim my €500.

Let's go back to old version and see how much of a lack of ammo there was. Remember those autosaves from the start of each map that it kept (can we have this back in the patch too?); let's pick a map - Alpha Labs 1. Quite early in the game, so it's a good demonstration. It's also from a "Recruit" run through because my old reflexes and reaction times are not what they once were, and besides, it serves to dispel the "hardcoe gamers only" myth.

So what have we got?

Pistol, 12 rounds loaded, 348 rounds spare.
Shotgun, 8 rounds loaded, 212 rounds spare.
Machine gun, 60 rounds loaded, 540 rounds spare.
Chaingun, 60 rounds loaded, 30 rounds spare.
20 Grenades.

That's a lack of ammo? That's a lack of ammo? Remember, this is only Alpha Labs 1 and that's a lack of ammo?

There was never a lack of ammo in this game and it's no use pretending otherwise because all anyone has to do is load up an old save to see for themselves. There may have been a lack of bothering to search for ammo on the part of some people for sure, but never a lack of ammo.

I hate to have to say this but I just went back to the original engine and id are actually right about flashlight shadows. They do look like ass.

A huge percentage of the time you don't even notice them, but when you do they tend to project out at right-angles from the occluding geometry rather than fall nicely on the background. It would be nice if that could be fixed but it may be a limitation of the stencil shadow tech.

True, I noticed that too. But that's because their whole shadow system svcks, shadows are too damn dark and look like black outlines. There's nothing wrong with them making flashlight shadows larger and much more transparent.

But that's just nitpicking, I don't mind the flashlight shadows missing

Edit: As for the whole ammo issue, no. It's NOT okay to make the game dedicated to casual gamers who svck at shooters.
The EASIER difficulties are there for non-hardcoe gamers. If a random casual gamer can grab a game for the first time and beat it in veteran, the game is way too damn f@cking easy.

The original engine used stencil shadows, andBFG does as well. I dropped in soft shadow mapping awhile back into idtech 4 cdk, which ill drop in into the bfg pc build when the code goes open source.


It is ok if you want to make money, out how ever many copies sold you guys and a few others are the only ones that care about this stuff keep that in mind.


That's marketing, who wants to play a game on easy? You want the casual gamer to feel awesome by letting them play a "harder" difficulty, that's been dumbed down. This type of thing has been going on for years...odds are most games you have played and svcked at will behind the scenes dumb everything down for you. Doom 3 bfg does the same thing just it's a constant dumb down and I guess in your face type of thing.

This isn't up for agruement, as I've said numerous times I've worked at many different game studios, and talked to many designers...this is what sells, no matter how much you try and spin the "it's to easy claim", you are in the very small minority.

That "this is what sells" mentality is alot of why games are getting worse, no matter how good the story or art is.

If hard mode is easy and easy is "children mode," you might as well not put difficulty settings in a game at all, just make it progress like an old RPG, where it starts off easy-as-hell and slowly builds up difficulty.

You and I might think that, but 99% of the world isn't as awesome at playing video games, so to them the difficultly settings are set appropriately.

You're not awesome at reading as well: IF THE GAME IS TOO HARD FOR YOU, PLAY AT "EASY", THIS IS WHAT IT IS FOR!

Casuals and hardcoes need to both be considered. Depending on the game, for example MMOs and other games where micro-transactions are becoming the norm, thats where hardcoes will be driving your game. FPS games with high multiplayer content, thats where hardcoes will be driving your game.

As a developer if can't see the value in both, and as a whole if all developers feel this way then there is clearly a disconnect between them and players. And thats another reason why games are so bad these days. When a developer tells the gamer whats good for them, thats when stuff falls apart. That's backwards my friend

YES, thank you for posting that! That is exactly the truth.

I understand what's "in the market" but what's in the market is mainly bullsh1t. The whole POINT of easier modes is for the casual gamers that can't do better.
Seriously, back in the olde' day you'd pick up a FPS game for the first time, and it would be difficult. Did you sit and cry and whine? No, you played in easy or normal, then keep playing at higher and higher difficulties until you were good. Stupid mainstream gamers these days want to pick up an easy game and call themselves hardcoe just because they own and beat alot of shooters.

The "this is what sells" attitude is what leads to rubbish like Pop/American Idol infesting the airwaves. The world does not need more of that; the world needs people doing a good job of what they themselves do good.

@ jmarshall23 - do you or do you not have a comment to make about my post on the ammo counts above?

Oh I know about the stencil shadows, I've owned Doom3 since forever
What I meant is they look like black outlines because they are usually pitch black, and that's just ridiculous. I'm sure Carmack knew a way to keep the shadows from ever being completely opaque, but it never occured to him that pitch-black shadows look like a$$.

I never said you didn't know .

Stencil shadows by default are 100% black(aka the stencil buffer just marks what pixels should be ignored during the lighting pass), so what happens if you don't draw a pixel? One cheap way you can make them semi transparent is by doing the shadow pass in a fbo with a white image, I did that awhile back as well but it didn't really help with the darkness factor of the game because of the way everything is lit.

Again it's more of a performance issue, and if you take a look at the doom 3 code, remember the exp renderer? At the time he was moving on to shadow mapping which is cheap(er) to do, and you get better results. First thing I'm going to do when the bfg edition is released is put in the shadow mapping code from my idtech 4 cdk code, for those interested you can find it here http://bmgame.googlecode.com/svn/renderer/ , why didn't they add it in the first place? Probably performance issues on the 360(remember shadow maps take up memory, and the 360 only has 512mb of SHARED memory). We can argue that all day and all night but that's more likely the case why they kept stencil shadows.

Oh, no I don't mind stencil shadows, they are fine
It's just the ones from the flashlight that always seem to look pitch black and awful.

But by all means, if you can add shadowmapping that would be awesome, I would love to see that

Please stop responding to this uninformed dolt. (jmarshall) It's obvious he never even played an Xbox 360 (or any console) in his life when he thinks autosaving and lighting are too much for it.

Ye, of course. He is right, so we ignore him - our world will be nice again. BTW: BFG is low end port for poor consoles, without that, what PC has in 2004. This is ridiculous.

I never said autosaving and lighting were to much for the 360, but the 360 is 2004 hardware so you have to think of it as such. Rage worked well on the 360(probably even better then the PC if it had more ram), because the 360 has shared memory between the video card and the application. Normally with virtual texturing you have to read in a chunk of the VT, and pass that to the video card, that requires hd read time, and video blit time. What's the bottleneck there? The BUS...that nasty thing on the motherboard that copies [censored] from one device to ram and from ram to another device. On the 360 since you have shared memory you don't have to copy anything to the video card. On a PC you do, even if you have a integrated graphics card because graphic api's don't really provide native support for that.

My virtual texturing code that I put into idtech 4(http://bmgame.googlecode.com/svn/vt/)(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75DSF3EsjAI&feature=plcp) would run almost 200% faster on the 360, because I wouldn't have to copy the data to the graphics card, it's already in a place the graphics card has access to.

Other 360 games take advantage of the same concept which is how they are able to pull off nice BAKED lightning(non-realtime). Even if you have a night and day cycle you bake most of the info needed for lightning into a texture, and do what you need to do to interate through night and day cycles. You can't compare Unreal3 games, GTA, Skyrim, etc to Doom 3 it's apples and oranges. With Doom 3 you have realtime EVERYTHING so you can't really use that huge benefit of the 360 artitecture so your stuck with the power of the card.

If we could do realtime everything products like autodesk beast(http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast) wouldn't sell for as much as does(60+ grand) . Integrated interchangable graphics card are the way of the future...

That's actually not true. Stencil test doesn't define a colour, so the colour for fragments that fail the test is whatever is currently in the framebuffer. That might be black but it might just as well be neon maroon - stencil test doesn't care.

Doom 3 doesn't do a separate lighting pass. Each surface in the game is comprised of 5 textures - diffuse map, specular map, normal map, light projection and light falloff, and these are combined to get the final result (a sixth texture, a normalization cubemap, was used in the original game but not in BFG edition; BFG edition also calculates specular power with math rather than a texture lookup which produces some subtle differences).

A surface is drawn multiple times for each light that falls on it, with the results blended together and then possibly modulated down if the hardware requires it. So if stencil test fails then all that happens is one of those "multiple times" ends up not contributing to the end result.

I've omitted one thing here which is the initial clear-to-black and depth-only prepass, which is the one case in which failing a stencil test is guaranteed to produce hard black, but that's only for the first light on a surface and that comes from the clear rather than the stencil test; if the clear was to orange then this colour would be orange.

Were arguing semantics, seperate lightning pass as I meant it was its a forward rendering system so each light has to get redraw each time it hits a surface rather than a defered lighting system which doesn't require re-draw, and does lightning entirely in screen space.

In this day in age you don't think of a separate lighting pass as the old geforce 2 series days .


The stencil buffer your right doesn't have color, as I mentioned((aka the stencil buffer just marks what pixels should be ignored during the lighting pass)) it just marks what pixels not to draw to, but I didn't feel like typing the black stuff is because of the depthfill pass(the first pass when rendering the view) is rendering the entire word as black , there is a point were to much tech stuff clutters up the point for people that don't do this for a living.

Correct me if i'm wrong but i recall the original Doom3 pc release has pitch black non transparent shadows whereas the shadows in the 360 version are indeed transparent.

The change from the old shadowing system running mostly on the cpu to the new stencil system(faster but jaggy) like Carmack was talking about and that is widely used in more modern games on consoles doesn't seem to have happend.
The shadows in the BFG 360 version are as sharpedged and defined as ever but this time transparent.
The usual "chainsaw jaggied shadows" as seen in HL-2 or Alan Wake or almost every other game on 360 are absent.

I can't tell anything about the versions for other platforms but it is valid to assume, that Carmack chose a type of shadowing that is suitable for all target platforms at resonable performance/quality levels.
They made their change from pc to multiplatform a big topic in the press so i guess their complete development architecture is designed for this. Rage has been developed simultaniously for PC, 360 and PS3. The same will apply to Doom3 BFG.

As for the quality of the flashlight shadows in Doom3:
Carmack himself said that at some moments in the game he wasn't sure if the rendered flashlight shadows were correct or totally buggy.
It was either his recent keynote or one of the interviews he gave in conjunction with the Oculus VR where he said this.
If i find the link i'll post it but i'm sure i've seen this.

That the flashlight shadows "look like ass" might also have somethng to do with the enhanced brightness of the BFG edition:

Try to forget your technical background for a moment and take the position of a visual designer:
The original Doom3 puts you in a almost completely dark scenario.
It's not the shadows that draw your attention, it's the light shining out of the dark. This is where the player's focus is set to.
Since they've heavily enhanced the brightness in the game, the attention is drawn away from the light to everything else.
The flaws of the old shadowing concept jump directly into your face now.

Imagine switching the light on in a ghost train in an amusemant park. This is a similar situation.

One word to all the "old schoolers" here complaining about the lack of difficulty in modern games:
Although i totally agree as a gamer that modern games are no challenge for me anymore (except for RE 6 on highest ) , jmarshall 23 is right about game companies setting the focus on the casual gamer.
Modern games are extremely cost intensive to produce and the small amount of hardcoe gamers just won't refinance the investments.

As sad as it is, Doom3 was one of the last no-compromise blockbuster games made by a small, dedicated team.
You can't make a game with this big "movielike experience" with a small team.
Movielike experience is what casual gamers want and casual gamers pay the rent for the game companies.
Oldschoolers (including me) are what they are named after: old and outdated.

It's a different generation now that claims the market.


@jmarshall23: Plexi or JCM800?

Stencil shadows were chosen at the time due to hardware restrictions(remember were talking 2004, with everyone on 2000-2002 hardware), hl2 shadows bsp/world shadows were baked and I can't remember if they used shadow mapping or not for models(I can't remember it's been to long), but they probably did.

For the BFG edition more than likely they just ran out of time to get shadow mapping in there, or they ran out of ram on the 360. They maybe had 50-100mb of ram to play with at most.

The original had translucent shadows too.

[img]http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/doom3/transfer/11.jpg[/img]

It's still very traditional stencil shadows in BFG edition, using the GL2.0 glStencilOpSeparate calls instead of vendor extensions but otherwise very much the same code. The difference (which is not showing in my GLIntercept log) would be that shadow volume may be computed in the GPU via transform feedback rather than on the CPU - BFG is updating a whole lot less buffer objects at the start of each frame than the original did, and is using sync objects too which are generally used to help with this kind of thing (not totally necessary though). Otherwise a hell of a lot of the code is surprisingly similar; there are the obvious changes (DSA texture binding, glDrawElementsBaseVertex, GLSL calls instead of ARB programs) but the basic structure is essentially identical.

There are some other surprising non-changes; it still uses glCopyTexImage2D instead of upgrading to FBOs (an upgrade I had expected) and even the idea to accelerate that by using glCopyTexSubImage2D if the viewport size hasn't changed doesn't seem to have occurred to them. That's bizarre, but not really relevant to the discussion on shadows.

Those aren't translucent shadows either technically because there is a additional light source present. One light + shadow = pitch black . I can't speak to anything else because I haven't tried to reverse the bfg edition.

I was referring to the flashlight generated shadow in the Orange Box on 360 which IS NOT BAKED but realtime.
Same effect used in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.
Alan Wake's All American Nightmare also uses the same technique for rendering the flashlight related shadows.

Looks jaggy but the shadowcasting itself is more realistic than in Doom3 which projects shadows that sometime seem to float in the air.

I guess my mind played tricks on me then with the transparent shadows. Must be related to the added brightness.
As i wrote in my other post in the other thread, more light means more detail hits the eye.
Will install the pc original to check closer.

Shifting the workload from CPU to GPU makes sense today to speed up things.
GPUs vastly increased in floating point power over the years compared to CPUs.
The difference wasn't that large in 2004.
I doubt that it would have been possible at all to calculate the shadowing mostly by the GPU back then.

Hmmm...
When taking a closer look at the picture, there's even three light sources.
The flashlight, the light above the door and the imp's fireball....