Doom III Demo (Quakecon 2002)

Gamespy has another article called DOOM 3: Behind the Horror, covering Doom III’s new features. Doom III promises to loosen up first-person gaming from its often amusement-park ride feel. By that I mean that sometimes you feel like you’re in a cart on a track, where you can’t investigate this door because it takes you off the plot, or that light can’t be shot because you need to see the level and the shadows cast from it are pre-rendered. Doom III promises to remove most of those rocket-resistant light bulbs.

“Every light is dynamic and can be turned on and turned off,“ [Tim Willits] explained. After shooting out a few of the lights, noticeably darkening the area, Willits explained one way the new tech will influence gameplay. “The player could blast out too many lights and will have a hard time seeing that monster that’s coming sneaking up behind them.”

Many good design decisions have gone into the game, many taken because it makes the development of their own games easier, but also because id licenses their technology to so many companies. An id engine-based game generally has a mod/map-making community as well. “[W]e decided we wanted to make things simple on ourselves and also simpler for the people out there who play our games and also modify them once they’re released.”

To this end, even the HUD graphics overlays that form the user’s controls and interaction with a world have been generalized. “[T]he new GUI system — it’s an HTML-like system that will both drive features in-game, as well as handle the game’s menus” is very flexible and even allows “picture-in- picture effect[s]”, pulling rendered views from the game engine. Presumably the in-game, perspective-rendered videos that Graeme Devine added to Team Arena will also be available in the Doom III engine.

With the new fantastic, dynamic-lighting system in the engine, id can finally step up the interactivity of the rest of the physics engine, since movable objects now won’t cost any more to render than static ones (outside of calculating trajectories).

“First, Tim showed the physics system by shooting some boxes off a shelf — the boxes would react differently depending on where they were shot. Next, Tim shot the side of a lighting fixture, causing it to swing back and forth, and subsequently cast moving shadows on the zombie below.”

For those actually creating maps and mods, id has a welcome change that has been mentioned here before: no compile times and an in-game editor right out of the box: “you can just run the game, bring the console down, type ‘editor’, and up pops the editor we use to build all the worlds.” Any user can modify the levels, watching the changes happen in real-time. Robert Duffy demonstrated this: “lights were placed and moved around the level, with the appropriate reactions in the environment”. To be fair, Doom isn’t the first game to do this. The Serious Engine by Croteam, which looks great in its own right, had real-time 3-D level editing first, at least packaged as a single tool. Of course, they don’t support dynamic lighting everywhere, but the editor worked very smoothly in exactly this fashion.

Unlike most other id games, the Doom III engine contains a powerful, flexible scripting system, which should quiet many mod and map making critics who complain that they usually only put in a couple of event triggers that can’t even be combined (like putting a pendulum on a rotating disk, for example). Models are as much a part of the scene as any environment, character or world object, as they’re all treated the same now. This homogeneity in the “real-time lighting simplifies things with the scripting”. There’s no special cases for models anymore, so, “[i]nstead of having to define lighting for scripted events, the shadows cast off the moving parts are all created naturally in real-time”. Similarly, the object’s collision interacts autmotically with other game objects without any work from the designer. In a demo “involving a large mechanical loading arm”, scripter Matt Hooper:

“was able to shoot through the holes of the arm, and by zooming through, we could see the bullet holes way off behind the arm. So even though the arm was part of a scripted event, and the spin could be adjusted so the holes could have ended up in any position, the engine still treats it just the way you’d expect in the real world — if there’s a hole, you can shoot through it.”

With the Doom Engine, there’s not nearly as many tricks needed by level designers any more. It does what the real world does; it just works. The sound system is also very interactive, emphasizing that they want to “make it easy for people with studio background to add sound to the world”. The sounds interact with moving objects as well, dimming with distance and muffling from interference:

“[S]peakers could also be attached to scripted events, such as the spinning id logo in the beginning of the DOOM 3 demo. By attaching a virtual speaker to one side of the logo, you’d be able to “hear” the logo spinning as well as seeing it.”

Coming to a PC near you in Spring 2003.