Author: | Infernal <[email protected]> | |
Date: | 8/4/2004 8:47:31 AM | |
Subject: | RE: My Little DOOM 3 Review... | |
the volumetric shadowing/lighting is far different from the old stuff you saw in q3. Carmack himself has an algorithm named after him called Carmack's reverse in the volumetric shadowing algs where he solved the issue of shadows inverting if you actually step inside one and view out of it (there are a couple problems with his alg, but not many). The volumetric shadows really lend to atmosphere, and if the engine can handle large areas like wfa maps, the ability to hide in shadows will be real. In q3 the static lightmaps never let anyone hide in the shadows well because they were never actually drawn over by the shadow volumes. If you go and interact with alot of the npc characters. If you were in all the highest settings ( or even medium like me) you would notice the bump and specular mapping making everything, including the SKIN on the npc look that much better. Finally about the sounds... it's as simple as starwars and the cheesy fadeout/transitions between scenes that lucas used in the orignals and again in the prequels. It's catering to the fans to use alot of sounds from the older doom games. I do not know how long you played into the game, but it does create a very good sense of fear later on. This game truly gave me the sense of "wtf is going to happen now" with it's story. If you wre so concerned with the lights, perhaps you should have opened your eyes and ears to the storyline and understood that massive power drains is what was causing lines to overload and areas to be on half power or less. Did you ever complain about how fucking dark the ships in aliens were? It's about a story and a mood set. For first person shooters, Doom3 has the best story so far, up there with halflife. Doom3's interfaces were fucking polished for a change. Clean and easy to use. ss, they shut those lights off because of the fact that rendering more than a certain number of lights with the shadow volumes and self shadowing models will really bog down the system. So it's not a cheat in rendering less geometery on it's own, it's keeping the game at playable levels. This does concern me for levels in mods with large areas, for example slab7-wfa. With the limited number of lights, it will be difficult to illuminate and use shadow volumes on each of the 4 balcony paths and the lower ground path, while still lighting the flagroom. |