Can't wait for JK4

[StaffMaster]

I just finished playing the second beta release for Doom 3 and to say im amazed would be a huge understatement.

 

U gotta give it to ID and Mr. Carmack.....they are the goods.

 

Which got me to thinking that the next release in the JK series ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY will knock our socks off with an enhanced Doom 3 engine.

 

The thought of the render quality realtime graphics in combination with a saber duel with me as Vader on bespin just makes me drool to even think about it.

[kingdomwinds]

where can i sign up for the doom 3 beta? Games would surely look awesome if they used the doom3 engine.

[Gabrobot]

Well, the supposed new beta is actually the old "alpha" (wasn't even an alpha) with some custom levels. The engine wasn't even finished at that time...of course this means that the finished engine will look much better than what's in the "alpha" or "beta".

 

Oh, and due to the "beta"/"alpha" illegality, you shouldn't ask for it...just wait a couple months or so, and Doom 3 will be released, and you can legally purchase it. (Or download a legal demo of it which is certain to be released)

[StaffMaster]

i hear ya but in reality John provided some of the maps for this beta pack.

 

he's old school and understands true beta testing goes on with the gaming public at large.

 

of course its nothing they will officially announce but instead let it out the back door for its stroll around the neighborhood.

 

they check in on it to see what kind of fleas it has contracted and act accordingly.

 

no biggie cus I dont know a soul that is not eager to fork out whatever amount it will retail for cus it will be well worth every penny.

[Lightsaberboy]

...that is of course assuming that there will be a jk4.

[StaffMaster]

up until the day good ol george becomes one with the force there will be lucasarts products based on SW.

 

JediMaster Moneywhore:D

[Kurgan]

Give it another 1-2 years and you'll see another Jedi game (my hunch).

 

If you go with the Doom3 engine add another 1-1 1/2 years to that estimate.

 

No official word on a sequel or expansion, so we're all just hoping right now. ; )

 

Though personally I can wait. Let JA get established first. Modders are only scratching the surface of what can be done with the engine.

 

Might as well get the most out of it before we have to move on and learn a whole new engine (that also requires a whole new computer upgrade)!

 

 

PS: He's right about the illegally leaked Doom3 early builds. The finished product won't be the same as those, and until it comes out, I wouldn't jump to any hasty conclusions about it and its possible role in the JK saga. There are plenty of design hurdles to using a brand new engine in a series like this, so just because it's the "newest thing" doesn't mean it will necessarily be an improvement or that it will be easy.

 

Remember that brilliant as Carmack and Co. is, they make their engines very generic. The third party developers who liscense them out have to do the grunt work to get other features working (stuff we want like sabers, force powers, huge environments, etc).

 

And their products aren't bug free either (that's a hopeless dream) they have to constantly tweak and patch their products just like everybody else.

[Andy867]

I personally would NOT want to see JK4 on the Doom3 Engine since last I heard, the multiplayer would only be able to support 4, count it, 4 people TOTAL, so CTF, TDM and most others could be ruled out. I'd prefer to see JK4 or whatever it will be on like the FarCry or UT2k4-based engine, which allows for far more people than just 4.

[Gabrobot]

Originally posted by Andy867

I personally would NOT want to see JK4 on the Doom3 Engine since last I heard, the multiplayer would only be able to support 4, count it, 4 people TOTAL, so CTF, TDM and most others could be ruled out. I'd prefer to see JK4 or whatever it will be on like the FarCry or UT2k4-based engine, which allows for far more people than just 4.

 

That's a design decision by id Software for Doom 3 as a game itself. They have said before that modders can change the number of players to whatever they want, so it doesn't even require changing anything in the engine. The only limit of the peer-to-peer method, that the Doom 3 engine uses, is that everyone has to join at the same time. Instead, people will go to id.net (like battle.net), or in the case of a JK game some other .net, and join up with other players and decide on rules and stuff and then start the game...this could actually help, considering the wide variety of player preferences...

[StaffMaster]

yeah I think it falls somewhere under what Kurgan said about third party devs doing the ground work and rolling out the really powerful capabilities of the engine.

 

 

I cant say I have too impressed with either the Far Cry or Unreal engines.

 

Far Cry runs like crap and unreal is just one big high res texture party while the gameplay and game atmosphere suks bigtime.

[JDKnite188]

I wouldn't mind waiting 2 years for JK4 if it was being made with the Doom 3 engine. Raven has been making progress in the JK series. JA maps have been a definite improvement from those of JO. With maybe some more weapons and NPCs, there is a lot of potential.

 

Sabers with Doom 3? OMG YES. Siege (another great thing that can be enhanced in the next game) with Doom 3? OMG HELL YES.

[Kurgan]

Yeah the whole deal is that just because it uses the Doom3 engine doesn't mean it will PLAY like Doom3.

 

Doom3 is designed to be a Thief-esque "sneak around in the dark and scare people" shooter with 4 players or coop.

 

So making a game on the Doom3 engine doesn't have to be the same in terms of player limits or atmosphere, anymore than JA had to be exactly like Q3 (which if you recall had no Single Player... unless you count 6 bot matches as "single player"). And we even had a game like American McGee's Alice on the Q3 engine that was solely a third person platformer experience (in third person no less).

 

The only benefit that having the Doom3 engine would be for the JK series is that the graphics would be phenomenally better (theoretically, assuming they take the necessary time and gain the necessary skills to take advantage of this) than what you see now in the Q3 engine. Of course that also means a longer development cycle (which means more waiting for us) and a more powerful computer to get decent performance AND take advantage of the better visuals (of course by the time that Doom3 actually comes out those types of systems will be more affordable in theory).

 

They could do "hide in the dark" missions for JK4, but that's totally out of character for the series anyway. It wouldn't be WRONG or impossible to do, just out of character.

 

And really this sort of thing was done in the AvP games, so it's not anything new, just the hype behind it and the fact that it's ID, with their reputation for popular FPS engines.

 

The whole "sneaking around" gameplay actually would be more apt for a game like Republic Commando, but that will likely come out before Doom3 and is being done on a build of the Unreal Engine.

 

 

About Betas (again don't ask where to get them if they're not official please): Isn't Carmack a big fish at ID Software? If he wanted to do a PUBLIC BETA TEST why wouldn't he just DO THAT like he did with Q3 (remember "Q3 test"?) rather than relying on some underhanded guys to "leak out" first an alpha, then a beta and never acknowledge it (then waste time and money having Activision lawyers pretend to track down/punish those responsible?)

 

 

Maybe the alpha/betas were a publicity stunt, but I find it easier to believe it was just a matter of some fanboys stealing an early version of a highly anticipated game (either through incompetance or to gain fame in the warez community).

 

Just like the the JA scandal, I wouldn't base your decisions about the game on any illegally leaked early editions of the game. You'll just get your hopes artificially up/down based on unfinished and not-for-public-consumption features and performance. That's the whole reason they get pissed when stuff like this is leaked.

 

Wait for a playable Demo or an OFFICIAL public test of Doom3 (or any new game), before you judge it.

 

Public tests (multiplayer) can be good for testing large numbers of players on a variety of internet connections. Every game company has their own internal beta testers, but testing the game over a LAN or in heavily controlled conditions doesn't always give you all the possibilities that a widespread internet test will.

 

In terms of gameplay considerations, the test would be less worthwhile because what are you going to do, pay some people to field thousands or tens of thousands of whiney emails from every person with a gameplay idea? Look at all the arguments we have here over what constitutes "fun/balanced/realistic saber combat." Just imagine if you had to choose design considerations (or risk the wrath of the fans) based on public opinion polls rather than what works? Yikes!

[Kurgan]

To add one more thing, is this the same PEER TO PEER system that games like Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith used?

 

In those cases you couldn't have dedicated servers (although that was perhaps mostly due in part to LucasArt's fear that fans would somehow "take control of star wars" or something, the same reason they didn't do it with X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter), plus it meant big games were hard to do outside of a LAN.

 

It did cut down on the LPB's/HPB's disparity though. The game was only as fast as the slowest player.

 

In JK1/MotS you had much higher pings than in a client/server game like Q3, plus you could move around during lag but other players would appear to be frozen or warp around. It favored smaller games in general.

 

Anyway, I'm not a networking genius, so I could be wrong, but it sounds to me like that's still a weakness which favors slower connections and smaller games (though I suppose a third party developer could just rip out the network code and insert their own for bigger games and user-created dedicated servers again if it isn't there already).

[Master William]

you know Kurgan, those paragraphs pay off.

[Prime]

Originally posted by StaffMaster

he's old school and understands true beta testing goes on with the gaming public at large.

[Gabrobot]

Well, I'm not entirely sure (I don't know much about network stuff), but I would assume that John Carmack knows what he's doing, and it seems id is going for online play quite a bit with their id.net. Also, I noticed that "you get a dedicated server resource (because some people don't want to run servers, they have marginal bandwidth)". That may help.

 

One of the reasons Doom 3 uses peer to peer, is because of the better collision detection. The collision detection doesn't use a cycle method like other games. The cycle method will miss collisions that happen in between cycles, and so you get imperfect collision detection (and is the reason for sabers going through each other in JA). Doom 3's collision detection, on the other hand, calculates the paths of objects so it doesn't have to rely on checking if two objects are overlapping or not...instead, it already knows when and where it'll happen. This could be very good for saber fighting.

 

As for system requirements, remember that Doom 3 was once used to show off the abilities of the Geforce 3...Doom 3 doesn't use anything newer than that technology, really. Having a fast system will certainly help to run everything really high, but John Carmack has said that he expects the minimum system requirements to be: 1Ghz CPU, 256MB of RAM, GeForce 1 / Radeon 7xxx level graphics card. Remember that Doom 3 runs on the Xbox with the only graphical downgrade being lower res textures and levels being cut up (like the Xbox versions of JA and JKII, which as it seems VV wanted to do so they could prove to id that they were worthy of doing a Xbox version of Doom 3) due to the Xbox's limited memory.

 

As for why should the Doom 3 engine be used? Well, besides the possible Raven factor, the Doom 3 engine offers more than just pretty shadows and bump mapping. Doom 3 is capable of CGI level animation (and in fact an animator who worked on Antz and Shrek quit his job in favor of working on Doom 3 at id). Because of this you can have whatever facial expressions you want...it's done just like CGI movies (id uses Maya, but the text nature of Doom 3's animation files means that plugin's are easily made for other 3d programs...very good for modders). Doom 3 is better for cinematic Star Wars cutscenes than the Unreal engine, and while the Source engine might be as good with animations, it's more limited with what programs you can use, and the Source engine's other features aren't even as good as the Unreal engine technology.

 

Doom 3 really is overall the best engine for another JK game, and even has the best lighting technology to top it off.

[Kurgan]

I should have stated this right off the bat, but we really can't allow discussion that involve illegal beta's/alpha's of commercial games.

 

I'm sorry I missed that in the thread starter's post, but it's really against the rules and I apologize for not locking the topic sooner.

 

This is really off topic anyway. If people want to discuss a theoretical JK4, probably the Swamp is a better place and leave off any discussion of leaked releases.

 

 

Thanks.