Doom 3 world

Sorry.. I saw this guy posting on gamedev I think before.. peeved me.. but didn't really see it worth while responding at the time.. I should have just put my two cents in over there.

Calm down guys. There's nothing to argue about. Doom3 didn't come with glossmap support natively for reasons that are probably good. I made the shader to add versatility to what people can create. What else is there to talk about? Now go out there a mod stuff!

Well, that was certainly invigorating.

-Glee

I'd say we could clear up these discussions about specularity and glossiness alot if we talked about the mathematical models of lighting, using mathematical terms to express our thoughts, and not use those misinterpretable words like 'shiny', 'highlight' and so on, where everyone has a different concept of what it means.

Sorry for sounding harsh: If it will make it more difficult to take part in the discussion for people with no background in that field, then that's probably a good thing.

True.

It doesn't help that JC called glossmaps to the specularmaps in D3 (and accurately so).

It also doesn't help that you can have several specularity functions for different purposes (off-line renderer, game engine, for instance).

And it certainly doesn't help that specularity in games is ultimately flawed as a proper representation of reality. Like everything else, it's an approximation.

wait i didn't understand your first statement. what did John Carmack say?

and in your second sentence are you referring to how the game engine renders the doom3 models slightly differently to der_ton's viewer and 3dsmax and other renderers?

i would just like to say that crimity is my hero.
that is all.

Talk about overly dramatic. The actual difference that you would notice were doom3 shipped with gloss map surrport would be extremely minuscule compared to the cost it would have on performance. ID knows wht they're doing. They've been making the best game engines around for a good 15 years now, I don't understand how you could possibly think you know better. The point isn't to create a game with every single cool new feature conceivable. The point is to make a fun, great looking game while still having it perform reasonably well on current day technology.

ViPr, do you think Doom3 looks good? Yeah? Then what's you're point? Of course you can make it look better, but it still looks great as it is. The absence of gloss maps does not make the game look bad at all, and 99.9% of the people who play the game will not notice a thing unless you specifically point it out to them.

Heh.. Yeah.. I rarely get angry.. but when I do, I tend to go... overboard... sometimes... Sorry.

This instance just goes to show how useless ranting is.. Vipr is still unreasonably obsessive with his glossmaps.. and continues to post his obsessions in a non-productive manner..

Surely Doom 3 has gloss already? Look at, say, a dead zombie with a bloodstain on his body, and look how shinier it is compared to the surrounding cloth. Is that gloss or not?

I think what you are referring to is the transparency of the specular map.. gloss will spread/shrink the specular highlights, where as transparency simply makes them less visible. The specular transparency is usually controlled based on the brightness of the specular map.

Gloss was not implemented into Doom upon release, but there is a gloss mod by idiom that adds this feature. However, this only works with custom materials since Id did not create their content with intention of using gloss. Like W01f said, They decided to go with the performance boost instead of using this small feature.. as did most other game developers around D3's release.

Idiom's glossmap mod (referred to as a hack by some people, although they're incorrect) works extremely well, and just setting the global specular exponent higher made the game look much better.

Now if someone were to actually take the time, and use Idiom's mod to its fullest by modifying the alpha channel of the diffuse map with seperate gloss specifications, Doom 3 would see a qualitative increase in surface accuracy.

So, I consider Doom 3 to have glossmaps. CryEngine also uses the same method Idiom used for gloss maps.

This method should serve us well, until engines with multiple interaction program support come out, and you can use different programs with different specular exponents and light transport properties per material, such as JC's next renderer and UE3 (both baselined DX9).

Doom3 is a lost cause. the CryEngine is superior and came out before.

Oh dear

Would you like to substantiate that so the good people here don't waste any more of their time?

Oh how very little you know. The stencil algorithm in CryEngine is buggy, flawed and nowhere near as functional as Doom 3's (I mean every character gets only one shadow and it looks pre-computed).

Also the lighting is mostly precomputed.

Stop talking out of your ass, moron.

no, i want these people to waste their time trying to develop for Doom3 so i can watch them become angry bitter frustrated empty shells of people that crack open when i kick them.

How old are you?

Ugh.

This is primarily a Doom 3 modding forum so if FarCry or Half-Life 2 is your engine of choice then one has to wonder why your here, "wasting your time" with Doom 3.

The truth is something here is appealing to you. There has to be some merit to the engine or community. If there wasn't you wouldn't be here.

Maybe it's not so much the engine, but more so the community surrounding Doom 3. There seems to be quite a few exceptionally talented people here and maybe, just maybe, that's why the Doom 3 vs. [insert game here] issue keeps cropping up.

Is that what it is? Is it that the Doom 3 mod community's death can't come soon enough because you need our modelers, texture artists, mappers, and coders? You need to point out Doom 3's faults in order to convince people to make the switch?

It makes sense to me because I'm not pointing out HL2 or FarCry's flaws and it's certainly not because they don't have any. It's because I don't care.

I see promise in Doom 3's engine. That's why I work with it.

I don't care about the flaws. If I find a flaw, I don't bitch about it. Instead, I fix it.

And when I don't know how to fix it I don't announce the problem over and over again in hopes that someone else will fix it. No, I teach myself what I need to know so I can fix it.

Thank you, rich_is_bored, you've summed it up quite nicely.