Carmack on Dread or Grind

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Lilura

Morrowind would need 20 cells, 20 pause-loads. Morrowind has NO interactable doors, no doorways, no ladders, you can't look out of windows (they are always shut because they are just textures). Everything is flat and chambered into a cell. Nothing is seamlessly contiguous.

Nah. Morrowind was amazingly good. Just so good. Not so much the sequels though. As I said, Skyrim was fun in VR, but none of the ES games have come close to MW. It's just sublime.

I respect your opinion though, but it's just that, as is mine.

[Locutus]

This whole discussion can be settled with one argument; Morrowind has CHIM.



....;-)

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Your open world RPG has to manage an ever growing list of things as you explore the world.

Nothing to do with the 3D graphics engine. Gothic is more advanced than Morrowind yet doesn't CTD anywhere near as frequently. And it doesn't employ cells yet features seamless contiguity, far more complex environmental interaction (ladders, interactable placeables that MOVE), much better pathfinding and more variable AND precise movement and positioning of the Avatar in a 3D world-space. And Gothic came out before Morrowind yet is far superior in terms of design and code.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Lilura

Quake actually employs waypoints minimally in its original campaign. Not many enemies patrol along pre-defined paths; they just roam or lie in wait.

Indeed. Which is why they are hapless if they can't reach you. In my QuakeC mod (lost, unless I can find a backup. It was a bit bugged last I remember), I improved enemy behaviour a lot. They are dumb as bricks normally. I added the ability for "teams" inspired by TKG, so enemies like grunts and enforcers can share your position and also the ability to use waypoints to reach you. Again, inspired by TKG. I fixed the Ogre, he now knows how to aim vertically. As does the fiend, when he jumps, making both a lot more dangerous. The Scragg is aware of how slow his projectile is, so he projects your current position forwards in time (using your velocity) by roughly the flight time to your current position and aims at that point instead. So does the enforcer. There were many things like this.

Not true. Most states are reset by moving away by one cell and resting for as little as one hour. And this is how the a grubby engine "cleans itself".

It's called garbage collection and it's a standard technique. Just like lazy loading what you don't need until you need it, you throw stuff away that you don't need rather than hoard it. It should only do this for things that genuinely don't or shouldn't matter, according to the designers. I wouldn't expect to see killed NPC resurrecting (unless random) or quests resetting etc.

Like when a monster runs sideways for half a cell instead of directly charging, which is what it's actually "doing"?

I guess having a buggy moment. I didn't say it wasn't bugged. In fact I said that Bethesda open world games are full of amusing glitches.

Indeed. Thus, CTD. Shoddy software engineering. Shitty design.

But you are talking more of the engine in general, not so much the 3D graphics engine.

Most of the crashes won't be due to 3D rendering. That's the point.

How does Quake deal with moving between cells in a large open world? Oh that's right it doesn't. I am still keen to understand why you think Quake is an infinitely better engine when it simply isn't capable of doing what NetImmerse was designed for any more than NetImmerse can do a fast LAN arena game.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Lilura

Gothic came out before Morrowind yet is far superior in terms of design and code.

Indeed, but Morrowind is the better game. I know that it is, as evidenced by the indisputable fact that I enjoyed it more.

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Lilura

So many Bethesda / Elder Scrolls fans!

Here is my Morrowind Review. I'm sure you'll love it.

Nah I'm good thanks

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TCD

Looks like Dark Age of Camelot was the only (?) game that uses NetImmerse and had multiplayer (massively so though ).

No! I worked on Project Entropia (now "Entropia Universe") which is a MMORPG and it ran on NetImmerse /Gamebryo for several years until they replaced the entire engine to a custom version of CryEnige (2). Mindark then spent a lot of time and effort on removing the limitations of CryEngine to "keep" the features of GameBryo it ran on until that point (basically seamlessly streaming assets/terrain in and out etc).

[LaBodilsen]

Originally Posted by Lilura

So many Bethesda / Elder Scrolls fans!

Here is my Morrowind Review. I'm sure you'll love it.

It sounds more like a rant against the game, than an actual review.

ps. From your quake "review"

Quake's engine pushes around several thousand Gouraud-shaded polygons while maintaining 40 FPS at 640x480 resolution on Pentium 100s with 16 megs of RAM -- insane.

That is insane to believe indeed. It took a Pentium II 300mhz to get even close to that benchmark. A Pentium 200mhz would push about 40fps in 320x200.

[Karlos]

Only polygon models (monsters, pickups, etc) are Gouraud shaded in Quake. They also use affine texturing, which accelerates the calculations a lot (only the weapon view model uses perspective correction). The world is just straight up textured and performs perspective correction once every 16 (or maybe 8, I forget) pixels on screen ans interpolates between them. This is why you get a sort of ripple along the wall textures at sharp angles.

The world is lit by dynamic light mapping, not Gouraud. The way this works is that the engine maintains a cache of active textures for walls. This cache contains the result of blending the basic texture with the baked in lightmap. When your moving light source illuminates a wall, a temporary texture is created. A circular light spot, size calculated based on the distance from the source is calculated at the same resolution as the lightmap (which is something like 1/64th the texture, e.g. 1 lightmap texel is 8x8 texture texels) and summed with the lightmap, and reblended onto the texture to produce a new temporary result. The lightmap is scaled to the texture size with interpolation during blending. And this happens for every visible world surface that each dynamic light source interacts with in a single frame. Now that's impressive. One of the reasons it's affordable is because the game uses MIP mapping. When doing your fresh blend calculations you only need to do them for the MIP level of the visible polygons and only the most nearby ones are at level 0. MIP mapping also accelerates the rendering of far surfaces since you don't stride through the texture in great big steps and waste cache bandwidth.

Try turning it off and see how well the game runs ...

[haps]

Originally Posted by Lilura

Dude, I'm an expert on Morrowind. I know how fast a character can move and how that pushes the cell-loads. And I know how the game shits itself under the slightest amount of pressure.

Bwahahaha!

Arrogance really comes from insecurity, and in the end our feeling that we are bigger than others is really the flip side of our feeling that we are smaller than others.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Lilura

So many Bethesda fans... eew.
Gothic doesn't pause to load cells every few seconds. Everything is seamless. In Gothic you start outside in a city, open a door to a house, walk through the doorway into the house

Actually no.
In Gothic you have 3 parts that you need to wait to load, and load back to main map:
- Old mine.
- New mine
- Sleepers chambers (at the end of the game).

But why you pull this on as an argument at all? This is what I don't understand. Oblivion (as far as I remember) doesn't have any loading screen, let alone Skyrim, and that didn't make them less dull games.
All Elder Scrolls games are like Stannis Baratheon from Got series.. dull.. boring... wanted to be loved.. but they lack charisma.

[Karlos]

All this talk got me nostalgic. I've recovered what I think is the source and assets for my old quake mod, but not the engine port. I think I scrapped that after it went GPL anyway. I would like to find it still because there was a W3D direct version I'd been working on (standard quake 3D transformation and clipping with W3D as just the end rasterizer). I think I'd gotten to the point where it rendered the world geometry, but I don't think it got any further than the BSP, without lightmap.

[Tsak]

Getting back to Dread/Grind, this talk made me realize -on the other hand- how unrealistic is asking from this current engine to become a basis for an open world RPG. I.e. there is a monumental amount of extra work that needs to be done to even get close to that. Memory management in particular is super difficult already, imagine having to also manage a persistent world, monster encounters, dialogue trees, quests, inventory management etc. etc.

[gimbal]

Besides there not being enough time in a human life to do it.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Getting back to Dread/Grind, this talk made me realize -on the other hand- how unrealistic is asking from this current engine to become a basis for an open world RPG. I.e. there is a monumental amount of extra work that needs to be done to even get close to that. Memory management in particular is super difficult already, imagine having to also manage a persistent world, monster encounters, dialogue trees, quests, inventory management etc. etc.

In theory, if you allowed yourself a higher minimum spec, it might be possible. Still an enormous effort though.

[oscar_ates]

I remember on twitter John Carmack replied to KK Altair about the grind and said nobody uses software renderers nowadays because of gpu hardware rendering pipeline stuff

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I remember on twitter John Carmack replied to KK Altair about the grind and said nobody uses software renderers nowadays because of gpu hardware rendering pipeline stuff

I thought that is what kk replied to?