That’s my analogy of the Doom 3 engine. The sooner it’s gone the better in my eyes. Let’s face it, you cannot argue that it feels like a fortnight-old drowned corpse compared to the lovably flawed Quake III engine or the hyperspeed Unreal 2003/4 engine. It’s difficult to describe how the engine feels, especially so to those who aren’t well aquainted with games, but I shall try anyway. Quake III’s engine was at its very best in Quake III. The game was intensely fast and designed in such a way as to fully take advantage of this - Quake III was a no-frills plug ‘n’ pray multiplayer fragfest - even the singleplayer aspect of the game was a faux-multiplayer. Then along came Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. These games took the Quake III engine and used it for themselves with a few modifications. Of course, some of the Q3 bugs weren’t ironed out, such as the infamous ‘negative acceleration’ caused by a multitude of factors, but the game were for the most part, polished. Play either of the two now and they are lightweight for both modern and aging PCs and manage to prove that the Q3 engine is suitable for both OMGQUAKEFRAGZ and sophisticated teamplay, objective-based play.
Enter the morbidly obese, hulking behemoth named Doom 3. Allow me to paint a picture for you here to better appreciate the differences between the two engines. Quake III is like a Swedish supermodel with mild haletosis and a lazy eye; she still looks pretty damn good and everything works as it should under the hood. Doom 3 on the other hand is Monkey Island II’s Governor Phatt; a bed-ridden creature who relies on constant sustenance fed to them through tubes, barely able to breath under the tremendous weight of an eighteen wheel lorry crushing down on them, which in fact is its stomach. It’s an immobilised funeral in bed, where the heart could cease to function at any second and nobody would know until the body began to decompose (or it went off its appetite) and let’s not forget the fact that it probably hasn’t seen it’s penis since it first lay down in that bed. Can you see what I’m getting at here? Ok, I’m exaggerating a little here, but after all that is my technique as a writer-cum-anything-else-I-want. The point I’m trying to make is that when you play a Quake III engined game, it is responsive, pacey and how a First Person Shooter should feel. When you play a Doom 3 engined game you immediately notice the lack of responsiveness, the dampened pace and lethargy. This isn’t just in Doom 3 either, I gave up trying with Quake IV thanks to the engine it ran off.
Another downright infuriating flaw of the Doom 3 engine is the cvar lock. So many of the engine’s cvars are capped or locked at a certain value that it makes it nigh on impossible for tweakers to have their way with the game. Q3, RTCW and ET were tweaker’s paradises, remember the days of Q3 where one of the hottest gamers had a mouse sensitivity of 30 whilst others went down as low as 0.1? On top of that, the only FPS cap in Quake III’s engine was the fastest it could manage without crashing (333fps). That means you could set your monitor’s refresh rate to 100Hz, com_maxfps 100 and cl_maxpackets 100 in your config and have a damn smooth game. Doom 3’s engine is limited to a measly 60fps and it disappoints me to say that for, supposedly, the most advanced graphics engine in the world, I can play Quake IV at a constant 60fps without a flicker to 59fps at damn high settings to. It’s about time that these limitations were lifted.
These are the reasons I refuse to get excited about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It looks like an MTV Mash-Up between ET, Battlefield 2142 and Quake II. Brilliant, I can’t wait to fight off the Strogg as a Covert Ops on mp_Kuwait, or fly my A10 Tankbuster over the Strogg spawn on sw_Hellmand - do me a favour. The only silver lining to the grey stormcloud that has been named ET:QW is that it will be the last id Software affiliated game to run the Doom 3 engine. That’s right, Carmack and Hollenshead said that ET:QW will be the last Doom 3 engined game they make before focusing completely on a new “in-house” technology featuring DirectX 10. So it looks like 2008 will see the release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2 built for Vista using Direct X 10’s API. Now that DOES excite me slightly. Yes, I know that ET:QW will run off a “heavily modified” Doom 3 engine with ultra shader or whatever the hell it’s called, but face it - you can’t polish a turd guys. As far as I’m concerned, ET:QW will be little more than a place to keep contacts for me and burn time. RtCW2 is where I’ll be - and that is a promise.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m fully aware that this new engine that RTCW2 will run off could be just as bulky and lethargic as Doom 3’s, but look at it this way, people learn from their mistakes. There are a lot of well-known and highly respected gamers whose decisions can make a difference, not to mention the millions of gamers worldwide who could well turn up their noses at the ET:QW offering. There have been many complaints about the Doom 3 engine, and for sure mine is not the first and nor will it be the last and a great many have been for the same reasons I have given, lethargy, unresponsiveness and a generally ‘bloated’ feel. Maybe we are just purists who are happy with a custom cfg file and CRT monitor, but let’s not forget that those very purists are the ones who make QuakeCon possible each year and it’s also those purists that ensure Enemy Territory is still alive a good three years after it’s release and that ensured RtCW stayed alive for as long as it did. I’m not expecting perfection from RtCW2, but something that is good enough to keep the current RtCW/ET communities together would be damn fine enough for me. Engines are one thing we can all rant about, but those we game with are just as important.
Enter the morbidly obese, hulking behemoth named Doom 3. Allow me to paint a picture for you here to better appreciate the differences between the two engines. Quake III is like a Swedish supermodel with mild haletosis and a lazy eye; she still looks pretty damn good and everything works as it should under the hood. Doom 3 on the other hand is Monkey Island II’s Governor Phatt; a bed-ridden creature who relies on constant sustenance fed to them through tubes, barely able to breath under the tremendous weight of an eighteen wheel lorry crushing down on them, which in fact is its stomach. It’s an immobilised funeral in bed, where the heart could cease to function at any second and nobody would know until the body began to decompose (or it went off its appetite) and let’s not forget the fact that it probably hasn’t seen it’s penis since it first lay down in that bed. Can you see what I’m getting at here? Ok, I’m exaggerating a little here, but after all that is my technique as a writer-cum-anything-else-I-want. The point I’m trying to make is that when you play a Quake III engined game, it is responsive, pacey and how a First Person Shooter should feel. When you play a Doom 3 engined game you immediately notice the lack of responsiveness, the dampened pace and lethargy. This isn’t just in Doom 3 either, I gave up trying with Quake IV thanks to the engine it ran off.
Another downright infuriating flaw of the Doom 3 engine is the cvar lock. So many of the engine’s cvars are capped or locked at a certain value that it makes it nigh on impossible for tweakers to have their way with the game. Q3, RTCW and ET were tweaker’s paradises, remember the days of Q3 where one of the hottest gamers had a mouse sensitivity of 30 whilst others went down as low as 0.1? On top of that, the only FPS cap in Quake III’s engine was the fastest it could manage without crashing (333fps). That means you could set your monitor’s refresh rate to 100Hz, com_maxfps 100 and cl_maxpackets 100 in your config and have a damn smooth game. Doom 3’s engine is limited to a measly 60fps and it disappoints me to say that for, supposedly, the most advanced graphics engine in the world, I can play Quake IV at a constant 60fps without a flicker to 59fps at damn high settings to. It’s about time that these limitations were lifted.
These are the reasons I refuse to get excited about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It looks like an MTV Mash-Up between ET, Battlefield 2142 and Quake II. Brilliant, I can’t wait to fight off the Strogg as a Covert Ops on mp_Kuwait, or fly my A10 Tankbuster over the Strogg spawn on sw_Hellmand - do me a favour. The only silver lining to the grey stormcloud that has been named ET:QW is that it will be the last id Software affiliated game to run the Doom 3 engine. That’s right, Carmack and Hollenshead said that ET:QW will be the last Doom 3 engined game they make before focusing completely on a new “in-house” technology featuring DirectX 10. So it looks like 2008 will see the release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2 built for Vista using Direct X 10’s API. Now that DOES excite me slightly. Yes, I know that ET:QW will run off a “heavily modified” Doom 3 engine with ultra shader or whatever the hell it’s called, but face it - you can’t polish a turd guys. As far as I’m concerned, ET:QW will be little more than a place to keep contacts for me and burn time. RtCW2 is where I’ll be - and that is a promise.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m fully aware that this new engine that RTCW2 will run off could be just as bulky and lethargic as Doom 3’s, but look at it this way, people learn from their mistakes. There are a lot of well-known and highly respected gamers whose decisions can make a difference, not to mention the millions of gamers worldwide who could well turn up their noses at the ET:QW offering. There have been many complaints about the Doom 3 engine, and for sure mine is not the first and nor will it be the last and a great many have been for the same reasons I have given, lethargy, unresponsiveness and a generally ‘bloated’ feel. Maybe we are just purists who are happy with a custom cfg file and CRT monitor, but let’s not forget that those very purists are the ones who make QuakeCon possible each year and it’s also those purists that ensure Enemy Territory is still alive a good three years after it’s release and that ensured RtCW stayed alive for as long as it did. I’m not expecting perfection from RtCW2, but something that is good enough to keep the current RtCW/ET communities together would be damn fine enough for me. Engines are one thing we can all rant about, but those we game with are just as important.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the latest Quake IV beta release as mentioned here allows for adjustable FPS above the previous cap at 60. Whether this option is included in ET:QW remains to be seen (please correct me if that's an oversight) so I really can't see how such firm judgement's can be made about a game that is yet to be given a wide release. You may feel that the game engine itself is lacklustre compared to it's predecessors, but who knows it could work wonderfully well for ET:QW. Wishful thinking? Probably :P
EDIT: read it again:
Haha this has to be the stupidest crossfire column ever:) good job
"I dont like this new thing and I dont have a clue about how it will turn out, so il write about it" <-- your a smart kid:)!
Really professional of Crossfire to publish this. This is just bullshit, you don’t know anything about how etqw will be and still you try to kill the game. You even talk bullshit about rtcw2, a game we know 0 about. How more stupid can this get? Reminds me of all the cs kids when 1.6 came, or 1.5 for that sake, or any new version. “Oh NOES SOMETHING NEW, WE MUST KILL IT BEFORE ANYONE CAN TEST IT AND FIND OUT IF ITS ANYGOOD!!!! BECAUSE I THINK IT SUCK, CUZ IM ZO ZMART”
Wait, test and then judge please… go quality columns.
However, having played QW at E3 and Qcon I dont share those fears at all, and cant wait for it to come out!
I don't think a turd is the right example, but I do know what you mean, and I disagree. To stick with your example, you CAN polish a turd, not entirely, but still a good bit.
I have to agree with that, they gave us ET, the least we can do is not whine about the game they're gonna give us this time. Who know, maybe they found a way to polish the turd after all?
Vindicator Over & Out
Anyways, fun irc quote:
(@RR2|work) I just giggle every time I see crossfire peeps say omg etqw will suck et r0x0rz
(@RR2|work) They did omg et sucks rtcw r0x0rs for the first two years of et's lifespan
This column is not dedicated to bashing ET:QW, it's a column where I raised my concerns over the game. I know there are many people out there who share my fears that a game like ET:QW could possibly turn out badly, personally, I don't wish for this to happen at all, in fact I'd love ET:QW to be better than ET because that's how a sequel SHOULD be. What I'm trying (and failing to do by the looks of things) is get across the point that the D3 engine is not as widely tweakable as the Q3 engine is. I will play Q4 with the 1.4 beta patch to see what changes have been made, but my point remains valid at the time of writing.
Seeing as this is written before the masses have had their chance to play ET:QW on their own PCs, it is merely a speculatory column and should be treated as such. Whilst I don't mind criticism in the slightest and am in no way trying to indoctrinate anyone into my views, I find your responses completely appalling and a prime example of parts of the ET community that are really lacklustre. Swearing on an internet website is a sign of weak intellect, it doesn't get your point across anymore efficaciously than it would if you omitted the demotics.
Use 120 hz on your monitor and you will have a damn smooth game indeed. Using 100fps - 100hz is a pain in the ass as you can see your monitor draw images, and the whole picture gets distorted.
Nice writeup. You even had some of your own ideas :P
tired of waiting..
so wont game on xp and vista differ?
on vista game will be using directx10
and on xp game will be using directx9
am i thinking correctly?
125 fps / 100hz
and is meant to be hell smoother :)
"Var" part in CVar stands for variable, which means this CAN be changed. Even if game doesn't allow you to change it, it doesn't mean that engine restricts that. If it would restrict it, it would be called const, not var.
FPS cap in 1.4 point release (Q4) can be changed, but 95% of players can't see the difference.
One could whine about performance of this engine, that's true, but besides that it's very good. New hitboxes, nice movement possibilities and almost everything tweakable (even tho many changes are forbidden by games like Q4/D3). I'd say it's just as good as Q3 engine, only that it's far more advanced technology.
I am also really sceptical about ET:qw, cus if SD wasnt involved with the development of the rtcw multiplayer u cant really say that they invented 2 wheel with ET. When i see ET:qw trailers i see: low fps, mass spam, vehicles (what really sux) but the positive things are: support for the game, possible hype which makes it attractive for lans, ability to configure the game so that it can be played competetively.
the second best option would be to limit fps to the same value that is your display refresh rate (and disabling flipping in opengl games?)