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The Doom 3 engine is a computer game engine developed by id Software and first used in the PC game Doom 3. The engine was designed by John Carmack, who also created previous engines such as those for Doom and Quake, which are also generally recognized as marking significant advances in the field.
History
The Doom 3 engine began as an enhancement to the Quake 3 engine. Originally it was planned to be a complete rewrite of the engine's renderer, while still retaining other subsystems, such as file access, and memory management. After the new renderer was functional, however, the decision was made to switch from C to the C++ programming language, necessitating a complete restructuring and rewrite of the rest of the engine; the Doom 3 engine today contains very little code from the Quake 3 engine.
At the time of Doom 3's release, the hardware requirements to use the engine to its fullest potential were criticised by some as excessive.
Features
The Doom 3 engine added several new features absent in the Quake III engine that preceded it. These included bump mapping, normal mapping, and specular highlighting. More features were added in the development of later games. However, in future games using the Doom 3 engine, new features were added or are planned to be added soon.
The primary innovation of the Doom 3 engine was its use of entirely dynamic per-pixel lighting. Whereas previously, 3D engines had relied primarily on precalculated lighting or lightmaps, and while dynamic effects had been available before, the effect merely changed the brightness on an entire object. The approach used in Doom 3 permitted more realistic lighting and shadows than had previously been seen in PC games. *
MegaTexture rendering technology
Rewritten rendering code (Direct3D support and fixed self-shadowing problem) and add the ClipMapping and Unique texturing by large terrain. The original version of the Doom 3 engine was criticized for its perceived inability to handle large outdoor areas. The MegaTexture technology addresses this issue by introducing a means to create expansive outdoor scenes. By painting a single massive texture (32,000×32,000 pixels) covering the entire polygon map and highly detailed terrain, the desired effects can be achieved. The MegaTexture can also store physical information about the terrain such as the amount of traction in certain areas or indicate what sound effect should be played when walking over specific parts of the map. i.e. walking on rock will sound different from walking on grass. * It is expected that this will result in a considerably more detailed scene than the majority of existing technologies, using tiled textures, allow. and add the terrain creation tool called "MegaGen".Further extension technology
The shadows of the original Doom 3 engine had one major flaw; their edges were all sharply defined. Future games built on this engine will feature true soft shadows. This is unlike the "fake" soft-shadows found in other engines which blur the edge of the shadows — instead, it will use shading calculated correctly by deriving the penumbra of the shadow from the distance from the occluder and the light.Newer versions of the engine also feature a number of other increasingly common graphical effects such as high dynamic range rendering and parallax mapping.
Techniques used in the Doom 3 engine
Doom 3 Engine Games
Games powered by the original Doom 3 engine
Games powered by the MegaTexture technology
Games powered by the further extension technology
- A game by id Software based on new intellectual property — id Software
- A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein — Raven Software
References
- CNN - Life after "Doom"
- Gamespy article from which some information on MegaTexture was derived
- Article detailing some features of the Doom 3 engine
External links
"Doom 3 engine"