Unreal 3 Engine

[Intel17]

Licencees get access to ALL the code, experimental or not. It's in the engine.

[oldsk00l]

Originally Posted by Edge

Doom 3's models are between 2,000 and 4,000 polygons each. Backgrounds vary, but I'd guess they peak at around about 20,000 (probably substantially less most of the time). So at most, maybe 30,000 polygons on screen at once in Doom 3. Half-life 2 a bit more, but still not by a huge amount. By comparision, Half-life 1 and Quake 3 used had around 3,000 polygons in a single scene.

Actually, it seems higher polygon counts are more prevalent in console games than PC games, partially due to less effects being used on them. For example, Ferrari F355 Challenge on the Dreamcast (a console using 5-year-old technology) had areas with over 50,000 polygons on the screen, and it ran at 60FPS. Of course, it only used basic textures and specularity maps for almost all of them, no fancy bump mapping, normal mapping, or advanced lighting effects, but it still looked pretty decent. At this point, more polygons aren't really a big deal since the camera is almost always far enough away from the characters and geometry that the extra smoothness isn't very noticable. Also with displacement mapping and offset mapping, you can simulate the effects of millions of polygons in a single surface. Just take a look at Humus's offset mapping demo: had the floor and walls been built strictly from polygons without using any mapping, it would've probably used well over a million polygons in the scene. But, thanks to the surfacing effects, it looked almost exactly the same except it only drew about 10 polygons.

Although there are some rough edges in Doom 3 that could've been smoothed out with more polygons, in-game it looks great but sometimes cutscenes zoom in far enough that you can see a lot of pointy edges on the characters.

Don't forget though, the Hitachi SH4's synergy with the tile rendering PVR2DC chip was grossly under-rated for geometry. They stated 3 million/sec, devs could crank 5 million/sec out, and in some of the final DC games it appears even higher.

The first Shenmue has comparable geometric character detail to most games in 2002-2003...some of '04's. RE:Code Veronica is also a good example of how far they were able to push it. It'd be nice if Sega decided to crap out after Avatar. That would have given the GC a run for its money.

[Zelda_fan]

Originally Posted by Intel17

Doom 3's Engine has DirectX9 level fragment program support. In an email from John Carmack, he told me that HDR is in the engine, but it's only for NV40, and basically in beta and it's not artist friendly.

I hate when people say the D3 engine is a DX7 engine...

well there is a difference if the engine is capeable of DX9 or DX9 based. Doom3 is capeable of DX9 but ID's next gen eninge is DX9 based.

[Intel17]

The ARB2/Cg/EXP paths are DX9 class only.

Remember Doom 3 has different rendering paths.

[f|LtH fR@g]

Originally Posted by f|LtH fR@g

What level is that spider-woman on? Been meaning to play through that level, since I never came close to beating the game. I don't even think I've seen a hellknight

I wasn't kidding, can some1 tell me what levels these guys are on?

[Intel17]

Originally Posted by f|LtH fR@g

I wasn't kidding, can some1 tell me what levels these guys are on?

Alpha Labs 4

[oldsk00l]

and the caverns, I think it was 2, or 3

one of those, shortly before the hellhole.