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Which do you like better?
Poll: Which do you like better?
(Vote): Doom 3
(Vote): Half-Life
(Vote): another similar game (explain
I played the Doom 3 demo yesterday (mostly because it runs on Linux) and I have to say it's frightening as hell. The atmosphere is so thick, you really get the impression of being in that space station fighting for your life. The gamespot review is pretty negative saying that the game is too dark and predictable. I'd say that the game does exactly what it intends to do. It doesn't have revolutionary gameplay, it doesn't require brains, gameplay wise it's just run and shoot, but it looks absolutely amazing (even over 2 years after the release) and it scares you so much you feel like cowering in the corner of that damn Mars base and cry for help.
Half-Life 2 works differently. I was impressed by the graphics too, and the overall realism, and things like the gravity gun bring something to the gameplay. I also liked the passages where you're on a vehicle and trying to get from one base of amazingly animated npcs to the other. Still, right now I feel that Doom 3 is the game for me.
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Belgium8305 Posts
I've played and finished both and I really think Half-Life 2 is a far better game.
I'm sure playing the Doom3 demo for a while is fun, but try playing it hours on end. It's dark all the time and after a while you just KNOW where the enemies are gonna appear - always at the most inconvenient spot. The graphics are amazing though and overall I had fun playing it.
Half Life 2, on the other hand, has a much nicer atmosphere in my opinion. Cool, crisp graphics and a far superior singleplayer experience - the scripted events throughout the game really make it an immersive experience. The parts where you get to control a boat or a vehicle, and all of the fun you can have with the (upgraded) gravity gun... I just had way more fun with this game.
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Doom3 is a great technology demo. The d3 engine is far superior to the HL2 engine, and they make pretty good use of their technology with the various lighting effects and so forth. I feel gamespot is spot on with their review of the game. It is boring as hell, very predictable, very scripted, and very easy. There is absolutely no thinking to be done. You act like thats a good thing because that was their goal in designing it. I say just because you set the bar low doesnt mean you deserve accolades for meeting your goals. Quake4 is a much better showcase of d3 technology while making the fighting a little more varied and interesting, albeit still very linear.
HL2 is ultimately the better game and far more engrossing. Their choices in level design and the differences in how the engine renders scenes make up for any technological deficits it has against the d3 engine, and therefore even graphics wise I'd say it basically trumps d3.
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
On March 10 2007 07:48 NewbSaibot wrote:
The d3 engine is far superior to the HL2 engine.
Excuse me, but how did you establish that? Source engine has rich physics, to the extent of possibility of having physics-based puzzles, while d3's physics are obviously made as an afterthought and are very bland in comparison. There are impressive large spaces, while in d3 everything is cramped and the "outside" parts look pathetic and are slow. There are vehicles in Source, there is very nice looking water, there is HDR, while ONLY d3's effect that uses even PS 2.0 abilities is the heat haze. There is complex facial animation and lip sync, there is at least some kind of AI in Half-Life... Doom has only the overused and ugly stencil shadows to boast of, which are only useable indoors, and are so inefficient that they had to have like 6 triangles limit for their characters heads. Not only that, they cheat with them - did you ever look closely on the "shadows" which the flashlight produces?..
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First of all:
doom3 has a very thought out, solid graphics engine.
beyond that, doom3 has little to offer. the game itself may be compelling, but the engine, other than the graphics, is behind at least a generation.
hl2 also has a very thought out graphics engine, however, they focused on different things.
while john carmack foresaw the use of dynamic, interactive lighting and shadowing (which NOW really hits the industry with unreal engine 3 and crysis), gabe newell wanted his screens to look pretty. source cannot offer extensive dynamic shadowing, which in turn, demands that they static lighting almost all the time. and THIS causes efforts made in the multi-texturing with normal maps pretty ... invane.
you can see that the characters are normal-mapped in some places, but most of the time you hardly see a difference between normal mapping and just diffuse mapping.
long story short:
hl2 delivers great images
d3 delivers great DYNAMIC images
both have their applications (prey made EXCELLENT use of the dynamic lighting and shadowing), but both have their downsides.
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:
There are impressive large spaces, while in d3 everything is cramped and the "outside" parts look pathetic and are slow.
this is not true at all.
large outdoor maps in source with hdr enabled don't use up less cpu power than similar large designed open levels in d3 engine games (once again its time to mention prey).
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:
There are vehicles in Source, there is very nice looking water, there is HDR, while ONLY d3's effect that uses even PS 2.0 abilities is the heat haze.
while it's true that d3 doesn't support vehicles now, they will be implemented in enemy territory: quake wars. and before you start crying ... hdr was added to hl2 also at a later time.
the water:
there are user created water shaders (not that complex) that are visually on par with hl2 water visuals. however, they lack in the vertex shader supporting where the water interacts with objects and the map. i think we will see nice water in et:qw too. there is no technical reason that hinders its implementation in the d3 engine.
hdr ...a valid point. i rememer a statement of jc on qcon 05 where he said that hdr just didn't make it for him ... whatever. its a fine addition to hl2, but in reality, i doubt that it would have turned out good looking in d3.
the heat haze argument:
no. d3 uses vertex shaders to animate models and to cull shadows. and it uses pixel shaders for specular mapping, the heat haze effect, glass shaders and ... well, thats it.
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:
There is complex facial animation and lip sync
true to the bone. source is certainly ahead at least 1 generation here ...
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:
there is at least some kind of AI in Half-Life...
um ... no. did you ever play hl2?
ai is as evolved in source as it is in d3 engine games ... virtually not.
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:
Doom has only the overused and ugly stencil shadows to boast of, which are only useable indoors, and are so inefficient that they had to have like 6 triangles limit for their characters heads.
-) you can use stencil shadowing outdoors (see prey and enemy territory ... even q4)
-) stencil shadows have the "advantage" of beeing fully dynamic and "affordable" on hardware from 2003
-) doom3 models have similar polycounts as hl2 models. what makes them seem to have less is poor visual design, dumb cutscene camera movement and strict lighting settings.
also. stencil shadows allow for rockets and plasma-bullets to cast lighting and shadowing, creating incredible animatory detail you can NEVER see in source engine games.
i rewrote the plasmarifle and rocketlauncher shaders for based3 to have them cast shadows and they work very fine in singleplayer. (2000+ amd and gf4 4200 at that time)
On March 10 2007 11:03 Random() wrote:Not only that, they cheat with them - did you ever look closely on the "shadows" which the flashlight produces?..
i see you read that article that says the flashlight shadows are cast incorrectly, because you can see them in first person. but this article was wrong. lighting and shadowing can't be "cheated" in doom3 (at least not stencil shadowing), because they follow strict mathematical principles.
and of course, if you hold a flashlight like the d3 character does, don't tell me you NEVER saw shadows ... comeon ... ever heard of point of view and how yours and the flashlights are not the same (a principle also used in shadowmapping, the "other" shadowing technique used by farcry, unreal engine 3 and crysis)
puh ... much writing.
and to the question which style of gfx i liked more, i voted for hl2. i LOVE to toy around with d3 and its possibilities, but i also enjoyed hl2 and hl2:ep1 very much. and also because of their visual appearance.
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quake 3 engine for multyplayer > *
At least doom runs on linux :-)
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O_O its funny watching geek wars commence.
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On March 10 2007 13:25 Lisk wrote:
quake 3 engine for multyplayer > *
oh shit ... and i thought bw was THE top rts mplayer game ... but since it lacks the q3 engine, i must be wrong
head -> wall
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thanks for posting jacen, I always enjoy how well you can explain things.
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
On March 10 2007 12:48 jacen wrote:
but the engine, other than the graphics, is behind at least a generation.
That is exactly my point.
large outdoor maps in source with hdr enabled don't use up less cpu power than similar large designed open levels in d3 engine games (once again its time to mention prey).
I haven't seen Prey, but I've seen "open" spaces in Quake 4, 5 by 5 meters size, where even the sky box looked like it was ripped from Quake 2. Horrible. You can say it's bad design, bud they should've had their reasons...
On a side note... Why would HDR rendering have an impact on the CPU? (That's not sarcasm, I'm just not sure how is it implemented in Source).
the heat haze argument:
no. d3 uses vertex shaders to animate models and to cull shadows. and it uses pixel shaders for specular mapping, the heat haze effect, glass shaders and ... well, thats it.
I didn't mention vertex shaders. I said that it only uses PS (as in Pixel Shaders) 2.0 for the haze effect, everything else is done in PS 1.3, which was outdated even at the time of the release. However, I agree that this isn't in any way an engine limitation, it's just the particular game.
no. did you ever play hl2?
ai is as evolved in source as it is in d3 engine games ... virtually not.
Well, at least I could fool around with the combine soldiers at the beginning and get them pissed off trying to pull a garbage bin over their head  I don't exactly remember how the soldiers did behave at the later stages in Half-Life 2, but in the original Half-Life they at least threw grenades, took cover and tried to get to you from the back. Then, there were those funny bugs attracted by surface vibrations and repelled by thumpers (Shai-Hulud ftw), the feromone grenades, etc... In Doom, the bad guys only go straight at you, shooting.
i see you read that article that says the flashlight shadows are cast incorrectly, because you can see them in first person. but this article was wrong. lighting and shadowing can't be "cheated" in doom3 (at least not stencil shadowing), because they follow strict mathematical principles.
and of course, if you hold a flashlight like the d3 character does, don't tell me you NEVER saw shadows ... comeon ... ever heard of point of view and how yours and the flashlights are not the same (a principle also used in shadowmapping, the "other" shadowing technique used by farcry, unreal engine 3 and crysis)
I didn't read any article about that, I noticed that myself. If you look closely, they don't draw shadows for the flashlight, i.e. they really don't build shadow volumes and spend rendering passes for that. They use the fact that the flashlights POV and your POV are approximately the same, and make some blackish slightly offset silhouettes of the objects, which, considering the POV similarity, kind of automatically looks projected on the scenery behind, producing something like a shadow, but not truly being a correct shadow.
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
On the topic, I really liked Far Cry more than both of them for some reason... It had this feel of freedom, but not the annoying "wtf am I supposed to do!?" freedom (Morrowind often made me feel this way), but rather the freedom to toy around with the environment, choice to slip by or to shoot down every mofo on the way; stealthily kill them one by one with a silenced SMG, snipe them from afar or get more bullets and go Rambo, or hijack a hum-vee and run over their sorry asses, or get a missile boat and bombard them from the water...
Then, there were those moments like when I drove a jeep onto a pontoon platform, which was attached to a motor boat, to transfer it to another island, but while I was towing it, some guys on another boat appeared and started shooting at me. The boat with the platform indeed felt heavy so I couldn't escape, but I could shoot off the binding chain and thus detach it from the platform, gaining enough maneuverability. When I finished with them, I returned and pushed the drifting platform to the shore with the boat's nose and get my jeep back.
I really like such things.
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AS great as some of you think the D3 engine is, the game sucks
prey kinda sucks so does quake 4. soooo..
Great Engine Shitty games 
Half Life 2 FTW!!!
Great Engine and Great Games!!!
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As simply as I can put it:
Doom 3 gets repetitive... fast
Half-Life 2 is rich in many ways - story, graphics, action sequences, variety
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Half Life 2, Doom 3 just sucks.
On another note, the best single player FPS games ever are Unreal 1 and Half Life 1 and both have a very good multiplayer, too 
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you can't seriously say that throwing a kitchen sink at the opponent's face is not cool in multiplayer, hl2 multiplayer is incredibly fun with the grav gun.
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On March 12 2007 07:01 lololol wrote:Half Life 2, Doom 3 just sucks. On another note, the best single player FPS games ever are Unreal 1 and Half Life 1 and both have a very good multiplayer, too
Unreal 1 was boring as fuck, Doom 3 at least is scary, Unreal had NOTHING but the engine which was breathtaking at the time.
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The Unreal 3 engine is the bomb diggity too.
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On March 11 2007 22:18 Vi)Chris wrote:
As simply as I can put it:
Doom 3 gets repetitive... fast
Half-Life 2 is rich in many ways - story, graphics, action sequences, variety
Agreed with that, Doom is all about monsters jumping out of closets [you know it is coming] and pure action. In Doom you can only see dark, dark and more dark 
I have played D3 and expansion but HL2 if far better for me. I think HL2 episode one has impressive HDR implementation.
I cant wait for episode two and Crysis.
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EPT
