Comments - creoleplane

There would be no copyrights to bitch about if they used the Doom 3 engine for an HL1 remake, your forgetting all of Valves 3d engine technology comes from ID originally in the first place. The HL1 engine is just a highly modified Quake 1 engine.

Doom 3 was an insult to Doom 1, there I agree, but the Doom 3 engine is hands down the most advanced engine we have to work with right now, not to mention the easiest. I have no clue what your talking about with the Models in Doom 3, they look far more polished than any of the HL2 models with supperior facial animation and more believable movement. But if your name has anything to do with the web browser you use I can see that your just ignorant and don't like reasearching things before you just jump on the bandwagon. Saying that the source engine is supperior to the Doom 3 engine is just as ignorant as as saying Firefox is a good browser.

The one decent game you've mentioned that used the Source engine was SiN. Unfortunatly compared to the original game the new SiN was god awful and failed to capture the feel or awe of the gameworld that the original had. Sin felt a bit like HL2 did, could have been good but felt like a lot of what wanted to be done with the game just wasn't there. It felt like the developers were forced to hold back due to limitations of the engine. Valve should have stayed smart and done what they did with the first HL game. Gone with preexisting 3d technology from a company that already knew what they were doing in the field. Valve should have kept there contract with ID and used there technology for the Source engine. It would have made it much better in the end as far as mod making and future development with it goes.

I hope you guys alter the level design a bit in BM:Source. The original HL and HL2's level design for that matter was god awful. Terribly linear, never did I feel like I had to explore or think about where to go. The game just pushed you forward in almost a completely straight path. I hope that while redoing the game they try to change this a bit.

I'm not basing my opinion on the Source engine based on my loathing for Steam. It's just quite simply that the Source engine isn't capable of nearly as much as the Doom 3 engine is. Sure the games you've seen teams make use of the Doom 3 engine in are dark but thats because the games were supposed to be dark games. Anyone that says the Source engine is more powerful obviously hasn't seen any of the screenshots or video for QuakeWars. Maps lighting will change during gameplay depending on the time of day. Fully destructable outdoor enviroments. Real time weather effects. The Doom 3 engine is more capable at creating enviroments that feel solid and real. I'd hope we would have progressed past the days of seeing a flat wall texture with posters on the wall being part of the same texture. The textures and way there mapped around the game world in the Source engine feel terribly flat and fake. Another downfall of the BSP format though. The Doom 3 engine can simply do the HL2 style of storytelling much better than the Source engine can. Putting cutscenes in the game and making them feel like there just part of the game world was Carmacks main goal while coding the Doom 3 engine. The Source engine felt dated when HL2 was released and feels even more dated now.

To the_refridgerator:

I agree with you that at this point in time it would be terrible for the dev team to start over in a new engine. But with the sole purpose of the Doom 3 engine being to make the player not be able to tell the difference between the cutscenes and the gameplay itself it could handle capturing the feel of the game world much better. Source is a good engine but it's unfortunately already a bit dated for it's time. Valve's biggest problem though as far as the mod community goes and HL2 in general is Steam. It's the most god awful way I've ever seen of launching and managing a game. The last time I installed HL2 I couldn't play it until 3 days later because it had to "update" first. Terrible idea. Just give me a patch I can download manually from some FTP server somewhere, much faster and much more stable.

I agree with you that at this point in time it would be terrible for the dev team to start over in a new engine. But with the sole purpose of the Doom 3 engine being to make the player not be able to tell the difference between the cutscenes and the gameplay itself it could handle capturing the feel of the game world much better. Source is a good engine but it's unfortunately already a bit dated for it's time. Valve's biggest problem though as far as the mod community goes and HL2 in general is Steam. It's the most god awful way I've ever seen of launching and managing a game. The last time I installed HL2 I couldn't play it until 3 days later because it had to "update" first. Terrible idea. Just give me a patch I can download manually from some FTP server somewhere, much faster and much more stable.

I mean that the way HL2 does it's storytelling is by an ingame cutscene IE you view it without the game actually stopping. The Doom 3 egine could do HL2's idea of storytelling much better than the Source engine does. Doing what Valve did as far as cutscenes viewed in game from the on players eyes would work much better if done with the Doom 3 engine and be much more believable due the much higher level of detail that you can accomplish in not only characters but enviroments when using the Doom 3 engine. As far as for low player counts in multiplayer in Doom 3 that was done because at the time of Doom 3's launch the game required an insane PC for the time. I have no clue what your talking about as far as lag in large Quake 4 games. I reguraly play Quake 4 online and never get lag of any sort even in large 16 on 16 CTF games. Either your comp really sucks or your connection is terrible cause Quake 4 is far more lag free than CS:S or HL2 DM is.

Both the Source and the Doom 3 engines use the Havoc physic engine. Only Carmack modified the Havoc engine for Doom 3 and Quake 4 far more than Valve did to allow for the Quake style movement. The reason that HL2's physics may seem more complex is because Valve made the physics a much bigger part of the gameplay than ID did with Doom 3. Doom 3 didn't need physics for it's style of game so thus it was unneeded to make everything move around or fall realistically when hit right. The Doom 3 level format allows for far more customizablity than the HL2's bsp format does. In game cutscenes that HL relies so heavily on fit together with the game world far better in the Doom 3 engine than they do in the Source engine. As far as the gravity gun knock off in the Doom 3 expansion, it was actually a development too the guys at ID used to place items within the maps. The Doom 3 engine works far better for storytelling within the game than the source engine does, which is why I think it would fit this mod much better. Not to mention with the Doom 3 engine you never ever have to deal with the evil that is Steam.

and full destructable enviroments

Looks great, would love to see HL 1 remade using the Doom 3 engine instead thoug. More complex phyiscs engine, better sound code, much better netcode, and far supperior scripting in the level design. Not to mention your no longer stuck with the very obsolete bsp format.

It's also other things in the Doom 3 engine that would make it a much better choice for the design to do what they say they want to. Sound code is far supperior in the Doom 3 engine with it supporting perfectly emulated room acoustics. Meaning sound bounces off every crack in every wall, every bump on every rock just like it does in the real world. You can't honestly say that the sound in HL2 or even HL2: Episode 1 comes anywhere near to comparing to that of Doom 3/Quake 4. The Doom 3 engine allows much more freedom for the level designers as far as in game scripting and in game manipulation of the game world. The way I see it is that if your going to start an undertaking as big as redoing the entire game of Half Life, why wouldn't you want to use the engine that allows for the most creative freedom, which is currently the Doom 3 engine.