Engine wars , Source vs Doom 3

KdjaCL

Source Engine vs Doom 3 Engine
A technical comparison of today's top game engines

To give you an idea of how weird it is to see people comparing a Valve engine to an id engine, consider that without id, Valve probably wouldn't be in existence. Gabe Newell left Microsoft and went into game development after he talked to the id development team and saw what they were doing. Even more ironic is that Half-Life used the Quake licensed engine from id. Now these are the top engines out there and something no other game will be able to top for a couple of years (Unreal Engine 3). Here's a comparison of each engine, not game, in each critical area of game development.
Lighting and Shadowing

The Doom 3 engine is a leap and a bound away from the Source Engine when it comes to lighting and shadowing. The Doom 3 engine unifies all the objects with the lighting and bump mapping creating real-time, realistic shadows that look breathtaking. None of the objects look out of place and react with one another in terms of lighting. In previous id engines the lighting was created with a light map for the environment and than models would use various other forms of lighting. This led to the models not actually looking like they were in the environment, but instead on top of it. The Source Engine's main lighting system is real-time radiosity lighting, which the Quake 3 engine used so id is still a few years ahead in light technology. The Source Engine also still uses light maps along with dynamic lights as well as the very cool yet system intensive high dynamic range lighting. The Source Engine still looks great and compared to other games it is a noticeable upgrade, but the realism just still isn't there when it comes to shadows and lighting. The Doom 3 engine is paving the way for photo-realistic games.
Environments

The main stereotype that the Doom 3 Engine suffers from, is that it can only render small, cramped inside corridors. This in fact is completely untrue, because the engine is quite capable of rendering big, detailed outside worlds. You will see the outside capabilities of the engine in Quake 4 and it will dramatically change people's perception on what the Doom 3 Engine can do. The Doom 3 engine is more suitable for inside environments though, because of its BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) system for optimizing the graphics engine. The Doom 3 Engine also supports larger textures, which in the future will allow the textures to look even better. The Source Engine is pretty much the opposite. It is more suited for outdoor environments and its inside environments don't look nearly as lifelike or detailed as Doom 3's. Both of these things are debatable and it is pretty much a toss-up for this category.
Character Models

When describing character models there's a lot involved with the textures, bump-mapping, and actual model itself making it hard to pick a clear winner in this category. The Source Engine does much better with textures than Doom 3 does, because the textures are fitted better to the character's muscle skeleton giving the model's skin weight and purpose on the model. The models in the Doom 3 Engine start as high polygon models (100,000+) that are CG-movie quality and than the texture is created for this model. Next, a low-polygon model (<5000) is created of the character. The resulting low-polygon model is combined with the high-poly texture creating amazing results. In the Source Engine the models are much higher model counts and more detailed textures for their models. Doom 3 uses a lot of normal mapping to simulate higher-poly models, but high-poly texture on a low-poly model makes for weird facial distortions. The monsters however seem much more lifelike with their detailed skin combined with many details. The Source Engine has better models, especially human, but combined with the lighting and shadowing, the Doom 3 Engine creates amazing textures.
Artificial Intelligence

I won't spend much time discussing this area, as it isn't even meaningful to debate. The Source Engine has amazing A.I. that consists of team-based A.I., A.I. that reacts to the environment and its senses, and a sophisticated path finding system. The Doom 3 engine has minimal A.I. capabilities and still remains true to the same type of A.I. that previous versions of Doom were known for. The one interesting element of the Doom 3 A.I. is the addition of sound based enemy reaction. The enemies will react depending on the degree of sound you create, which adds some intelligence to the creatures. The Source Engine was built with A.I. in mind and has achieved the desired effects creating some of the most lifelike characters in games.
Animation

Animation is another area where the Source Engine clearly succeeds. The facial animation alone is mind-blowing and was created by consulting with a scientist whose whole work revolves around studying the muscles of the face. The research that went into studying the body's muscular reactions to certain emotions brings the characters to life. Half-Life 2 doesn't even have cut-scenes and with the Source Engine's power it really doesn't have to. Doom 3 has good key-frame animation and motion capture animation compared to most games, but the normal mapping texturing makes the textures seem awkward for the character. Splitting can occur, especially in cut scenes, and can make it look like the texture and models are two separate parts instead of a smooth unified one. This is an easy win for the Source Engine.
Physics

The core gameplay of Half-Life 2 is built around the physics engine. The Havok Physics Engine, easily the top physics engine out there, powers the Source Engine. The physics engine is integrated with the world and characters. The sounds and graphics react with the physics engine, AI characters are able to interact with objects, and it actually matters instead of being a nice sideshow. Ropes/cables, machines, constraint systems, ragdoll physics, vehicles, kinmetic-animated bones, and a materials system make the Source Engine the undisputed champion of physics gameplay. Doom 3's physics engine was built in house and although it has ragdoll physics, inverse kinematics, and a materials system it is on a much smaller scale. In Doom 3 it is only used with objects other than enemies like barrels, which have a little effect on gameplay. And yet again, the Source Engine wins.
Sound

This category is tricky, because I haven’t had the chance to experience the sound of Half-Life 2. For the sound category I am simply comparing the environment, weapon, and object sounds not the voice acting. Doom 3 has great sound that can be used strategically to hunt out enemies and reacts with the different materials in the walls. The Source Engine does the same thing in theory, but I've yet to listen to it so I can't pass judgment on it. The cool thing worth mentioning for Doom 3 is it uses the CPU instead of soundcard to create the sounds. This produces great sounds for people with cheap soundcards, but your new, $200 soundcard won't be able to improve on it much. Both engines have 5.1 surround sound and sound wonderful. For this category it's pretty much a tie, because on paper they are pretty much exact and I haven't had a chance to test out Half-Life 2.
Networking

The Source Engine uses Steam and pretty much the same similar core networking code used in Half-Life for networking. The networking code is extremely fast and I’ve heard numbers of 64 players at one-time being played with little to no lag. The Doom 3 Engine has a much tougher time with networking code, because of the graphically dynamic environments. The recommended number of players is 4, but I have played a stable game with up to 8. Lag and slowdowns are present when playing Doom 3 multiplayer with as little as 4 people. The Source Engine once again takes the title and rightfully so as the most popular FPS multiplayer game Counter Strike has proved to be very stable and solid in networking.
System Spec

When comparing the engines on, which can be played on more computers the Source Engine easily beats out the Doom 3 engine. Doom 3's minimum requirements are Microsoft Windows 2000/XP; Pentium IV 1.5 GHz or AMD Athlon 1.7 GHz XP processor or higher; 384MB RAM and a DirectX 9.0 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card just to get the thing to even run. To run Doom 3 at the highest setting, the way it was meant to be run, you need a 512 MB video card, which don't even exist yet. Half-Life 2 is still steep, but because the engine allows use of DirectX 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0, the game is still playable on a low-end machine. Half-Life 2's minimum requirements are 1.2 GHz Processor; 256MB RAM; DirectX 7 level graphics card; and Windows 2000/XP/ME/98.
Portability

Although this is probably the least important to gamers and developers, because all of the best selling games are on PCs running windows I still think it's important. The Source Engine uses the DirectX graphics API so it can only be used on the PC and Xbox without modification. There are ways to make Half-Life 2 run on a Linux computer, but the software hasn't been released and is third-party. The Doom 3 engine uses OpenGL as its graphics API making it easier to be able to be used cross-platform.
Conclusion

KdjaCL

The answer to the convoluted question of what engine would I like to develop for is obvious, neither. Just kidding, but I do prefer the challenge of creating my own engine than using an off-the-shelf one even if it is the Source Engine or Doom 3 Engine. Joking aside, it's pretty obvious that for making a game the Source Engine is the obvious pick. If I wanted to make a graphics demo or even a CG movie I would probably pick the Doom 3 Engine. The Doom 3 Engine's only advantage is the in the graphics department, which won't make a complete or even a good game. The Source Engine is the complete package and its only competition for graphics is Far Cry and Doom 3. Combining the two engines would be a dream of mine and pretty much any other game developer out there. Both Valve and id did a great job with ushering in the new age of game engines. I can't wait to see their next iterations and what Tim Sweeny has come up with for Unreal Engine 3.


/ stupid 10k limit

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/source-vs-doom3/

Not a bad article.

kdjac

Lemming

Your portability claim with regards Source on Linux is actually incorrect. There has been a tool available for quite some time to run windows applications natively under Linux.

WineX

Further linky here

Giblet

The technical aspects of an engine don't really matter if you are creative.

http://www.pcgamemods.com/dl/01b3ddbcedc860dc09adb56cc156c37a/d3cdit_test_build_jan_23_2005.zip

That's a test of a new DoomIII map. As you can see, that even though it's not finished, It's pretty detailed.

Also, it can change from day to night, but they don't show it in this video, it's pretty cool.

satchmo

It's a pity he didn't bother to compare the sound properly, since Doom 3's sounds improves the game to such a great extent compared to HL2. I absolutely agree with HL2 having better animation though, the facial animation still never fails to impress me whenever I see it.

SirLemonhead

Lemming wrote:

Your portability claim with regards Source on Linux is actually incorrect. There has been a tool available for quite some time to run windows applications natively under Linux.

WineX

Further linky here

Does Steam work on that?

And I thought Wine hadn't got decent DirectX9 support yet?

Snaga

MasterOfSolos wrote:

Does Steam work on that?

And I thought Wine hadn't got decent DirectX9 support yet?

If you clicked on the link youd see, right in the center of the page 'Supports Half Life 2'.

Click on that and it mentions that it does indeed support Steam.

That doesnt mean that it supports every game available through steam however.

Lemming

MasterOfSolos wrote:

And I thought Wine hadn't got decent DirectX9 support yet?

Oh .. I don't know .... say perhaps:

W40k: Dawn of War
Rome: Total War
World of Warcraft
StarWars: Galaxies
FarCry


might give an indicator that DX9 is supported. But I might just be crazy ...