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 recognised as marking significant advances in the field. A game engine is the core software component of a video game. ... id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Doom 3 is a sci-fi horror first-person shooter computer game developed by id Software and published by Activision. ... John Carmack circa 2004 John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. ... Doom Engine is a psychedelic doom metal band based in Oxfordshire. ... The Quake engine is the game engine that was written to power 1996s Quake, written by id Software. ...

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. The Quake 3 Engine was developed by id Software and is used in many games today. ... Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model, by means of a software program. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the UNIX... C++ (generally pronounced see plus plus) is a general-purpose programming language. ... Computer code (HTML with JavaScript) in a tool that uses syntax highlighting (colors) to help the developer see the purpose of each piece of code. ... The Quake 3 Engine was developed by id Software and is used in many games today. ...

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 Quake III engine was developed by id Software and is used in many games. ... In computer graphics, bump mapping is a technique where at each pixel, a perturbation to the surface normal of the object being rendered is looked up in a texture map and applied before the illumination calculation is done (see, for instance, Phong shading). ... Normal Mapping used to re-detail simplified meshes. ... A specular highlight on a rendered sphere. ...

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. [1] A Lightmap is a data structure which contains the brightness of surfaces in a game. ...

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 than walking on grass. [2] It is expected that this will result in a considerably more detailed scene than the majority of existing technologies, using tiled textures, allow. A pixel (pix, 1932 abbreviation of pictures, coined by Variety headline writers + element) is one of the many tiny dots that make up the representation of a picture in a computers memory. ...

ClipMapping and Unique Texturing : http://www.sgi.com/products/software/performer/presentations/clipmap_intro.pdf http://www.vterrain.org/Games/

id extended 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. Umbra & penumbra The penumbra is that part of the shadow where the light source is only partially blocked. ... An occluder is an object that partially or completely impedes the amount of light reaching the eye. ... Prism splitting light Light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye (visible light) or, in a technical or scientific context, electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength. ...

Newer versions of the engine also feature a number of other increasingly common graphical effects such as high dynamic range rendering and parallax mapping. The factual accuracy of this article needs to be verified. ... Parallax Mapping (also, Photonic Mapping, Offset Mapping or Virtual Displacement Mapping) is an enhancement of the bump mapping or normal mapping techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering applications such as video games. ...

Games powered by the original Doom 3 engine

• Doom 3 — id Software
  • Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil — Nerve Software
• Quake 4 — Raven Software
• Prey — Human Head Studios

Doom 3 is a sci-fi horror first-person shooter computer game developed by id Software and published by Activision. ... id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil is a first-person shooter expansion pack for the 2004 video game, Doom 3. ... Nerve Software is an American video game developer. ... Quake 4 is the fourth title in the series of Quake FPS computer games. ... Raven Software is a computer game software developer based in Madison, Wisconsin. ... Prey is an as of yet unreleased video game being developed by Human Head Studios and produced by 3D Realms, using a modified version of the Doom 3 engine. ... Human Head Studios is a computer game development company located in Madison, WI. Started as a break away company from the developer Raven Software. ...

Games powered by the MegaTexture technology

• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars — Splash Damage

Although only the blue player in the centre takes a direct hit, everyone within the circle takes damage. ...

Games powered by the id extended technology

• A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein — Raven Software
• A game by id Software based on new intellectual property — id Software

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first person shooter computer game published by Activision and released in 2001. ... Raven Software is a computer game software developer based in Madison, Wisconsin. ... In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form. ... id Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ...

Techniques used in the Doom III engine

• Unified lighting and shadowing
• Stencil shadow volume
• Shadow volume

Quake III screenshot illustrating old lighting model Doom 3 screenshot illustrating unified lighting model Unified shadow and lighting is the lighting model used in the Doom 3 game developed by Id Software. ... A stencil shadow volume is a method of rendering in 3D computer graphics. ... Shadow volumes are a technique used in 3D computer graphics since 1977 to add shadows to a rendered scene. ...

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

• idDevNet|Official MOD support website for the Doom 3 engine
• Doom3World.org Forums|Technical Help Forum & Custom Content Creation
• modwiki.net|Doom 3 engine reference material

This article relating to the computer game Doom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.