Doom - The Dark Ages (2025)

Loved Doom 2016. Doom Eternal was a bit too much for me and my old brain/reflexes.
This looks great but hope it dials back on the Eternal side of things.
 
Platforming was OK in DE but it certainly ramped it up a gear compared to 2016 Doom. I remember one little bit in the original and I was running round like a headless chicken trying not to die - it was brilliant. Then DE, some brutal grinding - particularly one of those special missions where you had to do a number of waves - another great gaming moment. And they were so well optimised, can't wait.
 
I kind of got bored of Eternal, felt a bit too "whoah hey look at me" vs Doom of old. I liekd the tech, the fact that a 3080 Ti could max our the settings with RT and stil get well over 100fps is something good-sinister.

SO I fully look forward to Dark Ages, though as Alex points out, the gameplay shown so far shows heavy use of screenspace effects, not full RT, so hopefully the final game uses proper RT.
 
www.tweaktown.com

DOOM: The Dark Ages uses ray tracing to enhance gameplay, not just visuals

DOOM: The Dark Ages is on track to become one the best-looking games of 2025 thanks to DLSS 4 and Path Tracing. It's also using RT to enhance gameplay.
www.tweaktown.com www.tweaktown.com

"We also took the idea of ray tracing, not only to use it for visuals but also gameplay," Director of Engine Technology at id Software, Billy Khan, explains. "We can leverage it for things we haven't been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection. [In DOOM: The Dark Ages], we have complex materials, shaders, and surfaces."

"So when you fire your weapon, the heat detection would be able to tell if you're hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal," Billy continues. "Before ray tracing, we couldn't distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you're hitting metal or even something that's fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player."
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Ray Traced hit detection :D
 
I'm not quite sure why it needs ray tracing for that exactly - though hit detection has always been a form of ray tracing as it simply traces a line through the world until it hits a surface - you've always had the ability to tell what kind of surface was hit and even, though potentially a little slow, identify the texel hit, what material is painted on it and then use that to find details of the material type.
 
mrk said:
The 2nd quoted paragraph explains why straight from the dev's mouth lol
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Yeah - and none of that is impossible, or unfeasible, with normal hit scan methods and there isn't really a benefit to going to per-pixel as the player will never notice the difference to per-texel.
 
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It's about accuracy, it's more accurate and thus more immersive, especially with a suitable destruction system that reacts accordingly to the exact material properties being shot at. The engine is path/ray tracing by default anyway so may as well code in the properties to leverage RT as a result. This will likely be a game like Indiana Jones that requires hardware RT, good news a big AAA title is enforcing advancement.
 
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mrk said:
It's about accuracy, it's more accurate and thus more immersive, especially with a suitable destruction system that reacts accordingly to the exact material properties being shot at. The engine is path/ray tracing by default anyway so may as well code in the properties to leverage RT as a result. This will likely be a game like Indiana Jones that requires hardware RT, good news a big AAA title is enforcing advancement.
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None of that makes sense - box tracing used for collision detection is already as accurate as will ever be noticeable by the player and you can't utilise any of the ray results used for rendering as you need an accurate trace along a vector at the point of doing the collision detection, which is unlikely to already have been done by the renderer.

There is a certain amount of usefulness is being able to better hardware accelerate hit detection and/or batch traces in with the ray tracing tests but that is another matter again - and most hit detection routines will use an initial test and then do something else involving new tests and/or re-test with different parameters, etc. so you are limited to how much you can gain performance wise from combining it with the rendering traces.

EDIT: Where things would benefit is if you have volumetric effects like fire say a flame thrower as it is prohibitive to trace every possible texel the effect touches - but again players will never really notice the difference outside of a reasonably optimised routine using existing functionality.
 
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mrk said:
I'm pretty sure the devs of a Doom game know what they are doing :o
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Maybe, but what they've said there doesn't make much sense in respect to what is already possible.

EDIT: I'm guessing what they are actually meaning is a limitation of the material system rather than hit detection system - where materials are often just tagged as one kind even when they have multiple different types portrayed in the texture, but that can be addressed with something like material masks (more of an index than mask).
 
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mrk said:
When is your 5090 coming??
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The superior MFG tech. is all one needs so a 5080/70ti will be enough ;) :p
 
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