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Also, the moving sky texture will probably be gone or will change. One likely replacement is an enclosing texture-mapped box around the world, at a virtually infinite distance; this will allow open vistas, much like Doom, a welcome change from the claustrophobic feel of Quake.

Another likely change in Quake 2 is a shift from interpreted Quake-C code for game logic to compiled DLLs. Part of the incentive here is performance—interpretation isn’t cheap—and part is debugging, because the standard debugger can be used with DLLs. The drawback, of course, is portability; Quake-C program files are completely portable to any platform Quake runs on, with no modification or recompilation, but DLLs compiled for Win32 require a real porting effort to run anywhere else. Our thinking here is that there are almost no non-console platforms other than the PC that matter that much anymore, and for those few that do (notably the Mac and Linux), the DLLs can be ported along with the core engine code. It just doesn’t make sense for easy portability to tiny markets to impose a significant development and performance cost on the one huge market. Consoles will always require serious porting effort anyway, so going to Win32-specific DLLs for the PC version won’t make much difference in the ease of doing console ports.

Finally, Internet support will improve in Quake 2. Some of the QuakeWorld latency improvements will doubtless be added, but more important, there will be a new interface, especially for monitoring and joining net games, in the form of an HTML page. John has always been interested in moving as much code as possible out of the game core, and letting the browser take care of most of the UI makes it possible to eliminate menuing and such from the Quake 2 engine. Think of being able to browse hundreds of Quake servers from a single Web page (much as you can today with QSpy, but with the advantage of a standard, familiar interface and easy extensibility), and I think you’ll see why John considers this the game interface of the future.

By the way, Quake 2 is currently being developed as a native Win32 app only; no DOS version is planned.

### Looking Forward

In my address to the Computer Game Developer’s Conference in 1996, I said that it wasn’t a bad time to start up a game company aimed at hardware-only rasterization, and trying to make a game that leapfrogged the competition. It looks like I was probably a year early, because hardware took longer to ship than I expected, although there was a good living to be made writing games that hardware vendors could bundle with their boards. Now, though, it clearly is time. By Christmas 1997, there will be several million fast accelerators out there, and by Christmas 1998, there will be tens of millions. At the same time, vastly more people are getting access to the Internet, and it’s from the convergence of these two trends that I think the technology for the next generation of breakthrough real-time games will emerge.

John is already working on id’s next graphics engine, code-named Trinity and targeted around Christmas of 1998. Trinity is not only a hardware-only engine, its baseline system is a Pentium Pro 200-plus with MMX, 32 MB, and an accelerator capable of at least 50 megapixels and 300 K triangles per second with alpha blending and z-buffering. The goals of Trinity are quite different from those of Quake. Quake’s primary technical goals were to do high-quality, well-lit, complex indoor scenes with 6 degrees of freedom, and to support client-server Internet play. That was a good start, but only that. Trinity’s goals are to have much less-constrained, better-connected worlds than Quake. Imagine seeing through open landscape from one server to the next, and seeing the action on adjacent servers in detail, in real time, and you’ll have an idea of where things are heading in the near future.

A huge graphics challenge for the next generation of games is level of detail (LOD) management. If we’re to have larger, more open worlds, there will inevitably be more geometry visible at one time. At the same time, the push for greater detail that’s been in progress for the past four years or so will continue; people will start expecting to see real cracks and bumps when they get close to a wall, not just a picture of cracks and bumps painted on a flat wall. Without LOD, these two trends are in direct opposition; there’s no way you can make the world larger and make all its surfaces more detailed at the same time, without bringing the renderer to its knees.

The solution is to draw nearer surfaces with more detail than farther surfaces. In itself, that’s not so hard, but doing it without popping and snapping being visible as you move about is quite a challenge. John has implemented fractal landscapes with constantly adjustable level of detail, and has made it so new vertices appear as needed and gradually morph to their final positions, so there is no popping. Trinity is already capable of displaying oval pillars that have four sides when viewed from a distance, and add vertices and polygons smoothly as you get closer, such that the change is never visible, and the pillars look oval at all times.

Similarly, polygon models, which maxed out at about 5,000 polygon-model polygons total—for all models—per scene in Quake, will probably reach 6,000 or 7,000 per scene in Quake 2 in the absence of LOD. Trinity will surely have many more moving objects, and those objects will look far more detailed when viewed up close, so LOD for moving polygon models will definitely be needed.

One interesting side effect of morphing vertices as part of LOD is that Gouraud shading doesn’t work very well with this approach. The problem is that adding a new vertex causes a major shift in Gouraud shading, which is, after all, based on lighting at vertices. Consequently, two-pass alpha lighting and surface caching seem to be much better matches for smoothly changing LOD.

Some people worry that the widespread use of hardware acceleration will mean that 3-D programs will all look the same, and that there will no longer be much challenge in 3-D programming. I hope that this brief discussion of the tightly interconnected, highly detailed worlds toward which we’re rapidly heading will help you realize that both the challenge and the potential of 3-D programming are in fact greater than they’ve ever been. The trick is that rather than getting stuck in the rut of established techniques, you must constantly strive to “do better with less, in a different way”; keep learning and changing and trying new approaches—and working your rear end off—and odds are you’ll be part of the wave of the future.

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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash