id Software interview transcript
Julian Schoffel recently had the chance to interview Todd Hollenshead (CEO) and Tim Willits (Lead Designer, DOOM III) from id Software at Activision's big ‘Activate Asia’ event. The following is the full transcript from that interview.

PC User: What made you guys decide to revisit DOOM?

Willits: There's really two things. The first one is John Carmack had the original vision for DOOM, at the time he was really into hardware and technology and things, of course, and he made great games. When he started to develop the DOOM III technology, he realised the potential of what you could do with real scary environments, bump mapping could make the creatures look awesome and so on. Anyway, he decided that he wanted to bring his original vision of DOOM to life using this new technology. Everybody at id, except for the owners, we fell in love with computer gaming with DOOM. And for us it was awesome because we get to make a game in a universe that we all love.

Hollenshead: See, for a lot of these guys, DOOM was the reason they actually chose the video game industry as a profession. Tim was making WAD files, DOOM III was the opportunity to work with the Holy Grail of gaming for these guys – the proverbial offer you can't refuse, the opportunity to work on a brand-new engine created by the world's foremost 3D graphics programmer in a universe that, for some people, is almost mythical in terms of its hold over your imagination.

PC User: Do you think it's the archetypal nature of the story of the original game that made it so popular?

Hollenshead: That's a great word to describe it, it is this classic, epic battle of good versus evil and this is not some grey question: "Oh well, it's war and who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?" Sometimes that's dictated based on who wins. This is the ultimate embodiment of evil for people! This is the spawn of hell! You're fighting demons, there's also this sort of really cool almost classic conflict of science and philosophy and religion to where it's like: "Should we be making these experiments? Is science taking us to areas that border into things where the religious would tell you, you ought not to be doing some of these sorts of things?" A lot of the philosophy behind the original game is the demons have taken the technology and incorporated that to sort of augment themselves, and you sort of see those influences continuing in DOOM III with PV Demons with these mechanical back ends and the head of a demon, or front half or torso of a demon or what have you. So those are elements of the story that we don't talk a lot about, but if you want to sort of delve into even some of the Catholic upbringing of like Adrian Carmack, for example, who all of the monsters sort of came from his imagination (and I don't want to get too deep into it and have people think that, you know, I'm going to write the next Paradise Lost of something), but there are a lot of those elements in there.

PC User: I read that you hired a sci-fi guy to do the story-line. Quake III Arena was obviously multiplayer, why the decision to put the focus back on single player with DOOM III?

Willits: You know, we felt Quake III was the ultimate deathmatch game and we felt that it was time for us to work on a single-player game because that's what we wanted to do internally. You can't do the same thing over and over again, you'll go crazy.

Hollenshead: That's actually the definition of crazy – doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of a different result.

Willits: It a great opportunity to work with this franchise and make a great single-player game just to kind of like do something different and have fun doing it and make great games.

PC User: I read that you storyboarded DOOM III, that you approached it like a film in some ways.

Willits: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, we had a graphical media artist actually storyboard the whole game. You know, it's not as detailed as a high-budget movie but you know it shows each event, around fifty pages or so. It gives the developers on the team, if they're working on a particular area, they can just open the storyboard and go: "Oh that's what happens, got it."

Hollenshead: One of our goals with the game was to make it a very cinematic, atmospheric experience and with the visuals approaching film quality, you might say they are comparable to a Final Fantasy movie, a Pixar film except a twisted and demented one, but rendered in a real-time basis. And so we actually worked with some of the techniques that are used in the movie industry to create those sorts of experiences. And having a story written by a professional writer and taken out to a storyboard and then even to using some Hollywood set techniques in terms of the lighting, especially since it's all with the real-time lighting, you know, it's very important in DOOM III just like in a movie set to have the lighting set just right to create shadows, to basically create the atmosphere and suspense and the tension that is so important for us to provide this terrifying, gripping experience that we're trying to create.

PC User: From a technical standpoint, were the lighting and shadows the most challenging facet of DOOM III?

Hollenshead: John [Carmack] is not here so I'll give you the idiot language response to that. I can't really give you the technical response because that's not my field of expertise. Certainly, the calling card of the game has got to be the real-time generated lighting, shadowing and bump mapping because it's the interaction of those elements that allow us to present the image fidelity that we do. The critical problem, and I'm kind of parroting John so this probably shouldn't even be a Todd quote. The critical problem that John had to address was this classic issue when you're doing the shadows. When you have intercepting shadows, it creates a lot of redundant math because you have this sort of classic puzzle where, with an object, ultimately the shadows occlude as the shadows intercept behind it. That not only create problems because the math involved to create all these redundant shadows can also create visual artefacts as well as the shadows intercepting. So John came up with an elegant solution where he basically calculates that from the inside out to eliminate the redundancy of the shadow calculations. The algorithm is actually a white paper that's written up on nVidia's Web site called Carmack's Reverse. I think that's what it ended up being named. So the solution to that critical problem was basically what sort of formed the foundation of the ability to do the shadowing calculations on a real-time basis and not have the visual artefacts, and be able to present it in an interactive experience.

PC User: Going back to the story-line facet of the game, I saw a few scripted events in yesterday's demonstration. Will there be more of those throughout the game?

Willits: Yeah, yeah we have more character interaction, cinematic presentations as well as character introductions we'll do with the camera up. We'll also pull the camera up for some story points to happen in real time as well. We have some orchestrated events that happen with the characters, you know, where they either fight each other or fight you. We have some other situations with good guys you don't know are good guys, or bad guys you don't know are bad guys and stuff. So, hopefully we'll engage players with the story so they're compelled to find out what happens next.

PC User: With the multiplayer facet of the game one of the things I was just reading was a quote from Quake Con about per polygon hit detection.

Willits: Yeah, in the past boundary boxes are what determined whether or not you hit the characters but now it's actually their skin, so you can shoot a rocket underneath their arms or beneath their legs and stuff. So, it means actually that hitting the character requires a good bit of skill and a little more aiming. One side effect of this is it's a lot more difficult to kill people willy-nilly in deathmatch and you have to be very precise. We think it really helps to create more of a realistic atmosphere. You know you really feel like: "Oh I shot the guy through his legs, I missed him! That was my last rocket!" So it's actually added quite a fun, realistic feel to single and multiplayer. [Looks at Todd] You want to say something?

Hollenshead: I was just going to say the analogy to make is that it's like if you had a guy standing in a doorway before with boundary boxes, as long as you just sort of hit somewhere inside the doorframe you would hit him, whereas now you actually have to hit the body standing in the doorframe. So that's sort of the difference between the boundary box and per polygon hit detection. It was sort of one of those unanticipated things that always seems to happen as you go through the game development path. You know, when we were working on the single player, we put that in over a year ago, we played around with the multiplayer to see what the impact of it was and our first experience of it was: "You know, what the hell is going on, does that guy have 1,000 hit points or is the gun not doing any damage? Does he have like some ridiculous amount of armour, are you in God mode!?" And it's like: "Oh, we just aren't very good shots!"

Willits: Yeah. I mean. the head shots do more damage but you really need to aim for the body.

PC User: How will using objects within the environment affect gameplay?

Willits: Yeah, yeah, you can knock objects down on characters, you can move them around, monsters can throw them at you. You have to watch out for machinery falling on you, things pushing out of floors, you know, it really will add a more dynamic, fluid experience to the game.

Hollenshead: A lot of interactivity, too.

Willits: Yeah, and we've had to adjust the AI [artificial intelligence] to accommodate for that and stuff, and I think we've done a pretty good job.

PC User: OK, thanks for your time guys. I think the game looks amazing!