Well I'm back again. This time for real. Got day-care nailed and work is happening, back to playing, loving, and building games. Neat-o.

So for my first act coming back to the world, I shall tick off a good 3/4ths of the gaming world and say I don't like Doom3. Shame on me. I am sure, deep-down, there is something fundamentally flawed about the core of my being. I've tried to like it, I really have. I even went and played it on a friend's computer in the hopes that maybe it was just my play experience. But nope, doesn't do it.

Here's the problem in a nutshell:

ITS TOO DARK. Yeah, ok, there is the flashlight. And the cool reflective windows. Neat. But really, I went to art school for a long time, and I can sum up the lessons of painting in the following rule, that took me a while to understand: "Never, ever, ever, use black". There it is. Don't do it. It's wrong.

Underlying this is a ton of color theory - about how the human eye percieves shadow - and light - and about how color is layered and reflected in the "real world". If I am going to paint a scene with, say, warm colors, then I cen get a "warm black" by mixing red and green together. I can get a "cool black" by mixing blue and brown together. These "blacks" look darker than a flat black paint, but more importantly they look richer.

So I mentioned this to one of my graphical programming wiz-kids and he looks at me all squinty for a minute and then says 'yea, but, its the card that colors the shadows'. Stencil buffers. Etc. Essentially you mask out an area for shadow, and don't draw the scene into it. Well that's wrong. It's an optimization that doesn't need to exist on modern graphics hardware: it has the power to do the whole scene - so do it. Map the shadows in undulating dark mix. Get some vibrancy there. Use dark fill lights and all the other Hollywood tricks. Make my screen come alive.

Probably, if this was anyone other than the miracle that is Carmack I wouldn't be so picky, but it is, so I can say: "solve the Shadow Problem!". I hate turning up my gamma so people don't cream me in online play. I hate how flat my screen is. I want more color, more vibrancy, and more depth, even in a dimly lit area crawling with baddies. The world of Doom3 IS immersive, but too often its a little flat and more than a little annoying. I'm all for scary, I like scary, but that's not scary "I'm going to get killed by something hiding in there" its scary "I'm going to trip over my own feet and fall on my gun". Very different kind of scary, and I just can't get into it.

Maybe its just me.