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For discussions join the id Tech 4 Discord: https://discord.gg/Q3E9rUFnnP , #rbdoom3bfg
RBDOOM-3-BFG is based on DOOM-3-BFG and the goal of this port is to bring DOOM-3-BFG up to latest technology in 2021 making it closer to Doom 2016 while still remaining a DOOM 3 port regarding the gameplay.
I started this project in 2012 and focused on making this code being future proof so other cool projects can build interesting things on top of it without the need to fix a lot of stuff first. Over 40 people all over the world contributed cool patches. Some results are:
* Physically Based Rendering using GGX Cook-Torrence as in other modern engines (UE4, Unity) and 3D authoring tools like Blender 2.93 or Adobe Substance
* Baked Global Illumination using Irradiance Volumes and Image Based Lighting that fix the pitch black areas
* Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing as a cheap alternative for MSAA. For more information see "Anti-Aliasing Methods in CryENGINE 3" and the docs at http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/
* Screen Space Ambient Occlusion http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/SAOHPG12/ used to only dim down the Global Illumination contribution like in the Frostbite engine
* Bink video playback through libbinkdec (thanks to Daniel Gibson) or FFmpeg (thanks to Carl Kenner)
* Updated idRenderLog to support RenderDoc and Nvidia's Nsight and only issue OpenGL or Vulkan debug commands if the debug extensions are detected. Reference: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/best-practices-gpu-performance-events/
RBDOOM-3-BFG allows mod editing and has many tiny fixes so custom content can be put into mod directories and the engine accepts it like vanilla Doom 3. DOOM 3 BFG wasn't designed for actual development or modding support. Many things like reading anything outside of the packed resource files was not supported. I also fixed many things in the renderer like r_showTris.
* New PBR related material keywords like basecolormap, normalmap, rmaomap
* invertGreen( normalmap.png ) material keyword to allow flipping the Y-Axis for tangent space normal maps
* Added exportFGD `[nomodels]` console command which exports all def/*.def entityDef declarations to base/exported/_tb/ as Forge Game Data files. TrenchBroom has native support to read those files https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/FGD.
If the nomodels argument is not given then it will also export all needed models by entity declarations to base/_tb/ as Wavefront OBJ files.
If you want to see what is planned or in progress in a Trello/Kanban style manner look here: [RBDOOM-3-BFG projects](https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/projects)
Very certain short term goals are to port and extend some improvements from Justin Marshall's [Iced-Hellfire-Dev](https://github.com/jmarshall23/Doom3BFG) branch:
* Explore Screen Space Global Illumination with Christoph Schieds' A-SVGF realtime denoising because A-SVGF works really well in Q2RTX
* Update texture compression based on [Basis Universal GPU Texture and Texture Video Compression Codec](https://github.com/binomialLLC/basis_universal)
* Rip & Tear renderer backend with modern approaches by [The-Forge](https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge)
* Replace collision detection and physics with PhysX 4.1
Implementing Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Doom 3 is a challenge and comes with a few compromises because the Doom 3 content was designed to work with the hardware constraints in 2004 and that even meant to run on a Geforce 3.
The light rigs aren't made for PBR but it is possible to achieve good PBR lighting even with the old content by tweaking the light formulars with a few good magic constants. However I also want to support the modding scene to allow them to create brand new PBR materials made with Substance Designer/Painter or other modern tools so multiple rendering paths have been implemented.
PBR allows artists to create textures that are based on real world measured color values and they look more or less the same in any renderer that follows the PBR guidelines and formulars.
***RBDOOM-3-BFG only supports the standard PBR Roughness/Metallic workflow.***
Adding PBR is a requirement to make the new content look the same in RBDOOM-3-BFG as in Blender 2.9x with Cycles or Eevee and Substance Designer. PBR became the standard material authoring since 2014. With RBDOOM-3-BFG modders can work with modern tools and expect that their content looks as expected.
The PBR implementation is restricted to standard PBR using the Roughness/Metallic workflow for now. Specialized rendering paths for skin, clothes and vegetation will be in future releases.
It's usually rendered with Blinn-Phong specular with a fixed specular exponent.
Specularmaps are more or less Gloss maps.
In RBDOOM-3-BFG it uses the PBR GGX Cook-Torrence formular and you can vary the roughness along the material like in other modern engines and you usually define a texture with the _rmao suffix.
The engine will also look for _rmao.[png/tga] overrides for old materials and if it finds those it will render them using a better PBR path. Old school specularmaps also go through a GGX pipeline but the roughness is estimated from the glossmap.
The Ambient Occlusion will be mixed with the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and will only affect indirect lighting contributed by the environment probes.
## Baked Global Illumination using Irradiance Volumes and Image Based Lighting
*To achieve the typical PBR look from an artistic point of view it also means to that it is necessary to add indirect lighting.
Doom 3 and even Doom 3 BFG had no indirect lighting.*
Doom 3 BFG is a big game. Doom 3, Resurrection of Evil and Lost Missions sum up to 47 big single player levels with an average of ~60 - 110 BSP portal areas or let's call them rooms / floors. Each room can have up to 50 shadow casting lights and most of them are point lights.
I needed a good automatic solution that fixes the pitch black areas without destroying the original look and feel of the game.
I also needed to add environment probes for each room so PBR materials can actually reflect the environment.
So RBDOOM-3-BFG comes with 2 systems to achieve this and both are automatic approaches so everything can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time.
The first system are environment probes which are placed into the center of the rooms. They can also be manually tweaked by adding env_probe entities in the maps. They use L4 spherical harmonics for diffuse reflections and GGX convolved mip maps for specular reflections.
The second system refines this by using a light grid for each room which provides a sort of a localized/improved version of the surrounding light for each corner of the room.
### Irradiance Volumes aka Light Grids
RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.3.0 brings back the Quake 3 light grid but this time the grid points feature spherical harmonics encoded as octahedrons and it can be evaluated per pixel. This means it can be used on any geometry and serves as an irradiance volume.
Unlike Quake 3 this isn't radiosity which is limited to diffuse only reflections. The diffuse reflectivity is built using all kinds of incoming light: diffuse, specular and emissive (sky, light emitting GUIs, VFX).
Lightgrids can be baked after loading the map and by typing:
```
bakeLightGrids [<switches>...]
<Switches>
limit[num] : max probes per BSP area (default 16384)
bounce[num] : number of bounces or number of light reuse (default 1)
grid( xdim ydim zdim ) : light grid size steps into each direction (default 64 64 128)
```
This will generate a ***.lightgrid*** file next to your .map file and it will also store a light grid atlas for each BSP area under ***env/maps/<path/to/your/map/>***
Limit is 16384 by default and means the maximum number of light grid points in a single light grid.
Quake 3 had one light grid that streched over the entire map and distributed lighting every 64 x 64 x 128 units by default.
If the maps were too big then q3map2 made the default grid size broader like 80 x 80 x 144, 96 x 96 x 160 and so on until the maximum number of light grid points was reached.
The Quake 3 approach wouldn't work with Doom 3 because the maps are too big and it would result in up to 800k probes for some maps or the grid density would very coarse.
RBDOOM-3-BFG uses the bounding size of the BSP portal areas and puts smaller light grids into those BSP areas.
This way we can maintain a good grid density and avoid wasting storage because of light grid points that are in empty space.
> But what is an Irradiance Volume or Light Grid exactly?
It tells each model or lit pixel how the indirect diffuse lighting is coming from any direction. The Probulator page by Yuri O'Donnell has some good examples:
Left: The captured view using a panorama layout. Right: The Diffuse lighting using Level 4 Spherical Harmonics aka Irradiance.
Now think of this for each of the grid points in RBDOOM-3-BFG. If a model is placed between those probes the lighting will be interpolated by the nearest 8 grid points similar like in Quake 3.
Quake 3 only stored the dominant light direction, the average light color of that direction and an ambient color term for each grid point.
In RBDOOM-3-BFG you basically can have the diffuse lighting information for **any** world space direction instead.
This is a way more advanced technique.
### Image Based Lighting and Environment Probes
Environment probes supplement the light grids. While light grids provide diffuse lighting information the signal isn't good enough to provide plausible specular light reflections. This is where environment probes are needed.
If a level designer doesn't put any env_probe entities into a map then they are automatically distributed through the map using the BSP area bounds and placed in the center of them.
Environment probes can be computed after loading the map and by typing:
```
bakeEnvironmentProbes
```
This will generate EXR files in ***env/maps/<path/to/your/map/>***.
The environment probes use an octahedron encoding and the specular mipmaps are convolved using the Split Sum Approximation by Brian Karris [Epic 2013]. Convolving the environment probes is done on the CPU using the id Tech 5 multi threading code so it will consume all your available cores.
For artists this basically means if you increase the roughness in your material then you increase the mip map level of the environment probe it samples light from and it gets blurier.
### Fallback for Missing Data
If you haven't downloaded the additional baked light data from the [RBDOOM-3-BFG ModDB Page](https://www.moddb.com/mods/rbdoom-3-bfg) and just run RBDOOM-3-BFG.exe with the required DLLs (or you built it yourself) it will use an internal fallback.
RBDOOM-3-BFG.exe has one prebaked environment probe that is compiled into the executable.
It's the light data from the Mars City 1 lobby in the screenshot above. Using this data for the entire game is inacurrate but a better compromise than using a fixed global light direction and some sort of Rim lighting hack like in version 1.2.0.
The default irradiance / radiance data gives the entire game a warmer look and it fits for being on Mars all the time.
Left: No global illumination. Ambient is pitch black like in original Doom 3. Right: Extra ambient pass for global illumination with r_forceAmbient 0.5.
Dithering demonstration: left side is quantized to 3 bits for each color channel. Right side is also only 3 bits but dithered with chromatic Blue Noise. The interesting fact about the dithering here is shown in the upper debug bands.
The first top band is the original signal. The second shows just 8 blocks and if you dither the those blocks with Blue Noise then it is close to the original signal which is surprising.
Doom 3 also requires some extensions in order to work with TrenchBroom. I usually develop these things for RBDOOM-3-BFG but I created a seperated brach for vanilla Doom 3 so everybody can adopt TrenchBroom and the new Doom 3 (Valve) .map support.
The goal of the TrenchBroom support is to make it easier to create new maps. It doesn't allow to create bezier patches at the moment so you won't be able to edit existing Doom 3 maps.
You can only save maps to the Doom 3 Valve format but you can copy paste from the vanilla Doom 3 .map format into the Doom 3 (Valve)configuration and reset your texture alignment as you want.
TrenchBroom doesn't support brush primitives like in D3Radiant or DarkRadiant and if you are familiar with TrenchBroom then you know that the preferred .map format is some kind of (Valve) .map format for your game.
The Quake 1/2/3 communities already adopted the Valve .map format in the BSP compilers and I did the same with dmap in RBDOOM-3-BFG.
Here is an overview of the changes made to TrenchBroom:
***New***
* Doom 3 .map parser with brushDef3, patchDef2, patchDef3 primitives
* Doom 3 Valve .map configuration
* Quake 3 .shader parser adopted to support .mtr
* .mtr support includes support for Doom 3 diffuse stages and the lookup for them is like in idMaterial::GetEditorImage()
* New Doom 3 OBJ parser. My TB Interop branch automatically creates OBJ files to work with TB and it also allows seamless interop with Blender 2.8x and 2.9x with the need of additional model formats for func_static entities (like misc_model for Quake 3)
* Game FGDs for Doom 3 and Doom 3 BFG
***Issues***
* D3Radiant usually does not allow to use just textures. Only valid materials work and only materials should be shown in the texture collection overview. However this branch still displays all found textures.
* It has no support for BFG .resource files and .bimage files. BFG only shipped for precompressed textures and no .tga files so people who want to mod for BFG have to copy the vanilla D3 base/textures/* and base/models/* to D3BFG/base/
* Many entities work differently in Doom 3 if they have an origin. Brush work in D3 is usually stored in entity space and not world space. This is a major issue and not solved. I couldn't figure out how to parse the origin first and then translate the brushes accordingly.
* Doom 3's primary model formats are LWO and ASE. LWO and .md5mesh model support is missing.
* Some ASE models can't be loaded and materials are usually all wrong if loaded
### Some Scenes of Mars City 1 loaded into TrenchBroom
ADDITIONAL TERMS: The Doom 3 BFG Edition GPL Source Code is also subject to certain additional terms. You should have received a copy of these additional terms immediately following the terms and conditions of the GNU GPL which accompanied the Doom 3 BFG Edition GPL Source Code. If not, please request a copy in writing from id Software at id Software LLC, c/o ZeniMax Media Inc., Suite 120, Rockville, Maryland 20850 USA.
You don't need FFmpeg to be installed. You can turn it off by adding -DFFMPEG=OFF and -DBINKDEC=ON to the CMake options. It is enabled by default because the bundled libbinkdec is slow during development if compiled for Debug mode.
1. Download and install Homebrew (https://brew.sh) for single architecture builds or MacPorts (https://www.macports.org/install.php) for universal architecture builds on macOS Big Sur or later.
You don't need FFmpeg to be installed. You can turn it off by adding -DFFMPEG=OFF and -DBINKDEC=ON to the CMake options. For debug builds FFmpeg is enabled by default because the bundled libbinkdec is slow during development if compiled for Debug mode. For release, retail and universal builds FFmpeg is disabled and libbinkdec is enabled by default.
> ./cmake-xcode-opengl-universal.sh (universal build on macOS Big Sur / Xcode 12.2 or later)
Depending on which package manager you install (Homebrew or MacPorts) you may need to change the openal-soft library and include paths specified in the cmake shell scripts. For single architecture builds (debug, release, retail) the default openal-soft paths are set for Homebrew on x86, while for universal builds the default paths are set for MacPorts on x86 or Apple Silicon. If you want to build using the single architecture shell scripts (debug, release, retail) on Apple Silicon, you will need to change the openal-soft paths from `/usr/local/...` to either `/opt/homebrew/...` (Homebrew) or `/opt/local/...` (MacPorts).
For Xcode builds double click on RBDOOM-3-BFG/xcode-opengl-\<buildtype\>/RBDoom3BFG.xcodeproj and start the build. The generated Xcode project file is pre-configured with the correct targets and build settings.
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2. RBDOOM-3-BFG is usually split into 2 packages. Make sure you have the Win64 binaries like RBDOOM-3-BFG-1.3.0.37-win64-20210604-git-c705e89.7z and the baked environment probes and lightgrid data for all BFG single player maps (4.2 GB download) like RBDOOM-3-BFG-1.3.0.36-baseSP_bakedlightdata.7z
On Linux and macOS the easiest way to install is with SteamCMD: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD.
See the description on https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Linux (macOS is directly below that) on how to install SteamCMD on your system. You won't have to create a new user.
(replace <YOUR_STEAM_LOGIN_NAME> with your steam login name)
When it's done you should have the normal windows installation of Doom 3 BFG in ./doom3bfg/ and the needed files in ./doom3bfg/base/
That number is the "AppID" of Doom 3 BFG; if you wanna use this to get the data of other games you own, you can look up the AppID at https://steamdb.info/
NOTE that we've previously recommended using download_depot in the Steam console to install the game data. That turned out to be unreliable and result in broken, unusable game data. So use SteamCMD instead, as described above.
Alternatively with the GOG installer, you can use Wine to install the game. See https://winehq.org/download for details on how to install wine for Linux and macOS.
5. On macOS the RBDoom3BFG executable will also search for game data within an app bundle's relative path ../Resources/base and, as a last resort, within the absolute path /Applications/RBDoom-3-BFG.app/Contents/Resources/base. In addition, if you want the game to be standalone without dependencies on pre-installed dynamic libs, you can use macdylibbundler to bundle all external dylib dependencies into the app bundle (see https://github.com/auriamg/macdylibbundler or simply install via "brew install dylibbundler" or "sudo port install dylibbundler"). For example, the following command will copy all external dynamic library dependencies to the Contents/libs directory of the game's app bundle and adjust the rpaths within the RBDoom3BFG executable and copied dylibs.
After running dylibbundler you must re-sign the modified executable and dylibs if planning to run on **Apple Silicon** machines. The output of dylibbundler will indicate which dylibs (if any) require re-signing. This code signing step is not needed for x86-based Macs.
r_hdrAutoExposure [0 or 1] | Adaptive tonemapping with HDR. This allows to have very bright or very dark scenes but the camera will adapt to it so the scene won't loose details
dmap mapfile | Command: Compiles a .map to its corresponding BSP .proc, Collision .cm files and Area Awareness System (AI navigation) .aas files. Just type dmap to list all options
dmap `[glfile]` mapfile | DMap option that exports the BSP areas and portals to .obj for debugging purposes
bakeEnvironmentProbes | Command after loading a map. Captures all env_probe entities and stores them to disc
bakeLightGrids [`<switches>`...] | `<Switches>` limit[num] : max probes per BSP area (default 16384) bounce[num] : number of bounces or number of light reuse (default 1) grid( xdim ydim zdim ) : light grid size steps into each direction (default 64 64 128)
exportScriptEvents | Command: Generates a new script/doom_events.script that reflects all registered class events in the idClass C++ system. The gamecode still needs to be extended to add the original comments of the events
postLoadExportFlashAtlas | Cvar: Set to 1 at startup to dump the Flash images to exported/swf/
postLoadExportFlashToSWF | Cvar: Set to 1 at startup to dump the Flash .bswf files as .swf (WIP)
postLoadExportFlashToJSON | Cvar: Set to 1 at startup to dump the Flash .bswf files as .json. Can be reimported into the engine and imported into Blender for inspection
convertMapToJSON mapfile | Command: Convert .map file to new .json map format with polygons instead of brushes. This was easy because the original .map format is only an array of entities and each entity has a simple dictionary for its values. This JSON format contains all level data and can be imported and exported to Blender without loosing any data. The new DMap can also compile map files with the .json suffix like regular maps.
If you want to report an issue with the game, you should make sure that your report includes all information useful to characterize and reproduce the bug.
* Search on Google
* Include the computer's hardware and software description ( CPU, RAM, 3D Card, distribution, kernel etc. )
* If appropriate, send a console log, a screenshot, an strace ..
* If you are sending a console log, make sure to enable developer output:
> RBDoom3BFG.exe +set developer 1 +set logfile 2
You can find your qconsole.log on Windows in C:\Users\<your user name>\Saved Games\id Software\RBDOOM 3 BFG\base\
**A**: It is fun, period. Doom 3 was an impressive milestone in total game development in 2004. In 2011 id Software added lot stuff from the development of Rage like its own Flash SWF and ActionScript 2 interpreter, proper support for gamepads and widescreens. It also combines the gamecode for D3 and its missionpacks and runs it in a seperate thread and it has many multithreaded rendering optimizations.
DOOM-3 and DOOM-3-BFG are some of the most transparent games available where you can open all files and inspect how the game was built.
Unlike Quake 1-3, DOOM-3-BFG shipped with all level .map sources for 47 single player maps.
There is plenty of stuff to learn from it like solid run & gun core gameplay, AI, animations, client/server multiplayer, level design or simple and elegant engine design.
**Q**: Can I use this engine to make a commercial game?
**A**: You can but don't bother me to give you free support and you probably should use Unreal Engine 4. I am a full time game developer and usually don't have time for any free support.
However some people already work on total conversions and there is a community on the id Tech 4 Discord server where you can ask questions and get some support:
**A**: Apart from the Git diffs, you can look for `// RB` in the source code. Many other contributors commented their changes in the same way. I enforced the usage of Astyle in this project which also makes it alot easier to compare it against other ports of DOOM-3-BFG. Simply format the other ports with Astyle like I do in neo/astyle-code.bat and you can compare the code easily in WinMerge or KDiff3.
**A**: If you install this package you can start the engine, open the console and run exec extract_resources.cfg. This will create a basedev/ folder next to your base/ folder with the indidividual files like .mtr materials or .def entity declarations.
