Wirehead Studios

So now that the demo is out, I can talk about this game since, well, what's to spoil about a demo, right?  Well if you've not played the full game OR the demo then consider this entire thread a spoiler, and stop reading!

Technology

Quite impressive.  The detail is quite good, and by playing with the options it's quite amazing how much of it is actual bump-mapping.  Things that would take thousands of polygons to create can now be done with bumpmapping.  Oh, if only Q3 had this, Gen's weapon models could go from looking damn good to looking !@#!@ unbelievable!

The shadowing, specularity, and fluid animation system add a lot to the environment.  Watching your guy in the mirror actually twist his body, instead of rotating in the clunky fashion of the Q3 models or the cartoonish nature of the Q2 models is a fresh change.

Performance

Pretty choppy for me.  At 640x480, medium quality, all options on it's quite rare to see smoothness at all.  There's no way it can be "smooth as glass" on my hardware.  I think my biggest limitation is CPU, as if there's a lot of physics activity in the same room it can slow down rendering more than just walking into a larger space.  Reducing options like bump-mapping had no noticeable effect on performance.  Dropping to low-quality on the texturing helped a little.  "Minimum system requirements" = "barely tolerable gameplay."  What was even more amusing was bumping the settings to "Ultra Quality" at 1024x768.  It's like when Quake first came out, and I tried to play it on a 486!

Atmosphere

Dark and claustrophobic so far, at least Mars City is.  If anything, this feels like a cross between Half-Life and System Shock 2 so far.  In the original Doom, you arrived in response to a distress call, and got there AFTER things went wrong.  Here, you watch them go wrong.  I must admit that Half-Life's scripting of the experiment's failure felt a little less rushed, but that may have to do with the fact that you were at Ground Zero at the time.  So far it feels very far removed from the Doom I've come to know and love.

Monsters

When the hell did Zombies get smart?  The zombies with guns tend to have much better AI than the wandering melee-only zombies.  It's more like fighting actual soldiers than "zombies with guns".  Again, shades of Half-Life.  They're not too hard to take down once you know how they work, but I was hoping for more cannon fodder and less soldier-ish behavior.  Call me old-school.  I also noticed that if you shoot a civilian they fold with one pistol shot, yet as a zombie they take several.  Behold the power of possession?

Imps...  Not your brown thorny bastards any more.  They like to come out of every nook and crack they can.  Still shotgun fodder, but it's a lot harder to box with them than it used to be.

Exploding barrels

What can I say.  They suck.  They explode instantly, they don't have that old "knock the barrels around" effect, and what's with the wimpy explosion sound?  Sure they'll pulverize anything near by, but I like explosions to sound like "BOOM", not some wimpy asthmatic gasping noise.

Tinker Factor

As in, what kind of stuff can you play with in the environment?  Pretty decent.  There's a lot of stuff you can interact with, but not to the Duke Nukem level.  I was hoping for more physics objects, like hoses that can be pushed around.  So far you can nudge some boxes or get caught in machinery, etc.  Boxes are VERY hard to push when up against a wall if you can't get directly behind them.  In Q2 or Half-life you could strafe them at an angle and slide them along a wall.  You can't "grab" and pull on them either, so that's a complaint there.  None of them are breakable either.  Even the cardboard paper boxes are indestructible.  I realize they're "Doom Crates" but isn't that a tad extreme?

Controls

What can I say?  Standard FPS arrangement.  My only gripe is NOT having a toggled run option.  I haven't dug into any config stuff yet to see if there's an option outside of the menu choices, and I know the game is supposed to be at a slower pace, but this WOULD be preferred over having to hold the bloody shift key down.  It's hard to hold down shift + movement while trying to switch guns or reload at the same time you're diving for cover from a machinegun zombie, or trying to jump out of the way of an imp about to come flying at you through a doorway.

Weapons

Fists - for when you're out of everything else I guess?

Well the flashlight hurts.  Two bops in the head and a common zombie goes down.

Pistol seems 100% accurate to me all the time.  Not much damage, but it's good for long-range or potshotting the slower zombies.

Shotgun... what did they do, try to combine the single shotty and SSG?  It shoots 12 pellets like a magnum 00 buck round, but it practically sprays them all over the damned room!  I love the power in this gun, but it's just about worthless unless you're dead on top of something.  No real shotgun patterns that loosely, even if it's cylinder bore.  I would have preferred a tighter spread with less damage, and throw in the double-barreled later on in the game for use on the big boys.  I seriously detest the limited usefulness of this weapon as a result of this setup.  About all it's good for is popping things point blank as they come in through a door or around a corner.  Used in that roll, it excells.

The machinegun is a P90, as far as design purposes are concerned.  It's quite useful, I'd say more useful than the shotgun since it's accurate across a room.  Used in short bursts you can tear up the more dangerous zombies and imps go down without having to get point blank or waste 3 shells (or eat three fireballs) trying to.

Other neat stuff

Security drones rock!  A walking guide bot with a built-in gun turret, who could ask for more?  Throw in the cute little chirpy noises it makes, along with it's ungainly, spider-like appearance and you have probably the most charming thing in the game so far.  Just sit back and let it machinegun anything in your way, or let it distract the monsters, then turn your fire on them while they're distracted by the bot.  Two guns are better than one, after all.

Super Turbo Turkey Puncher... anything look familiar there?

The PDAs are loaded with information.  Some of it useful, some of it not, but hey, I like that sort of stuff.  If a game is going to be of the "slower" variety, I like having backstory and sub-plots thrown in.

Stuff hidden all over the place.  I've found probably 4 or 5 secret ammo/item caches at LEAST on the two levels in the demo so far.

Other gripes

I don't know what the absorbtion rate on that green armor is, but you might as well be wearing air.  If anything it feels like the old .33% absorbtion green armor from the original Doom.

They used the Q3 health sounds....  AWK!  :wtf:

I understand the need for darkness in the game, but I think it's somewhat overdone.  Granted, can't judge the whole game by two levels, but so far, except for the initial no-combat part, most of that beautifully rendered scenery is hidden in shadow.  Kind of makes for a waste of texturing unless you have the flashlight out.

I've noticed a few physics quirks too.  Some dead bodies flip out like you've put 1 million volts through them just by punching the things.  If you're that damned strong why doesn't one punch waste a zombie?

The "dissolve" effect on the bodies...  It's a neat effect, though not really made clear as to why zombie corpses would do that, but I miss the old "blow the corpse apart" gib effects.

Final thoughts

As a game, I like it to a degree.  It's creepy, but I don't think it's "scare the crap out of you" creepy as some people have said so far.  Some things startle if you're not attentive, but I guess some people scare too easily.  The system demands of the game make it difficult for me to justify purchasing it at this time.  I don't think people with minimum-spec systems like mine can really enjoy the gameplay owing to the choppy visuals.  It's hard to hit moving objects at 5-10 frames per second, which I can say it honestly drops to this level at some points where there's a lot of complex scenery.

I also don't think it's the most "to die for" game in existance either.  Id said their goal was to make a slower, creepy, nightmarish environment as opposed to the "90 MPH action shooter" the original Doom was.  In that I think they have succeeded.  I guess it's too early for me to judge if I would consider it a worthy successor to Doom and Doom II in that respect.  I'd have to play the full game to draw that conclusion.  Right now it feels more like "System Shock 2 * Half-Life + Doom Monsters", though the only "Doom Monster" I've encountered so far in the demo is the Imp.

In the preview of Doom3 that was at Quakecon2002, :wtf:

Armor info:

The framerate issues are easily resolved with some tweaks you can find. Try This: http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/Doom3Guide.htm (http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/Doom3Guide.htm)
I agree with you on the darkness bit, it gets a bit irritating.
The shotgun's alot more useful that you think. Due to fact that you'll be fighting in small spaces most of the time, it'll pretty much be your minute-by-minute workhorse.
You can also shoot out some lights with the pistol, though it's not useful, it's still fun. :P
Also, Doom 3 has a bad habit of having s_maxsoundspershader defaulted at 1. Set it to atleast 10 to get the most of your audio goodness.
Score 25000 points or more on STTP3 for a special email in your PDA. :thumb:
The only solution for the run problem is Windows's sticky keys accessability option. Not the best, but it works for me. :D
To bring down the console, hold ctrl and alt and press ~. You can pretty much then give yourself all the weapons and try them out. ;)
I think you can spawn any monster you want as well. I haven't played the demo to see if any monsters weren't included for spawning. The spawn command can summon the beasts. And pressing tab after typing spawn shows you a list of all the entities you can spawn. The item and weapon entity names can also be used in the give command. Nifty. :D
The dissolve effect was mainly made for performance reasons.

Do you mean the "in-game" graphics of STTP, or the cheap ripoff of Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha 3 logo? ^_^

I played the game for a while... and quite honestly, I wasn't very impressed. Sure, it looks fantastic, but it just doesn't play like a game with the "Doom" name on it. It's exactly as Phoenix said -- it feels like "Half-Life * System Shock 2 + Doom Monsters." Sorry folks, that's not what I think of when I see the big-D name on a game.

Funny, zombies don't dissolve on MY end; only the hellspawn critters.

And Carmack said it himself, Doom3 is revisionist history. There's even an in-game joke later on if you're paying enough attention.

The "tweaks" really didn't give me any performance benefit, but at least now I know how to get to the console.

I meant the in-game graphics for STTP.  I've never seen Street Fighter Alpha 3.

All of the non-demo material is disabled.  For example, I can spawn in a "pinky demon", but it's just a shadow box on the floor with a collision volume that does nothing but look around.  Can't access any of the heavy weapons either.  They have no classnames, even though there are references to them.

Angst:  If you punch zombie corpses in the head they turn into a bloody skeleton that fades into thin air but leaves a blood puddle on the floor.  The imps vaporize with a "burn away" effect.

There is an "always run" option available in the console commands (in_alwaysRun), but it's restricted to multiplayer.  You also can't use "_speed" from the console.  It MUST be bound to a key.  I did find some useful light control cvars though, to take some of the "dimness" out of the level.  Here's what I set.

r_gamma 1.2
r_brightness 1.2
r_lightlevel 2.5

That helps a bit.  I also found that I can give myself a nice set of binoculars with the following scheme:

seta farview "g_fov 20; sensitivity 2; bind e vstr nearview"
seta nearview "g_fov 90; sensitivity 7; bind e vstr farview"

bind "e" to "vstr farview" and you've got a toggled sniper zoom.  It's not really useful for shooting things, at least not in the demo, but it does let you see detail from across the map you might otherwise not get to look at.

Another fairly serious gripe I have is the 60 FPS internal clock.  I really don't care at what speed the game logic calculates, but it does NOT seem to interpolate between player positions at all.  There are some spots where I can get up to and over 100FPS while staring at a wall or floor by setting com_fixedtic -1.  However, the video update ALWAYS jitters when I strafe regardless of my fps, so the effect is that strafing and/or turning makes the world slightly blurry.  I despise blurry movement!  If I set com_fixedtic to 1 I can kill off the blurry if the fps indicator pushes up to the monitor's refresh rate cap.  The problem is... com_fixedtic 1 hardlinks the game's logic to the refresh, so at 20 fps the game is in slow motion, and at 100fps it's turbo-speed.  Setting the monitor to a 60Hz refresh won't help either since 60Hz  looks like a strobe light to me, and the game doesn't run at a PERFECT 60Hz.  This means the movement is somewhat smooth, but "jumps" now and again, which is not good either.  It seems the only way to get things "smooth" and still run at the proper speed is to lock the monitor to 60Hz, set com_fixedtic 1, and be able to maintain a STEADY 60FPS throughout the entire game.  That's not going to happen on my hardware.  I realize I'm not going to get 100fps or even a steady 60FPS out of the game without some rather expensive hardware, but the lack of positional interpolation really bothers me.  I know for a fact this is an interpolation issue because I set timescale down to .1 and instead of the nice, smooth glass-like movement you'd get out of Q3 your position jumps from one position to another a few times a second.

Another gripe is when the hell did Mars get  1/3 MORE gravity than Earth?  If anything it should be 1/3 the gravity OF Earth, so in essense everything should be extremely light.  It feels like a lot of corners were cut in order to break away from the physics tricks from Q3 and prior.  I really don't care about physics tricks.  If they want to lock player movement onto a 60Hz clock that's fine, but interpolate the damned viewposition updates and let me run my video at whatever flocking speed *I* (THE ALMIGHTY PLAYER WHO PAYS YOUR SALARY) want!  If you want a lower jump height, that's great too, just lower the Z acceleration for player jumping (duh!).  Why muck with the gravity?  I think it would have been great to have Earth-like gravity inside the structures (we assume artificial gravity generators) and lighter gravity on the Mars surface if you stray away from the structures.

I think that whenever I get around to actually buying Doom 3, the first thing I'm going to do is mod some kind of visual lerping for the vieworigin to get rid of that blasted jitter, and unlock the "always run" option from being multiplayer only.  THEN I'll play the game all the way through.  As it stands I'm finding more and more irritants, mostly visual, that are reducing my prospects for buying the game any time soon.

Noone said the game was 100% realistic. :P *dodges a brick*
Make sure your Direct X is 9.0c or higher and that your videocard drivers are up to date.

Just a question, Pho, what are your specs? I'm accually a little below the minimum and the game runs suprisingly smooth for me, and I'm using a GF4 MX 440, 1.4 ghz, 512mb ram.

My specs:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 1.53 GHz, Palamino core
Asus A7V266-e mainboard
512 MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
Chaintech GF4 Ti4600

Video driver version:  6.14.10.6177
Direct-X version:  9.0b

Now before you jump on my for my direct-x version, let me clarify what I'm talking about.  Let's take Mars City, when you first come in through the bioscanner.  After you leave the scan room, turn right, and walk toward the information display pannel.  Look at the two paintings on the wall above the bench.  Now, face those paintings, then strafe left or right while keeping your eyes FIXED on the paintings, paying attention to the borders and text.  What you'll see is an effect that looks something like this:

Stationary:

(http://wirehead.planetquake.gamespy.com/phoenix/misc/stationary.jpg)

Moving:

(http://wirehead.planetquake.gamespy.com/phoenix/misc/movement.jpg)

This drives me up the wall, enough to make me not want to play the game.  I do NOT have this problem in Quake 3, Quake 2, or GLQuake.  The reason is in any of these games I can set my com_maxfps (or cl_maxfps) up to match my screen's refresh rate.  Even locking at 125FPS in Gen isn't a problem since updating at 125Hz doesn't jitter the screen NEARLY as bad as that blasted 60Hz update in Doom 3.  Even at that, I'm not wandering around reading stuff in Gen, I'm just concerned with blowing things up.  I can replicate this behavior by setting com_maxfps or cl_maxfps down to the 60Hz range in Q3 and Q2, so it is most certainly a render clock vs. refresh rate problem.

The bottom line is that the game's visual update clock MUST MEET OR EXCEED the monitor's refresh settings to avoid this behavior.  Maybe I'm just being bitchy because my eyes take pictures faster than human eyes?  Maybe I'm the only one running into this problem?  I don't know, but it's a severe gripe for me.  If there is some other way around this besides modding the game then someone please let me know!

What about increasing the smooth mouse option? Tried that?(Probably not a solution, lol)
I don't have the bluring/doublevision.... there's a g_doublevision command. I've never messed with it myself. But I have it set to off anyways.

If none of the above work, you can try messing with the video console commands, like the r_ and image_ prefixed commands. :P

About the armor. You can accually increase the absorption rate of Armor in-game with g_armorprotection. It's defaulted at 0.3, same as slippy's green armor. I have mine set at 0.5, same as Doom's blue armor.

The shotgun isn't as bad once you get used to it, but the range is deffintely limited to about 10 -15 meters, unless you're shooting at one of the bigger monsters. I would still say its about the best weapon for fighting imps and zombies, you just have to be mobile and use it like a long-ranged melee weapon. Once you get the imp's patterns down, it's pretty easy to just  sidestep their first fireball, zip across the room, and put one in their gut.

The machinegun is also very good for situations where you don't want to leave your secured position in the doorway across the hall. Obviously, you can't go point blank with your shotgun in every situation or you could get flanked by something you didn't see around the corner. If you go for all chest shots, the MG should down an imp or zombie VERY fast. If you go for headshots, which is very tempting, unfortunately most of the rounds will miss and it will take twice as long,

The pistol, like you said, is good for long range if you don't have MG ammo. It's also good for taking out former maintenance guys (zombies w/ out guns) without wasting ammo for your better weapons. Like the MG, just go for chest shots. Head shots will take a zombie down in 3 rounds, but given the way they stumble and lunge about you can land the required 5 chest shots much faster most of the time.

Nah Pho, it's not 'your eyes' - but a lot of people these days seem to think '60 fps is enough!'.
It's just very odd and horrifying that the ID Software dev-team now belongs to that partical disturbing kind of thinkers.

Been there, done that.

Tab:  60FPS is NOT enough, I don't care what anyone says.  I'm getting more and more of the mindset that if I can't have it my way, I'm going to MAKE things my way.  That's the essence of modding, of course but feeling that I have to mod something to be able to stand, visually, the out-of-the-box version of it?  That's what I'm drawing issue with.

hey guys. i tried out the demo, and im actually quite impressed. not the fast paced doom that i was expecting it to be, but 1. they meant for it to be a slower game, and 2. its only the beginning of the game, who knows if it gets more intense later on?

In terms of performance, the game would start going kind of slow in big rooms and such, but it was always playable. in hallways the game ran fine. as in completely smooth. usually wasnt the case when security guards starting running in to take you down, though.

Like phoenix said, the darkness can get annoying at times, and alot of times keep you from fighting back against those dang security guards (the shotgun ones are painful). its funny, the only old id game that could scare me was Doom and Doom 2, and Doom 3 is following suit so far. I had plenty of times where i'd jump 3 feet when something suddenly jumps out at you. sure scared the crap outta me. my scariest one though? In the bathroom in Mars City, try looking in the mirror on Hard mode. (not sure if it triggers on any other mode, i looked in the mirror on Normal and nothing happened) you'll have the bejeebers scared out of you (especially if youre wearing headphones like i was, geez...i had to throw off the headphones and look away, it was so sudden), and then have to face an ambush charging in the room. (Edit: well, the whole mirror thing probably triggers on hard mode and nothing else, just as an excuse to throw more monsters at you. pretty good excuse if you ask me, lol)

try it and see  :thumb:

while im at it, is it possible to unlock nightmare mode in the demo?

I am not as technical as most of you, but i'd like to say that i do noit enjoy doom3 very much. i'm about an hour into the game and find it monotinos. same dark room, same thing going to happen.

i'm just looking forward to HL2. that seems to have more veriety to it.

You guys just complain too much. As a near-future psycologist i?ll tell ya dat, one of the most common mistakes we humans do, is dat, expect. Because we learn from childhood to ?expect?, many people later on ends up messed up emotionaly because they always ?expect? almost every time dat, what ever is happenin it is good, no matter how catastrophic things may be, dis actually is related to the fact dat we have a psychic protection with us dat all the times does not allow us to assimilate somethin dat in all cases its very recomendable to do: just accept, accept dar somethin we think dat could not be, like ?dis is not happenin to me!!!? when you crash yer dad car dat ya borrow from him, and things like it that can get worse to ?he or she cant be dead!!!? and dat thinking will take ya to look forth psycological attention.

So after all dis crap, guys, accept what ya have, start thinkin less and lesser the ?why dis or dat, didnt happen dis way!!!? and you will have an edge and feel not ass bad as if you choose not to accept somethin, as far as i?m concern, DOOM3 is just great!!!! and i?m in a way like pho, DOOM is my favorite game of all time, when i get to play the DOOM64 series, i realize dat the original Doom could be implemented with a bit more ?cinematic? or ambient music dat makes ya more unconfortable, like you really are in hell, and of course Doom almost did dat, since i have downloaded some mp3s from the original, or single mixes or songs based on the first one, you can say that im really a fan of the game, not to mention i get more into it since ill get to play it with JDoom and the 3D models.

All the people I know told me that at least they jump from their seats like 10 times per map, and for me it was i think the same as they, since it is the game that has freak me out more than Undying, that was complicated but was also a good game, not to mention that also features a very well dynamic shadows as well, so DOOM3 is awesome!!! and ill tell ya since my machine is an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2Ghz, 378Mb ram, and a 64Mb GForce3 video card and using the lowest of all settings it really scares ya!!! so finish DOOM3, then play Halo2 and Half Life2, then try to be the most objective as you can be, and decide for yerselfs if DOOM is the best, no matter how much different it is from the original one, since the old school feeling is dat, ?old? and i think its not only me, buy all the guys dat use to play games from dat time when the Ultimate Doom was the king and other like Duke Nukem and Blood came behind, get a feel of greatness, of something different from the ones we play now, that feel cool, intense but deep inside ya know its not the same but in a way ya cant compare them because a number of differences in criteria.

So recieve a nice warm salutation from me, stop the forces of hell (we already know dat theyre goin to reach the earth) and stay sharp, beat the game in the hardest mode and try the mods, specially the ?duct tape mod? and the ?cooperative mod?. See ya around...

wots happenin madsk1lls woot!
yo homey, dis 'o dat about ''expect'' dosent mean d1ck yo!
rox0rs me box0rs dis & dat yadig!


Seriously though, I'm above the mental level of 'retarded oatmeal grinding primate' so I can combine common sense with expectations, as well as form an objective opinion.
If and when I say I think something sucks, I do. I don't mean that I expected it to be too much, I don't mean I was born in the wrong era and I didn't just jump to conclusions.

Let's just asume for a while that we've all evolved beyond the CS-players stereotype that dislikes everything that isn't the way it used to be. Just give everyone here atleast the benefit of the doubt.

Aside from all that, I am still curious about Doom3, because I sure as hell am not going to play it before I have decent hardware. And believe it or not: 60 fps limits suck. They really do - 'dats' a fact.

ok, well i finished the demo on hard mode finally. you know the game's good when you finish the demo and you think to yourself: "..thats it? that cant be it! i want more!"

so far im really liking this game, and im really considering going out and getting it. if you guys know whats good for you, i suggest you follow suit. then its Doom 3 multiplayer time  ;), creeping through dark hallways, hiding in the shadows, and shooting all the lights out...this is sounding fun actually. personally i think multiplayer mode should have some sort of Night Vision Goggles powerup or something along those lines, things could get pretty intense, and then all the lights would be out. you're vulnerable with your flashlight out, but you cant fight in the dark without a general idea as to where your opponent's at. but yeah, most other games' deathmatch mode gets really fast-paced and sometimes out of control. looks like Doom 3 is taking it in a different direction :)

It's funny to hear all these people talking about the demo when I've owned the game since the week it came out (even though I didn't get my new comp till 2 weeks later and coulcn't play immediately.) I don't see what the big deal is.  It's DOOM! It may not be exactly the way you want to be, but it's still Doom! How bad can it be?  And it's only $40, it's not  a huge risk! As far as the cost of system upgrading, if you're a PC gamer, you're going to have to do it eventually anyway, so why not do it now?

A lot of you probably know how much I like to nitpick and criticize, and I still think Doom 3's a good game and at the very least is worth the $40.

That said, with respect to what Karnage is expecting of multiplayer....while Doom 3 certainly has those elements, at it's core Doom 3 MP is still just Quake with "clip" reloading and destructable lights. It depends on the players a lot, but often times it's just as fast paced as any other DM shooter because if you try to creep around,  you're just not going to get the weapons and powerups as fast as another guy of the same skill who's going full speed. Stealth and using the dark works in certain instances, but in most cases, when you enter a dark room, its better to just run blindly through hoping if anyone shoots at you in the dark you can just swallow the damage and return fire with your rocket launcher. This is made even more so by the fact that most "creepers" on public servers are n00bs with chainguns, and the windup noise gives their position away and allows you to snuff them with a SG or RL blast before their gun even starts to fire.

On the other hand, the dark can play a role in 1 on 1 with 2 skilled players, particularly when one player needs to make an escape or compensate for missing an important weapon or armor. It's just that a lot of servers are allready using the 32-player mod with 6-8 people and element of mystery is more or less gone. Plus, I think wiith a little modding, the intensity could be increased much more.

I'm getting by far more bang for my buck out of buying UT2004 when it came out for $30 than I am by buying Doom3 when it came out for $55. That game just isn't fun like the other id FPS games.

You sure you're playing the right game? I'm running through single player for the thrid time and I'm having a blast. :D

It costs money, and that is something I do not have at present.

Look, I can deal with some gripes like the shotgun patterning, but the 60FPS limit MUST GO, period, end of story.  I'll do it myself.  I do WANT to play the game, don't get me wrong.  I just don't want to play it on outdated hardware with FPS caps causing visual annoyance the whole time.  If it doesn't bother you, that's great.  I can't help it if my eyes/brain are more sensitive to these things.

JLMode:  Would it hurt you too much to use proper English?  I can guarantee you that you have at least a 500% better chance of being taken seriously and not having your entire post skipped over if you would do that.  Games Keeper keeps his posts short, which is why he's not completely ignored.  Nobody can stand reading three large paragraphs of Games Keeper Speak™.

Well, about multiplayer, i wasnt expecting to be ALL Creep around-backstabbing action. If you have a rocket launcher, you dont really have a reason to be hiding, do you?

I may try Doom 3 again at some point in the future when it's less of a risk for me, money wise (I sold my copy to my roommate for the exact amount I paid for it). Right now, it's just not worth it -- I'd rather go buy two games with that $55 that I would enjoy rather than one that, right now, doesn't fit the kind of game I'm into playing.

As for the 60FPS cap, that's not an issue for me, but it might be because I'm used to it. A lot of the games I play, particularly Dance Dance Revolution, are also capped at 60FPS.

for all you ATI card owners

http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/doom...riencept2.shtml (http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/doom3enhancetheexperiencept2.shtml)

It was very dark and mostly metal.

I Just Got Doom 3 Yesterday, and while i like it

both Tab and Pho are sooo right 60Fps really does suck, while for games like beat - em - ups 60Fps is fine

For First person shooters 60FPS is just too slow especially for deathmatch and it makes the single player chog somewhat

it quicker Pho, or anybody brings out a code to remove the limit the better

as at the mo, even with the hardware to run it at full pelt, it seems slower than the original doom

which is very wrong, doom has and should be about fast action and gameplay, not creeping around and waiting in the shadows

BRING BACK A PROPER, FAST DOOM

ID YOURS FANS DEMAND IT!!!!!!

sorry bad typing,

it should have read

the quicker pho, or anybody brings out a code to remove the limit the better

(it's too early to be typing correctly)

I quite enjoyed the demo however on my laptop it ran at like 10fps lol. Bit I enjoyed most was walking outside on mars, that part imo was better than the rest of the entire demo. So much so that I kept killing myself just walking around outside trying to get away from the base and to go for a stroll around mars  :thumb:

you know , you CAN edit your posts and avoid double posting .

There's a TC in the works that remakes the original Doom 1 levels and brings back fast gameplay. They're even removing reloading, which IMO is a mistake, but if you want fast action, they got it.

http://cdoom.d3files.com/index.php?page=news (http://cdoom.d3files.com/index.php?page=news)

Well, it'll be a while before I can attempt to tweak Doom 3 because I only have the demo.  Even if I can't remove the hardcap on the 60FPS, that com_fixedtic variable may hold some promise for finding a way to sneak around it.  I'll find out once I can afford the game. ;)

One thing I know you can do is tighten the shotgun spread and damage to more appropriate non-SSG levels. I've done it myself with no knowledge of Doom 3 code just rooting around the PK4's in notepad. I also sped up plasma to not be super slow. Just stick your changed weapon definitions in a zip, rename to PK4, and make a new folder for it in the D3 directory, and you have yourself your own personal mod for playing through SP the way you want it.
(Not to be confused with your own personal jesus, even though Depeche Mode rocks. :rolleyes:)

hmmm i might try that you know, get them all working more like there old doom counterparts

certainly worth having a look

thnx gnam

 :)~

Well, I uploaded my version of the "shotgun fix":

http://www.geocities.com/chris_gnam/D3-Cla...sicShotguns.htm (http://www.geocities.com/chris_gnam/D3-ClassicShotguns.htm)

there's 2 different mods, one to make the D3 shotgun more like the D1 single barrel shotgun (9 pellets, 8 damage), and one to make it more like the D2 super shotgun (23 pellets, 8 damage). The single barrel sounds weak, but with the tight spread you can make headshots more easily (144 damage), and do more body damage at long range. The double barrel is basically the same as the default D3 shotgun (they do almost the same total damage) but the main difference is the saturation of pellets (lots of weak pellets vs few strong pellets).

For spread, since they do the same damage, the spread for the SSG version is the same as the the default (22), then since the spread for the SSG is basically 1 unit of spread per pellet, reducing the spread of the single-barrel version proportionally is easy (9).

The main problem with spread in D3, which I think is why every hates it so much, is the spread in single player is double what it is in multiplayer. I think in multiplayer, it's pretty reasonable given the high level of damage (13 pellets for 15 damage each...195 total) and fit a damage/spread rate pretty close to what we're used to in Doom 1, 2, , Quake 3, etc. So, in addition to the spread for the modded shotguns being half the SP amount in multiplayer, I also provided 3 mini-mods for playing with the modded shotguns, as well as the default D3 shotgun,  with the reduced, half spread in single player. I think that pretty much covers just about anything you would want to do with shotguns in Doom 3.  ;)

time to shotgunsnipe :)

I don't know how you guys can even stand to play that game. It's WAY too dark, you have to have your flashlight on almost all of the time or you can't see dick. The game was uninspired anyway, it's nothing but Aliens vs. Predator with a psuedo Half-Life intro phase. The one thing I will say though, is that using bump mapping for details as opposed to unneeded polygons was a pretty smart move.

As soon as I have a chance to go out, I'm picking up Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines instead. It's thankfully finally out, and is destiend to be great... Troika games in themselves are awsome, let alone ones that use Valve's utterly beautiful engine and White Wolf's always classic RPG system... I know, you power gamers probably prefer D&D or Rifts, but I like character and story behind my PnP RPGs :P

LOL, oh god, you're one of those people....I honestly don't know why people have such a big problem with the darkness in D3...if you find yourself needing the flashlight all the time, then either your gamma is sporked up, you're a pussy, or your aim is shit. D3 is dark, but not pitch black. In 95% of situations there is still more than enough light to see your targets and aim. There are only like 2 instances in the game where you encounter enemies in total darkness, and it's only maintenance zombies easily bludgeoned to death with your flashlight..

BZZT! Wrong! Try again. :P

The brightness setting exists for a reason. Also the console command r_gamma helps.

My brightness is about 3/4 of the way up with r_gamma set to 1.1. I can see quite clearly unless the area is pitch black.

One of those people? My aim is fine... How could it not be in such a slow game? My brightness is jacked up pretty high, however I did not mess with my gamma as I was unaware that there was a console command for it. Which is another problem I had with the game, there wasn't anything presented in the options, except different levels of graphics, no real customization involved through the GUI... And for whatever reason I can't use ALT as back pedal, which turns me off quite a bit.

Face it, Id failed. They wanted to make a scary game and they failed. What they do is attempt to force fear down your throat by putting you in an isolated and utterly claustrophobic environment while limiting your movement and vision. The gameplay has barely even evolved past that of the original Doom; enemies merely bust through carefully placed walls now instead of the walls opening up for them due to an enabled trigger.

lord_malchia, what you call failure is exactly what id was going for in the first place. A remake of the original.

However, I do say it was too dark. It was so dark I eventually quit playing it. I couldn't see a damn thing, even after adjusting gamme/brightness/contrast/whatever. I eventually made it where I could see a little, but the game looked horrible.

The fact that my monitor is dark anyway doesn't help the problem at all.

Lord_Malchia, I'm under the impression that you're immune to fear. :P

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and around me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fears path, and only I will remian.

Nice litany, but you're not the Mahdi. :D

Foot:  From what I played in the demo I didn't really find it scary at all.  It's dark, and things are going to jump out at you and surprise you.  We know this going into it because Id kept touting how much of a "horror" game it was going to be.  To me it sounds more like the average haunted house at Halloween:  You know what to expect

If you really want to freak someone out you package something as a standard action game and throw creepy stuff in to spook the player when they least expect it.  Little things, like going down a brightly lit hallway and seeing some bloody handprints on the walls, or marks where someone was dragged INTO a dark room is a lot more disturbing to the psyche than just "all shadows all the time".  Once you're in the darkness you know what to expect, but I guarantee that you would NOT want to go through that door.  Does seeing a pair of red glowing eyes in a pitch black maintenence area really scare you?  To me it makes for a handy target.  How about walking into a medical lab where everything is in its place and there's about a half dozen tables with corpses covered by sheets on them.  Then after walking halfway across to the other side they all very slowly and quietly sit up at the same time while still under the sheets?  How about going through a room with dead bodies on the floor, and after coming back that way from retrieving a keycard you notice they're GONE?  See it's things like that that really screw with the mind.  The conscious mind picks up easily on certain things, but the subconscious mind locks onto "small things that are out of place", and THAT is what triggers one's danger sense the strongest.  Fear is psychological.  One can be afraid of a danger that is not real, the same as one can not be afraid of a danger that is very real.  It all depends on the psyche.

See I think the original Doom had freaky bits in it because everyone expected an action game, and then when you'd open a door from a technological looking area and the room behind the door is completely RED it throws the mind for a loop.  We biological creatures are programmed to expect consistency.  Throw in a few evil altars, gibbed bodies, and you have a neat formula that throws that sense completely off.

Consistancy starts to die a bit by the time you reach the Alpha and Delta labs in the full. Though seeing the blood, dead people, demonicly warped and influenced technology and stuff starts to become second nature. :/
And Hell... I'll leave that to your discretion... But I will say, it'll throw you in for a loop. ;)

I agree fully with what you have said Phoenix... I do think that there are a few games that take psychological horror seriously. Eternal Darkness is a great example of such. It was heavily based upon H.P. Lovecraft's work though, so it's hard not to expect such (unless we're talking about Quake 1, heh). As you sanity slipped the statues and paintings would begin to subtly watch you as you cowered from hearing soft footsteps or laughing off in the distance of your cerebrum. Of course even this wore thin after a while as you became used to it.

Silent Hill has always presented pretty good scares as well, I think. Of course, I have only ever played the first one and even that's been years ago.

I played the d3 demo
didn't think d3 or hl2 was worth getting.
don't get me wrong d3 and hl2 are good
just not good enough to want to play more than once or twice.
q4 from raven will be using the d3 engine and should
be a good sp and mp game.
that's what my $$ will go for when it comes out.

I'm very iffy about Raven doing Quake IV. I've absolutely hated their more recent games like Soldier of Fortune II and the various Star Wars crap. The first Soldier of Fortune and the Hexen series were awsome, but I don't find them to be that talented anymore. Just my opinion of course. Also, as fun as Quake II was for multiplayer purposes, I liked the first Quake's storyline much more (see previous post for indications of Lovecraft fan-mania, heh)

Raven did a good job with Heretic and Hexen, and Elite Force was decent even if the Q3 engine limits made the map size too bloody small.  Could have had some more inspired maps, but how creative can you really get with a Borg cube?  :huh:

I'm hoping Q4 ends up being the mind-blowing action game it's being touted as in some of the preview articles I've read.  We shall see.

So far, my assumptions have proven to be true. Both Doom3 and Half-Life 2 are games that any self-respecting pc-gamer should play sooner or later. Otherwise it'd be just like calling yourself a movie-enthusiast, but refusing to see 'The Godfather' and 'La Haine'.

I have decided to wait til christmas before trying HL2. I want to really get a good few hours alone to get into it.

On Doom3: I just got bored, and went back to deathmatching, and playing American McGees Alice. (never played it til this year)

I am still going to play both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 eventually, but funds for new hardware and games are lacking.  I had to uninstall the Doom 3 demo to make hard drive room as well.

right now I'll stick to ut2004.
it has the best mp and the best level editor's.
the online mp is way better than d3 or hl2 and no steam LOL.

D3 deffinitely was not as good as it could have been, but that's not because of the darkness, it's because Id just didn't do a great job with the level design. The shadows and having to use the flashlight were not the problem.

The biggest problem by far with D3 SP is the poor placement of monsters. Durring the early part of the game, it's mostly haunted-house style scripted sequences that don't present much of a challenge, and got balatanly old enough after a while that id had to try something else. In the last half of the game, there's basically no scripted monster entries, but instead of being placed in ambush locations in 'monster cages' and hidden locations around the map, where the layout of the rooms and anticipating encounters comes into place (which was used in the original Doom games to great effect), basically the later portions of the game are 90% monsters (mostly imps and hell knights) just spawning into the middle of the room when you walk in with no thought put into it at all. If monster placement had been more like that of the old Doom games, atleast it would have been fun and challenging, and not a step BACKWARDS in design from Doom 1.

That said, D3 is a decent game and does exactly what it advertised it would do. It's not the best game ever, but it's worth playing. It's just not the end-all super-great successor to the original games that it could be if done properly. Then again, no games today are ever all they're hyped up to be, are rarely done "properly" and they allways have flaws, so there's not a lot to be surprised or worked up over about it.

Meanwhile, D3's MP scene has gotten somewhat better lately. The average FFA player on public servers is no uber-competative player, but isn't a complete n00b either and atleast knows how to pick up the rocket launcher. You still have lamers that just camp in the shadows getting killed, but usually if you wind up in a good server there are atleast 1 or 2 players actually moving around the map getting items and fragging like men, and usually only like 1 n00b that thinks he's playing splinter cell. The combat doesn't have the same skill/manuevering depth as Q3; it's still mainly just about getting the RL and raping everyone cause there's no room to dodge, but it's a fun novelty and change of pace on occasion due to the different tactics involved.

On a related note with the things-jumping-out-at-you stuff, however....

Yeah, good point footman. I think that was the one part of the game where the level designs actually felt like old-school doom. At the same time, if it had been like that the whole time, with the monsters just attacking head on, it would have gotten repetative (it allready was starting to at the end) so I think a mix of head on + classic-style hidden monster cages would have been cool if the levels had continued to go in that directioo (the fact that they didn't is probably D3's biggest flaw).

Please write normally. Writing in ebonics drives me apeshit.


I have no problem with 60FPS. The original Doom games (except for ports like ZDoom and Doomsday) are locked at 35FPS, and i was never really a problem except for extremely intense maps. I'm lucky to crack 60FPS in Gen at 1024x768 with all of the the graphical features enabled. The difference between 60 and 120 FPS isn't really noticeable to me and seems a purely academic thing for people who beat off  to their system specs.

60 Hz and 60 FPS are WAY below the average human limits of perception. If you cannot play with higher values, why always the utter conviction that differences are indetectable? Every single gamer I know that has played with higher framerates with higher monitor refreshrates agrees totally on one thing: higher is better. I have not yet found a true limit for which I cannot detect the differences, and in fact, for which it does not annoy me to have to go back.

I have played Quake 3 with 60 frames per second on an 85 hz screen, back when those framerates were quite hard to get. After that, I was able to switch to 125 fps, on a refreshrate of 140 and quite recently, 160. The smoothness with which the game runs at that is awe-inspiring, when compared to the previously mentioned 60 fps situation. The amount of information one takes in (and lacks at lower rates) is clearly noticeable and even has a noteworthy effect in fast paced combat.
After a system upgrade, even faster speeds are possible. Framerates as high as 333 (another useful quake3 setting) up to 500 are managable with relatively new desktop technology. Refreshrates for lower resolutions can exceed 200 hz. Playing with these values is very smooth indeed. Switching back and forth shows a distinct difference, a noticeable choppyness using the set of lower settings.
Grudgingly I switch back to 125 fps, since Quake3's netcode does not allow for higher rates without causing serious connection issues.

There is no refuting the above. The only reason for disbelieving this, is an inferior perception, hardware or both. If you are one of the diminishing amount of people that still claim to see no difference between 30 and 60 frames per second, I seriously advise you to go see a doctor -- I'm sure you'd be unfit to safely drive a car on a busy day.

I stopped playing Doom 3 myself because the lag was giving me headaches. Yes, it was mostly due to my hardware's limitations I'm sure, but still. Engine ports (like jDoom) of the original game did this too me as well. Maybe I'm just sensitive :(

Woolie:  I made a minor edit to your post to correct your quote brackets.

I again have to, again, agree with Tab on this.  Remember also that the original Doom was pretty low-rez stuff compared to what's available now.  There was a LOT of moire effect, and combined with the size of the pixels it offset a lot of the FPS chop.  I cannot stand Quake 1 to this day because of the lack of model interpolation.  Sprites in Doom have some chop to them, but it's not the same as the animation on the Q1 models.  Now if I run something like Q2K4 or Phoenix Quake (No relation to me) then Q1 is playable since it's smooth.  When ZDoom started supporting high video refreshes I was VERY happy.

If you think slow refresh isn't annoying, try connecting your mouse to a PS/2 port and lowering the repeat rate down to 40.  (I'd say hook up a serial mouse, but most people use XP now and XP doesn't support serial mice I don't think.)  Now, compare that to the refresh rate of 200 (assuming your drivers support this).  Big difference.  By contrast, a USB port is fixed at an 8ms refresh, or 125Hz.  From 125 to 200 is a HUGE difference, and quite noticeable to me.

Therein lies the problem.  Not everyone is wired the same, and not everyone notices the same things.  My eyes pick up tremendous amounts of detail.  Tabun is graced with an outstanding level of visual accuity for a human, or perhaps all humans are capable of this and he's just one of the few who has realized his full potential here.  Why should we be punished for our differences?  Would you make an outstanding runner wear concrete boots?  Would you give a sharpshooter an inaccurate rifle and ask him to shoot 1,000 meters?  If you want to know what it looks like for us to play with a low refresh rate like that, try walking around with your shoes tied together.  Once you start feeling frustrated to where the back of your skull aches and you get tense, you'll understand completely.

I stopped playing doom 3 because i beat it in two days. wasnt a whole lot to do afterward.

*coughNIGHTMARE SKILLcough*

The only thing significant about Nightmare is your maximum health is reduced down to 25, with normal medkits acting like megahealth items in which they'll push you over your max health, then gradually go away. In short, you play the same game, except you can't be hit more than once per encounter.

Have at it, if you love needing to be abseloutely perfect in every movement and shot.