Doom 3 Discussion

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-02 05:17am

[EDIT] Thread title for more adequate description.

I have played the first level of Doom 3.

From what I saw it is truely an interesting game. They've expanding the story line from "Hell's coming and you have to kill it" to "Hell's coming, you have to kill it, there's also some other people around to talk to every now and then, scientists aren't very nice." Which is ok in my books, from what I saw it appeared to have some interesting goings on in the background.

Now the first level was an interesting experience. There's a game you can play in the lobby called "Super Turkey Punch 3000" (you'll see) and you can run around part of the UAC facility, interact with terminals and the like. Now, Doom 3 as you all know has a revolutionary new graphics system that Id have developed, which is nice for a while, then the shit starts and most of the impressive next generation graphics dissapear from view, most of the screen is pretty much either black, or close to it.

"Shoot him in the head!" My co-worker yelled. "I can't see his head!"
"RAAAA!" *crunch* *crunch*
"Oh, there it is."

After a few moments of realizing that you can't see shit you start to realize that that's pretty much the point. You can empty round after round randomly into the darkness to still have the zombie step into the light and start taking swipes at you. Suddenly, slow scientist zombies are actually dangerous, as for the marine zombies, they're quick and armed. While there is an inherrant coolness to this, it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Doom 3 should really have been taglined "Doom 3: I can't see shit".

As for the gameplay, from what I saw of it it appeared nice and smooth, the feel was right, the mood was right, there was only one thing wrong, the game's broken.

We had installed Doom 3 on two machines. One of them a Compaq Pressario with 512mb RAM and a Radeon 9200, the other a custom machine with 256 RAM and an MX4000. (which suprisingly enough managed to cope, albeit with some jerkiness). At what appeared to be the end of the first level the game freezes and stops responding. This happened with both machines, running totally different configurations. One NVidia, the other ATI, one AMD, the other Intel. Both crashed in exactly the same place, in exactly the same way.

There wasn't however time to do any extensive testing, this may be some weird driver issue but on two different machines that have nothing in common besides operating system? From what we saw it looks as though the game is simply broken.

[edit]

Bought the game, problem didn't persist on my home machine. 9/10

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2004-08-02 05:28am

Resource hog like nothing else!

My poor PIV1800/Nvidia GF3 struggles really hard in 640*400

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2004-08-02 05:29am

You get an advanced copy or something?

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-02 05:42am

Zac Naloen wrote:You get an advanced copy or something?

I work in a retail store. We installed copies on two machines a few hours ago, it is currently the night before it's release. The second factor is that it's a worldwide release and New Zealand is GMT+12. We're the first to open with it.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2004-08-02 05:43am

ahh ic. that makes sense.

Hopefully they'll rush out a patch to fix this.

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-02 07:05am

Zac Naloen wrote:ahh ic. that makes sense.

Hopefully they'll rush out a patch to fix this.

I hope so, because at present they've spent the past 5 years working on a game that's roughly ten minutes long.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2004-08-02 07:08am

Sorta cool ingame tiein here:

http://www.martianbuddy.com/

No spoilers or anything just a code for a locker

And btw My copy is running just fine, into the forth mission or somthing like that

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-02 07:28am

Faram wrote:Sorta cool ingame tiein here:

http://www.martianbuddy.com/

No spoilers or anything just a code for a locker

And btw My copy is running just fine, into the forth mission or somthing like that

Hmm...strange. Maybe something weird was happening at work. Oh well, will find out tomorrow morning.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2004-08-02 09:29am

Spyder wrote:Hmm...strange. Maybe something weird was happening at work. Oh well, will find out tomorrow morning.

Perhaps getting the new DirectX 9c will help?

Linky

DaveJB · Post by **DaveJB** » 2004-08-02 09:40am

I doubt it; Doom 3 is OpenGL based.

Anyhow, if there was a major bug, the GameFAQs board would be up in arms; currently, there's just a few threads discussing performance, opinions of the gameplay and whether or not the huge amounts of pirates are justified in downloading the game.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-02 11:29am

Yeah, Spyder, check drivers and such. Maybe the ones installed on your box just aren't cooperating. Go up or down.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2004-08-02 11:51am

DaveJB wrote:I doubt it; Doom 3 is OpenGL based.

Don't think it's OpenGL it want's to install DirectX9B during the game in stallation.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-02 01:09pm

Faram wrote:Don't think it's OpenGL it want's to install DirectX9B during the game in stallation.

D3 is OpenGL but uses some DirectX functions.

YT300000 · Post by **YT300000** » 2004-08-02 01:22pm

Spyder wrote:While there is an inherrant coolness to this, it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Doom 3 should really have been taglined "Doom 3: I can't see shit".

But that's intentional! It's so that people with even shitty hardware can play the game, since it doesn't need to render useless things like enemies, doors, or ammo pickups.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-02 02:20pm

phongn wrote:
Faram wrote:Don't think it's OpenGL it want's to install DirectX9B during the game in stallation.
D3 is OpenGL but uses some DirectX functions.

So what did Carmack do for these functions on the OS X and Linux ports? Write equivalents in OpenGL?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-02 03:38pm

There's more to DirectX than Direct3D.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2004-08-02 05:58pm

phongn wrote:There's more to DirectX than Direct3D.

And neither of these OSes use it.

DirectSound, DirectPlay, etc. Nothing that can't be done by regular C++ programming, since it's not hardware-specific, unlike graphic cards.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-08-02 06:46pm

I meant that D3 might use DirectSound for sound card access in Windows. On the Mac it might use Core Audio, on Linux it might use ALSA. The actual sound engine doesn't rely on any of them except for the "output" stage.

lukexcom · Post by **lukexcom** » 2004-08-03 12:11am

Spyder wrote:While there is an inherrant coolness to this, it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Doom 3 should really have been taglined "Doom 3: I can't see shit".

Heh, and by extrapolating that observation, we get a nifty quote from Somethingawful

:

"Many people were worried that the game would run terribly on older hardware, but thanks to id's patented "Can't See Shit!" technology, Doom 3 will run great even on a STD Velocity 128! id accomplished this fantastic feat by covering the world in darkness. What this does is take substantial load off the video card by not rendering useless things such as walls, monsters, and ammo pickups. But that's not all! Check out this exciting list of features never seen before in a first person shooter:" -SA

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-03 01:16am

lukexcom wrote:
Spyder wrote:While there is an inherrant coolness to this, it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Doom 3 should really have been taglined "Doom 3: I can't see shit".
Heh, and by extrapolating that observation, we get a nifty quote from Somethingawful :

"Many people were worried that the game would run terribly on older hardware, but thanks to id's patented "Can't See Shit!" technology, Doom 3 will run great even on a STD Velocity 128! id accomplished this fantastic feat by covering the world in darkness. What this does is take substantial load off the video card by not rendering useless things such as walls, monsters, and ammo pickups. But that's not all! Check out this exciting list of features never seen before in a first person shooter:" -SA

Gotta love SA.

In all seriousness though, Doom 3 does actually seem to be a really good game and not just a game engine demo.

Meest · Post by **Meest** » 2004-08-03 03:00am

If you don't up the brightness/gamma settings and play with surround sound in the dark its pretty much an interactive Aliens type movie on steroids. The sound is really amazing (especially the radio chatter heh), also I like the computer screens which you can interact with in game. Other than it being impossible to run on "ultra" detail mode, thumbs up so far, added a bit more story to the shoot-em-up.

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2004-08-03 05:47am

One of my co-workers decided to try and run it on ultra when he first installed it on the compaq.

It was a nice screenshot.

Post by **Vympel** » 2004-08-03 06:11am

Well, bought it today. It 0wnZ0rs my computer. At 640x480. Bloody hell. Maybe I should return it and buy it again when I have a new computer (next year).

Post by **Vympel** » 2004-08-03 09:22am

Update: actually its quite playable, now that combat has started. Resolution is shit, but the atmosphere is top notch, and I can tell the graphics kick arse.

This game is scary as hell. And yes, I can't see shit.

Mutant Headcrab · Post by **Mutant Headcrab** » 2004-08-03 11:19am

Somebody over at the planetdoom forums apparently found a trick to increase Doom 3's framerate. Anyone getting some sluggishness could try it? Config Tweek

Also, I'm not very tech inclined, so maybe somebody could answer a question for me. I know that almost all of my things are up to spec for Doom 3. Good processor, lots of ram, lots of memory, etc.. The only thing I'm not sure about is my graphics card. I'm clueless when it comes to that kind of thing. Does anybody know if an NVidia G-Force FX 5200 would work with it? I'd really like to know before I do something rash like go out and but it without knowing.

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