Doom 3, first comments

[Mr. Natural]

I finally picked up the game today and I thought I'd lend a few early observations for those interested.
Overall from what I've heard from most folks, they think it is a good game. You can never please everyone all the time as they say and those that complain about the game have comments such as, "run around, shoot monsters, rinse, repeat." Also comments about no story line and "it's not as good as Far Cry". I think those that make comments like that are missing out on a lot of what's going on with this game.

I've played just past the first episode now and time for some early thoughts.
There are some cinematics at the beginning of the game and then some wondering around before jumping into the action. I spent the time during the "wondering around" tweaking the video settings just to see how well I could run the game and how high I could crank the settings.
My rig is a P4-2.53, 1 gig ram, 9800 pro video card, SB 2 audigy 5.1 sound. I'm running the catalyst 4.6 drivers right now. After playing around with it a while it looks like running on high detail with 2x AA and AF at 1024x768 works pretty well. Sorry I don't have a frame rate report, but it's acceptable for me. I might even be able to squeeze 1152x864, but likely will experience some slowdown in areas. I prefer to stick with high detail if at all possible. There is a "highest detail" setting and I did try it with no AA and AF. I received a warning that enabling that takes 512 meg of texture memory. It ran ok, but I think this setting is designed moreso for video cards better than mine, so I elected to go back to high detail. I couldn't see a big enough difference to warrant the highest setting.
So let's comment on the game. As expected this is a new look for video gaming and once again Carmack is showing his great programming skills. I read previously that Carmack did a lot of study on lighting and effects and this game is a result of those studies. The game is dark and I pretty much immediately cranked the in game gamma up 2 notches and this helped considerably. A lot of the suspense in this game involves wondering dark areas and making use of a flashlight to explore areas. This adds a great amount of suspense to the game and while some complain about having to switch between flashlight and gun, I don't find this to be a problem, but rather part of the game and the way it was designed to play. I'm sure the ID folks considered putting the flashlight on the gun barrel, but I think this would take away from the overall experience of the game. I posted in another thread about a "flashlight mod" which someone already created. I think this takes away from the intended experience of the game.
Game play is very good and the only brief bug I encountered so far was a glitch in the sound one time while playing a sound byte on my pda which is used to review situations in the game very much like System Shock 2.
So let me wrap this up so I can get back to the game. :p:
This game is an experience, and I'm not disappointed at all. This is not a "run and shoot" game. There is a lot of suspense and it is very scary. You have to take your time first to admire the great lighting effects, and wondering what is hiding around the next corner. There may not be much of a story line, but that's always been the nature of most FPS games. I'm very happy with the experience so far. When a game like this finally arrives with all the hype involved, there will always be some folks complaining about something in it. I have no complaints at this point.

[Gary V.]

I agree with your thoughts on Doom 3. I have played on all resolutions at all detail settings and I can't see much difference from one setting to the next. The game is gorgeous at any of the settings I have tried.

[OldsterHolster]

No complaints, here, either. I'm just getting started, too, and I'm being totally entertained by just looking at the machinery, architecture, and lighting. Like Mr. N, I'm just adapting to the flashlight aspect of the gameplay. So far, my greatest irritation is that the pistol seem almost worthless; and the shotgun is not much better, but I've only died a couple of times, so I'm doing all right; and I'll just bet I gain a little firepower as the game progresses. Heh, heh. I'm in no hurry, and, in fact; I will probably pace myself to make it last longer, but I'm having fun, so far. Edward.

[Ojnod]

Ed make sure you are up close when you use the shot gun. It is a 1 or 2 shot kill for almost everything in the game up to where I am so far (recylcing1). I personally like to strafe back and forth to get up close to them, dodging fire balls and rockets or whatever they are shooting at me.

[Torsion]

I just got to the delta labs. The game starts off more atmospheric and scary and gets more adrenaline filled after you get better guns and fight bigger demons. This is one long game I might add. There are plenty of creepy, weird and scary moments all throughout the game. So far, the game impresses me with its consistant design. There is no drop in quality after the beginning like some games and the game steadily builds in intensity. I can not wait to get back in and finish the other half of the game.

[Gotanypop]

I just got it today and have finally finished playing with the settings and the tweaking and am happy with 1024 X 768 on High settings. I am able to get a consistently playable framerate with no appreciable slowdown on my 9600 pro which really surprised me. Game is scary as hell.

[Mr. Natural]

I guess I've spent around 6 hours on this game and the more I play it, the more I think the title could have been Sytem Shock 3 instead of Doom 3. It's a modern day System Shock game. I heard one comment about the similarities before the game came out. I'm surprised no-one else has noticed the similarities and not heard any comments to that effect since the game came out. If you liked System Shock 2, this is right up your alley.

[Nova]

Dammit, I loved System Shock 2.

*Shells out more money*

[SupaTroopa]

I am enjoying it the further I get into it. My only complaint is that I can't really play it during the day in my room even if I shut the blinds as it's just not dark enough, whereas at night it really shows up well. Of course it doesn't get dark til 9-9:30pm here still and that only leaves me roughly 2 hours of time to play! Cmon daylight savings time...

[Rockn-Roll]

I'm new to this forum, so here's my first impressions...

[edit] of Adrian Carmack's Doom [edit]

Mr. Natural, tweaking your gamma up will work in the first couple of episodes where there is sufficient ambient lighting, but I think you will find that you will not be able to get away with that form of "cheat" in the Delta labs, especially in level 2 when you get to specimen transport cause all the lights are gone. It looks, however, like you want to play the game as it was designed. With that in mind...really...turn your gamma down to normal and prepare to be scared.

Overall I was ready for a new game, an intense game, a game where I can explore new levels and meet the bad guys and put them down. But, I didn't expect to be so scared. Oh, at first, like in the first few levels it wasn't so bad. I finished playing Thief3:Deadly Shadows just a few weeks ago, and it had some very scary sections with knocking sounds in haunted house type atmospheres. But, I just was not prepared for the pure evil that is depicted in Doom3.

I've gotten to the gates of Hell now, and already it has been the most enjoyable game I've ever played. Including System Shock 2, which is like a Disney film compared to Doom3 (wait til you get to Delta labs).

As Torsion said, it's long. I've already played 20 hours and have only just made it off Mars and into Hell. I'm expecting another 10 hours in Hell. I'm also not canvasing the entire areas or looking for secrets (though I've stumbled on one or two) on the way. Thus, after finishing this beast I will definitely be diving back in to scoure the levels for secrets and just to put away all those monsters that thought they were so smart lying in wait to pounce on me the first time through. Finishing the game once also unlocks Nightmare difficulty and I'll be able to just sit in one spot and blast the monster of my choice as it continually respawns.

The end result is, for me, that Doom3 is unbelievably scary...horror...pure evil horror at a level that I didn't think was possible today. It's like graphics engines took a leap that should have taken a decade. The heat waves and shock waves are awesome! The gates of Hell with the burning lava pits and skull gateway is just so surreal it's uncanny how it looks just like how Hell has been depicted for mellinias. I think if Goya came back to life he would bow to Adrian Carmack in how realistic his artwork is. Goya was known for his work depicting gods such as Saturn who run amuck devouring people. Raphael and Michael Angelo are turning over in their graves.

You might want to take a look at the credits and notice that Adrian is listed first, above his father, John. Doom and Doom2 was more a technical achievement while Doom3 is an artistic achievement.

OK, I've said too much.

[Tom Servo]

Adrian Carmack isn't John Carmack's son. No relation.

IMO, not sure how Doom 3 is more artsy than technicality. IMO, the 'art' is kind of bland. It's the inside of a spaceship. Commander Keen had good art that Adrian did, Doom 3 is all about the looks and effiency of the engine.

Oh, BTW, if you haven't read it yet, I recommend 'Masters of Doom', it's a good read.

[Rockn-Roll]

Adrian Carmack isn't John Carmack's son. No relation.

IMO, not sure how Doom 3 is more artsy than technicality. IMO, the 'art' is kind of bland. It's the inside of a spaceship. Commander Keen had good art that Adrian did, Doom 3 is all about the looks and effiency of the engine.

Oh, BTW, if you haven't read it yet, I recommend 'Masters of Doom', it's a good read.

Sorry, I must have been asleep in 1994/5 when I heard about John Carmack and the boy who was old enough to be John Carmack's son who happens to have the same rare last name as each other...just a coincidence I suppose? What is Masters of Doom, and why would I want to read it?

I believe I disagree on your entire post.

BTW, the best time to play Doom3 is at 4am on Sunday morning with headphones turned way up, or in an isolation room with 6.1 surround.

[Tom Servo]

Well I'm just saying it's a good book, and you might want to read it. And in that book it also says how Adrian is not his son.

[Ojnod]

Masters of Doom is a book about John Carmack and John Romero dealing with their work at id software. Check it out at amazon on thinkgeek if you are interested.

[Kalbrecht]

I guess I've spent around 6 hours on this game and the more I play it, the more I think the title could have been Sytem Shock 3 instead of Doom 3. It's a modern day System Shock game. I heard one comment about the similarities before the game came out. I'm surprised no-one else has noticed the similarities and not heard any comments to that effect since the game came out. If you liked System Shock 2, this is right up your alley.

I noticed it, too. But everyone kept on harping on about the scariness of it, that the SS2 aspects were hidden.

But it feels just like SS2.

[Mr. Natural]

I should elaborate on the System Shock 2 comment. Making use of the PDA to allow the story to unfold and in the early stages the game involves getting around inside a facility. These two things make it identical to SS2. The one thing there isn't however in this game is the rpg aspect of upgrading weapons and searching for certain chemicals in order to upgrade things.

Perhaps RocknRoll was being sarcastic with the comment about Adrian being John's son. There is no relation and simply coincidence that they share the same name. I read Masters of Doom and it's definitely an interesting read. I highly recommend it. In the book it states that Adrian did not want to do Doom 3, but wanted to do something different. John pretty much made the call on his own and started working on it. Adrian did all the art work in the game. The members of ID agreed that after they finished Doom 3 they were going to begin a new project that will be something different compared to what ID has previously delivered to the gaming world.

[SupaTroopa]

There are a # of homages to the original Doom in D3 also which I like - the flying skulls/heads, the fireball chucking demons, and the bloody tentacles on walls (what I've seen so far and I'm only in the "Communications area" level).

The game is a lot of fun and thus far I like it about as much as Far Cry, probably more though since Doom 3 is very stable and highly polished/bug free - whereas I've had and still have problems with Far Cry crashing/freezing up on me after a period of time and some poor performance issues.

Essentially I've figured out that i have to run these two games with Medium quality settings across the board at 1024X768 with 4x FSAA (or 2X) and 2x AF.

Some of the textures up close look bad but otherwise Doom3 and FC look great.

I have a P4 2.4ghz cpu and 512MB of 266MHZ DDR SDRAM, and a 128MB 9800 Pro.

I am hoping a 1GB DDR RAM upgrade (300-400mhz dual channel etc...,) and a CPU processor upgrade to 3.2ghz on my P4 will enable me to bump them up to the high quality settings. Eventually I will get a 6800 Ultra or a newer video card this fall hopefully also...and that'll be it for another year.

[Biglines]

its just rulez!!

[Ojnod]

Supa you can probably crank the AF up more, usually there isn't much of a performance hit between 2x and 8x. Heck you probably don't even see what the AF is doing with it only being 2x (the number is the distance away that AF will do what it does to the texture, therefore 8x is 4 times as far as 2x).

[Rockn-Roll]

Perhaps RocknRoll was being sarcastic with the comment about Adrian being John's son. There is no relation and simply coincidence that they share the same name.

No I wasn't joking. I really do not believe that two people with rare last names will be in the same small town in Texas and have such talent as they illustrate. Nobody has really come close to their caliber of original work (though there have been many good clones), you can believe it's just coincidence if you wish, but I don't. I also do not believe everything I read, so even if there is something written that states they are not related, I will not believe it until I hear it from John or Adrian themselves...or from John Romero, who BTW I spoken with at the 99 E3 when I was working with Intel and Gamespy. The subject of whether John and Adrian are related is not something to bring up to John Romero, especially at that time when he had just recently parted from idsoftware and was trying to get ion storm off the ground with Deus Ex.

[Rockn-Roll]

Essentially I've figured out that i have to run these two games with Medium quality settings across the board at 1024X768 with 4x FSAA (or 2X) and 2x AF.

Some of the textures up close look bad but otherwise Doom3 and FC look great.

I have a P4 2.4ghz cpu and 512MB of 266MHZ DDR SDRAM, and a 128MB 9800 Pro.

I am hoping a 1GB DDR RAM upgrade (300-400mhz dual channel etc...,) and a CPU processor upgrade to 3.2ghz on my P4 will enable me to bump them up to the high quality settings. Eventually I will get a 6800 Ultra or a newer video card this fall hopefully also...and that'll be it for another year.

Your bottleneck is the Front Side Bus (FSB) speed. 266Mhz just isn't fast enough. You need to check your MotherBoard (MB) to make sure it can handle faster RAM cause more RAM will not help much; though, if your MB can take a 2.3Ghz P4 then I'm sure it can run the FSB at 400Mhz or maybe even 533Mhz. I have a 1.4Ghz P4 with 384MB of RAM with FSB running at 400Mhz and a 128MB FX 5200 in a MB with just a 4X AGP slot and I'm running High Quality, but at 640x480 resolution. I looked at medium quality and saw that almost 1/10 of the texture information was lost...unacceptable to me. Thus, High Quality at 640x480 looked way better than Medium Quality at 1024x768...mostly because the image artifacts were just magnified by the higher resolution. I.E. if the actual image is a text character 'T', but due to compression looks like an 'r', then magnifying it just doesn't help. I've seen only one poster/print that I couldn't read...and it was because a computer terminal was in the way. For instance, I want to know where I can get a copy of Gib Weekly?!

Have you tried High Quality at 640x480? It looks like you should be able to get it working even up to 800x600

[Kalbrecht]

And yet you still haven't read Masters of Doom?

BTW: John Romero was Daikatana, NOT Deus Ex.

[Ojnod]

Your bottleneck is the Front Side Bus (FSB) speed. 266Mhz just isn't fast enough. You need to check your MotherBoard (MB) to make sure it can handle faster RAM cause more RAM will not help much; though, if your MB can take a 2.3Ghz P4 then I'm sure it can run the FSB at 400Mhz or maybe even 533Mhz. I have a 1.4Ghz P4 with 384MB of RAM with FSB running at 400Mhz and a 128MB FX 5200 in a MB with just a 4X AGP slot and I'm running High Quality, but at 640x480 resolution. I looked at medium quality and saw that almost 1/10 of the texture information was lost...unacceptable to me. Thus, High Quality at 640x480 looked way better than Medium Quality at 1024x768...mostly because the image artifacts were just magnified by the higher resolution. I.E. if the actual image is a text character 'T', but due to compression looks like an 'r', then magnifying it just doesn't help. I've seen only one poster/print that I couldn't read...and it was because a computer terminal was in the way. For instance, I want to know where I can get a copy of Gib Weekly?!

Have you tried High Quality at 640x480? It looks like you should be able to get it working even up to 800x600


DDR means Double Data rate, meaning his front side bus is 133mhz. This is then quad pumped for the processor since it is a P4 (making it 533mhz) and double for the ram (making it 266mhz)

[Tom Servo]

It WAS mentioned in the book though, and the book actually interviewed the people so...

http://articles.filefront.com/128

"The Two Johns knew exactly who they wanted for their artist as well: a twenty-one-year-old SoftDisk intern that went by the name of Adrian Carmack (no relation to John Carmack)."

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/42/42470.html

"Programmers John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation), Tom Hall, and John Romero founded the company in 1991."

There ya go.

[Rockn-Roll]

And yet you still haven't read Masters of Doom?

BTW: John Romero was Daikatana, NOT Deus Ex.

Yeah, that's what he was releasing at the time.

[Rockn-Roll]

DDR means Double Data rate, meaning his front side bus is 133mhz. This is then quad pumped for the processor since it is a P4 (making it 533mhz) and double for the ram (making it 266mhz)

Front Side Bus (FSB) is the speed at which data can travel from the CPU to the memory bus. A valid rating of memory chips is the fastest FSB that the memory can support. 266Mhz rated RAM (DDR or RAMBUS or whatever) is RAM which can be run at the 266Mhz FSB speed. Also, 133Mhz FSBs were never available for P4 systems...FSBs were already at 166Mhz for the P3 (and even P2s like my 350Mhz system I have right next to me) when the P4 was released. So, what happens is that the FSB of his system is running at 266Mhz, while the RAM itself internally doesn't have to be any faster than 133Mhz due to the fact that the RAM chips contain circuitry allowing it to double pump the data onto the bus. I have not covered DDR yet, so I don't know the details of how the circuits are designed. But, I'm fairly sure I've covered the front side bus aspect correctly.

[Rockn-Roll]

It WAS mentioned in the book though, and the book actually interviewed the people so...

http://articles.filefront.com/128

"The Two Johns knew exactly who they wanted for their artist as well: a twenty-one-year-old SoftDisk intern that went by the name of Adrian Carmack (no relation to John Carmack)."

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/42/42470.html

"Programmers John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation), Tom Hall, and John Romero founded the company in 1991."

There ya go.

Just goes to show that I learn something new each day...sometimes it's stuff that I was just stupid about before. Also, the article says the artist "went by" Adrian Carmack...but, perhaps that is not their real name? Well, thx for the info...I appreciate it.

[Mr. Natural]

Been playing a while now and it looks like I've settled for 1024x768 at high detail with 2x AA and AF w/4.7 cats. Runs pretty good for me at that setting.

[MarkN]

I was having lots of trouble getting this game to run fine on my system. It looked good and ran ok for a little while but then started freezing on me a lot. I'd eventually installed the ATI 4.7 driver, and DirectX9.0b from the game, but still had problems. Someone recommended the Omega driver, so I got that and it seemed to have worked, till the game froze again (everytime it did I'd have no choice but to do a hard reboot). Then on some other recommendations I upgraded just the other day to DirectX9.0c, then got the 4.9 beta driver from ATI and now the game ran the best so far for the 90 or so minutes I played it tonight.

At first, when I was downloading the 4.9 beta a warning about my graphics card came up so I stopped the download and then things went a bit wonky on my system (the mouse's settings and screen settings were reset, and my ATI display driver icon was missing) so I just restored it back one day and that took care of that. Yesterday I installed the 4.9 beta driver after being told to ignore the warning, restarted the rig, played DOOM 3 a bit and it was fine, although within 10 minutes, if that, before I stopped playing it was hiccuping a bit here and there so I saved at one point just in case it might freeze again and then I quit. I'm at the Alpha Labs part, shortly after the little spiderlike robot met me and helped clear our way to the labs.