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Thanks to The Phobos Lab, a Doom fansite, for their info, directly from John Carmack, that the minimum specs for Doom 3 will be "1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card." There's no word yet on recommended specs to get the best fidelity, but sites such as NewDoom.com and The Phobos Lab are keeping a close eye on the situation, including an interesting but very unconfirmed rumor that "a Doom 3 demo [will be available] for public playing at this year's QuakeCon" - probably wishful thinking, although Carmack is scheduled to speak there, and it's possible at least some new Doom details will be revealed.

Thanks to The Phobos Lab, a Doom fansite, for their info, directly from John Carmack, that the minimum specs for Doom 3 will be "1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card." There's no word yet on recommended specs to get the best fidelity, but sites such as NewDoom.com and The Phobos Lab are keeping a close eye on the situation, including an interesting but very unconfirmed rumor that "a Doom 3 demo [will be available] for public playing at this year's QuakeCon" - probably wishful thinking, although Carmack is scheduled to speak there, and it's possible at least some new Doom details will be revealed.

CitizenC points out that John Carmack's .plan file has been updated to discuss ATI's driver optimizations. If you weren't paying attention, ATI put code in their drivers to optimize for Quake3, based on the name of the executable - so when running Quake3, you'd get a (good) set of optimizations for the game, but when running the same game after changing the name of the executable, you'd get a default set of optimizations with lesser performance. Some people called this cheating since Quake3 is a typical benchmark application these days.

awful writes: "Two composers in Australia have copyrighted over 100,000,000,000 phone tone dialing sequences. They state in the article that they are lampooning copyright laws that protect big business rather than artists. Their website has more info and explains how they did it. You can check your number and make sure it hasn't been copyrighted by these guys. They have already recieved one offer of money - from a guy who wanted to purchase the copyright to his number so he could stop direct marketing firms from calling him." Somehow I don't think the inventors of DTMF envisioned this. Update: 10/04 14:11 GMT by M : There's a US mirror available.

CitizenC writes: "Most people don't really associate the phrase "open source" or "GPL" with games. However, that is just what Galbraith Games is trying to change. Today on 3DActionPlanet, Sabre takes a look at the recently released tech demo."

Ant writes: "There's an interesting editorial currently running on 3dactionplanet which I agree with. Game developers and companies need to think about us people who can't get broadband connections! Yes, I am a part of the analog modemers. I can't play Q3A, HL, games, etc. very nicely due to my 28800 connections (even with 56K). No cable and DSL services here. Other options are just too expensive or won't work (i.e. satellite for online gaming?)"

Thermodyne writes: "The sequel of the game that helped invent the fps is being developed and the first of the screenshots have been released here. The game is based on the Quake 3 engine, but seems to stray away from the original intent of the first game." I can't begin to count the number of hours I lost in wolf3d ... course, I hope it does stray from the original game: who wants to run around shooting dogs and finding hidden switches for 30 levels? The lighting in some of those screenshots is super impressive. (check out that flame thrower). Sadly, I think my fps days are past me. I played The Sims for the first time last week. What an amazing game.

CitizenC writes "According to this GameCenter.Com story, at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Wolford told Gamecenter that the Voodoo5 6000 has not been cancelled, that 3dfx will not start selling current chipset technology to third parties such as Creative Labs and ELSA, that Voodoo products, including current graphics and TV cards, will continue to be manufactured, and that the company isn't going belly-up any time soon."

keefer writes "Since I know /. readers are generally fans of various ZD magazines anyway, I thought I'd pass this along that I saw from Blue's News. The gist is that programmer Randy Pitchford at Gearbox Software gave a .plan update talking about a piece Family PC(a ZD mag) did relating to some under-17-year-old supposedly being able to pick up Half-Life: Opposing Force, an M-rated game (17+), without incident at a CompUSA store. However, um, the game isn't even done yet, let alone gold or on the shelves."

I thought I'd post this in the YRO section for a couple of reasons. One is that it's starting to reverberate, and has generated at least one counter-editorial. But the second is a larger point. Half-Life and similar games are marketed to adults, not children; the 20-30 year old age group purchases almost all of these types of games. Yet attackers want to restrict the sales of these games to anyone on the basis that they're unsuitable for children. The fact that Family PC misjudged the game's release date when making up their article (remember, this had to be written months ago to make it to publication now, they probably forecast that the new game would be on sale by now) makes the attack more obvious, but these sorts of attacks happen all the time from the "save the children" crowd. (Family PC makes most of their income from advertising filtering software and similar snake-oil parental protective measures.) This is how you whip up the troops to go censor the internet or whatever other target you have in mind.