Doom III Officially Announced

Jacek Fedorynski writes "The end is near. First, id Software's site is updated for the first time since the Quake II times and now they officially announce Doom III!" If you recall, there were some screenshots released last year, but I don't think there's been much since then - these are probably out of date.

Comments

tip

[Anonymous Coward]

dont buy a GeForce Ti4mx if you want to run Doom 3. Carmack has said it wont work well with it.

Why link to Yahoo!?

[cliveholloway]

...when the press release is also on the ID web site???

.02

cLive ;-)

may 22nd

[Maskirovka]

For the record, the electronic arts expo is may 22nd to 24th, which is when they'll show off Doom3.

Re:may 22nd

[Osty]

electronic arts expo

That would be Electronic Entertainment Expo (thus, E3). Electronic Arts (EA) is a game publishing house, most famous for their sports lines (Madden, NHL, FIFA, etc). While they're big, I don't think they're big enough to have such an important expo dedicated solely to their products.

Officially announced means

[Screaming Lunatic]

It means that they found a publisher, which is Activision. Having a publisher means they can put on a better show at E3. id definitely did not want to go to E3 without a publisher. Activision does what it is good at: marketing. id does what it is good at: making cool shit. The Activision deal should not be a surprise since they also published RtCW.

Re:GPU

[wackybrit]

In fact I was waiting for Doom III to buy _the right_ 3D card for it. Now the time has come.. wich one is it?

Don't get too excited, my friend. Don't expect to see Doom III for quite some time. No dates have been mentioned yet, and it might not even be out by Christmas.

That said, Carmack has said a good GeForce 3 will run the game at a 'playable' frame rate.. but that might only be at 800x600. A super top-of-the-range GeForce 4 should see you okay.

However, since you don't want to play games, and Doom III won't be out for ages anyway, why not just wait until a few weeks before its out and then buy whatever you can afford? You'll probably want to get up into Athlon 1400+ territory too, and some DDR memory wouldn't hurt either ;-).. it's gunna need some serious memory bandwidth.

Re:DOOM 3 poised to ruin old games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash buddy: Nothing is EVER going to recreate that gameplay for you again.

At least not in an fps. You're used to it, you've seen it before. It's just not going to creep you out like it did the first time. DOOM was one of the firsts in the field and was revolutionary. You're hoping that this brings something new to the field, like the original DOOM did....but you want them to recreate the original DOOM atmosphere. Near impossible to do.

I'm sure that they'll try to recreate the creepy DOOM atmosphere, and they'll probably do a pretty good job of it. Hopefully they'll provide experiences like we had with the original DOOM for the up and coming gamers who'll have this game as one of their first killer games. The only difference is that they'll have absolutely bad*ss graphics this time around.

Re:Quake, still my fav.

[ComputarMastar]

the mouse always feels not quite up to par, and the movement has been slightly 'off' since that engine... Just, nothing has ever felt right since then.

Thats because everything up to glQuake was DOS and in that OS you can poll the mouse as often as you want and always get the real current value. You could even get down to mouse mickeys (the best way, IMO, to do mouse control in a FPS). I remember Carmack bitching about the mouse when he converted over to Win32-native. The complaint, as I remember it, was that no matter how many times per second you poll, the driver only polls the hardware X times per second and theres no way to change that. Thats where hacks like m_filter came from. Hopefully, some day MS will write an OS from the ground up with gaming in mind instead of hacking gaming features into an OS designed to run business apps. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that though :/

Re:Yay for tech demos

[tswinzig]

Each id game is pretty much a tech demo for what we should expect to see in the intervening years between games- I don't expect much out of Doom III- but it's a harbinger of the next Half-Life.

Speak for yourself. For many people that enjoy deathmatch over single player, the id Software games are king. I still prefer Quake 3 Arena over any other for deathmatch.

Re:What makes Doom

[ilumits]

And don't forget the *speed*. Developers are so concerned with having players move at a realistic speed, that they forget that it's fun to whiz around a level at a pace faster than your mind can think.
Dozens of monsters swarming you all at once
Aye! The one current game I can think of that offers this is Serious Sam 2 (I'm sure the original does, as well, but I've yet to play it). An arcade-style romp that you don't need 53 fingers to play.

ZDooM has a linux port

[axolotl_farmer]

The GPL:ed DooM port ZDooM has a linux port.

There aren't any pretty flare effect like in JDooM, but you can play at high res and use mouselook etc.

Get it at http://zdoom.notgod.com

Re:What makes Doom

[Vireo]

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I read somewhere (I think it was an interview with Carmack) that Doom 3 will be so polygon-heavy that even the basic gamespeed will be slower (and more realistic, no more running at 30 mph) -- not to mention that there will be few monsters at once. Last year they mentionned a GeForce 3 as a minimum for the game.

However, you'll probably be delighted by the lighting and overall atmosphere, judging by last year's screenshots. Also, if I remember, dynamic lighting computations will allow tricks like a character half hidden in the shadows, slowly revealing himself as he moves; or incredible lights-behind-fans effects including shadows.

I think Carmack and the rest of id Software know very well that yet another no-plot, dumb-action Wolf/Doom/Quake-like game will be badly perceived by the public; for my part, I wouldn't be surprised if Doom 3 is a story-driven game much closer to an interactive movie.

Re:GPU

[Rothron the Wise]

You're getting things confused. Carmack bitched about the GF4 MX-series not having any pixel-shader and vertex-shader functionality, and recommended people not to buy those cards, at least not for playing doom III.

The GF4 Ti-series is a different matter. They are basically souped up GF3s and will be able to run Doom III just fine, at least faster than GF3s.

Still, I'd wait to see whatever card is best when Doom III is released.

Re:DOOM 3 poised to ruin old games?

[yason]

DOOM *did* have a Z-level, obviously. It is a common misconception that it didn't. There was a technical limit in the virtual representation of a level, but it would've been the same even if a game used three-dimensional coordinates for all vertices but for rendering or clipping reasons didn't allow two rooms above each other.

For the technical side, Doom used 2D vertices to create 2D polygons, called sectors, which in turn had the attributes of ceiling height and floor height. So your map would always be 2D but Doom could render the floors and ceilings of a sector to any height.

Also, there are well-known techniques to trick the Doom engine to have two stories present on a particular place of the map, or even three stories. Creating several bridges on top of and crossing each other is possible, too.