Slashdot Mirror
No Doom 3 This Year?
Ant writes "According to an article at Blue's News: 'Though id Software basically invented the idea of using "when it's done" as a release date, and thus did not specify a release date when DOOM 3 was announced, many have been assuming that the game would be available for this year's holiday season. Now a report on HomeLAN Fed cites Activision's 2003 release calendar and quarterly financial conference call... [saying that] Activision admits that this matter is entirely in id's hands, but that they are not expecting the game this year, and have it "penciled" on their calendars for fiscal Q4 (Jan-March) 2004.' Additionally, Quake IV is now due in Fiscal 2005 (which begins April 2004)."
Or maybe Doom Whenever?
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Obligatory: Doom 3 Forever.
As long as I don't have to buy a Pentium 6 with 2GB ram and a Geforce 10 running windows 2005 with Directx 15.
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
"DOOM!"
"DOOM2: Hell on Earth"
"No DOOM 3? What the Hell?"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...No wonder I couldn't find it on Kazaa!
...I will be able to afford the hardware needed to play it at 1600x1200 when it is released.
That leaves a chance we'll get play Duke Nukem first!
What's the purpose in trying to predict the release date of a game that doesn't have a release date? Activision doesn't know exactly when the game will be released, and if ID releases it before this prediction then I'll bet Activision will make time to publish it.
There will be no meaningful comments to this article, unless John Carmack or one of the other ID guys decides to respond.
I thought it was Michelangelo, when painting the Sistine Chapel's celing, that he said "When it is finished!". I'd post the IMDB link to the particular movie emphasizing that, but I'm not sure which movie it was. I'll let someone else reap the karma rewards.
moox. for a new generation.
I think id did start the "when it's done" trend. 3D Realms has just interpreted that as "just in time for the LAN party at the end of the universe".
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It seems that everything imitates one of a few different styles. I'm saddened to see that an intelligent and creative man like John Carmack is just repeating himself.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
1.) Duke Nuke Um Forever
2.) Team Fortress 2
3.) Doom III
They're calling it the "vaporware of the century pack" and it will be available for the low cost of $0.00 that's right folks, free.
Just playing, I mean it's not like there aren't screenshots that people love and a huge crowd of ever-anticipating buyers just waiting.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
That's from the folks that bring us the Duke Nukem games. C'mon. Let's give credit where credit's due.
.plan from the developmental Doom 2 era. Nice try, though.
It's straight out of Carmack's
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Is nVidia and ATI. The new version of any game like this generates as much sales for them as it does for whoever put the game out I bet.
I'd also bet that AMD and Intel see a nice little spike when a new generation hallmark game comes out. Thats the kind of thing that everyone is waiting for to upgrade...
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Looks like 2003 is going to be a bit less of the kickass-gaming year it looked to be. And if Doom 3 is only out in 2004, some games that will be released meanwhile could make id's design look real old. *cough*
I'm thinking that after Valve's E3 techdemo and their subsequent best of show awards with little mention of ID/D3 that ID were taken off guard. I'm sure they thought they'd waltz in there and floor the place but Valve came out of no where and blew the socks off of everything hands down.
I think ID realized that they would have to revamp somewhat and code additional features into the engine itself as well as enhance gameplay so the worlds would at the very least be as interactive as the worlds in HL2.
I've never been a HL fanboy the movies I've seen of in game play not cinematics are amazing! They have revolutionized gaming and are taking it in a new direction in terms of a fully interactive world. Go dl a movie of HL 2 off Kazaa or BT and see what I mean.
I had no intentions of purchasing HL 2 but after the tech-demo/in game movies I will now buy it.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
...for FPS gamers over the next couple of years
We have Half Life 2 coming out, its engine alone will be used in numerous games and for numerous mods, then Doom 3 and its engine will produce yet more games and all before Quake 4, whose engine is likely to be used in as many games as Half life 2s engine. Thats not even inculding those three games themselves which will all be first rate.
And of course following the release of HL2, the DNF team will switch to the HL2 engine and start again... then to the Doom engine etc etc you know the drill by now
Is it just me or does this ideology seem to lead to titles dying from over engineering. I don't think it'll come as a shock to anyone that when you let the engineers decide when a product is ready to ship, that it will never ship. On the other side of the rope are the marketers who want to realease it now, now, now. What you need is someone in the middle who is willing to give a cut-off date, a deadline. This means that the engineers are not allowed to keep adding features, creating bugs, and fixing those bugs after a certain point, and that the marketers have to wait for a product to actually exist before booking orders. Ya, deadlines suck, most of us probably deal with them in our jobs, but they are necessary to making a company run, as long as they are realistic. Too short, and the product sucks, too long and the product dies in engineering or misses the market. When its done, seems to be a deadline that is just way to long for bringing a product to market, and slowly builds dissatisfaction in the customers who would buy your product.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Maybe this is a sign that there are good things to come. I just hope that there is some true innovation involved.
If you consider how scaleable the Quake 3 engine is, and the fact that many games are still being released using it today (Star Trek - Elite Force 2 for example) then it is no surprise that Carmack wants to get the Doom 3 Engine right. After all ID will be licenscing this technology left right and center for 3 or 4 years at least.
but idspispopd better still work.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For some reason known only to accountants and PHBs, many corporations base their 'fiscal' year off of a different quarter than the calendar year. In general, the fiscal year number is the number of the highest calendar year that forms part of the fiscal year.
So, for id/Activision, fiscal year 2004 runs from April 2003 to March 2004.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I'd hit it.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
Of course there's Doom this year. It's called the RIAA.
id Software has always been about quality over quantity. They generally release software that requires some patches after release, but those patches fix mostly network and driver issues, and not serious game problems.
I'm glad id is waiting to release Doom III when it's done instead of releasing it on a schedule for holiday sales. The sound engine they've described, the lighting and camera abilities they've described, and just the basic plot make me really want this game, and I'd rather have it finished than nearly-there first.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
...the drivers for that hardware will actually work. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Way to be narrow minded. Don't need more FPS? You discount an entire genre right off the bat? Do you lump Wolfenstein with HL2? Hell let's just lump everything that uses a pixel as FALSE innovation since it's not really doing anything new, just reusing those same pixels.
I'd have to say that those two games(wolf & HL2) are different genres, two totally different worlds of gameplay. I really dislike this arguement that "games suck there's no innovation". The whole argument of more frames per second died out awhile ago, it's all about how detailed your environment can get now, how interactive.
What is TRUE innovation? Without some new interface to meld human to computer we're kind of stuck with using what we have. DDR I guess was innovative, but that's just a rehash of Track & Field for NES.
-- taking over the world, we are.
In the past week, this date has just come out of nowhere and is now generally accepted as the release date. Not that long ago, there was an interview with someone at id that suggested the engine was complete and it was just down to finalising level design.
It wouldn't surprise me if HL2 has been a factor here. Everyone was shocked at the E3 debut of Half Life 2, and full, full credit to Valve. Over the past 2 years especially, Valve have taken all the criticism of "you're just happy to sit on the laurels of Half Life you lazy b's", and sat back and blown everyone away when it mattered.
Certainly some aspects of the Doom 3 engine seem from reports awful in comparison to HL2's engine - poorer scaling in terms of system spec, Environment manipulation (which HL2 blew everyone away with at E3 but is apparently very poor in the current Doom 3 engine) and a plethora more effect/shader programs than Doom 3.
The competition is good, because its a chance to force id's hand to play catch up. For too long, id and Carmack have sat in almost demi-God mode over the PC games market with the Doom 3 hype and you have to wonder if maybe they have got a little complacent.
Oh, and a final issue, purely to play Devil's Advocate, I understand Half Life 2 uses DirectX and some might suggest that it is the reason why HL2 apparently is more scalable and achieves more effects more easily across many performance levels. Could HL2's apparent conquering of Doom 3 at the moment be the defining moment of DirectX's conquering of OpenGL?
Even if you assume that to really play the game you need twice the minimum specs which would be approximately:
2 Ghz CPU
512 MB RAM
GF2 or Radeon 8xxx series card
I would guess that's gonna be one outdated computer system by Jan-March 2004.
So much for Doom 3 forcing everyone to upgrade and sparking a business revivaling for PC parts manufacturers....
Where the Music Matters
Or for ATI to develop drivers to run their cards ...
-------
Those who can, do, and those who can't, well
I'm sick and tired of software companies saying that such-and-such product will be "released when it's done" or "done when it's finished."
Since when has any software product ever been FINISHED when it's released? Usually -- and *especially* with PC games -- the release is full of bugs and requires a couple of quick patch cycles to bring up to par, followed by a few more patch cycles over the following months to make it solid.
This also hurts any bullied geeks planning a school shooting, now forced to keep using outdated Doom and Doom II mods to map out their attacks. When Kleinbold and Harris began their spree they were completely unprepared for jumping or for how prettily water reflects in real life.
Nobody thinks of them.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Oh yeah? Uh... MICROSOFT SUCKS!!! OPEN SOURCE FOREVER!!
Dammit... PC game comedy died with Old Man Murray.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Everything I have heard was that Quake 4 was the next step of Quake 2; it's a mostly single player game with some maps for DM tacked on. Then again I just read gaming news sites all day.....
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
DirectX 9 was the first to allow the use of all the latest fancy pants shader stuff of the bleeding edge graphics cards.
I believe OpenGL can do those things to an extent but at least until OpenGL 2.0 comes out, DirectX will be the top graphics API.
What really blew me away though about HL2 was the physics and wickedly creative game play like shoot the rope and the huge thingie swings down and kills everything in it's path. And those rediculously tall creatures. Things which really have nothing to do with the graphics themselves. It's phsyics and creative character design.
DooM3 relied on more corridors and darkness. HL2 brought the monsters out into the light which is so much less cliche it's actually "scarier." Plus you actually get to see the full magnitude of what it is you're shooting at.
Walking down a brightly lit street and a huge monster jumping out at you will make me jump higher than one jumping out of the shadows where they have been hiding for years.
HL2 is definitly getting my money as will ATI or nVIDIA. DooM3 I'm skeptical about.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Further, Nvidia's Cg provides a high level (c like) shader language which is equivilant to D3D 9.0's HLSL. OpenGL 2.0's HLSL will provide even better functionality when it's released.
I'll chime in... not to correct, but to provide some of my observations...
Quake3 lacks scalability to large numbers of people. The main problem is that the server sends the same info about each client to every other client. So if 64 people join a server, there are 64 different clients that you have to know about, even if you shouldn't (like, they aren't close to being on your screen). This effectively limits Quake3 based games to a MAX of 32 players per server (due to outgoing bandwidth limitations of the server, CPU time is also a concern, but not as great).
I do not know what DOOM III is going to do to solve these types of problem, but I have heard rumors that it will support the ability to tell clients about only the relevant players on his screen. This would increase security (prevent cheaters from using "radar" cheats via packetsniffing) and dramatically increase the number of players capable of being on a single server.
Also, larger terrains will be supported. In quake3, you make terrains with a 3D mesh, and the computer must render every polygon in the terrain no matter your distance from it. In many newer games, the level of detail of the polygons are reduced when viewing terrains from large distances, thus improving performance dramatically without costing any visual degredation. DOOMIII will likely support these enhancements.
Vehicle support is another big thing for DOOMIII. One of Quake3's biggest drawbacks is that it does not have cars or planes to drive. Battle Field 1942's popularity has proven this fact online, where the Q3 equivilent game (wolfenstein, and wolf ET) are in competition, but most everyone who plays BF1942 stick with its engine dispite it being buggy,slow, and crappy physics simply because of its vehicle support.
The list can go on and on, but those are the 3 biggest points that are preventing Quake3 from selling to developers. With DOOMIII's upgrades, id will have the upper hand on the game engine market and many game developers are itching for it is release.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
My chances of getting laid this year just increased! I may even pass college with this much free time on my hands!
Looking at the HL2 and D3 trailers, it is pretty clear that the lighting effects in Doom are far superior. Watch the HL2 guys pass through a shadow and their entire body changes shade all at once (kinda like in the original Doom :P). In D3 the shadows pass over the creatures in a far more realistic fasion, including shadows cast by dynamic lights (remember the bathroom scene?).
The HL2 physics appear to be a lot better though. Not a big suprise there, Id has never really shown much interest in good physics (strafejumping anyone?). I'd also bet HL2 will have the better AI. And the HL2 engine will probably be more versatile: larger areas, more enemies on the screen, stuff like that.
I expect HL2 will be the choice for "kill your friends online", and D3 for "at home with the lights off getting the shit scared out of you". Personally I'm getting kinda tired of the former, so I'm really looking forward to D3.
Daikatana? How everyone who was granted a preview said it looked to be amazing (gee whizz, I wonder if there's a connection) and it was only when it was released and the advertising money was already in the magazine's pockets that they declared that it sucked more than anything had ever sucked before?
I'm not saying that Doom 3 sucks. I'm just asking if you remember how much you believed that Daikatana didn't suck either.
In brief: let's wait for the reviews, rather than wetting our pants every time we get a sneak peek preview.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Its called a feature set.
:) ) but all of shortcomings you mentioned have specific reasons and could changed by any decent coder.
Doom isn't trying to be Battle Field -- so why spend resources trying to add a feature (like vehicles) that your game doesn't call for?
If the concern is licensees, anyone with the money to license the engine surely can afford programmers who can add vehicles. Hell, Gunman Chronicles, which starts as a mod and never even had engine source access added a vehicle, even if it was a bit simple.
Doom isn't targeting massive outdoor areas, so why does it need to support 64 clients? Scalablity costs time and money. If they aren't going to use it, then there is no reason at all to work on it. If there was a huge demand for 64 player games, either ID would do it if it fit in to their feature set and time line, or a licensee could add it.
If you are a licensee and you want to add an occlusion system, well, go for it. Same with LOD (though LOD can frequently be a slowdown if the CPU is doing it dynamicly).
Carmack and Id know their shit. I am not a fan boy (hell, I am part of the competition
I'm a little bit perplexed about the responses for this story. Many people think that the reason why the Doom III may be delayed is related to Half Life 2, which had an incredible showing this year. This may be true, but that seems rather unlikely, and there is a much more reasonable explanation.
Firstly, it seems to me the phase of development D3 is in right now is polish. The graphics engine is more or less complete, which is demonstrated by the fact that the screenshots from last year compared to this years aren't much different. They've story-boarded the game's story like a Hollywood movie, so unless they're changing a fundamental story element (why?) they're just working on finishing the level designs and maybe enemy (and ally?) AI. I personally figured that that has been pretty much what they've been working on all this year, and why they would release this holiday season.
Now, this far into the development process, close to a final product, you don't fundamentally change everything just because you see some game clips from another company. I too was quite impressed with HL2, but I don't see why we can't just expect two great games. Carmack strikes me as an incredibly pragmatic person, and it really doesn't make sense to me to fundamentally change your development for an unreleased game.
What seems much more likely and actually has been hinted on is that they're delaying the game to so they can have a simultaneous xbox release. id has confirmed there will be an xbox port, and Carmack has been quoted saying Microsoft is offering them a pile of money if they have a simultaneous release. Although the xbox is just a PC variant, because of the fixed hardware and TV constraints (though xbox can output HDTV quality), optimizing the game for a system pretty close to D3's minimum requirements is going to be a slight challenge.
http://www.talknerdy.org