Doom 3's Release Date; Quake Turns 8

LehiNephi writes "Apparently, GameStop has an updated product page for long-awaited PC FPS Doom 3, along with the note: 'Official launch date of August 3rd, 2004 confirmed!', although the official Doom 3 site hasn't yet been updated, sporting just a 'coming soon' notice. [Blue's News also has further info, noting 'that the British Board of Film Classification has a DOOM III Listing with a rating for the game, a seeming indication that they've already been able to review all its content'.]" In related news, Ag3nt writes "One of the biggest leaps in PC gaming technology, Quake, celebrated its 8th birthday yesterday, according to an AmpedNews piece - there's also a birthday note on John Romero's homepage."

Comments

Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[gbulmash]

Just Monday, the "Foxtrot" comic strip was joking how it seemed Doom III would never come out.

Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves. Even when they announce ship dates, these companies are notorious for having last-minute changes. Thirty-six hours before you should be able to pick up your precious pre-order, it's announced that you'll have to wait another two weeks... maybe three... they're not sure.

I'll believe the release dates when I have a copy in my grubby little hands and not before.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[Ignignot]

I prefer to deal with companies on a case by case basis. id software has almost never disclosed release dates until they were done. They've always followed the "when its done" philosophy of development. When they finally said it will come out this summer, I trusted them. The Aug 3 release date is in the summer, so if it comes out that day I'll continue to trust them where it comes to releases. The one thing that disappoints me is that they're letting quake 4 be developed on the doom 3 engine. :-(

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[chimpo13]

Isn't any "Doom III out soon" an automatic dupe? Hasn't this been a topic since 1920? Isn't Doom the first of the talkies?

New Star Wars sucks
Doom III out soon
SCO sucks
Microsoft sucks
XBox is great
XBox sucks

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[devphaeton]

I'll believe the release dates when I have a copy in my grubby little hands and not before.

Lots of games like that. Most recently Driv3r (their cutesy name for Driver 3). We've been strung along for almost 2 years on the release date, watching it get announced then pushed back again and again.

Now that i've got a copy in my grubby hands (and slightly less than grubby ps2), i still question whether they were *really* done with it, or if they just got to a point where the devels said to each other:

"Well, we've got the basic idea down, fixed most of the big problems, the rest we can live with. It's been 3 years.. shove it out the door and let's wash our hands of it"....

Still seems like it'll be a fun game though. As an armchair programmer, i can understand and appreciate the types of delays one gets with a complicated program (even without various levels of management and all that bullshit getting in the way). But to develop something that will get scrutinized lloudly and publicly by every pimply-faced teenager to young adult male in the world would drive me batshit insane.

I used to want to be a game developer, but on second thought, no thanks. At least coding has given me some more empathy and patience when it comes to game release dates. :-D

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[kfg]

Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves.

People often complain that auto repair cost estimates bear no relationship to the actual final cost. Anyone who has ever been on the other side of the wrench knows why though. Making a cost estimate is very much reading tea leaves. You never really know what's really in need of repair until you start taking the bugger apart. Until then you're just making an educated (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual mechaninc) guess. Sometimes you get it right and look good, but that's really pretty close to coincidence.

(Certain transmission shops, especially those beginning with the letter "A", have turned this fact into orginized fraud. They won't give you an estimate until they've taken the tranny apart to look at it, but that means that at the point they give you the "estimate" your car is in their hands with its guts scattered across their floor. Unless you're the sort who knows, and is willing, to start screaming "Put my car back together and give it to me, NOW! Or I'm calling the cops and the Attorney General" you're pretty much stuck just paying whatever they ask. And of course you can't prove that when it gets put back together it's more broken than when it came in).

Release dates are just estimates. Shit can always go wrong, and usually does.

In the case of id (sic), however, they are, as Ignignot says, generally pretty good about not giving a release date until the game is actually in the can.

Of course shit can still happen in the distribution channel, and that's out of id's hands, so even if it's in the can the actual release date can still get pushed back a week or two, so it's still an estimate, but at least it's a pretty damned educated one not likely to slip too far.

KFG

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[kfg]

While ID may have never put out a release date, Activision sure did, many times.

Ah, but Acitvision was the subject of neither the article or my own post.

A publisher's projected release date isn't typically an educated guess. It's what might be called in the colloquial, "Lying", and should be treated as such.

KFG

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[Maudib]

Wolf was published by ID but put together by an independent developer (who had previously worked at ID) who licensed the engine and the Wolf Copyright.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[kfg]

I would say "informed lying"

Well, I guess I would agree with that on the basis of its being a bit a tautology. You can't actually lie without having information.

While such is certainly not always the case it's my experience that it is not unheard of for a publisher to announce a release date when the information they have is that there is no way in hell it will ever actually be released on that date. It may well be good marketing to make the claim, however.

Anyway, this is not exactly like the "transmission on the floor" example -- Carmack is a good enough engineer not to be 2 years off in his estimates unless there was a good reason to be.

I hope I didn't in any way give the impression that I was implying that Carmack or id were in any way similar to my "transmission on the floor" example. Activision taking preorders for a specific date might be vaguely like that, but certainly not id.

I thought I had rather explicitly said that Carmack was more like a mechanic who is intelligent enough, and forthright enough, to tell you up front that his estimate is only reading tea leaves (although his reading of the tea leaves may be considerably more accurate than "Norm"'s) and that he'll be able to tell you the actual cost and time of completion when the job is done. Take it or leave it.

KFG

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[l810c]

The one thing that disappoints me is that they're letting quake 4 be developed on the doom 3 engine. :-(

Why on earth would this disappoint you? Seems like using their latest and greatest engine for Q4 would be the only obvious choice.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[Fweeky]

Probably because the Doom 3 engine may be more suited to slower paced single player gameplay, and Quake's traditionally been quite a fast paced multiplayer game. Multiplayer at 25FPS/800*600 doesn't sound so great to me.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[crayz]

You think by the time Quake 4 comes out, current comps won't be able to handle it at better than 25FPS?

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[bluesnowmonkey]

The one thing that disappoints me is that they're letting quake 4 be developed on the doom 3 engine. :-(

I'm sorry, is Doom 3 not advanced enough to suit your standards?

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[one4nine4two]

Dude, he's talking about the graphics engine.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[billcopc]

When they get around to releasing Q4, we will have moved on to bigger, faster rigs that can handle the output.

In addition, consider that Doom 3 has been under development for several years already. Graphics hardware has evolved, not as fast as it used to, but I'd say my not-so-expensive Radeon 9600 Pro is faster and nicer on the eyes than the Geforce 4200 I had last year. NVidia recently announced (released?) the Geforce 5, and THG gave it a very positive rating, leaps and bounds ahead of the Geforce FX line of shite, and outperforming the top Radeon model.

Heck, Quake 2 made the Voodoo shine, and led all my buddies to lust after my Voodoo2. Quake 3 saw us all move to 32-bit OpenGL cards like the TNT2. Doom 3 will bring forth the new age of graphics acceleration, exactly as the developers foretold years ago, not only their goal, it is a necessity, or else we won't enjoy the game nearly as much.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[SphericalCrusher]

Even though I am really looking forward to it coming out more than any thing else, I'm glad to be waiting. I love how John Carmack and idSoftware have the attitude of "It'll be released when it's finished." They have always had that attitude and look at their history of games... Hexen, Heretic, RTCW, Quake series, Doom series... hell, even Dangerous Dave. idSoftware can take as much time as they want to make the game -- when it's officially done, it's going to be awesome.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[supersteve1440]

Notice that Jason is using an iMac in the comic. He'll definitely have to wait a while for Doom 3.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[lucas teh geek]

NVidia recently announced (released?) the Geforce 5,
err... Geforce 6.

GeforceFX == geforce 5 series Geforce 6XXX == geforce 6 series

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[emilng]

You forgot: Duke Nukem Forever out soon.

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[C0rinthian]

I'm sorry, is Doom 3 not advanced enough to suit your standards?

Even Carmack has stated that graphics engines are coming to a point where they have a much longer shelf life than we're used to. Look at the visuals in Doom 3, and keep in mind that they are not using the engine to it's fullest potential by any stretch. Think about how long the Unreal engine lasted, and how much more people accomplished with it long after it's release. The Doom 3 engine should last us quite a few years provided it's flexible enough for developers.

Besides, if Carmack was going to code ANOTHER new graphics engine for Quake 4, that would kinda kill his chances of selling the Doom 3 engine, wouldn't it. (Not to mention that we wouldn't see Quake 4 until 2010 or something)

Re:Believe It When I See It On Shelves

[Fweeky]

The greatgreatgrandparent poster presumably isn't planning an upgrade.. personally I'm eyeing up these new S939 AMD64's and PCI Express GFX cards ;)

Time to update...

[tcopeland]

...my WAD file parser. Argh!

Re:Time to update...

[tcopeland]

> fingers and pies [...] Bertrand Russell

Even Google could not help me understand this... surely it must be a pithy quote... don't keep me in suspense!

Re:Time to update...

[tcopeland]

> To have ones fingers in many
> pies is to be involved in many diverse endeavours.

Ah, OK, right. I had thought perhaps there was a specific quote from Russell to which he was referring... 'twas a kind comment on the parent AC's part, indeed.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

If we were to take that poorly worded title literally, that would mean Doom 3 was released yesterday. W00t!

Re:Wow

[vijaya_chandra]

I am sure my english is to be blamed, but reading the title, I thought that the next version of quake is going to be QuakeVIII

Re:Wow

[Tatarize]

And to think I was actually playing Quake yesterday. TF it was sorta fun, but I suck so I have to go Engineer.

Re:Wow

[fanfriggintastic]

Looks look others made that mistake; the title's been changed.

I Want DOOM3 More Than Anyone...

[th1ckasabr1ck]

... but remember id still hasn't budged from it's "when it's done" release date.

Re:I Want DOOM3 More Than Anyone...

[Dan Farina]

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040511/sftu128_1.html

"Activision and id Software Confirm Summer 2004 Ship Date for Doom 3"

It's not "when it's done" with no qualifiers, as you imply. id and Activision have a rough idea of when "it's done" will be.

Re:I Want DOOM3 More Than Anyone...

[angle_slam]

There's a big difference between "August 3, 2004" and "sometime between now and September 21, 2004" (which is what "Summer 2004" means).

Oh, and here's a clickable version of the link.

Re:I Want DOOM3 More Than Anyone...

[Dan Farina]

On the other hand, the original poster gave the impression that we were operating under the unconditional, unqualified "when it's done" statement, which is not really the case.

Original Doom almost 11 years old

[csirac]

... according to this.

10 Years of Doom

Ten years ago on December 10th, 1993, id Software released the Doom shareware, forever changing the world of PC games. Doom pretty much defined the very young first person shooter genera, and set the bar for future games to come. With immersive, colorful levels, deadly enemies and some of the greatest gameplay any game has ever seen, Doom can be best described as nothing short of a masterpiece. Even to this day it is still cited as one of the best and most signifigant games made.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Ralph Wiggam]

The only people I know that got motion sick from Doom had really slow machines, even for the time. My friend had a 386 and his brother barfed all over the computer desk. I can get badly motion sick in a car, but FPSs have never bothered me.

-B

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[supersandra]

DOOM is almost 11, indeed... seems line only yesterday I was playing it against my brother on the home LAN.

Does anybody know how old the various Wolfenstein games are? That's where I got my start on true FPSs and now this whole post has made me quite curious.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Jaysyn]

A guy I work with has a couple of cafe bikes that he like to hauls ass around town on, but he gets violently ill if he tries to play FPS games. PC, X-Box, PS2, all with the same result.

Jaysyn

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Tongo]

The early FPS's like Doom 1 & 2 and quake didn't bother me at all (although playing Descent for 3 minutes had me falling over dizzy). Now unfortunatly, any FPS on any platform seems to make me nautious after a few minutes. Otherwise I never get any kind of motion sickness, even on a boat.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Lord Kano]

Even to this day it is still cited as one of the best and most signifigant games made.

Doom is still cited by people who want to blame school shooting on video games. It's a part of the popular culture. Not bad for a game that was released when most US households didn't even have computers.

LK

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[danny256]

With immersive, colorful levels

I don't know about colorful, I seem to remember a lot of grey and brown...

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[vk2]

This is so true with me too. I never had any kind (air,sea,road etc.) of motion sickness. But when I eagerly bought Quake III, within 10 minutes of install - I was drolling like a terrible hangover.

Thats the reason I haven't spent money on a PS or a XBOX.

Do all the games on PS or XBOX cast this kind of sickness ?

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[supersandra]

PS games, definitely not. Only played an XBOX a couple of times so I can't speak to it directly, but my feeling would be probably not plenty of games on it, either.

I've had problems with a lot of the more recent FPSs but most other games simply don't use such high framerates and have as much motion going on. I've heard some people complain about certain highly realistic racing games but I had no problems myself. I especially don't experience problems with kiddie-style games, though those are more a GameCube phenomenon.

If you're really worried but want to play awesome games, try RPGs. They're good for you and your brain! :)

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[eln]

Clicky

The first Wolfenstein (Castle Wolfenstein) was released in 1983. The more well-known Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[h0mer]

I've found that a lot of the motion sickness on the PC comes from the twitchy input device known as the mouse. Being able to turn 360 degrees in a fraction of a second is kind of disorienting. But then again, that's a primary reason PC gamers love their mouse and pour a big glass of Haterade on console controllers.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Wanderer2]

I don't know about colorful, I seem to remember a lot of grey and brown...

Funny thing is, I remember Doom as being quite colourful, but hated the shareware version of Quake because it was all grey and brown and colourless by comparison...

Of course, Doom 3 promises to be colourful in other ways.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[Doogie5526]

The whole game was only 256 colors. They did use a lot of grey and brown, but they had bright greens,yellow/ornage,and reds that contrasted it really well.

Man, i remember hacking away at that pallette trying to make decent WAD files.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[drinkypoo]

Absolutely the most motion sickness-inducing game of all time is Descent - especially when you turn the graphics settings up too far and your frame rate gets too slow. It's like falling down a well-lit mineshaft while blinking.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[mr_sas]

in quake engine fps' you can limit the framerate by pulling down the console and typing /seta maxfps "x" (iirc) where x is the number of fps. dunno if that helps with motion sickness any.....

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[AthosGhost]

Games that have a wide field of vision that cause a sort of fisheye effect get me motion sick and give me head aches, such as the quake 3 engine. I can play the unreal engine until the sun comes up though.

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[AviLazar]

I remember when this came out. I was accessing local BBS' at the time playing MajorMud!!! The SysOP made me the Doom_OP. Heh, I took one of my mud buddies and we began to work with some networking files (forget the client, but i think it was winsock or something like that) so people could play DOOM on the BBS.
Took us about an hour to get it right (i think; it was a long time ago) but then me and the guy started to play the game. Four or five hours later I get booted off the system, I come back and one of the Chat_OPs appologize's for booting me. Apparantly there was about 25 people all sitting in the "DOOM" chat room waiting for me to announce the game opening and show them how to access it :)
I love DOOM! It really did define the way these FPS games are played, and I would still play Doom 1 or 2 online today, even with the games out there that are far superior to it (i.e. Counter_strike).

Re:Original Doom almost 11 years old

[suckmysav]

"The first Wolfenstein (Castle Wolfenstein) was released in 1983."

Gee I loved that game! If I recall correctly, it was the first PC game ever to have "digitized voice" served via the apple II's tiny single bit speaker no less!

"Halt!"

"You're caught"

The official release date

[PovRayMan]

"When it's done"

Part of me wishes this was the industry standard instead of forcing themselves to abide by release dates only to output a buggy product.

However the downside to "when its done" would be our favorite game Duke Nukem Forever.

WHEN WILL YOU BE DONE?!

Re:The official release date

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

They're up to version 1.7 already, bucko.

Re:The official release date

[TheSpoom]

My theory is that the name Duke Nukem Forever is an inside joke about how long it will take before it is released.

Re:The official release date

[falser]

Actually I think they should just abandon telling us when it *will* be released, but rather when it *was* released.

-- Press Release --

Oh we forgot to mention that Doom 3 was available at all retail outlets yesterday. Sorry about that.

Re:The official release date

[toolio]

Like most things, projects need to find a medium between setting a goal and trying to attain it and keeping quality number one.

If a project doesn't have a goal for a launch then odds are the project will fail.

Most who say "When it's done" only mean it to keep the media off there backs. I think most have a good idea of when a release is likely to be.

Re:The official release date

[Tatarize]

A close friend of mine showed me some Duke Nukem Forever clips he downloaded. He said "This game is gonna rock". I called him an idiot.

Re:The official release date

[iabervon]

I'm nostalgic for the old days, when nobody believed that iD would actually release the game they'd been talking about, and that they couldn't possibly actually implement the stuff they were saying they had planned. Then they released it, and it had sloped floors, water, and walls with triangular holes, in addition to most of the claimed features. Although they never did do melee combat like they had originally claimed. A bit later, they released the official version, which wasn't nearly as cool. Ah, how I miss chasing people around with a plain brown stick, blowing myself up.

Re:The official release date

[drinkypoo]

Never did melee combat? I can distinctly remember a chainsaw in one game (and its sequel which consisted more or less of more levels) and an axe in another. Or, did I hallucinate that stuff?

Re:The official release date

[cK-Gunslinger]

Hexen / Hexen II, perhaps?

Re:The official release date

[mkoenecke]

I know a fellow who is working on Duke Nukem Forever at 3D Realms. All I can say is yes, it's still in development. And he's even more sick of all the delays than we are.

Re:The official release date

[AviLazar]

Duke Nukem Forever is done - it was done at Duke Nukem II. The company that makes Duke Nukem is all laughing at us as there will be no next version....

Re:The official release date

[thrash242]

I think he's talking about how, in an interview with John Romero, he said that Quake was going to be purely medieval and purely melee combat.

I quote:

"In Quake you'll fight, say, three monsters at the max...but it's going to be like a virtual fighter. ... In Quake, you'll have to really kill things. You wont' just press the trigger and hit it, you'll have to heat the living shit of of the thing until it's dead. So you'll have this huge hammer and you'll pound in into blood paste on the floor, and you're going to ahve to take a while, too. ... You won't have this arrow point-and-click kind of thing."

This may have something to do with Romero leaving, since the rest of the team didn't seem to go along with this. The way he was describing what Quake will be like (there's a lot more) sounds more like Morrowind than anything else.

Anyway, yes, most games have handheld weapons, that are used very rarely as an absolute last resort, but I don't think I would consider that melee combat like was planned in Quake.

Re:The official release date

[drinkypoo]

Ah, that clears things up quite a bit. If only the OP had linked or C&P'd that pasage.

Quake turned out to be one of the best games EVER. I still play Quake occasionally, not least because I can play at 1600x1200 on my current system :) Plus, it created the mod scene as we know it today.

I do however think I speak for the majority of users when I say that Quake could be an even better game if you had a big fucking sword in addition to your usual kit, even in place of the axe.

Re:The official release date

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

Prescient though - a rich hand to hand combat system focusing on individual engagement with small numbers of enemies seems to yield great satisfaction for the player when implemented properly, for example Ninja Gaiden, Shenmue series ( originally Virtua Fighter RPG ) and the upcoming Jade Empire.

I wish NG's developers had just included a straight out deathmatch multiplayer mode. Would have been a scream. Romero! Make us a big multiplayer hand to hand game in the style of Battlefield: 1042 or something.

Re:The official release date

[thrash242]

I would still play Quake, but I lost my CD. I still play Doom and its ports, though. I think Doom actually started the idea of being able to make your own content, altough in a different form from Mods today.

Re:The official release date

[thrash242]

Well, yeah, I know that it was possible to do some WOlf3d editing, but not nearly as easy as Doom. With Doom, user-made content was actively encouraged by id.

Re:The official release date

[iabervon]

I think it turned out that the gameplay for a FP hand-to-hand combat system was just too bad. The field of view that your brain can process with a perspective projection with the viewing angle of your monitor doesn't give you enough information about something close up, and you don't get enough information about the position of your body from the game to tell what you're doing.

Now, it is possible to do well (see Thief), but it's too much of a pain to make it the majority of the game.

Foxtrot reference

[Jhon]

Damn funny

I pre-purchased doom3 long ago

[ekvin]

My pewter mancubus is sitting on top of my monitor, where it's been laughing at me ever since I paid $10 way ahead of time to own doom3. All I can say is, it's about time! (... to upgrade my video card, that is)

Re:I pre-purchased doom3 long ago

[xsupergr0verx]

Yeah, I did a double take in Best Buy at the preorder box (made to look like the release box).

"WHOA! How did this come out without me knowing?! $20!? I thought it was going to be like $60!"

Then I saw the Pre order stripe on the corner and the world returned to normal.

Re:I pre-purchased doom3 long ago

[EssTiDee]

Everyone knows the Revenant was a much more difficult enemy to handle than the mancubus...

I also pre-paid to secure the first copies of Doom3, but was able to reclaim my 10 bucks from Best Buy when they first delayed the release. Perhaps you could look into a similar possibility?

I intend to stand in line if necessary and get my hands on a copy when it comes out just the same... saving myself 10 bucks to spend on a pewter statuette of whatever beastly creature gives me the most crap in the third version!

Hardware nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to upgrage my box to run this and HL2, then have to throw it all in the trash next year so I can upgrade to a Longhorn spec machine. Wheeeee!

Re:Hardware nightmare

[Deusy]

I can't wait to upgrage my box to run this and HL2, then have to throw it all in the trash next year so I can upgrade to a Longhorn spec machine. Wheeeee!

Why would you want to play Longhorn? It doesn't look like a very fun game.

What's that? It isn't a game? But what about the...

Oh right.

but what about the...

Ah ok.

But why would they bother to do that? Did they think Enlightenment was going to be ready before - can't say Doom 3 - Duke Nukem Forever shipped? Crazy multinationals...

Skeptical

[generic-man]

I'm always skeptical about release dates, but at least two stores are consistent this time. EB Games has the release date for Doom III listed as August 3 as well, but the strategy guide comes out on July 10. You can spend three weeks reading up on the game and then kick ass at it!

Re:Skeptical

[shystershep]

On the other hand, Amazon claims "Date first available at Amazon: July 5, 2002"

You can theoretically pre-order, but it doesn't seem to be working right now.

Re:Skeptical

[generic-man]

Amazon also claims August 1 as the release date.

I'm more curious about the 67 customer reviews. How do people take Amazon's customer reviews seriously when 67 people review a game they haven't played yet in final form?

Re:Skeptical

[foidulus]

I'm more interested in this line from the website:
Popular in: Illinois (#20) , Pacific Bell Internet Services (#3)
Hmmmm...an ISP buying up a lot of copies of doom, wonder what they plan on doing with those ;)

Re:Skeptical

[shish]

People get prizes to be the first to review something; Whether the reviewer has any idea what they're doing is beside the point

Re:Skeptical

[rush22]

When I pre-ordered Half-life 2 from Amazon it was going to be out before Christmas... of 2003.

aha!

[termos]

So this is why they've been delaying it for so long. I knew there was a logical explanation!

In other news...

[jesser]

Warez group announces August 1, 2004 release date for cracked version of Doom III.

Impending Doom

[joNDoty]

No doubt that this game's gonna have everyone flipping head-over-hoof. I just hope the game will actually deserve its reaction. Much like any good trilogy, the third release is often a dissapointment. (with the exception of the original star wars trilogy ;-)

Re:Impending Doom

[getnate]

Doom3 is not the third episode of a trilogy, it a retelling of the original doom story.

Re:Impending Doom

[iamsure]

the third release is often a dissapointment. (with the exception of the original star wars trilogy ;-)

Blasphemy. All Jedi had was a bunch of muppets.

Re:Impending Doom

[Ansonmont]

Well, Return of the Jedi was a bit of a disappointment after Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, IMHO

Re:Impending Doom

[BRock97]

the third release is often a dissapointment. (with the exception of the original star wars trilogy ;-)

Me thinks the demon-possessed Ewoks at the end of Doom 3 will change your tune....

Re:Impending Doom

[comedian23]

Well, Return of the Jedi was a bit of a disappointment after Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, IMHO

I think you must have been getting popcorn during the scene on Jabba's Love Barge. Princess Leia in metal lingerie...

In fact that is pretty much all I remember about RotJ. What are these "ewoks" people keep complaining about?

Re:Impending Doom

[CanadianCrackPot]

I'm getting very confused about the Doom numbering we had Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom (Doom 1 + an extra episode), and Final Doom (two more Doom 2 sized episodes 32 levels each). I could have sworn Final Doom was 3 (or 3 and 4 given the size of it). Oh well whatever I'm just gonna have to find the Linux versions of each of them.

Re:Impending Doom

[Cyno01]

The log thing isn't so far fetched. Ever see a car vs tree? Tree always wins.

Re:Impending Doom

[runcible]

Mods: Not insightful. Funny. It's a quote from Clerks: http://www.atlyrics.com/quotes/c/clerks.html

Unless quoting movies requires insight...

Quaking...

[KoshClassic]

Wow, I can't believe that it was only 8 years ago. When the original Quake was released, I honestly wasn't that impressed by it. Perhaps that's because I never had such hot hardware to run it on. But, mostly I remember thinking that the main way in which Quake, as a gaming engine, improved on Doom / Doom 2 (which I really loved) was by providing a true 3D environment, as opposed to Doom's psuedo-3D. Yet, to me, Doom was so well done in terms of level design, etc, that all Quake did was make me aware of things that Doom did not do, but that I had never missed in Doom as I never really realised that Doom wasn't doing them.

Re:Quaking...

[Ignignot]

Romero, will you never admit quake was better? We know its you!

Re:Quaking...

[normal_guy]

I feel that Quake is the first truly modern FPS. Sure, it would run like shite on older hardware, but if you had the hardware it was amazing. (To say nothing of later GLQuake.) Going back to Doom after playing Quake made me realize just how much I longed for true 3D in a game. Doom just seemed so cheap after it, with the three-frame death animations, the sprites that always face you, the bright pixely colors.

Re:Quaking...

[KoshClassic]

I honestly used to get scared to death from the sound playing Wolfenstein 3D - coming through a door to find one of those sub-machine gun toting SS guys and his yell when he saw you used to always cause me to jump in my chair.

But that was nothing as compared with the original Doom - preparing to go through a door took a lot of prayer and the sounds of the monsters when they saw you could almost frighten me into another dimension.

Re:Quaking...

[JVert]

Yea, when I first played doom it was really great the first day but after that I started to feel like it was a step forward in 3d but a step backwards in overal appearance. Maybe it was just because my hardware wasn't up to the cause, but I renember being upset thinking that the days of doom are gone and here is this square boxen quake with sharp cornered shoulders... blegh. But technology has mostly caught up with sprite animation, however I still wonder what it would be like to have a fully sprite animated game again. Take the 3 models and pump out the sprites with full polygon power.

Re:Quaking...

[mattyrobinson69]

>understanding is like a three edged sword

useless and difficult to maintain over time

Re:Quaking...

[bonch]

Romero worked on Quake.

Re:Quaking...

[Drooling Iguana]

And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.

Quake 1 really had some of the worst AI ever. Good thing they fixed that for Quake 2 (the best game in the series, imho.)

Re:Quaking...

[WuphonsReach]

And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.

DN3D's mobs were limited by whatever floor section they were standing on. I don't remember whether or not they would chase you off of "their" floor tile, but they definitely wouldn't notice you if you were on an adjacent tile. (e.g. climb up on some crates which are actually a different floor section, look down at the oblivious mobs)

Re:Quaking...

[Sigma 7]

And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.

From my experience with Quake and Doom, I noticed no difference between the AIs at that stage. The only thing that the Quake AI doesn't do is to spin in a random direction when it get snagged - it instead follows the wall that it suspects would minimize the distance between it and you. The removal of this isn't exactly a bad thing, as it doesn't truly help naviation around corners.

I tested the Quake's AI in E1M1, where a dog on the left hand side of the bridge ran across to attack. The grunt stayed there for a while, but could navigate around the bridge corner with "coaxing" by standing on the right-hand side of the bridge rather than the left.

Doom also exhibits this behaviour in E2M9 - the cyberdemon occassionally gets snagged in the small rooms containing rockets and other supplies. It also gets snagged in the corners, and has trouble nagivating around the structure.

Quake 1 really had some of the worst AI ever. Good thing they fixed that for Quake 2 (the best game in the series, imho.)

The problems with the Quake 1 AIs were not fixed - it was still possible for them to get snagged on corners in Quake 2. IIRC, the first game to be released where enemies could navigate around the map would be Unreal - they understood lifts, corners, doors, and many other environmental stuff by using a waypoint system from within the map. They could still be fooled or evaded, but not as easily as most other games.

Re:Quaking...

[Grayswan]

The six degrees of freedom in Quake was certainly one of its best features, but I think GLQuake (The OpenGL (Voodoo) version) was just as important. GLQuake was so many leaps and bounds beyond anything up to that point it truly was revolutionary. Nothing, not event Doom3, will ever match that leap again.

Re:Quaking...

[CaptnMArk]

I agree. No card will seem as impressive as going from the software renderer to Voodoo 2. After that I went to GF2 and GF4Ti and Voodoo 2 is still the most impressive jump.

More Importantly

[smclean]

When is the Linux release date? Does it say anywhere whether they are doing a concurrent Linux/Windows release? Will there be a nice free demo, as is ID's habit?

Re:More Importantly

[geekd]

I thought I read somewhere that they are developing for Mac/Linux/Windows at the same time.

Demo, probably, but not the "test release" like they had before Quake 3 came out. The focus of that test was the multiplayer code, and Doom 3 has a single player focus.

Re:More Importantly

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Yes, they definitely are shipping Linux binaries with the game. Also word is that there will probably be a demo AFTER the game is released.

Re:More Importantly

[Zathrus]

Does it say anywhere whether they are doing a concurrent Linux/Windows release?

id Software has repeatedly stated that the Linux, Mac, and Windows executables will all be on the same CD/DVD.

Will there be a nice free demo, as is ID's habit?

Nope. Not this time. At least, none prior to release. Which is deeply disappointing on several levels -- particularly since a lot of people would like to figure out if they need to upgrade their video card, memory, entire system, etc. prior to purchasing the game.

Of course, if you're in doubt, wait a day or two for the reviews and benchmarks to hit the 'net. It won't kill you.

Getting hacked

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I remember a Half-life 2 release date... and I'm still waiting for it.. believe it when you install it and it runs without five hundred bugs :)

Wouldnt it be cool

[WormholeFiend]

Wouldnt it be cool if they modelled an Armadillo Aerospace rocket crashed somewhere on a Doom 3 map? ;)

Re:Wouldnt it be cool

[kisrael]

Wouldnt it be cool if they modelled an Armadillo Aerospace rocket crashed somewhere on a Doom 3 map? ;)

And then the voiceover: "That's one Doomed Space Cadet, hehe"

VideoCards

[artlu]

I'll have to wait until August 2nd to get a video card that can handle doom 3. Oh wait, I use a laptop guess I can't play :(
Damn.

GroupShares Inc. - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community

Re:VideoCards

[afidel]

Not sure if things have changed in the last year or so, but Carmak's origional goal was to have it play on any card with a vertex shader which meant the lowest end card is the GF3Ti200. Today there are laptop's with MUCH more powerfull GPU's including the GF4Go, GeForce FX Go5700, and ATI offerings.

Re:VideoCards

[orasio]

GF4Go doesn't implement the needed shaders, don't know about fxGo5700, but watch out for those.

Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been rumors that Apple will release a 30 inch Cinema Display for WWDC next week. Imagine Doom3 on a dual 2.5ghz machine with a 30inch cinema display!

I can just see my skin becoming more pasty and pink.

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[mrchaotica]

It still won't be able to run it, because it's got a measly Radeon 9600 (special orders excepted)

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[cK-Gunslinger]

I think a "measly Radeon 9600" will be able to run D3 as well as HL2 just fine. The recent Doom 3 leaked Alpha runs on my Athlon 2600 / Radeon 9600 XT with perfectly acceptable rates. I can't actually see or adjust the detail level, but the default is still nice looking. I imagine that the retail version will have some tweaks and optimizations that will improve performance.

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[Exitthree]

Well, the Cinema Display isn't standard either, so who cares?

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[Durandal64]

If you're gonna blow thousands on a 30" display for your computer, I think that spending another $300 on a Radeon 9800 is within the realm of possibility.

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[HeghmoH]

Special orders don't cost any more (other than the price for the parts), don't delay your order, and are easily available online, so why does it matter if it's "only" in special orders?

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[Soul-Burn666]

Make that 400$ for an X800 ;)

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[mrchaotica]

Actually, there is a difference: special orders aren't returnable.

Re:Doom 3 and the 30inch Cinema Display

[danila]

Acceptable and perfect don't mix. I can play FarCry at "acceptable" framerates in 1024x768 on my Radeon 9600 (not XT, though, and the CPU is P4 1.6) with decent settings, but to play it perfectly I need to be able to crank up the resolution to 1280x960, set every single setting on Highest and still be getting 40+ FPS. That would be perfectly acceptable and I am afraid one would need an X800 or GeForce 6800 for that. I don't think D3 or HL2 would be much different.

Any word on the Xbox version?

[Ryu2]

What's the date on that, anyone know? And will they be using OpenGL -- will iD actually restort to doing a wrapper of the OpenGL API on top of the DirectX or push buffer interface of the Xbox?

Re:Any word on the Xbox version?

[mgs1000]

For that matter, when will the OS X and Linux versions come out?

Re:Any word on the Xbox version?

[.pentai.]

XBox port is handled by Vicarious Visions, not iD, and it's using DirectX like every other XBox game.

Remember that these days the underlying graphics calls aren't nearly as complex as the game code, swapping between APIs isn't (generally) THAT hard (though it can most definately be time consuming)

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke Nukem Forever will become bundled with Doom 3 as well.
8/3/04.

Re:In other news

[BokLM]

Huh ??
I thought Duke Nukem Forever would be bundled with Longhorn.

Oblig. PA Reference

[marnargulus]

Obligatory Penny Arcade reference

Re:Oblig. PA Reference

[Anonymous Daredevil]

This one was pretty amusing too...

Until Duke Nukem Forever

[Man in Spandex]

This will keep me occupied until that ghostware will come out.

As a hardcore doom fan who still plays doom 1/2 (plutonium pak and final = no fun. just repeating d2 stuff), I can't wait to get my hands on this game no matter what the gameplay is. ID Software has always been the company I've supported the most due to their quality fps games & engines. I own quake 3 since it came out in 99 and I still play it today. Now that was a game worth of buying!

With doom 3 finally comming out soon to the public, you can just imagine the other companies hopping on ID's leg for a license.

id is the only reason I buy new computers

[geekd]

id software's games are the only reason I buy new computers. Sure, I'll update my video card, or get a bigger hard drive, but as far a whole new system goes, it's just when id's new games come out.

Quake 3 - new machine
Wolfenstein - new machine
Doom 3 - ordered new machine yesterday. (from endpcnoise.com - wife is complaining the 3 computers in the office are too loud. We'll see if thay are as good as they claim.)

I wonder how much hardware worldwide id is responsible for selling?

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[nih]

Duke Nukem Forever - new machine

/me waits

ffs

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[tjwhaynes]

id software's games are the only reason I buy new computers. Sure, I'll update my video card, or get a bigger hard drive, but as far a whole new system goes, it's just when id's new games come out.

I believe it. I've been holding off for Doom III to get close to release before I replace my machine so that I will end up with something capable of running ol' Doom3 well, rather than the scrag end of technology currently sitting under my desk at home. Athlon 650MHz? That's tech from the previous century!

On the other hand, it also gives me an excuse to stock up on the other games I haven't bought recently because my machine isn't up to it. UT2k4 here I come!

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[88NoSoup4U88]

LOL, wow, i recognise myself in that ! Scary :D

Im only upgrading my current videocard though, as everything else is enough up to date (i -would- have switched from my damn MX440 card last Septermber, if it wasn't for HL2 getting delayed)

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[Zed2K]

A lot of folks are doing this. Waiting for Doom 3 (or HL2) and then buying a new machine. Each month they don't announce a release date gives you more time to save and gives prices more time to drop further.

I've got my new machine all spec'd out. Just waiting for doom 3 and HL2 to hit the shelves.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[_14k4]

How about donating the old computers your wife says are making noise to charity?

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[Kallahar]

id pretty much created the consumer 3d graphics card industry. I remember being in college at a LAN party playing quake. We were hiding under the water and got hit with a rocket on the first shot. How did he do it? GLQuake with a 3dfx card had transparent water.

After seeing how amazing the game looked and played with a special 3d card, most people dumped the $150 to get the 3dfx. By the end of the term everyone had a 3dfx, and the "cool" people had SLI voodoo2's.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[geekd]

How about donating the old computers your wife says are making noise to charity?

I do, kinda.

I "kick them down the line" to friends who just need a machine for email and stuff, and don't have the personal income to just go out and buy one (students, stoners, musicians :).

Once upon a time, it was me on the recieving end of a free "new" machine, and I was very gratefull, so I figure it's my responsibility to keep it going.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[emptor]

650? Sheesh, you don't know how good you have it.

Try my PII-400. With an 8 mb graphics card.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[pnatural]

At the risk of a "me, too!" post:

Me, too! I'm waiting to upgrade the crusty old athlon/geforce2 to something Doom3-playable.

My real reason for posting: what kinda hardware is going to be needed to play Doom3 at decent frame rates (say 1280x1024, lots-but-not-all-eyecandy, and average 60 FPS)?

What's the latest and greatest nvidia chipset? I tried a radeon on linux - And Will Not Go Back.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[grendelkhan]

I have found myself doing the exact same thing over the last year. I worked at a data center for a large company who just went through a merger and had just signed to replace every friggin desktop in the company. So, old P-III desktops and servers fell into my trunk, and they have found good homes with friends and family who were also thrilled to have them.

Re:id is the only reason I buy new computers

[Haeleth]

Wolfenstein - new machine

Yeah, I remember when that came out and the only place I could play it was at school when the IT guys weren't looking - I only had EGA graphics at home, and the only guy I knew with VGA only had an 8088, and it needed a 286. Man, ID have always been so unreasonable with their hardware demands.

In other other news...

[imthatguy]

the makers of Duke Nukem Forever have announced a lawsuit against ID software for copyright infrigment of their business plan.

backhanded compliment ....

[JSkills]

I just checked out Romero's homepage and although he mentions Doom 3, he also used the word "sequelitis" and goes on to list all of the sequels ID has produced since he left (as opposed to attempting to launch some completely new game as he did).

After reading Masters of Doom, this smells a little like sour grapes to me ...

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Torgo's Pizza]

Sour grapes? Perhaps, but he's right on the money.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[JSkills]

Right on the money? Bzzzt. Wrong.

The success of all subsequent Dooms, Quakes, and even Wolfenstein will attest to people's love for the various franchises that had made ID successful. What you're not realizing is that each sequel is a new game - because of the engine. The improvements in the game engines are nothing short of amazing work each time around.

And the maps, weapons, sounds, art, opponents, and rewards are all new as well. The only thing that is the same is the name of the game and the fact that is a first person shooter ...

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[aardwolf204]

Incase anyone was wondering, it goes kinda like this:

Wolfenstein 3D :: Wolf3d Engine

Wolfenstein 3D 2 (Spear of Destiny) :: Wolf3d Engine

Doom :: Doom Engine

Doom 2 :: Doom Engine

Quake :: Quake Engine

Quake 2 :: Quiake Engine (beef'd up)

Quake 3 :: Quake 3 Engine

Return to Castle Wolfenstein :: Quake 3 Engine (Beef'd up)

Doom 3 :: Doom 3 Engine ...
...

So now we've got 3 Wolfensteins, 3 Quakes, and 3 Dooms. Each of which has an original and a sequal on the same engine, and a third on new engine, which gets recycled to make the next game.

Whats coming next?...

Quake 4 :: Doom 3 Engine (prolly?)
Then what, Wolf 4, Doom 4.... I'm all for new and shiny, but at some point id needs to come up with something fresh. Their last new series was 8 years ago.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[TheAngryMob]

Indeed, we shouldn't have any time on their hands to play Doom 3, what with us all being Romero's bitch and all.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[timeOday]

I disagree, so far as I can tell ID has only ever done one genre - the first person shooter. Whether something is a "sequel" based just on the plot and characters is silly, since there's hardly any plot nor characterization in ID games (which is fine).

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[88NoSoup4U88]

IIRC, the way id wanted to go was also the breaking point for Romero to leave id : they (or Carmack especially) wanted to be groundbreaking in engine design, not especially in boundbreaking games.

Carmack has announced that Doom III will be their last sequel-game, and they are (allready?) working on 'something completely different'.

I hope they can put their money where their mouth is : But since credit is due where it's due (i -still- play doom, quake 1/2/3 weekly) : I think they will be able to do so.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[xeaxes]

Yes, Quake 4 is in development using the Doom 3 engine. However, id is not developing the game. I believe Raven software is. It has something to do w/ the Quake 2 enemies, I think.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[88NoSoup4U88]

Commander Keen was a side-scroller though. And iirc, also made by id.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[88NoSoup4U88]

Yep, Raven software is doing Quake 4, and it will be a game placed in and around the Strogg Universe, set out (a bit) in Quake 2.

Looking forward to that game too ; allthough the new engine look could be kinda grown old by then, and it -will- have to rely on a kickass single-, and multiplayer experience.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[88NoSoup4U88]

Since you included RTCW in that list which was made more by Gray Matter and Nerve Software ; than by id software themselves : I also wouldn't want Enemy Territory to miss from that list. (made by splashdamage , and id software).

This game is a free , and now very popular multiplayer game (six maps included, and mapping/modding tools released ; spawning allready a few good mods in progress) and can be downloaded from Splashdamage's site.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[shish]

Demons, aliens, and nazis. What else can you shoot?

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Torgo's Pizza]

Slow down there Tex. Sure, they use new engines, but you're missing the point. Just because they're using new technology doesn't change the fact that since Romero left in the mid-nineties, id Software hasn't come up with any truly original gameplay ideas. I'm not saying that if they kept Romero that they wouldn't have made new games either. That also doesn't mean that we all hate playing the sequels. If fact, we can't get enough.

I think most people would totally agree that the engines truly are nothing short of amazing and everyone buys the games because of the abilties of that engine. However, you have to admit each of the games have used the same storyline or built off of the previous title. It's all demons, Nazis and Stroggs in a very, very weak plotline. Gameplay hasn't really changed. You can add little things, but that's what sequels do. Trick it up a bit more to make it better. id Software is extremely good at it. But they are still sequels.

The only minor exception is Quake II, which for all intents and purposes plays exactly the same while changing the location from Earth to Planet Strogg. And Raven is going to revisit it in Quake IV, another sequel. Still it's not like Final Fantasy where they completely create a new world every time.

Just check their development record since 1995: (RtCW not listed because id Software did not do the game development.)

DOOM II: Hell On Earth 1994 Action
Master Levels for Doom 2 1995
Hexen 1995
The Ultimate Doom 1995
Final Doom 1996
The id Anthology 1996
Quake 1996
The Depths of Doom Trilogy 1997
Quake II 1997
Quake and The Ultimate Doom Compilation 1998
Quake III: Arena - Elite Edition 1999
Quake III: Arena 1999
Quake III: Team Arena 2000
Commander Keen 2001
Ultimate Quake 2001
Doom: Collector's Edition 2001
Quake III: Gold 2001
The Ultimate Doom Trilogy: Collector's Edition 2003
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Platinum Edition 2003

I'm not seeing a whole lot of original game development there. id Software is sick of it too. Carmack didn't want to make another Doom game, but was forced into it. The next product from id Software will be totally different and it's about time.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[borgboy]

Cows.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Rew190]

Actually, Carmack was the one who wanted to do Doom 3 and threatened to quit if it didn't happen.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[CanadianCrackPot]

iD is proud to present Commander Keen X, a new adventure with Billy Blaze teaming up with his old grandfather B.J. Blazkowits (however the hell it's spelled), Aliens, zombies, mutants, rehased old stuff.

It really is amazing how much stuff ties in together with iD's games. Commander Keen is decended from B.J. in Wolf3D the Doom space marine looks like B.J.'s twin, I just need to find out about the people in Quake now...

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[mr_sas]

why's RtCW not listed, but RtCW Plat. Edition is?

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Torgo's Pizza]

My bad. Cut n' paste error.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Torgo's Pizza]

I stand corrected. Adrian Carmack, Graeme Devine and some others were against it. John Carmack, Tim Wilits were for it.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[beardz]

I'm all for new and shiny, but at some point id needs to come up with something fresh. Their last new series was 8 years ago.

It seems as though some id employees feel the same as you.

Taken from a GameSpy interview with John Carmack :

GameSpy: I am surprised that you do not see Quake IV using this next generation engine.

John Carmack: Wolfenstein worked out so spectacularly well. Inside id there is a group that really, really does not want to do another sequel. Our next game is not going to be a DOOM, Quake, or Wolfenstein sequel, it's going to be something new and that is a foregone conclusion.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Noren]

You forgot:

Castle Wolfenstein (1981) by Muse Software
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984) by Muse Software

id software purchased the rights to these, and Wolfenstein3d was initially going to be an updated version of these two games, but it evolved away from them in production (the originals had stealth aspects, wearing enemy uniforms, obtaining/using passes, (some) soldiers who would surrender when surprised by a gun... but only had a pistol and grenades as weapons.) And yes, those two classics still had significant name recognition in 1992 when Wolfenstein3d was released.

So, a possible sequel would be Wolf 6, if you're keeping score at home.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Black Hitler]

Paul Steed was for it too and Carmack (John) claimed that Carmack (Adrian) fired Steed in retaliation. Adrian denied it, of course.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[wideBlueSkies]

>>Demons, aliens, and nazis. What else can you shoot?

Middle Eastern Terrorists.

Criminals.

Deer, Bears, and other wildlife.

wbs.

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[dnijaguar]

With the new Doom 3 engine out, has id given any signs of GPLing it's Quake 3 engine as it did with the 2 previous versions?

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[JSkills]

So you're complaining about id's software because of a lack of a better plot/story? Who plays FPS's for the plot anyway? The real attraction has always been playing in multiplayer scenarios online. It's a different game every time there.

The originality you claim to not be seeing lies in the engine development. Original and creative approaches to engine development should not be underestimated.

BTW if you read the book I mentioned, I think you'd understand id software (i.e. John Carmack) a little better.

And what "next product from id Software" that will be "totally different" are you referring to?

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[Torgo's Pizza]

> So you're complaining about id's software because of a lack of a better plot/story? Who plays FPS's for the plot anyway?

I'm not complaining so much as pointing out a known fact. id Software doesn't do plot. Hasn't affected sales at all and players don't seem to mind. That's been my point all along. id Software has always been about action and pushing everything to the limit.

I just happen to think that a plot can enhance a game to the next level. At least people who've played Half-Life, Max Payne, Elite Force, Call of Duty or Far Cry would tend to agree.

I'm not a id hater at all. Sheesh, six of my good friends have worked or currently work there now. So, I think I have a good grasp on id software -- well, the individuals that work there at any rate.

> And what "next product from id Software" that will be "totally different" are you referring to?

Video game developer id Software, famed creators of games like "Doom" and "Quake", will likely start work on its new project almost immediately after completing four years of work on "Doom 3", its chief executive says.

In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the video game industry trade show E3 here, Todd Hollenshead said that the game in question was new intellectual property, and was not a "Doom", "Quake" or "Wolfenstein" game.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=5 125798

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[rush22]

I thought what was the same was that it is Doom 3. In other words, it is Doom, part 3. Didn't you watch the trailer? Those skull heads are from Doom. I thought Romero was talking about the plot and setting, not the game engine. If he was talking about the engine, umm... well, he would have said that it was completely different and not a "sequel" of the engine at all, right?

Re:backhanded compliment ....

[JSkills]

Your point all along was what? I thought it was that Romero was right on the money in dissing Doom 3 simply because it was a sequel.

I just can't see justifying/agreeing/rationalizing a negative comment like that from a guy who just didn't get it when it came to what it took to *stay* successful (they did ask him to leave id for lack of performance) - not to mention that fact that the great majority of games are fired up to see the new Doom 3 engine, art work, weapons, levels, etc.

Thanks for the link. I thought there was more to the "totally different" part of the new project. Knowing Carmack, it very well could be just another improved set of physics/reality for another first person type game (not called Doom or Quake).

Nuking...

[Savage-Rabbit]

I always felt that Duke Nuke'm was better than Quake 1 despite the psuedo-3D used in Duke because it was more fun to play. There were all sorts of cool details:

You could get healthpoints by taking a leak and drinking water.

You could pay the hookers to dance.

All the piggy cops had LAPD written on the uniform sleeve.

The list goes on...

But most of all I liked the way Duke lived up to his promise to rip off the Uberfiend's head and sh*t down his neck. When he sat down on the thing and unfolded the newspaper I fell of the chair laughing...

Re:Nuking...

[88NoSoup4U88]

Duke Nukem's interactivity (allthough very limited) was very cool at that time ; Ok, the pooltable made no sense, but hey, you -could- pocket those balls ! (in the meantime , trying to get them piggy cops off your back ;) )

Re:Nuking...

[mbbac]

Yeah, but Quake had deathmatch that allowed people to drop in and out. In Duke Nukem, everyone had to be present at the start.

Re:Nuking...

[Drooling Iguana]

I thought they had LARD written on their uniforms. Or maybe that was one of the Playstation pseudo-sequels.

Re:Nuking...

[grendelkhan]

My fav was the shrinkray. For this alone, I loaded it up and played it again the other week.

Re:Nuking...

[rush22]

...pipe-bombs, lasers, vents you could shoot through, light switches, exploding holes in walls, secrets everywhere....

Oh no!

[jocmaff]

If you were to upgrade with say AlienWare PCI-Express with the new NVidia card your new PC will be shipped after Doom 3 is out !!!

How disappointing is that?!

That warez group's going to

[vijaya_chandra]

get doomed out of business pretty soon for being that late

(Karma be damned! I am no better than an AC anyway)

8 Years ago? I'm getting old.

[g00z]

"Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride..."

I clearly remember when Quake came out like it was yesterday. I remember that at the office I was working at there was a big debate on what was the better game... Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. In the end Quake won, but not without some heated arguments in DN3D's favor.

And of course, before that I remember playing Deathmatch Doom on the office lan on a 386 with a b&w monitor (shivers).

Re:8 Years ago? I'm getting old.

[WuphonsReach]

I clearly remember when Quake came out like it was yesterday. I remember that at the office I was working at there was a big debate on what was the better game... Duke Nukem 3D or Quake. In the end Quake won, but not without some heated arguments in DN3D's favor.

Quake had the better models / better physics... but Duke had soul. I played DN3D a lot, but never found Quake to be that appealing.

(The enemy toons in DN3D were 2D animated sprites which were always rotated to face the player... so they looked 3D. If you got up on top of some boxes and looked down on them, it was pretty obvious. Level design in DN3D was pretty simple too, since the 3D model was so rudimentary.)

Re:8 Years ago? I'm getting old.

[kryptkpr]

Duke Nukem 3D was not actually 3D. It was 2.5D ..

The level design was so simple because the levels were all laid out in 2D. The game engine pulled some fancy tricks to make the game "appear" 3D..

However I agree that multiplayer Duke3D .. I remember playing 4 player dukematches on a local BBS, it ran special BBS software with a special terminal client that set up some kinda LAN-over-Modem deal... it was my first taste of multiplayer (n>2) gaming..

Re:8 Years ago? I'm getting old.

[Moderator]

Quake had 2D sprites for fire.

I'm an old bastard!

[goldenfield]

Every so often, something comes along that reminds me that I'm 29, for all intents and purposes old, and probably not cool anymore.

• I'm no longer in MTV's core demographic (12-26)
  
• Younger family members think "Take My Breath Away" by Jessica Simpson is such a great, original song.
  

And now this...Quake is 8, Doom is over 10. It couldn't have been that long ago, right? I got it when I got the first Snoop Doggy Dogg CD...oh, wait...

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[genner]

W00T! I'm still int MTV's core demographic, being 25. Thanks for making me feel better. I was just getting depressed about Doom being 10.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Hard_Code]

It's not your fault. The world has gotten steadily LESS cool for like the last 20 years. What's cool today is just trite and rehashed-without-awareness-of-its-rehashedness (whereas before it was rehashed-with-irony-of-its-rehashedness).

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Digz]

..the first clue should have been that I (and probably you) still remember playing games on actual Commodore 64s (not emulated) before they were "retro".. :)

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Zed2K]

And 20 years ago what you thought was cool, the then 30 or so year olds said the exact same thing about the culture of the day.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[RML]

I remember playing games on a C64, and I'm under 25. Of course most of them were stupid edu-tainment things my parents got me. Curse you, Algebra Dragons!

I even have a framed picture of me playing with a paint program (Koala Paint) on my dad's C64 when I was 3 years old.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[swordgeek]

I was out of university and working when Doom was released. I remember the entire campus network crawling to a halt as every student and young-ish staff member 'in the know' tried to download the TWO ungodly large floppy images for the demo. Took me six hours to download ~2MB that day.

Or to put it in a different context, I was starting to learn how to program on a PET2000 before you were walking. That should make you feel younger.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Gr8Apes]

bah, try 30+ years ago. I still remember the hippies, and I'd have to say the last original fads I can recall were parachute pants, leg warmers, and big hair - Not the "big" hair of the 50s, or the piled wigs of the 1400s-early 1900s, but that big teased looked like someone tried blow drying their hair while bathing look. These fads were all possible because of technological marvels of the day - artificial satin-like material, lycra, and the combined blow dryers, perms, and super hold hair spray.

OK, that's not entirely true, the last cool original fad I can recall was the punk/modern rock/post-modern/alternative music movements, all original before the "alternative" mainstream movement began around 1990. This was driven by the "new" electric guitar and newer multi-phonic electronic keyboards. The last 2 major innovations in musical instruments.

That whole wearing pants too big for you was pretty much done in the 30s, when people were so poor they bought clothes for their kids to grow into. The body piercing et al - pre-1900s folks. Same for "body art", which I think they've actually dated for women as a fad in the 1700s.

As for being less cool, what's less cool than walking around in corduroys, parachute pants, or leg warmers, much less that fire-hazard hair? And let's not forget the left-is-cool right-is-wrong escapade. All were phases, and they passed, for the most part. The only thing less cool in the last 10-15 years is the music scene, which thanks to the pandering of the members of the RIAA, now targets 12 yo's and has dropped all pretense of actually supporting music.

Well, that's enough of a rant in one posting.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[comedian23]

OMG! Me with a mod point left and I already posted to this thread. *bangs head on keyboard*

Anyway, great post. I would mod you up if I could.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Hard_Code]

Wow, how amazingly insightful...does Slashdot have a trite moderation...

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[TwoPumpChump]

Every so often, something comes along that reminds me that I'm 29

I'm right there with you at 29. You know you're getting older when you switch from listening to the top 40 radio stations, the rock stations, etc. and just listen to NPR or talk radio because all the new music these days suck; it's not as good as when we were growing up. (with notable exception of hair bands.)

We grew up with Atari 2600's and later Nintendo; imagine what it's like for today's 8 to 12 year olds growing up with Xbox/PS2's?

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Hard_Code]

Well, I can sort of attribute it to the centralization of media, and basically the resignation of the RIAA (and MPAA too) to fundamentally foster and generate new and orginal music. I closely associate the punk/alt music movement with the "beat" movement (you can think of the 90s grunge/gen-x as just a reincarnation of beat), and even before that the Goliards. I could sum up these movements as: youthful authenticity. "Cool" is out of the question as it is something hand-fabricated for popular consumption these days. Everything un-cool becomes cool at a later point. It may be that we have reached a stage of postmodernism and spectacle that "authenticity" is no longer feasible, especially from youth. Maybe we are all going to die from irony like suffocating on oxygen.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[gphinch]

I think the Jessica Simpson liking is more a reflection of bad taste in music than age.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Gr8Apes]

Ahh, Gen-X, the disenfranchised, depending on the day and the source, I'm a gen-xer, or a baby-boomer (the latter sources I think had one too many tokes and couldn't count properly...;) Grunge was definitely a repeat of the core gen-x, redone a bit. I still recall the non-conformists of the day, the "punks" that made even bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols look like Gramma's favorite kids.

gen-x came into their own around the early 80s. You do realize there was a band called Generation-X? I'm not sure what the exact relation was, whether the band was named for the generation, or the generation took the name from the band, or if was all a big coincidence. The band members, including Billy Idol, were ironically the last of the true baby-boomers. That's a whole other topic though.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Hard_Code]

It was my understanding the term "Generation X" was taken from the book "Generation X" by Douglas Coupland (in which he chronicles the lives of some prototypical gen-x-ers, including himself). Even though being non-conformist (or at least a-conformist) was fundamental to the "Gen X" mystique, I do find a pervasive and eerily ubiquitous set of characteristics that describe this generation (I'm on the tail end by accounts). A sense that everything interesting has been done before and a wish to live in a more interesting time while harboring an antogonism towards the past. A sense of antagonism against traditional goals of even monetary success or fame. A stifling apathy and skepticism of everything including self. I see these ringing in Office Space, Fight Club (both share a personality-duality/dream-state; in Fight Club the alter ego's goal is to destroy the Museum of History, and to start history from scratch) to Cobain's journals where he writes that, paraphrasing, "it is a generally held belief that everything interesting has already been done. But I think it might still be fun to pretend" and "it is the age of rehashing". Of course I suppose you could trace the roots of this Gen X attitude to the disillusionment of the massive outbreak of divorces and broken families after the 60s. I don't know what else could make these feelings and experiences as pervasive as they seem to be.

I really think this is an area that is open for some massive academic mining.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[swordgeek]

Storyline? DOOM? Doom was about the finest example of 'pure adrenaline, no plot' that ever came along. I'd be happy if they could make a sequel that was as fun as Doom, with just as thin of a plot.

For plots, I'm either playing adventures (Syberia II most recently), or Thief III right now. Now THAT is a unique game.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[tehcyder]

If you really get excited about being in anyone's "core demographic", you are a very sad young person.

Concentrate on being an individual, rather than a marketing concept, it's much more fun.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[genner]

"you are a very sad young person" You called me young!!!! Thank you!

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Gr8Apes]

Generation X, the band, existed since 1976 The also shortened their name to Gen X and also documented here

An interesting repudiation of Gen Xers as slackers was listed by none other than David Schwimmer in 1995.

Douglas Coupland's Generation X dates from 1991 and is listed as the source of the term generation-x here

Now, I can't find a single source about Gen Xers, as in when the term was first used, but I seem to recall it being used for a long long time. Pre 1991? I can't tell you for sure. I can't even tell you for sure when the Baby Boomlet term was first used, nor when Gen-Y, what I consider the current youth generation to be, was first used. I can tell you that the "Gen-X" movement, attitude, etc, was already noticed as early as 1982. The media at the time just couldn't understand the punk movement at all. (Things got a little out of whack on a large scale right around then, teens wearing earings, dyed hair, spikes, etc.) It was also the time in the 80s that we noticed that gee, our economy wouldn't keep growing insanely, and thus the first of us to graduate college started looking at ever bleaker job prospects, getting paid barely enough to get by, with no real prospects of advancement if you happened to get a job. (Sort of one defining aspect of GenX)

But I want to say all 3 terms have been in use more than 10 years, and I would swear that Gen X was in use prior to 1991. I would love to have this nailed down, but who's to say for sure? It's been almost 15 years and predates most of the internet (there were only a couple of thousand USENET newsgroups around at that time, and the myriad BBS's, the survivors that eventually comprised FIDONET. But that's going down almost forgotten memory lanes...even the waybackmachine doesn't go far enough back for this.

Now having done the research, I do recall we were initially called the Post-Baby Boom generation, in the early 80s on some of the freakier stuff that got reported in the news. Oh well, at the very least, Coupland is not in my frame of reference when someone mentions Generation X. I always related it to the band, who's single, Dancing with Myself, was re-released on Idol's first solo album and was a big hit at my high school, anyways. So I've 100% dated myself now!:)

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Hard_Code]

Speaking of TV...it's interesting how we can define "generations" as much by the media they consume[d] as by their age range. Since TV is more or less linear, and one-way, TV generations stratify easily. I can relate to you if you watched G.I. Joe, but I'm pretty lost if you were a generation that watched Howdy Doody.

What is interesting is I think with the advent of digital media we are reaching an event horizon in which media is not one-way...it can be consumed, but then altered and reproduced again. Evidence of this is fan pages about almost everything everywhere, fan-fiction and fan-made videos, music mashups (where two independent songs are combined into one new song), video mashups, and the crazy ass non-sense flash movies that are out there (an entire art field itself).

Will this definition of "generation" even mean anything to kids that were raised with immediate access to ALL media from ALL times?

Think Meryl Streep with a chihuahua head.

Ok, I'll give in...my secret dream is that sometime in the future every citizen is given a large ergonomic knob. They can turn this knob to any date/time they want and experience all media from that time. They can watch current daily TV from that date (that is if the TV was invented), they can listen to current radio of that date, they can look at billboards and see current advertisements of that date... etc.

Re:I'm an old bastard!

[Gr8Apes]

Quite interesting concept there, that knob. (Which in and of itself is another entire frame of reference. "knob" has a very particular meaning to a subset of the internet generation of 90-96 or so, when MUDs were large. They're much smaller percentage-wise now)

But, I think things will continue as long as groups like the RIAA/MPAA exist and have the use of Clear Channel and the like to drive their crap down the population's collective throats. They truly still control what you see, and hence, some of culture. The internet, in its current incarnation, is providing some relief, and lets people know via various forms of communication that perhaps what big industry wants you to believe is not really true. Free and open communication is definitely something we need to combat the "brain-washing" we'd otherwise be subject to.

That said, the growing but still minority group that seeks alternative "culture", for lack of a better term, will utilize that knob of yours to explore new things. :)

The 8th Anniversary

[AntiChris]

We celebrate id Software's ability to create more shades of brown than ever imaginable... and love every minute of it!

-

Re:The 8th Anniversary

[supersandra]

I think some of those are called "rust" colors ;)

NVIDIA and ATI should give id tons of money

[Lord Kano]

It was because of Quake that 3d accelleration made it to the big time. When I was 21 I plunked down 200 of my hard earned dollars to buy a Diamond Monster 3d card JUST TO PLAY GL-Quake!

Lots of my buddies did the same. Before Quake 3d accelleration was just a novelty.

LK

Re:NVIDIA and ATI should give id tons of money

[Anonymous Coward]

They do give game developers quite a bit of money. Check out NVIDIA's The-Way-It's-Meant-To-Be-Played ad when you launch ut2k4. I believe ATi has a similar program.

Re:NVIDIA and ATI should give id tons of money

[upsidedown_duck]

It was because of Quake that [commodity] 3d accelleration made it to the big time.

UNIX workstation vendors have been pushing full 3d-accelerated hardware for many years for things like CAD-CAM. The difference is that a traditional full-blown OpenGL card is at least $1500, while the typical ATI or NVidia card is less than $500. It can be said without a doubt that Quake reduced the cost for us all. Now, the top cards for UNIX workstations have obscene gobs of RAM and GPU power...a glimpse into the future for PCs.

Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[88NoSoup4U88]

They have been doing that as long as they 've been selling on-line. They don't know, but are counting on the people foolish enough to pre-buy it with them.

I won't believe any dates untill i see a 'we gone gold' message from the id-dudes themselves.

Setting the date at the start of August, would still be very convenient for the die-hards at Quakecon (12 -15 August) to have a LAN-go at it.

Anyhow, I'm very curious , and patiently await the 'we gone gold' message.

On a last note : Seeing that Splashdamage took the multiplayer portion as their part (at least leveldesign) i -know- the MP part is gonna rock my socks off, since they (co-) created the very cool (free) game Enemy Territory. For more info on this upcoming studio, check out their site, and give Enemy Territory a try, if you haven't allready. www.splashdamage.com

Re:Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[Jaguar777]

For more info on this upcoming studio, check out their site, and give Enemy Territory a try, if you haven't allready. www.splashdamage.com

Don't forget they also created the Q3F (Quake 3 Fortress) mod.

I miss playing that mod.

Re:Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[88NoSoup4U88]

Part of the current Splashdamage team was involved in Q3F though ; btw, what's been your nick in Q3F ? Hop around on Railbait for some good ol' reliving the old times ;)

Re:Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[Jaguar777]

btw, what's been your nick in Q3F ? Hop around on Railbait for some good ol' reliving the old times ;)

It was Jaguar of course ;) You might have seen me playing at the same time as my buddy Guardian. We even had a tag for awhile [PD], and I tried out the clan scene joining neg6 [-6]. I did spend a fair amount of time on Railbait. Further back in the beta days I would spend all of my time on Snoot's server. It had mirror damage turned on, and that would really cut down on the spam. I spent most of my time as an Engy, but I still managed to master the fine points of the other classes. I enjoyed joining the losing team and filling a gap in what they needed to see if I could turn things around.

I do recognize your nick though, and not just from seinfeld :) I haven't loaded up gamespy in forever. The last time I checked RB was about the only servers left, and they were empty most of the time :( I didn't even download the last update. What is a good time to catch people playing? Or should I just check out #q3fpickup? I checked out the Q3F main forum, and it was empty. Kinda makes me sad. Makes me wish for a D3F. :)

Re:Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[88NoSoup4U88]

Well, Railbait seems to be filled in and around 22:00 / 4:00 EUropean time (im a Euro) , so , minus 6 hours for eastcoast of the US. Generally alot of the left-over hardcore players are left, with once and awhile a newbie coming up.

Good news though, is that the current source of Q3F has been given to the ETF team (Enemy Team Fortress) : A free mod, for the (free) game Enemy Territory.

Afaik, they are quite on track, and a release migth be expected within the next couple of months.
Check out www.planetetf.com , and get updated once www.etfgame.com is up (which is near to open, afaik).

But still pretty much playing this mod once railbait fills up ; a shame that even after all those years, spammy MachSE seems to be the most played map :(

Re:Gameshops telling release dates : What's new ?

[Jaguar777]

Good news though, is that the current source of Q3F has been given to the ETF team (Enemy Team Fortress) : A free mod, for the (free) game Enemy Territory.

Good to know! I will be stopping by often to check on the progress. Can't wait to get hooked on some TF crack again.

spammy MachSE seems to be the most played map :(
Uggghhh MachSpamEdition. Maybe if I stop by you will have one more guy that doesn't want to play it. :)

Re:Quakeworld is dead...

[Digz]

No it's not. All those Amiga users are still running it!

Amazon has pre-order for $49.99 and different date

[DJFelix]

Amazon.com has Doom 3 available for pre-order as well, with August 1, 2004 listed as the release date.

Oddly enough, they also have Half Life 2 available as preorder as well listing September 1, 2004 ...

They will even give you a deal if you pre-order both at the same time ... I'm not holding my breath.

Re:On Quake..

[nightsweat]

I had the same experience. Quake just was missing... something. Doom had it, Half-Life had it and UT2004 has it.

Haven't tried Farcry yet.

Not that this post matters...

[devphaeton]

It's ironic (this story comes up) in that a friend of mine recently duped me into installing and running quakeforge. I went along with it because my gf keeps telling me that i need to play more video games.

It's hilarious. I have a fairly up-to-date athlonxp system w/ 512mb of ram, huge fast drives, a decent surround sound system and such, but since i'm not a huge FPS player, my video card is still the old STB Velocity 4400 (i.e. a RIVA TNT) from the k6-II that now serves files from my closet.

I get about 17 FPS in fugly-graphics mode, but it cracks me up. I fire up the game and all of a sudden it is 1997 again. All i need now is Duke Nukem, Doom, Sim City Classic and HotelChat, and i get all those warm fuzzies i haven't felt since the days on the roommate's 486.

w00t!

Disclaimer: i love both debian and freebsd

Re:Not that this post matters...

[Cornflake917]

I went along with it because my gf keeps telling me that i need to play more video games.

Man...is it sad that this sentence makes more sense to me if gf stood for "Geforce" rather than "girlfriend"?

Re:Not that this post matters...

[RustyTaco]

Ask and ye shall recieve: http://www.icculus.org/duke3d/
- RustyTaco

Re:Not that this post matters...

[Soul-Burn666]

wait a sec, didn't it??

Re:Not that this post matters...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Heck, I just compiled up Quakeforge last night to try it out on my little laptop here (Athlon XP-M 1600+ (1400Mhz), 352MB, 32MB shared video ram, S3 Savage video chipset) and was amused to see I was getting between 40 and 75 fps at whatever the heck the default resolution was. Well inside the 'Playable' range.

I'm disappointed that Id refuses to offer a "data files for open-sourced games" (i.e. Doom 1, Doom 2, Quake 1, Quake 2) disk or download at a reasonable price - I asked about it and got back a shocked "Oh, no, we'd NEVER do something like THAT!" as though I'd asked them if they'd consider auctioning off their genitals on E-bay or something...Since they're charging "new Quake I box" rates last time I checked ($30+) for a simple download of the original Quake disk alone, I just can't quite justify the cost at the moment. But I'd pay that much for permission to use (no support, even no media [i.e. download disk image only]) the quake 1, quake 2, and Doom 1,2 datasets to go with Quakeforge and the various DOOM ports...

That being the case - anybody know any good free "total conversion" datasets that don't require the original ID datasets? OpenQuartz appeared to be working on one, but they haven't had an update in over 2 years...

Re:I'll believe it when i see it.

[molarmass192]

Pffft ... I want Yet Again Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory II. RTCW, and especially ET are my favorite games. Finding a good place to hide and taking the enemy out with a sniper rifle is strangely addictive!

Question

[Kentamanos]

"Online networking code: Still considered by many to be the biggest step forward in gaming, id Software was able to crunch the heavy 3D graphics and make them playable on a 28.8 dial-up modem using the client/server tcp/ip connection that had only been used for application purposes prior to Quake being released."

I can't remember. Did it really use TCP/IP or was it UDP?

Re:Question

[molarmass192]

I'm pretty sure it was IPX (Novell), I remember we had to reconfig our routers to be able to play in the office back in the day. Also, they only passed coordinate and state info over the network, all the graphics and sprites were local.

Re:Question

[Kentamanos]

I remember IPX for sure. It's hard to remember that far back. I can't remember what all WinQuake for instance brought to the table.

Re:Question

[Bedouin X]

It used TCP/IP. They started using UDP in Q3 for speed purposes.

Re:Question

[molarmass192]

Me neither, those brain cells have long since been purged via alcohol ... the IPX thing only stuck because it was such an unbelievable pain in the arse to get our routers to play along.

Re:Question

[Kentamanos]

Thanks for the answer. I know everyone and their brother uses UDP for these things now. It makes the code a lot more difficult, but the performance is much better.

Re:Question

[Wyzard]

"TCP/IP" refers to a family of networking protocols including IP, TCP, UDP, ARP, and less strictly, DNS and the routing protocols. So it's perfectly valid for a game to use UDP and say that it's using TCP/IP.

Re:Question

[Kentamanos]

Did a little research, and it looks like you're correct. I thought TCP/IP meant TCP basically, but I've since google'd several things that back up your comment.

Thanks

Re:Question

[rush22]

...it's perfectly valid for a game to use UDP and say that it's using TCP/IP.

...unless you're setting up your firewall. :P

Doom 3 Uses OpenGL

[SeinJunkie]

IIRC, id had to write all of their own shaders for OpenGL, but are definitely not using DirectX. DirectX would have let them use the API's shaders, I believe, but OpenGL hadn't defined theirs yet. So, all of the shaders you see in Doom 3 were written in assembly code.

Refer to this article for more information about the engine.

Re:Doom 3 Uses OpenGL

[Viking Coder]

If it was written in Direct3D, they would not have used built-in shaders. They would have been written in assembly code, too (PixelShaders 2.0 versus ARB_fragment_program is not that different). It's not like DirectX has something here that OpenGL does not.

Everyone has to write all of their own shaders, at this point.

Move along, folks - nothing to see here.

Re:Doom 3 Uses OpenGL

[Pike65]

I'm assuming they'd be written in either assembler (because it's been around as long as shaders) or Cg (nearly as long), and both of those are API independant.

HLSL (the DirectX shader language) came out with DirectX 9.0, and the original version of GLSLang (GL Shader Language) was finalised by the ARB over a year ago (although it took a while to get into drivers). Either way, converting between them is fairly easy, apparently.

Karma Be Damned!!!

[Paulrothrock]

Marathon was way better than Doom.

Re:Karma Be Damned!!!

[swordgeek]

Never played it, but it sounds sort of like System Shock, which was way better than Doom. :-)

OK, DOOM was brilliant as a 2D/pseudo-3D adrenaline rush. SS was brilliant as a 2.5D/3D plot-driven FPS.

Gotta disagree with the Amped article

[BrianH]

The Amped article mentions that 28.8's were "slow", which I don't remember as the case. In 1996 the Net was far less congested than it is today, and the amount of data being tosssed around by the games was far more frugal, so gamers could actually get a decent gaming experience out of a 28.8 or even (*gasp*) a 14.4! The first experience I had with online MP games was Qtest via my U.S. Robotics 14.4, and it was very playable. I wouldn't try it today, but back then 28.8 was considered high performance, 64k ISDN was something most of us dreamed of, and those lucky enough to surf on a 1.5Mbit T1 were God's chosen ones.

Nowadays though, I bitch when my DSL drops below 2Mbit :)

Re:I'll believe it when i see it.

[Hassman]

Are they really gonna do a Quake IV?

id is an awesome gaming company. I want to see them branch out and try their hand at another genre of games. RPS? RTS? A 'Ninja Gaiden' type game? I bet they could blow the competition away.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good FPS, but maybe it is time for id to try and expand a bit?

argh, dutchlisch ;)

[88NoSoup4U88]

boundbreaking games should be 'groundbreaking' :)

Advantage Id or Advantage Valve?

[SQLz]

Seeing that Doom III and HL2 are basically the two most anticipated PC games of the Windows XP era and most likely will be competing for our cash, is there an advantage to being first on the shelves for either developer?

Re:Advantage Id or Advantage Valve?

[Quill_28]

Depends how good the software the game is?

Re:Advantage Id or Advantage Valve?

[SQLz]

Lets assume here that both games are 100% equal in quality. Is is better to be on the shelves first or, very soon after, or some time after? Do you guys think publishers strategize like movie producers on when to release a game?

This is *so* wrong.

[LordPixie]

I went along with it because my gf keeps telling me that i need to play more video games.
...
my video card is still the old STB Velocity 4400

The geek with the gamer GirlFriend has a video card that's more than six years old !! What. The. Fuck. Any gamer knows that those things are meant to be upgraded every six months.

This is why it's so hard for a gamer to find a decent girlfriend. They've all been stolen by people with 30 times as much system RAM as VRAM. I guess the size of your Video Card really doesn't matter !


--LordPixie
</joking>

Playable demos/tests?

[antdude]

I hope id Software will release a playable demo or test for us to check out the game before the game goes gold like with their previous games. Also, we can find bugs and other issues to make their games great.

Re:Mac support?

[EssTiDee]

From an article on Doomworld, quoted again here on imgmagazine.com:

http://www.imgmagazine.com/news/story.php?Articl eI D=366

"...id has noted several times in the past that Doom 3 will come to the Mac, but only for users running Mac OS X. Since it should be at least a year or two before Doom 3's release, this may not be a problem for many gamers..."

Looks like you might be in the clear... Now whether or not your little G5 (hopefully dual) with a weak little AGP slot (hopefully at least 8x and upgradeable) will run it... You might be stuck, but at least it sounds like you've got a chance!

Best of luck!

Doom-sick

[dpilot]

I have no problem with sickness when I play FPS.

But I can only watch someone else play one for a few minutes, then I have to turn away.

In related news...

[SkyWalk423]

On DNF's release date, Quake is diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Futureshop...

[Pyrosz]

has a release date of:

Pre-Order: Estimated Release Date:September 14, 2004

So uhmmm, not sure about anything anymore. Canada getting it later? Or just Futureshop being more pessimistic?

Re:Quakeworld is dead...

[Gilesx]

Gawd! If I was unfortunate enough to own an Amiga, I'd rather play the legendary Stunt Car Racer! :)

Re:TCP/IP question

[EssTiDee]

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe your options in firing up a multiplayer session of D / D2 (used to get grounded regularly for tying up the phone lines at home, and making my dad miss important business calls while i was blasting my friends with the BFG) were IPX/SPX and TCP/IP. Often had to modify your modem init strings and such, but I'm pretty sure it could handle TCP/IP.

Sounds like it's time for me to track down the software, and check it out to be sure...

Haven't played level 13 of that mayhem recently -- mancubus awaits!

Quake and 3Dfx

[Solosoft]

I remember playing that game on my old P133 with a S3 Trio (2mb) and a Canopus Pure 3D LX (voodoo 1) card. The card had 6mb of memory. 4mb for Buffer and 2mb for Textures. I remember seeing the game all smoothed out and spead up from the voodoo. Me and my friends would crank the shit outa the sound (we had going in the stereo) and play that game for hours. It was the first game I saw which was all smoothed out and didn't look like a big blockey world. Im sure other people noticed the niceness and prolly went and picked up a 3Dfx card for that. I know I sure did.

Re:On Quake..

[chrisbro]

What's with all the hating on Quake? I view it as *far* more atmospheric than Doom ever was. I never jumped while playing Doom - but play Quake at night with the lights off, headphones up loud, that Trent Reznor soundtrack going, and see if you don't nearly shit your pants when your first fiend starts to scissor you in half.

I had nightmares over that damned game ;)

CABLE MODEM - Way back

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

I remember getting taken out in quake, then, being amazed at a ping of under 100ms, would ask how was that possible. The lucky bastard would always respond 'Cable Modem' and I would say to myself "my modem has a cable! WTF?"

and those guys were always from california, I though California must have the fastest connections or something.

Even More Importantly

[mbbac]

When is the Mac OS X release date? It was demoed on a Mac first, so maybe we'll get it a day ahead. :)

Re:Even More Importantly

[Durandal64]

Ahem, Halo was demoed on a Mac first, too, on a B&W G3 with a Rage 128. Now, four years later, it can't even run well on a dual 2.0 GHz G5 with a Radeon 9800. I understand that Windows users have similarly horrid performance.

Re:Even More Importantly

[dolson]

Runs good on my Xbox.

Re:Even More Importantly

[Durandal64]

Funny how the Xbox isn't a Mac, nor is it a Windows PC.

Re:Even More Importantly

[mbbac]

The difference is that Microsoft didn't buy Id Software.

Re:...and your memory is getting bad

[Dr. Evil]

I had the same configuration. Pity us, please!

12" monochrome paperwhite vga, 8 bit soundblaster compatible and an AMD 386 DX 40. ISA video bus. Definately not playable at full screen!

It more the size of one of those big fancy postage stamps... or maybe a dollar folded in half :-)

preorder link from doom II official site

[frieked]

To any skeptics out there, there is a pre-order link on the official Doom III site with links to 3 sites, EB Games, Gamestop and Best buy... All 3 list ship dates of 8/3.

Re:preorder link from doom II official site

[justins]

To any skeptics out there, there is a pre-order link on the official Doom III site with links to 3 sites, EB Games, Gamestop and Best buy... All 3 list ship dates of 8/3.

To any people who just fell off the turnip truck, pre-orders are a scam and don't mean a damn thing. It doesn't lock in a release date and it doesn't get you the game any earlier than the day it appears on store shelves. Enjoy!

q2 was its own engine, I believe

[Matt Ownby]

I am pretty sure that quake2 wasn't just a quake1 mission pack. Remember, it introduced colored lighting which quake1 did not support. It also changed the server timing frequency to 10 Hz.

Re:q2 was its own engine, I believe

[PeelBoy]

If I remember correctly it was built on top of the existing Q1 engine. I could be wrong, but I think the Q2 engine was just a highly modified Q1 engine.

Re:q2 was its own engine, I believe

[Osty]

I could be wrong, but I think the Q2 engine was just a highly modified Q1 engine.

You're wrong. The Quake 2 engine was new. While it may have taken concepts and possibly even some code from the Quake 1 engine (hey, they were both written by theCarmack, so that's to be expected), the Q2 engine was not built on top of Q1. Perhaps you're thinking about Half-Life, which was built on a highly modified Q1 engine (many people get confused and think that Half-Life was based on Q2, since it was released around the same time).

Re:q2 was its own engine, I believe

[Osty]

I believe you're thinking of the Quake 3 engine. The Quake 2 engine was in fact built on the Quake 1 engine -- heavily rewritten, of course (.DLLs as oppposed to QuakeC, different storage systems for textures and models, built-in OpenGL support, etc.), but built on it nevertheless. Quake 3 was pretty much a ground-up project.

No, I'm talking about Quake 2. While I'm sure theCarmack started with some Quake 1 bits, the engine is a major change from Quake 1. The rendering engine was rewritten, the networking engine was rewritting, the file formats were rewritten, etc. In other words, it was all new, unlike Half-Life that tacked on bits like skeletal animation while leaving other bits hardly changed at all. Of course, you can download the Quake 2 source code and Quake 1 source code and see for yourself. Also, theCarmack sometimes reads and posts on Slashdot, so perhaps he can clear this up once and for all.

theCarmack tends to rewrite engines for id games (non-id games like RTCW or the upcoming Q4 don't get brand new engines). This makes sense, because id games have recently existed solely for demonstration purposes (licensing of the Q2 engine, Q3 engine, upcoming Doom 3 engine). Doom was not a modified Wolf3D engine. Quake was not a modified Doom engine. Q2 was not a modified Q1 engine, and so on. This is in contrast to Epic, who are constantly refining rather than rewriting. The current Unreal 2 technology engine is still recognizably similar to the original Unreal engine, and I expect that the upcoming Unreal 3 technology will still have a common thread. Neither way is better or worse than the other. They're just different approaches taken by two different geniuses (theCarmack and Time Sweeney).

On a side note, since theHair's site was posted in the original article, it seems that John Rome"Hair"o is growing out his man-locks again. He was quite the pretty woman when he had his long hair, and many fanboys were disgusted to find out he really was a man when he cut it a few years back (apparently while in depression from the failure that was Daikatana).

Promotional idea.

[EnsilZah]

Not that Doom 3 needs any more reasons to buy it that much.
But how about offering an Armadillo qualifying flight to a random person who bought the game?

Half Life 2

[dan_sdot]

The DOOM games never really interested me that much- they were a little too cheesy. The really cool game is Half Life, especially because of all the mods that are created based on it (especially Natural Selection).
Does anyone know when Half Life 2 is coming out? THAT is what I am waiting for.

Re:Half Life 2

[HarbV7.0]

When it's done! Oops sorry, that's an ID quote... Ummm I meant when the hax0rs are done with it. Joking aside I am really looking forward to CS2 and hopefully DoD2, both great mods.

Re:Your sig...

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Would be much better if you were to stand on this NES box instead...

Re:On Quake..

[anon*127.0.0.1]

Doom is still my favorite game evar. It was SO far ahead of its time. I remember playing it for the first time, muttering "Holy shit!" every few seconds as I saw something else new and totally cool. And the first time the imps started throwing fireballs at me, I was twisting and dodging in my seat, hoping they'd miss.

Quake was a disappointment initially. Single player just wasn't all that great. Does anybody remember the plot that was outlined in the manual?
It had absolutely nothing to do with the game itself.

Then I realized that I could get on this internet thingy, and play Quake deathmatch for FREE, with people from all over, any time day or night. And just when I was getting bored of deathmatch, Quakeworld came out, then CTF was released, and Quake was here to stay.

BBFCCB

[stimpleton]

If we rtfa and ftfl(follow the &*%$ing links) we find on the British Censors site:

"The cast for this work includes:
A film or video, together with associated trailers may exist in several versions and all versions known to the BBFC are listed below.

And...
"Details are likely to be more complete and accurate for the version submitted most recently. When a film is transferred to video the running time will be shorter by approximately 4% due to the differing number of frames per second. This does not mean that the video version has been cut or re-edited..

Is this merely a trailer video? Perhaps showable at a cinmea, show, etc.

Re:BBFCCB

[OAB]

The type is listed as Digital Media and the runtime as not relevant, so it's a game.

Sure, next you'll be telling us that Duke Nukem...

[ErnstKompressor]

has gone Golden Master...HA!

Linux, Mac and DOS in the same box?

[motorsabbath]

Anybody know if they'll be shipping the Linux and Mac versions in the same box? If it runs on my PowerBook I won't need to build another tower. It probably won't, though....

Re:Linux, Mac and DOS in the same box?

[HarbV7.0]

No word on a Mac version at all. Maybe it'll be released at the same time as Duke Nukem forever? Ironic as I believe it was originaly previewed at Macworld a few years ago.

Re:Linux, Mac and DOS in the same box?

[motorsabbath]

From what I've seen Carmack himself said the Mac port is being done in-house. Hopefully that has not changed.

Re:Linux, Mac and DOS in the same box?

[superpulpsicle]

Hope you realize the windows code took 20 years in the making. Mac port will certainly take another 20.

Re:Mac support?

[CanadianCrackPot]

That just reminded me of an old comment in PC Gamer when Doom got ported to the Mac. Mac users go to hell...

Anonymously tough on the internet?

[heinousjay]

I am impressed! Could you reply to this and tell me how many women you've plowed with your courageous superlong cock?

Re:On Quake..

[CanadianCrackPot]

The only game that ever gave me nightmares was Shivers by Sierra. That game creeped the hell outta me, alone in a haunted museum trying to solve puzzles. I hated some of the kinds of puzzles they used if it were real I'd be dead 20 times over.

Same

[Slappy00]

I remember quite vividly playing Doom 2 on an old 486 (DXII boyiee) connecting to my frined in the suburbs to play coop through the whole game. Half of the fun was getting your @%$^% init strings right for our modems, loading up quemm and sucking every last byte available from the soldered on packard-hell memory, only then (after a few failed connects) the game would work work. Now a days is turn computer on, load game, play. I know i come of as cane-waving but back in those day you auctually had to know a bit about computer hardware before you could play anything. and before anyone else does the obligatory Python sketch: Man#1: Aye, in them days we was glad to have the price of a cup of tea! Man#2: Aye, a cup of cold tea! Man#4: Without milk or sugar! Man#3: Or tea! Man#1: Aye, in a cracked cup and all! Man#4: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled-up newspaper! Man#2: Aye, the best we could manage in those days was to suck on a piece of damp cloth! Man#3: Aye, but we were happy in those days, though we were poor. Man#1: Because we were poor! My old dad used to say to me: Money doesn't buy you happiness! Man#4: Aye, he was right, I was happier then and I had nothing. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof. Man#2: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We had to all live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and were all huddled together in a corner for fear of falling! Man#3: You were lucky to have a room! We used to 'ave to live in a corridor! Man#1: Oh, we used to DREAM of living in a corridor. It would have been a palace to us. We used to have to live in an old water tank in a rubbish pit. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House! Huh! Man#4: Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us! Man#2: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake! Man#3: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us, living in a shoebox in the middle of the road! Man#1: Cardboard box? Man#3: Aye! Man#1: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down at the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt. (slight pause) Man#2: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel, work a twenty-hour day at the mill for tuppence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky! Man#3: Well, of course, we 'ad it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and lick the road clean with our tongue. We 'ad two bits of cold gravel, and worked a twenty-four hour day at the mill for six or seventy-four years, and when we got home, our dad would slash it to us with a bread knife. Man#4: Right. I had to get up at ten o'clock at night, half an hourbefore I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down at the mill and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our mother and father would kill us and dance on our graves singing Halleluja. Man#1: Aye, and you try telling young people of today that. And they won't believe you. Man#4: Aye, they won't!

If you wish to view the trailer:

[ThisIsFred]

And your machine doesn't have a Microsoft Windows registry, click here to download it.

If that's the way it will really look when I play it, I will buy it and play at 5 frames per second just to see it.

Quake is still going strong!

[Jagasian]

Some people still play old games. Chess for example has been played for hundreds of years. Quake... well it is only 8 years old, but it still has an active community of players, developers, competitions, etc.

One reason that Quake is still going strong is because it is that Carmack open-sourced the game engine a few years ago. This has made it possible to update the game's technology. Sure it isn't as graphically intensive as modern games, but it isn't bad looking either. The most important thing in Quake is a high frame rate, which is quite easy considering the game's system requirements.

So what are you waiting for?
Download Quake! Note that you will need the two retail content ".pak" files to play on most servers. Carmack opened the game engine, not the game content (skins, sounds, levels, textures). However, the eQuake package comes with tons of free content, so you can still play, somewhat, without buying Quake.

Join the community!

Finally, you might ask, "Why play Quake"? Well, why play Chess? Some games are classics, and they are classics because they are fun. Quake is the best game for fast, furious gameplay. Unlike tactical shooters such as Counter-Strike, Quake is more concerned with fun fast paced action than realism. So if you want slow realistic, but sometimes boring gameplay - stay away from Quake.

If you want fast, furious, chaotic and violent gameplay... Quake is your ticket to fun.

Re:Mac support?

[MacGod]

Now whether or not your little G5 (hopefully dual) with a weak little AGP slot (hopefully at least 8x and upgradeable) will run it.

Dual 2gHz, Radeon 9800Pro, 4GB RAM had better be enough. This was all but top of the line (only the RAM would have been upgradeable) until about two weeks ago!

Way OT: Sig improvement

[tmasssey]

Wouldn't this be a better way of expressing Yoda's famous words?

do() || do_not(); //try(); In your way, there is a not-try() option. In my way, there is no try. At least, when it's compiled! :)

Can't wait to see *this* one get modded... Don't ask me why I'm doing this logged in...

Raluca Romero?

[Avada Kedavra]

What happened to Killcreek?

Speaking of Doom 1/2 editing

[bonch]

Great strides have been made in the area of level editing for Doom 1/2. Thanks to Doom Builder, you can now edit your levels in Windows and see them in real-time 3D before you even fire up Doom. And with the scripting capabilities of Doom Legacy, ZDoom, and more, you can pretty much do a lot of crazy shit with Doom.

So go make a kick-ass old school Doom wad to pass the time before Doom 3 comes out.

Re:Except that...

[Viking Coder]

Sure. But re-read the grandfather post - it was completely inaccurate. Somehow using Direct3D would mean that they wouldn't have to write their own shaders? What?

The ESRB rating doesn't indicate doneness

[danshapiro]

the British Board of Film Classification has a DOOM III Listing with a rating for the game, a seeming indication that they've already been able to review all its content

According to the article "Lawmakers in a Tizzy Over Parent's Responsibility" in gamedeveloper magazine (June/July 2004):

"The publisher submits a completed questionnaire revealing the game's contents along with video footage of 'the most extrme content and an accurate representation of the context and the product as a whole', according to the ESRB."

Clearly, this can be done many months before the game goes gold. That's necessary so that box designs, which have long lead times, can be locked down early.

Re:I'll believe it when i see it.

[Black Hitler]

Are they really gonna do a Quake IV?

Yes. Raven is developing it, id will be publishing.

Mac

[peeon]

Jason from "Foxtrot" forgot he is looking at a Mac...

Re:On Quake..

[Sigma 7]

What's with all the hating on Quake? I view it as *far* more atmospheric than Doom ever was.

Mabye, but when I play games, I tend to look for gameplay more than eye candy. As a result, I hate games that tend to be dead simple on the hardest difficulty, as well as games that are impossible on easy. With Quake, the third dimention was a bonus - however, the monsters effectivly has the same AI as Doom - move towards player, but walk alonside a "wall" if you bump into one (where a wall indicates a high vertical slope up or down.)

The first time around, it felt like they cut out the use command - didn't affect me to a degree, but I had a feeling that certain situations could arise where you accidently touch a button of certain death.

After beating it on Hard, I tried nightmare mode - that difficulty option was hidden from view mainly because it is considered too hard for most players. However, there was really not much difference from Hard - the only changes would be the monsters firing or re-firing more frequenrly and the Shambler inflicting 10 more points of damage per shock. This is not much of a difference, since you can still dodge most attacks (they either don't have lead-ahead, or have predictable lead-ahead.)

Mutliplayer was acceptable, provided that you knew that you should switch to W-A-S-D and to type "+mlook" in the console. Otherwise, you'll encounter situations where you will get creamed by other players even before you should even know that mouse looking is even possible.

Commander Keen...

[Goonie]

Don't you guys remember the joy that was Commander Keen?

For those of tender years, this was an EGA/VGA side-scrolling platformer, and light-years ahead of any others for the PC at the time.

Doom... 3?

[SetupWeasel]

Last I checked we were up to Doom 6. I fail to see how Quake 1-3 are not sequels to the same damned game.

I really can't wait for another space/horror/arcade style FPS. We haven't completely exhausted the genre over and over and over again like beating a texan oil reserve that may contain the remains of a horse.

Maybe Id should aquire the Tomb Raider franchise. Then they would be on the cutting edge of INNOVATION once more!

Message to software developers: Too many games with numbers at the end. If you are going to exploit a franchise, make an entirely new game with the same characters and setting. Making the same game with better graphics is a cop-out.

Robots duh

[MrDolby]

Robots duh

Y'all left out psDOOM

[Provocateur]

Young whippersnappers like to list all a them games by idsoftware, they keep forgettin about good ole psDOOM...

oh, wait...

Ok, so time for a new system. Suggestions?

[AgentPhunk]

Ok, so FINALLY Doom3 is upon us. I've waited and waited to upgrade my lowly P3 500mhz ATI Radeon All-in-wonder system until D3 was released. Yes, I know its about another month or so off, but given today's specs, what system should I plan on buying? (and, please, refrain from the "buy the best you can afford" posts. What I'm asking is, should I buy a P4 with Hyperthreading, or an AMD 64, or ?? Should I buy an NVidia, or Radeon [fill in the blank]? I'm PC savvy enough to know to buy the requisite 512mb of RAM (at least) and the 400gb HD for all of my pr0n, blah blah, but not up with the latest specs on which mfg has the best proc, fsb, etc. I know iD hasn't released minimum specs required for it yet, but I just want to know what I should plan on buying. Motherboard recommendations welcome. (and, on a side note, Microcenter has a $100 rebate on mobo's right now if you sign up for the credit card during purchase. scha-weeet!) Also, should we be surprised that there's no officially released demo for D3?

Wolfenstein only 12?

[caitsith01]

When you read Romero's page, he talks about Quake's 8th birthday and Wolfenstein's 12th. It's an interesting reflection on how much slower the pace of (revolutionary) development of games is in recent years. It took 1-2 years to go from Wolf 3D to Doom, 1-2 to go from Doom to Quake 1, and now 8 years later even Doom III is not really going to be radically different - true 3D environments, a few new tricks with graphics cards etc., but where's the real revolutionary change?

Re:Wolfenstein only 12?

[Haeleth]

true 3D environments, a few new tricks with graphics cards etc., but where's the real revolutionary change?

If you think Doom 3 is just Quake with a few minor graphical enhancements, you need your eyes examined. Go and play Quake 1 again if you don't believe me, we always remember graphics as looking better than they really did.

The reason you're not amazed by Doom 3, but you were by Quake, is that ID aren't the only players any more. Now that we've had dozens of FPSes since ID's last release, all constantly evolving, our eyes are already accustomed to modern graphics.

If the last game you'd played was Quake 3, and now you had Doom 3, I guarantee you wouldn't be asking where the revolutionary change was.

Re:Wolfenstein only 12?

[caitsith01]

Um... I do basically still only play QIII, because I think it's the best FPS ever made... and I do play Quake 1 every now and then to boot. I've also played Far Cry, UT2004, and the Doom III Alpha and, although they look cool, they are essentially exactly the same in a functional sense as Quake III, or for that matter Quake 1.

I guess the way I see it, the earlier evolution was all about increasing the abilities of the software, but now it's just about increasing the ability of the software to take advantage of new hardware that pushes x million polygons/s and rams x megs of textures/s through the AGP bus.

And what are the specs?"

[way2trivial]

does anyone know- are the minimum/reccomended system requirements known now?

throw some my way

[zrobotics]

hey since your throwing it out anyway...

Breaking news! Re:Wouldnt it be cool

[Louis A. J.]

Wouldnt it be cool if they modelled an Armadillo Aerospace rocket crashed somewhere on a Doom 3 map?

Breaking News John Carmack just announced that Doom III is being delayed for some, "last minute graphic enhancements."

Re:Except that...

[kiddygrinder]

Yeah, i'm sure ut2k4 runs on direct3d in linux

Re:Ahhh ... Doom 3 on my 486SLC2 66

[Stormwatch]

No shit. A bit of exaggeration, maybe. Still, Phantasy Star is the best RPG on an 8-bit console, ever. It can actually be said that it was the first modern console RPG - and it remains (unlike early Final Fantasy games) a graphically impressive, immensely enjoyable and profound game.

Amazon said March 2003

[necro2607]

Yeah, my friend preordered the game from Amazon a good 2 years ago, and they said the game's shipping date was early March 2003.

I'm pretty sure he took a screenshot when he ordered it... if I can get it off him I'll post it on here.

Time between Quake versions

[Zog The Undeniable]

Quake: 1996
Quake II: 1997 (1 year later)
Quake III Arena: 1999 (2 years later)
Quake IV: 2005? (6 years later)

id are certainly less prolific these days, but I suppose when you have more money than God and your own spaceship, the incentive just ain't there any more.

Doom 3.........

[L337Designs]

Let's all stop wetting/soiling ourselves and realize that no matter how much time we spend debating and commenting about Doom it will not change the realse date.....at all. Instead, let's all sit down with a nice caffinated beverage/big bag of crack and play the games we can for now, and as far as im concerned the only thing that matters is that there are over 150 or more little monsters running around that need to be taken care of.

PAY THE MAN!!

[sco_is_for_babies]

Well put.

I have often wondered how much hardware John Carmack is solely responsible for selling.

I don't care how bloated Word or Outlook gets, nobody needs a 2.4 GHz machine to write a letter to Granny. Although it could be argued that these applications have bloated _because_ the game-driven advances in hardware allowed them to.

When a new id engine ships, nothing else is even close for months at least. They routinely raise the industry bar. And when other titles ship they're all basically just trying to keep up.

While Duke Nukem 3D was more fun than Doom or arguably Quake even, it never would have happened if not for Doom. If it weren't for id we'd all be bitching about how we need to upgrade to 486 machines to run Wing Commander XVII.

Mr. Carmack and 'id' are to be lauded for supporting Linux. The only reason I and most of you have licensed a copy of XP is to play games, and if the Doom 3 engine is well supported in Linux, you can forget about me Longhorn.

If Carmack can't get some major kickbacks from hardware vendors directly then the linux community should pitch in and setup a fund or something. Have a bake sale. I don't care how rich he is, pay the man!!! We want him writing code, not lauching himself into space.

my 2c if you want it, Mr. C