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Doom 3 Reaches Gold Master, Due August 5th
Rogerpq3 writes "Yes, this is the official word that [long-awaited PC FPS] DOOM 3 has been code released and has been approved for manufacturing! According to the .plan file of id CEO Todd Hollenshead: 'We literally just hung up with Activision and have confirmed that our latest release candidate has been mutually approved and is finally GOLD. So, the next question is release dates. Retailers in the States will be allowed to pick up games starting at 12:01 AM on August 3rd. The official street date is actually August 5th in the U.S.A., but some of your favorite stores will probably have it early for those of you who have to have it first. Check with your local retailer for that information... [Internationally] the UK will probably get it first, on or about August 6th. Everywhere else will probably be Friday, August 13th (cue Twilight Zone Theme) or close to that date, with just a few exceptions (e.g. Russia and Poland)'."
"...we're here to tell you that Doom 3 is not only done, it's absolutely mind-blowing."
"You are basically subjecting yourself to a 20 hour cardiac episode."
"...you will never experience a dull moment. Or even a less than mesmerizing one."
"Doom 3 is a masterpiece of art form - staying true to the frantic legacy of the Doom series, while ambitiously reaching new heights and bashing down the doors of the next generation of PC shooter. The bar is raised."
I can't wait to get my hands on a copy!
Does anyone know what the minimum specs are ?
If I need hardware, I need to be ordering it now !!
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
yes, but will it run on linux .....
YES! A hit title that runs on linux right out of the box. Thank you ID Software!
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"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
2GHz CPU 512 MB Ram Radeon 9800 5-Channel Audio
Supported Graphics Cards: Ge-Force 4 MX Ge-Force 3 Ge-Force 4 Titanium Ge-Force FX (and higher) ATI 8500, 9000 (and higher)
All the editors (except maybe Photoshop and Maya) are included in the game itself. You probably can switch between the map editor and game on the fly, changing the level, pressing a key and seeing it all in action. Not the first game ever to do this (e.g. the Battlezone action RTS had a similar stryle of level editing), but a welcome addition, nonetheless.
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Here's a system req discussion at Planet Doom.
Lets take a look at some dates...to place things in perspecive:
1993: Doom released
1994: Doom II released
1996: Duke Nukem 3D 1.0 came out using modified Doom II engine
1996: Quake released
1997: Quake II released
1999: Quake III released
2004: Doom III released.
So, Id's had 6 major releases in the past 11 years and in the time that 3D Realms has been working on ONE Duke Nukem Forever, Id has had 4 whole games come out.
Let's face it folks, Duke Nukem Forever isn't coming out. 8 years for one game?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
True... but part of the issue with many is the length of time Duke has been 'in development' I haven't been able to find an exact date, but Duke was announced in or before 99 and was originally being built on the Quake 2 engine, they gave up on that engine and moved to the Unreal engine. In that time, the Unreal engine has gone through several impressive revisions and we have seen plenty of shipped games using the Quake 2 and Quake 3 engine.
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If you're poor, get a Radeon 9600xt. If you've got the mad cash to blow, go for the 9800xt or 9800pro. I've got no idea the status of support for the x800, but you never know.
Check it out at nV News.
Exactly! The Radeon 9600SE cards or GeForceFX 5200 cards that run about $50 are more than sufficient to run DOOM3 at medium quality, according to previous remarks by developers and the review posted here.
you forgot Return to Castle Wolfenstein
1996: Duke Nukem 3D 1.0 came out using modified Doom II engine
No, Duke3d used a engine developed completely independent of Id, called "BUILD". It was much closer in capabilities to the Quake engine than to the Doom II engine, though many (most?) people considered it inferior to the Quake engine.
See Planet Duke for details.
Do you have Far Cry? If not, I'd recommend it, becuase a) it's awesome and b) it's a good way to gauge whether your system will be good for Doom 3, since they're supposed to be similar in graphics and the like. Ditto for Half Life 2.
I can run Far Cry with pretty much maxed out graphics at 1280X1024 minus antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, so I should be ok for Doom3. I have an AMD Athlon 3000+ XP, a ATI Radeon 9800 XT and 1G RAM, in case you're wondering.
Giving id's previous record of releasing tools which all lacked options/user friendlyness, i think this is a good move (Standard Radiant is pure hell to work with, compared to, for example, GTKRadiant.)
And I'm not too sure bout this, but I also think mappers don't have to compile their .map to .bsp , anymore ( a -very- timeconsuming process) as the data in the .map file will be generated in real time in the D3 engine : Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong.
Duke Nukem 3D did not have a modified Doom Engine. It was built on Ken Silverman's Build engine along with Shadow Warrior and Blood.
Bit of a correction... Duke3D used the Build Engine, created by a guy named Ken Silverman, who was also responsible for an _old_ shareware game by the name of Ken's Labyrinth. Info on the history of the engine is available from Ken himself here. He's also got several other useful utilities, such as an excellent PNG optimizer.
Well let's see here... There have been around 13 releases of various Duke Nukem games since 1991 right up until 2004, not counting DNF.
Not to mention all of the other games that 3D Realms put out (Shadow Warrior, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor, BioMenace, Max Payne 1/2 etc.). So no, they've been working on far more than just Duke Nukem Forever for 8 years.
Oh, I'm not sure where you got the modified DOOM II engine idea, pays to do a little trivial research though...
" When DOOM was released, Ken decided to have another go at a 3D engine. From this came BUILD, Ken's ever-evolving engine used in many, many games since, including Blood, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, and of course, Duke Nukem 3D. Not true "3D" but actually "2 1/2"D, the BUILD engine was one of the two most popular engines of its time, holding ground with Quake, id software's masterpiece."
Nice Troll, though.
That was what Carmack was saying back during the GeForce 4 TI vs Radeon 8500 days.
The GeForce 6 6800 Ultra GT vs Radeon X800 XT PE (wish I were making the product names up) seem to have similar performance on the ARB2 render path.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/doom3/index.html
At least you can check out these live video feeds for free.
Quake 3 was SMP aware / enabled.
I don't see why DOOM3 would be different.
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Parent has such an ironic subject line...
From TFA,
"Internationally, the game will take a few more days to make it to the store shelves. The UK will probably get it first, on or about August 6th. Everywhere else will probably be Friday, August 13th (que Twilight Zone Theme) or close to that date, with just a few exceptions (e.g. Russia and Poland). This isn't because we don't have love for you folks outside the U.S., but the localization and manufacturing process takes a bit longer outside the U.S. where we will have JVC run 24/7 to get the units built. I guess the European manufacturers prefer to give their employees nights and weekends off. Go figure! "
Quake 3 for the Macintosh supports SMP.
mbbac
yup, Quake3 was SMP capable. But some Quake3 engine games, notably Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory, don't support SMP.
Whether Doom3 will be SMP capable is another question.
Shadow Warrior: I'll give you this one, 3DRealms made it.
Wolfenstein 3D: WOLFENSTEIN! Are you nuts, this is the game that put iD on the map before 3D Realms was a speckle in Miller's eye. Maybe they own the rights now or something, but credit where credit is due.
Max Payne 1/2: Developed by the boys at Remedy way over in Finland. Can't really use this as a excuse for DNF never getting done.
I really don't see why people are waiting for DNF in the first place. Sure, Duke3D was sort of fun in it's time, I used to play it online a lot. But what makes people believe the Duke team has any sort of idea of how to create a modern game, why get hung up on Duke3D and not some other game? Except for their one single hit Duke3D the team's track record is frankly crap. Where the hell did all the expectations come from? Duke as a franchise is entirely mediocre if you take away the hype.
It's like deja vu all over again.
It was Remedy Entertainment that created the Max Paynes. (Remedy is those former Future Crew guys who didn't go to FutureMark/MadOnion nor Bitboys.)
But I think 3D Realms was somehow involved, as a distributor maybe? Or was it Gathering Of Developers... can't remember offhand.
I assume you're going for the best of everything, so why this PSU?
Enter the PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510
-gjr
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I'm not sure what the noted review was supposed to show, but I see nothing about Doom3 running well on average $50+ hardware.
Doom 3 does to an extent. One of the various quotes I've seen bandied about on the web is that the sound engine (which is entirely software-based) runs in a separate thread... The specific quote I've seen was related to the difficulty id had with thread-synchronisation for the sound and main threads.
So, yeah, it supports SMP. But as the sound engine takes a few percent of the overall CPU time, it's not going to do a whole lot.
~Rolphus
Build/Doom engines are raycasters No they're not. Wolfenstein 3D was a raycaster. Doom used a two dimensional BSP tree. Build from memory was more akin to a portal renderer than a raycaster. If Duke3D's look mode used raycasting, it wouldn't have looked as bad as it did. Raycasting sends a ray out for each pixel on your screen to see what it should draw there. Wolf3D was as quick as it was as it only did it for the horizontal pixels and consequently only had to perform ray casts about 300 times instead of 300x150 times (I think that was the rough render area of Wolf3D). Duke3D used a method known as shearing for its look mode, which basically stretches the screen vertically.
uhhhh....I played that alpha also with an Athlon XP 1800 and an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with 128 MB of RAM. It was nowhere near playable. Best I ever got was 20 FPS until more than one MOb got on screen then it dropped to 1 FPS. So it seems really odd that you found it playable on a celeron 400 and a Geforce 2 MX