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Marine Finds Duct Tape on Mars
mhore writes "It seems that one of the biggest complaints about Doom 3 has been resolved. Thanks to Glen Murphy, you may now use your flashlight and weapon at the same time, thanks to the ingenious 'Duct Tape' mod! While some may think this ruins the game play, I disagree and think it is worth noting." There's plenty of other Doom 3-related coverage over at PlanetDoom, including a pointer to a new IGN review, which PlanetDoom considers "a lot more fair and balanced than some of the reviews we've seen so far", with an overall 8.9/10 score.
While this mod is not for everyone, I've tried to maintain a certain level of paranoia by making the flashlight only attach to your smaller guns (but not the pistol - that would spoil the early early game), and making the cone of projection much smaller than the hand-held flashlight. This leads to situations where you're in a pitch black room, but can only see a very small area, which for some is much more claustrophobic than holding the default wide-angle flashlight. This especially applies when swinging your view around, and catching a glimpse of an enemy, who you are then unable to find as they've run off into the abundant darkness.
Granted, as you can still use the current flashlight it does make things slightly less scary, but Doom3 has plentiful amounts of scariness to spare. Like playing the marine in Alien vs. Predator, I know of several people who still can't play it even using this mod, due to fear.
http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html
I tried them out of curiosity, and I am indeed seeing improvement in framerates in Doom 3. I wonder though, if these tweaks are designed for OpenGL, will they translate over to other OpenGL games like Call of Duty?
I've always felt that the eye's light adaptation should be simulated by the game. If you play in a well lit room, your eyes won't adapt to changing light levels in a computer game, so I wonder, why doesn't the game increase the lighting when the majority of the scene is dark? It would even be possible to create "blinding" effects when entering daylight from a dark room. It would also create the impression of an even higher dynamic range of light than what is actually possible on a monitor.
-larsch
I do agree with your commentary and logic on lights, but as far as Doom3 is concerned, it doesn't apply. Things simply know where you are, once they are alert to your presence (Froms ound, etc) There is no place to hide, they seek you out. We have tactical rails on everythying from pistols to rifles these days, it doesn't make a lick of sense to me that we'd go over 100 years in the future only to downgrade our tactical weaponry. If the guy wasn't meant to shine a flashlight around in the first place, they wouldn't have given him one at all. It should have been on his rifle and or handgun to start with. Maybe an optional item to pick up, but still.
And were this a better simulation of reality, eyes adjusting to the darkness would be a useful thing, but since the game doesn't program such things into it, and thus it's not possible to see into that dark corner now matter how long you stare at it, using that kind of logic for doom3 is simply flawed.
More duct tape, less stupid story driven programming.