Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 Beta Patch to Address Config File Cheating
Jason Shoulders writes "There's a discussion at Quake3World about an upcoming change in the first Doom 3 patch. Specifically, Id Software's Robert Duffy has updated his .plan file and mentions making 'r_skipNewAmbient, r_skipSpecular, r_skipBump, and r_shadows cheat protected'. This will force players to use features such as bump mapping and shadows. What settings gray the line between tweaking and cheating?"
Making these options cheat protected in Multi-Player is the only way to make it fair. Especially the shadows, I've found it quite fun to be hiding in a shadow waiting for my roommate to grab the RL, only to be blown to bits by my other roommate running on a slow PC with shadows off because he just saw me sitting there, no problem. Also, IIRC, all of the lighting data is synched between the clients, so that everyone is seeing the same enviroment light wise. This is why they originally made the game peer to peer, and why it is only 4 player, because all that data takes up bandwidth. So it would be a waste to be sending all that and unifying the lights across clients if they could just turn them off. I think Doom 3 DM could have been fun, but they should have left the adreneline meter in, IMO. I've played standard, fast-paced DM to death. I was hoping the movement speed in Doom 3 DM would be a little slower, and to compensate there would be a lot of hiding and seeking in the shadows, but as it stands it is just a mindless fragfest, which isn't a bad thing, I just don't have fun with it anymore.
How did you even play it single player then?
.. but the instant I go try to play multiplayer, my framerate is just about halved or worse, and it's very sluggish.
I can get Doom3 to run in single player just fine-- high quality setting, 1024x768 on a Radeon 9800 Pro 128meg card...
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Well, the shadows in Doom 3 are absolute black, good luck trying to make your monitor bright enough to distinguish #000000 from #000000.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Locking down graphics settings and views and such is all well and good.
However, if ID is relying on a shared library for their OpenGL implementation, then they're ultimately playing a losing game. There are a number of software projects that can swap out the OpenGL shared library at runtime and intercept all of the gl and wgl calls. With this functionality, you can make the graphics look however you want them to. Remove shadows, change fov, even change the viewpoint entirely!
There are always third party projects (like, e.g. Punkbuster, tough I think that one was discontinued) that prevent altering the dll, but the game itself enforcing that would become a support nightmare.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.