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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 This is why they originally made the game peer to peer, and why it is only 4 player, because all that data takes up bandwidth.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.