Doom 3 for Linux Released

edawg writes Linuxgames reports that "the Linux edition of Doom 3 has been released by ID Software. Although it didn't ship with a Linux version on the install CD, its still nice to see they release Linux binaries around the same time as their first game patch. Here is Information directly from ID Software."

Comments

questions

[mirko]

1. does this means this uses OpenGL instead of DirectX ?
   
2. has somebody any clue when the osx version will be released ?
   

Re:questions

[Dogers]

id have ALWAYS used OpenGL for the graphics rendering. But they use DirectX for sound on windows, which is what will take time to convert to *nix..

I wonder if the hardware specs are the same...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

I've always found *nix to be a lot better at properly utilising its hardware than Windows. This is not a Windows flame message(tm) it is what I've found in the past.

I wonder if Doom 3 can be successfully played on lesser hardware if played in linux...

Re:I wonder if the hardware specs are the same...

[Beowulf_Boy]

Funny, I've played FPS games side by side in linux and windows, and I'd say the windows box was a slight bit faster. I was playing Quake 3 and Soldier of Fortune.

Not that I'm trashing linux, I use it daily. I have 2 boxes, with Synergy setup between them. One is linux, the other windows. I use the linux box for websurfing, AIM, and as a file server, and the windows box (since it has a bigger monitor) for doing any programming homework and playing games. I just find that linux isn't quite there yet for gaming. Hopefully soon though, its came a long way.

Re:I wonder if the hardware specs are the same...

[gowen]

It's pretty sad that when you say something even slightly critical of linux, you feel the need to defend yourself from the moderators by parading your linux qualifications to prove that your really truly one of the cognoscenti.

(Beowulf Boy, this isn't a criticism of you, but the mentality of moderators)

Re:I wonder if the hardware specs are the same...

[Karn]

To be fair, Quake 3 is basically the only platform-independant game that isn't disadvantaged on Linux in some way (pure OpenGL, not a Direct3D port/afterthought), and he was claiming something that is contradicting what benchmarking sites like Tomshardware have shown, that games can run faster in Linux than in Windows. For example, Tom has a benchmark page here that shows Linux outperforming Win2K on Q3. The difference is probably not noticable to a casual gamer, but benchmark junkies who tweak their machine to milk an extra 5fps out of their rig will.

So basically, it isn't sad that the guy had to put a disclaimer in there, because what he said does in fact contradict popular belief, as well as somewhat recent published benchmarks.

(Disclaimer: I'm not one of these dillusional people who claim Linux can run Windows games faster than Windows itself under Wine. The only game I recognize as running equal or better in Linux is Quake3.)

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Realistic_Dragon]

Well, yes, but isn't that what the duct_tape_flashlight mod is for?

ATI Drivers

[kaleco]

The ID release information suggests that ATI might finally get their finger out and are working towards decent Linux drivers. This would surely be a great contribution to Linux, even for non-Doomers ;)

DUP!

[JDizzy]

I swear! The editors cannot search, and shame on Taco since he knows better!

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/0 4/ 2122236&tid=127&tid=106

Who cares???

[Isldeur]

"the Linux edition of Doom 3 has been released by ID Software."

Who cares about Doom?! I've been playing Duke Nukem Forever here on GNU Hurd for months!

A few special notes

[GweeDo]

Be sure that your X Server is set to 24 bit mode. 16 bit mode won't workie. Also, it uses OSS for sound output. So all of us ALSA users had better have OSS emulation. Hope those two things help.

oh no, not again...

[nappingcracker]

once again Linux seems to get the short end. Im was (and am) really pleased that iD was supporting Linux, but it seems that once again Linux is the afterthought. Stereo sound for Doom 3? It was fine for the original quake, throw on some stereo headphones and get scared stiff; stereo sound does not cut it with this game. No 64bit build? cut off Linux's nuts a bit more, why dont you?

time will tell, and maybe these things will come, but most of the time these things loose steam as the team loses motivation and counts $$$.

Isnt it easier to develop for Linux, and port to windows? This way everything works in Linux, and if it works in Linux it cant be that hard to tie into windows? Easier said than done, sure, but easier than porting from windows to Linux.

I hope they take time to polish the Linux release and do not half ass it.

Re:oh no, not again...

[pgrst]

time will tell, and maybe these things will come, but most of the time these things loose steam as the team loses motivation and counts $$$.

you say that like it's a bad thing. ID is a business, not a charity. The economics are probably very simple. The Windows version will likely turn a profit several orders of magnitude larger than a linux version.

If I worked for ID I know which version I would concentrate on.....

Do I have to pay twice?

[a_nonamiss]

Please forgive my ignorance, but would I have to buy a seperate version for Linux, or does my serial number for the Windows version somehow allow me to download the Linux binary?

Not that this question isn't entirely academic, because my Linux box isn't capable of running Doom 3 anyways, but I am just curious how they are handling this.

Re:Do I have to pay twice?

[Anonymous Coward]

does my serial number for the Windows version somehow allow me to download the Linux binary?

There's no serial number check - anyone can download the game binary. However it's useless without the game data files which you'll have to copy from a windows install or from the CDs.

Whither OS X ??

[blakespot]

So where is DOOM 3 for OS X? My new dual G5 2.5 is just itching for something to challenge it. Of course...until Apple ships the GeForce 6800 Ultra I ordered as part of the bundle, I'm using the interrim Radeon 9600XT - not sure how well that will push DOOM 3 at high resolution....

blakespot

Re:Whither OS X ??

[blakespot]

Well...let's see.

The day the G5 arrived at my home I installed 2GB of Crucial PC3200 RAM (four 512MB DIMMs), bringing the total system RAM up to 2.5GB. I also installed a 74GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA HD, delegating the existing 250GB Maxtor for use as a "data" drive while the Ratpor takes on the boot / application storage role. I plugged my trusty external, FireWire 250GB Maxtor in to use as a backup drive.

A few weeks later I added a 3.3v PCI FireWire board with 3 ports. I've got a couple iPods, an iSight web cam, an external FireWire HD, and my DV cam to mate with the G5 from time to time. The extra ports make things a little easier.

Right now the machine has a Radeon 9600XT in the AGP 8x slot, as I'd mentioned in the original post. In the next few weeks I should be getting a GeForce 6800 Ultra which I will swap in for the Radeon. There's another upgrade.

I am trying to think what else I might wish to upgrade but will be unable, due to the difficulty you cite in upgrading Macs. I've got a 1250MHz CPU bus, and so I probably won't be wishing I could upgrade my motherboard anytime soon - but that would be a hard thing to do, granted. The two 2.5GHz, liquid-cooled CPU's are on a large daughterboard that connectst with the motherboard through dual CPU jacks. This would seem to allow 3rd parties to offer CPU upgrades down the road. They've certainly done so for the G3's and G4's in the past. I guess we'll have to wait and see. And it would be difficult to add another internal optical drive, I'll grant you. Given that this is a DVD writer capable of burning CD's, I've not go a great need for an additional unit that I can see. I suppose copying a DVD or CD would require caching to disk with just one drive, but I can probably squeeze that data somewhere amongst the G5's 575GB of on-line storage.

So I've got bluetooth, integrated modem, GHz ethernet, 5 FireWire 400 ports, 1 FireWire 800 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, analog audio in/out, digital (optical) audio in/out, an additional headphone jack, AirPort 802.11g as an option, dual screen support via digital outputs, and 2 empty PCI-X slots. How am I held back again?

blakespot

It worked fine

[tod_miller]

until all hell broke loose, then I hit alt-ctrl-~, did a ps -aux and hit kill -9 on everything I could find.

I think I must have been out of ammo or something, because it kept giving me stick about command not find.

I tried apt-get and still nothing.

No seriously, everything works fine, except all the PDAs on the base don't work right, because I guess linux on the PDA is a bit immature for the martian market :-)

Linux vs Windows performance

[yoyhed]

During the intro level, I get around 45 fps average in Linux, and 60 fps in Windows. My guess would be just that nvidia's Linux geforce driver hasn't had as much time put into it as their Windows one.

But I did notice it started up faster, and was smoother/faster in the menus in Linux than in Windows. And the whole computer wasn't slow for 30 seconds after I exited out of the game in Linux.

By the way, this story is a dupe, it was posted in the Games section yesterday (by a different submitter) so if you want more info check that out too.

WinXP Pro / Slackware 10
800x600 Medium Quality
AthlonXP 2800+
512mb ddr400
Geforce FX 5700 Ultra

Hrmmph

[Cirrius]

Well damn, the linux version of here I can't complain anymore. Oh wait, hey id where's the damn MAC port huh?? There's like 27 people waiting for it, chop chop!

Why not use SDL?

[Izaak]

id have ALWAYS used OpenGL for the graphics rendering. But they use DirectX for sound on windows, which is what will take time to convert to *nix..

I've heard this said before and wondered why they don't use a combination of SDL/Alsa/OpenGL to keep it cross platform. I've been doing that and have a single code base that compiles to Linux, Windows, and Mac with no nasty piles of #ifdef'ed code.

Re:Why not use SDL?

[Dogers]

Not knowing much (read: anything) about SDL and ALSA on windows, my guess is they dont want to be stuck supporting that if theres any problems with it. Why bother with that hassle when the numbers of people donwloading and actually USING the linux version are so small compared with that of windows?

Re:Why not use SDL?

[Watcher]

id has always had a healthy NIH (not invented here) syndrome that they learned from mess with the original Doom sound library they used. The thing never quite worked right, and caused no end of troubles. Even though SDL is open source, id has their own debugged code laying around that has been used for years that does the same thing-there really is no gain for them to throw out code they know and trust for someone else's work.

I've tried out SDL a few times, and although I've found it pretty workable, when you bring multithreading in it has troubles, especially if you don't want to render in your main thread.

Next on Slashdot

[imr]

-Doom3 Linux binary released. by Timothy.
-Release of the Doom3 Linux version. by michael.
-Linux Doom3 finally released. by Cliff.
-A look at the socio-economics behind the Linux Doom3 release. by JKatz
-The Doom3 Linux server is included in the Linux Doom3 release. By CowboyNeal.
- Doom 3 for Linux Released. by CmdrTaco who doesnt even read his own stories.

Re:Jon Carmack, eh?

[Begossi]

I still remember the good days when we didn't have computer games, and thus no violence at all.

Works great ... but ...

[bushboy]

Tried it today on slack 10, 2.6.7 kernel, 6111 drivers.

Got pretty much exactly the same timedemo benchmark as win32 (same box), although I could swear it felt smoother and sharper somehow.
I think I can coax a bit more out of it - I could with Linux Quake3.

Pity about the 5.1 sound - I really hope they get a patch for that soon as it's a big part of what makes the game fun.

For the record, it seems you have to be running X in 24bit mode - unsure if that was the case for quake3 too ?

Another thing, which would only apply to the small percentage interested - no editor support under linux.
No idea if this is planned for a future patch, but GTKRadiant now supports Doom 3 (without the render preview in the current build)

Still, kudos to id software for supporting Linux !

id Bittorrent tracker

[O0o0Oblubb!O0o0O]

This should get you playing in no time.

http://zerowing.idsoftware.com:6969/

Linux gaming benchmarks on Anandtech.com

[IronChefMorimoto]

As a nice companion to this Doom3 Linux release, there's also a Linux gaming benchmark article on Anandtech.com this morning:

http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2229

It's more of an AGP GPU on Linux comparison, but the information on some of the setup was, for a Linux newbie like me, a little informative. I had considered doing a Linux installation on my A64 gaming machine (using a separate hard drive) and installing some of the Linux versions of games that are mentioned in the article.

I'm curious, though -- do most of the mainstream game Linux versions come on the CD-ROM or have to be downloaded from the developer? Doom3, for example, requires the Windows CD for adding some files to the Linux installation. Enemy Territory is standalone. What about Jedi Knights: Jedi Academy, as mentioned in the Anandtech article? On the CD-ROM? Or a free download without requiring anything from the original Windows CD-ROM?

Anyway -- a good article. I enjoyed seeing information about gaming on Linux. Now, I just gotta get an Nvidia card so I don't have to struggle as a Linux newbie with the ATI driver installation.

IronChefMorimoto

Hmm.. interesting, but with a number of gotchas..

[d_jedi]

The Linux version only requires a P3 1.0GHz, while the Windows version needs a P4 1.5GHz (although with the P4's incredibly long pipeline, the difference isn't as big as you might think..)

But look at the FAQ for a number of gotcha!s..
- No AMD64 build (this would have been sweet.. but, oh well.. not a showstopper)
- Won't run on ATI cards using the fglrx driver! I don't know.. is this the driver used by ALL ATI cards for Linux? If so, this is a major issue for anyone wanting to play the game on Linux..
- No 5.1 sound.. considering that the eerie sounds are a good part of what makes the game..

In all, I'll be sticking to using the Windows version of the game :->

ATI drivers and running under FC2

[bernywork]

AWESOME!!!!

There were some new drivers released the other day.

I installed these applied the fedora patch and it runs just fine on a Radeon 9600. Not that fast mind you, but it certainly works.

BTW, if you are attempting to download, try the Bitorrent network, I pulled down the installer in about 30 seconds.