Oculus Rift Loses Doom 3 BFG Edition From Launch Package, But Gains TF2

skade88 writes "Neoseeker and the Verge are reporting that the Oculus Rift launch will no longer have Doom 3 BFG support. But in some good news to offset the bad, Valve will be releasing an Oculus ready version of TF2 when the Dev kits ship. For those backers who are upset about not having Doom 3 BFG edition support on launch of the Oculus Rift, they are offering the following options: '$20 Steam Wallet credit ... $25 Oculus Store credit ... or a full refund for your pledge.'"

Comments

Carmack Not Onboard?

[sanman2]

But I thought Carmack was recently demoing a prototype version of Oculus Rift at some gaming con. Has he opted out of this tech? Why, and for what alternative?

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[Trubacca]

No, things have been pretty hush hush in advance of GDC, but the community consensus is that the original support for Doom 3 was hard-coded in, and with the changes to the Dev Kit the support was no longer available. Carmack didn't have the time to plug in the changes needed, what with Doom 4 in development. We will probably find out more on the 26th.

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[noh8rz10]

my guess? doom 3 was an anti-loss leader... get people excited about an old product, then BOOM free upgrade to new product!

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[Zencyde]

That was Quakecon, I tried the Oculus Rift, it was fucking awesome. I'm shocked by this news. But in all honesty, the demo was very incomplete. There most not have been a lot of development done yet. Also, get one. While there are potential designs that will exceed the fisheye mechanic that they're using, it's absurd how good this is for the price.

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[Joce640k]

Doom 2 was good. Doom 3? Not so much.

(Not unless your definition of a 'game' is just walking around looking at the detail in the graphics.)

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[0123456]

(Not unless your definition of a 'game' is just walking around looking at the detail in the graphics.)

Yeah, Doom 3 has an extremely detailed black screen. I'd take $25 to not own it.

Re:Carmack Not Onboard?

[EdZ]

Carmack is on board, but he's busy on ID 5. The code written for Doom 3 was written before the Oculus Rift even had a name (back when it was Palmer's solitary prototype), and was written for a device using a different LCD and more importantly an entirely different tracker. The code, as was released with Doom 3 BFG's source release, will not work on the release-version Oculus Rift devkit.
There is nothing to stop someone modifying the source to receive data from the new tracker, render at the wider FoV, and perform the new pre-warp. The only reason that it is not being done officially is because the only reason it was ever included in BFG at all was because the code was already written and free to include.

That's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

You can simulate doom 3 with a couple of black eye patches

Re:That's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

You can simulate SimCity with a couple of black eyes.

It's a VR helmet.

[newcastlejon]

Just in case anyone else was wondering.

Re:It's a VR helmet.

[Nyder]

Thanks, but I figured that out with google. Anyone who's used the internet for longer than a week figured out how to do that one.

You would think so, but as I've noticed in the last decade of playing MMORPG's, that most people are too lazy google anything and would rather have you tell them.

Re:It's a VR helmet.

[rta]

Thanks.

I was on the verge of googling it, but then i thought, "eh, i don't care enough, but maybe someone will describe it in the comments."

Re:Is it really as chunky as the pictures suggest?

[Zerth]

This is the dev kit, off the shelf hardware, 7 ounces, a little bit larger than a pair of ski goggles. But it will probably stay about the size of ski goggles, though, as Oculus wants to keep the low price point and the large field of view without needing two displays(synch & latency) or complex optics($$$).

The size difference is kind of the point, as they are made for different purposes. The Rift is intended be as large as possible, while .5" screen on Glass is supposed to stay out of your line of sight.

Doom 3 BFG will be supporting the Rift

[Krashed]

As John Carmack supports the open-source community, he released the source code (not the game assets) into the wild as an open source project. I myself have downloaded, compiled, and played the game using this code and it works well. There is even integrated support for the original version of the Rift inside. While he was unable to release all of the code for the game due to patent issues (lookup Carmack's Reverse), the game is completely playable on homemade Rift units at this time. Once Oculus releases the offical SDK for the Rift, it will be a short time before I or another member of the open-source community takes care of the problem. Just lookup a fork on GitHub called Doom-3-BFG-VR and I will be there doing anything I can to help.
Please, to anyone planning on playing Doom 3 like this, purchase the game and copy the assets rather than finding nefarious ways of finding them. Support awesomeness such as id Software and its remaining founder.
--
Big shout out to John Carmack for the foresight to allow gamers the ability to again enjoy a game which is otherwise, past its prime. For the record, Quake 3 has also been released as well so expect to see MANY mods for both franchises very shortly and again, thank you Mr. Carmack.

it's called editing

[dutchwhizzman]

Just because you can cram more insider acronyms and names in a sentence it doesn't make it more informative or better readable than just using plain English. Think of your target audience. People that know every name and acronym in this summary will most likely have read this news well before it ever made the Slashdot front page. This means that your target audience will be those that not yet know about the existence of this device.

You could easily write something like this and actually inform people without the majority going TL;DR on you:

"Gaming web sites Neoseeker and the Verge are reporting that the community funded VR helmet Oculus Rift will no longer have support for the game Doom 3 BFG when the first units are shipped. In some good news to offset the bad, Valve will be releasing an Oculus ready version of Team Fortress 2 when the early edition of the Oculus Rift for developers ships. For those backers who are upset about not having Doom 3 BFG edition support on launch of the Oculus Rift, they are offering the following options: '$20 Steam Wallet credit ... $25 Oculus Store credit ... or a a full refund for your pledge.'"

That took all of 5 minutes to edit and every nub and their mum will more or less gather what it's about. That's the difference between an article with hardly any news worthiness and something that might draw the interest of most people reading the summary. As a writer, which one would you prefer?

Re:Doom 3 BFG not so B

[wonkey_monkey]

Good guys, bad guys, didn't matter, everyone respawns.

Is that Buddhism or Hinduism?