Down right fantastic. The level of world detail is unparalleled at this time. The gameplay is standard id fare, but the atmosphere ups the ante, and the claustrophobic spaces put the monsters in your face making ranged attacks limited. The shadows are not your friend.

Totally impressed, finally no more Quake II bathed in light style maps.

The creatures are especially well modeled and animated, and the sound design is well above all other games at this point.

So finally, a worthwhile id release, first time since 95....

I can honestly say, these cd's won't double as coasters. 

...even at 3fps in low quality! The fps does get higher though when things aren't too hot but you can't expect much when playing with a p3 550. 

It's not an FX - at least, on the box and everywhere else it said 5600 XT. Other's I've told here were like "XT? Never heard of it". It's made by eVGA. 

 

Gripping. From the beginning I have been glued to my screen. Id created a stunning world to emmerse yourself in. If you take the time that I have, there are all kinds of goodies stashed about levels. The PDA is full of useful/less information that just adds so much depeth. It's surprising how much character can be gleaned from the environment through a simple e-mail. I haven't really gotten all that far but from what I've seen it's shaping up to be one of my tops of all time. I know I say that now so I'll hold final judgement till later. For the rest of you, chances are you will have a system that will run it in some fashion. Check out the article at www.hardocp.com if you don't believe me. They ran a pretty complete set of benches over a wide range of systems to give you a general idea of what to expect from your rig. Anyways good fun so far. Multiplayer wise it's pretty rough if you ask me, everyone is just hosting their own games and the resulting lag for everyone else is pretty bad. I'm guessing they will do something about that in a patch later on. For now tho, this single player game has me by the balls. 

I searched "5600xt 256" in Google, and it seems that it is a 256mb GF FX5600, I wouldn't think twice if I were you, like I said you may have to turn things down, res/details, but it will still look sweet, and the sound /atmosphere, it's truely freaky. But I'm sure you will have MUCH fun.

I got to eat (if you call potato chips and softdrink eating, no time to cook etc) then back to the carnage.

mmmmmm the night is approaching, even gets better in the dark :) 

Detailed here:
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=5733&tid=1438663

"I dunno if it's just me, but I noticed this trick beefed up my DOOM3 performance by a lot.

Anyhoo:

In your DOOM 3 directory, find "DoomConfig.cfg" (x:\Program Files\Doom 3\base). Open DoomConfig.cfg in Notepad.

Find the line:

seta image_cacheMegs "32"

I changed 32 to 96.

I got a nice boost in performance. I dunno if the tweak worked or not (maybe my machine did something wierd, have no clue), so I'm just seeing if this works for others as well, or if a different setting works better than others."

Others report similiar results. 

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html
"These are 4.9 betas, btw. To avoid installing the whole package and just getting the OpenGL driver, open the downloaded .exe file in a program like WinRAR or Winzip, extract atioglxx.dl_ to a temporary folder, expand the file using the command line utility expand.exe like this:

expand atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll

Make a backup of the atioglxx.dll file in %systemroot%\system32\ and copy the new atioglxx.dll to that folder. That's it."

^ From 3DR forum 

I'm just waiting for hardware reviewers to start using Doom 3 in benchmarks so I can figure out what card to buy.

And yes, I realize there have been some Doom 3 benchmarks, but I haven't really seen any comparisons between the 128MB and 256MB versions of the same card. And yes, I know the extra 128MBs will be useful, but I don't know if it's worth the extra wad of money. 

I took the day off yesterday with the sole purpose I purchasing Doom3 and playing it all day on my new rig. My boss new I had the day off for that reason and she just laughed it off and let me go ahead. I wake up at 9:00Am and get around.

Now the day before, Monday I had already called around to all the nearest places that might have a copy and not a single one was carrying it with in a 50 mile radius (no joke) on August 3rd. Bestbuy however was going to carry it on the 3rd, it just was in Lansing over an hour away.

At 10:00 I call them as they open to make sure they have copies out and they do. I grab my shit and rush out the door and start my drive down. Problem was, I wasn't that fimilar with Lansing. I've driven through it tons of times, just on the east side. I figure though I'll make my way there, I always get to my destination.

Well after taking the directions given to me online, I am pretty much lost. I thankfully find a major road in Lansing and eventually come across CompUSA. I figured why not try since I'm already lost. Once inside I find the shelf space empty for DoomIII. It's only 11:30 at this point, did they sell out that fast? Well no, they wouldn't sell it until the 4th either.

Back in the car I head back the way I came and stop at a gas station for directions. "What's the best way to Bestbuy from here?" I ask. The lady at the desk then proceeds to tell me to directions I knew were wrong. Thankfuly the other person working politely told her she was wrong, and that I was already on the right road just keep driving just another 4 miles.

So I get to Bestbuy, run in a circle once, then find the game. I quickly dash off and figure the best way back home to Mount Pleasant. While on my celphone however, I forgot to take an excit on 96/69 and promptly drove to Portland, 10 minutes west of Lansing. I stop for gas and buy a map, at this point I'm fed up with being lost.

An hour and half later I'm back Mt. Pleasant. But first I had to stop by work, wish my co-worker happy birthday and grab some free pizza. So while I left at 10:00 in the morning, I only arrived at my house a 2:00.

Now it gets worse.

I place the first disk in the drive and begin the installation. Ding, "Cannot read file pak002.pk4, are you sure it's there?" asks the install disk. So I click yes and try again. And again. And again and again and again.

I can copy the other 2 disks manually fine, so I download a CRC checker, try moving it that way. Nope. I try opening the pk4 file with Winzip, it works, try to extract to c:\, of course that doesn't. I call Activision, sit on hold for 30 more minutes, and find that yes I do have a bad disk.

I want to murder, maim, kill, slash, destroy and just cause general pain to everyone around me. I've waited years for this game, and this is what happens? On my day off?

Since I had the time tho, and it wasn't like I was going to do anything else I decide that the only rational thing to do would make another 3 hour trip to Lansing and back. Thankfully a friend of mine accompinied me this time and I was able to at least stay rather positive.

Finally at 7:30 I arrive home, place the disk in the drive, copy the pk4 manually and walla. After nearly 7 hours of driving I am able to play the game, I just happen to be so damn tired form all the driving I can't stay up that late. I'm in bed by 2:30 wishing that today would be a better day. 

 

Sob sob 

I just made it into hell. Wow. Overall, the first section (mars base) was really long, and a bit too many corridors (open but dark warehouses would have been nice, like doom's e2m2), but ridiculously impressive technology, awesome combat/weapons, and obviously a lot of effort put into making a better single player experience. Some of the new monsters I didn't like, the new imp however is the most common enemy and is very well designed. So far, so good. 

This is a shot of D3 at it's highest settings - everything at it's highest:
http://home.online.no/~henryw/Diverse/Doom3.Ultra.Quality.8AF.16AA@2048x1536.Screenshots/shot00013.jpg

You can see blurred pixelation on the walls and some other things (character/player/weapon models).... you'd think that with the highest settings, these textures would be decently sharp. I'm wondering if, when 512MB cards debut, would these textures look loads better? Are these compressed even at their highest setting due to hardware limitations? I know that id had to make compromises in a few areas to get it all working... 

Could he have picked a more boring and less representative place to take a screenshot? 

Current texture compression does not lower the resolution, it just messes with the colours slightly (similarly to jpg block artifacts). 

. 

Textures on models, materials that is,
get a much greater deal of stretching than they do on brushes. The game that comes to mind where this easily seen is Dues Ex where a lot of static map models were used. The brushes were sharply detailed whereas almost all of the models were stretched and blurred.

The simplest solution is to devide a model into several parts and UV them seperately; however, because of the normal and glow maps and the extra passes they require this isnt as effective a solution with the Doom3 tech because it results in a performance hit. Texture processing being one of the weaker aspects of the standard GPU pipeline it is the most evident compromise in Doom3's design.

Okay, I need to add a joke here or no one is going to believe this post came from me. 

um, if that's everything at max, then why does my medium settings at 800x600 look better? someone, somewhere, is lying. 

 

I have been playing the game in ultra mode just fine. Mind you my system is rather kick ass, but it runs rather sexy all the time. You need to see it in action to understand the difference between high and ultra. The specular maps are much shaper. This is the effect of light hitting a edge of a texture.

My 6800GT runs along fine even at this level, but I think it helps I have 2 gigs of ram. That screenshot really doesn't show the detail that Ultra mode has. Goto http://www.hardocp.om and heck out the in depth benchmark guide the posted a bit ago. It has a image quality comparison between the different modes. That will help you notice the little details like that. In motion tho, you can diffenently see the difference. 

That is if we are talking about clouds.

Could be that the anti-aliasing is off in that pic. 

"Goto http://www.hardocp.om and heck out the in depth benchmark guide the posted a bit ago. It has a image quality comparison between the different modes."

I did, alot of those shots were sized down or the JPG compression ruined 'em. 

stop whining!

start winning 

...to play Doom3, but my ordered Athlon64 PC doesn't arrive until late August :(

I'll be making a Doom3 SP map-pack or two for this game, that's about 100% certain.

Much of it reminds me of an upgraded version of Quake 1, and can't wait to get my teeth sunk into it.