Talk:Doom 3/Archive 1

Number 3 in the title

This article (and all occurences of the title) should be changed from DOOM³ to DOOM 3. The cube variant is just a quirk in the logo design. The name is [officially spelled DOOM 3]. Fredrik 11:14, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There was some debate about this issue before, but at the time I don't believe the game had any official name, so the issue was up in the air. Although your link does list the game as Doom 3, the official Doom 3 webpage shows the official logo, which currently appears to be Doom^3... afaik the issue is still up in the air and they haven't made a final decision on the name yet. Just from id Software's website alone I don't think you can discern that the name is set in stone as "Doom 3". Perhaps there's a .plan file out there somewhere that settles this matter? Sarge Baldy 01:48, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

It's "DOOM 3" according to Todd Hollenshead [1]. Fredrik 12:54, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's something I try to find out, see the Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (trademarks) page. -- Lightkey 19:25, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Tool; Trent Reznor?

Is it true that Tool did the theme song, and Trent Reznor was almost the sound designer? Sources[2] [3] that I've found are inconclusive. --NeuronExMachina 20:31, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Chris Vrenna along with Clint Walker did the theme song that is indeed very "Tool-like".[4] And yes, Trent Reznor was indeed almost the sound designer.[5] Rumors are that there were personality conflicts between Trent and Graeme Devine, but neither Trent or id has commented other than the usual stuff. --Gregb 23:41, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The sound and ambient music in the game was actually done by contractor Ed Lima [6] who today works for Human Head Studios [7], the company developing Prey.

Poland, Russia and copyright infrigements

I removed the bit about piracy in Poland and Russia. Firstly, the statement about Poland is simply not true. While piracy was wide some years ago ("one might buy it almost officially", as one editor noted), this is not true now. The EU would fry us for that. Moreover, Poland was recently removed from major piracy countries list [8] (that link is about music piracy, but I guess that situation is similar to software piracy), so now only one EU member country mentioned is Spain. Moreover such mentions imply that Poland and Russia are piracy nests, while leaving out such countries as China and Brasil. Przepla 18:33, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The Polish distributors site state 13 Aug [9]

Then please remove Poland from that sentence (and put back the stuff about Russia). It's still true about Russia. The games in Russia are distributed primarily through small retail outlets, who specialise in selling pirated versions, but also sell official localisations in jewel-cases (that cost about 7-10$). Pirated version (localised) is usually released 0-day (or a few days later for less popular games). So unless there is an official simultaneous global release, everyone will buy pirated version (for 5-7$). Paranoid 08:23, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

As for Russia, official game vendor 1C did really good job localizing the game; it even beat original, imho, where I was able to compare. So I think people prefer this official release any way. For the record, pirated CDs usually go for about $2 (or - most often - free of charge, on CD-Rs, from friend to friend). 217.25.194.150 11:52, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

50,000 downloads

The game obviously wasn't being downloaded from websites. It was either private FTPs (in which case nobody knows how many downloaders and there are rather few of them anyway) and P2P (in which case nobody reliably knows how many downloaders). So a reliable source for the figure is needed and "According to statistics" is not such (taken from one news site). Paranoid 08:23, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hence the wording "estimated to be as high as", rather than stating it as a given figure. The main sources are Bittorrent, where downloads can be fairly reliably tracked, and newsgroups, which are less easy to track but figures can still be estimated. The figure of 50,000 was on several news sites, and was apparantly stated by the publishers.

I think something along these lines should stay in - this level of pre-release piracy is rare, the only other example I can think of is the theft of the HL2 source, and that wasn't the full game. Darksun 08:30, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sure, this may be included, but 50,000 is still not reliable. It was on several sites BECAUSE some journalist first pulled it out of his ass. The number is incredibly uncredible. If it was "Company X, that tracks filesharing activity, found that Supernova BT tracker was accessed by 50,000 unique users during the last 24 hours", that would be reliable. As it is, though, the number has no validity whatsoever, because I simply do not trust BBC (or any other news outlet) to find the correct number themselves. As for the scale, yes, it's impressive, but nowhere as impressive as the news try to make it. Leaks are common - HL2 source leaked, Doom 3 alpha leaked, Stalker alpha leaked, etc. Paranoid 08:44, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Pictures

Someone with the game give us a screenshot. :-) Evercat 13:44, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Can't we reuse illustrations from Kazimir Malevich? Paranoid 08:44, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

People. I'll do em myself if ya want, but it'd be nice to see others.

Reception and impact

Overall, Doom 3 was considered to be one of the best games of 2004. Also, from a technology perspective, it had several major advances. However, it did not have the same critical reception that the original Doom had. Several opinions are represented below but should be kept in the context of whether the grade of the game should be an A+ versus A.

The "Reception and Impact" section needs a serious POV adjustment as is. The comments from a very small minority in the gaming community should not be so emphasized in this section. The game was very well received. I'll get some edits going for that section. --G3pro

I NPOV'd the reception page and added a better quality screenshot. G3pro 9/06/04

Doom 3 is a great game, no doubt about that (and it's a polished big budget title), but it was a disappointment for a very significant fraction of the gamers, possibly even the majority. They may still agree it's a great game, but it's not as good as they were led to believe/expected/hoped.

Facts show this clearly. The 89% rating that you removed from the text, the user ratings at various sites. A recent survey by AG.Ru asked visitors who will be the winner after all. Half-Life 2 (52.5%, 12008 votes) beat Doom 3 very obviously (19.8%, 4523 votes) [10].

If you compare this with the expectations, characterised by the words of Matt Helgeson (senior editor of Game Informer) "Doom 3 has slightly lower expectations around it than the Second Coming of Jesus.", it's hard to see how the game is not a disappointment. 89% rating is a very clear indication.

And I think this should be reflected in the article, not just glossed over in a typical (bad) Wikipedia fashion - "some critics say...".

Personally I am not a Doom-hater. I liked the original games, I like this one. I even thought about upgrading my old CPU to get smoother gameplay. :) But I am not a fanboy either - and looking at the situation very objectively I see that the reception was mixed, almost all reviewers complain about certain aspects and the final scores are low enough to warrant the tone of the original version of "Reception".

This is why I disagree with G3pro's removal of most of the original "Reception" text (and replacement with a few very biased pro-Doom paragraphs [11]) and would like to hear his arguments.

Paranoid 19:58, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Half-Life 2 isn't even out yet. Why are you even mentioning HL2 in this discussion on Doom 3? The reception across the board was very positive, but there were a number of very vocal critics who seemed to criticize D3 on gameplay issues without understanding the purpose or plot of the game. From what I understand is that there is a large number of HL2 fanboys who are slamming D3 on any ridiculous issue that they can think of. "D3 is lame because I can't drive vehicles". That sort of thing.

First, HL2 is almost out, it's not somep pie-in-the-sky technology like DNF or Unreal3. Second, the poll I refered to was done on a general gaming site, not a HL2 fansite. Clearly, less than 20% of the gamers (in a relatively large group of 25 thousand people) like Doom3 enough to expect it to be better than HL2. This partly proves that there was no positive reception across the board, that the reception was only moderately warm. The number of vocal critics is not small, actually most of the reviewers were criticising the game to some extent. Just check out those reviews. That overall Doom3 good great ratings doesn't change the fact that it had a lot of shortcomings that were noted in even the most enthusiastic reviews.

The reception and impact portion was severely biased against Doom 3. The original said something like "Doom 3's graphics were outdated and eclipsed by FarCry and HL2" without even consciously understanding the difference between non-unified and unified lighting. I still don't even understand why there needs to be such a large section describing what a minor group of gamers and reviewers, who are biased against the game anyways, have to say about the game. It would be disingenuous for a wikipedian to stand by such a skewed sentiment in an encyclopedia article.

It was not biased, it presented the criticism, because it was very important in light of the hype and the overall expectations for the game. If you must quote, please quote correctly. It said "visual quality of DOOM 3 is comparable to many other games released in 2003 and 2004, most notably Far Cry." and "the technological level of DOOM 3 is similar to that of Far Cry and Half-Life 2". The second opinion was supported by a round of interviews of five directors of game development companies. More importantly, the original text clearly said that the game was still a success and that some areas (overall polish of the game and the art direction) were unquestionably good.

The unified lighting is irrelevant, because noone criticised it. But what is important is that this feature was already implemented a year before Doom 3 was released in a budget (!) game. And it is important that most of Doom 3 levels could be done without unified lighting (using an engine such as CryEngine) extremely easily and with very similar results in terms of gameplay and image quality.

I am starting to doubt your POV in this issue. I see that you are the one responsible for the original section on it. Some of the things you have written are quite useless and biased: "below-par story, forcing the player to read countless text messages (by hiding access codes there), lack of cut-scenes," It seems like you personally haven't even played the game. System Shock 2 which is a masterpiece in itself had the same things that you personally "don't like". The original HL had essentially the same story except for a portal to hell, there is a portal to Xen.

Sorry, but it's you who sound like a Doom fanboy. I am not biased, I am trying to be objective. I personally like the game very much, I just recognise that Doom 3 was criticised a lot by critics and gamers alike and feel that this should be reflected in the article. And despite liking the game and enjoying it a lot, I can notice the flaws that the critics talk about, even though they don't bother me personally that much. When you resort to using language like "small number of critics have bitched about", you clearly show that you are not impartial.

Sorry about my ramblings as it is late at night, but let me try to summarize: glossing over the general reception of Doom 3 with the critiques of a relatively small number of vocal players and reviewers is disingenuous to the article. If you want to make some small edits and try to elaborate on what that small number of critics have bitched about, go right ahead. Please don't skew the POV as you did with the original section. G3pro

The general reception was that the game is good, but has many flaws. Practically every reviewer said something like this. Overall it got the same average rating as Far Cry - 89% (according to GameTab). I haven't heard from you any facts supporting your position, just baseless claims that the game was great and everyone felt this way. I showed with numbers that this is not the case. Unless you can support your position better, I will feel justified in restoring most of the original version of the "Reception and Impact" section. Paranoid 13:58, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Paranoid makes two arguments that are commonly used, but shouldn't be because they classicaly don't go anywhere. (Fearlessly exposing my mega-geek debating history...) Don't defend a point by stating that most people agree with you. Don't claim that something is bad because something else is better. Refining Paranoids argument, it can be stated that while the hoopla around Doom 3 was nearly equivalent to a major motion picture, the only great reception it received by the general public was in sales (so much so that even video card sales saw a great boost). The reason an average gamer may be dissapointed is that an average gamer doesn't care how an effect is done. They only see the end product. They don't see (or have the ability to understand) the technology. However, with a powerful computer, the game is very nice looking. When computers get better, the game will get better because the highest detail level isn't visible yet. I, for one, didn't like reading the emails. When I play a shooter, I want to point, shoot, run, point, shoot, etc. I also didn't like switching between my flashlight and weapon. But, I liked Doom 3 overall. I'll probably like Half Life 2 more, but that doesn't mean that Doom 3 is bad. Kainaw 14:02, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've got a debating history too - being a champion in the country championship once. :) Anyway, the argument about people agreeing with me that Doom 3 had flows is used to show that people think Doom 3 had flows. Kinda relevant, isn't it? The second argument is used just to illustrate that most people are not really blown away by Doom 3. If you remember the time of Doom release, there was simply no question about who is the boss. Doom ruled unquestionably, there were no apparent flaws, it was clearly superious to all games in the genre (even broadly taken) and for a long time there was no contender for the throne. After id announced Doom 3 and showed the videos extremely early in development, everyone was excited and Doom 3 was hyped by the game press and the gamers. It was common knowledge even in early 2004 that Doom 3 is going to be amazing (though possibly on-par with HL2). But then Far Cry was released and D3 ended up having very annoying problems, so most people no longer think that Doom 3 is so hot now. That's all - that's what the section was illustrating, and I have seen no compelling reason why it should not exist (and no evidence that it is factually incorrect). Paranoid 14:48, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes. I agreed with you. I stated that the hoopla exceeded the reception. The high reception was in sales, not in the player's reviews. Stating reviews gets fuzzy, so I pointed out that an average user is not interested in the technology. From a technology review, Doom 3 is outstanding. From an average player review, it is merely good. I gave my own opinion of the gameplay from an average player viewpoint: looks great but it is just a point and shoot game with a few annoyances (emails and the flashlight). Kainaw 15:00, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Here you go again with your skewed reception and impact section. Why you have to make the voices of the few critics so loud in this encyclopedia article, I'll never know. What's really sad is that you didn't even NPOV the original.

First, it is you who are biased. You are a Doom 3 fanboy and can't tolerate the fact that not everyone loves the game. Sorry that reality is so harsh to you. Second, the text in the reception section was neutral and criticisms were made in many reviews. Even ecstatic reviews on sites like this one had a lot of these criticisms. Third, you are in no position to dictate what should be done to the article, you have only the same rights every other Wikipedia user and no more. Fourth, you have not provided any evidence to back up your counterarguments and ignored all facts I provided. Fifth, reverting is needless vandalism when there were a lot of genuinly good changes made. Sixth, you are too emotional about it and should calm down. Paranoid 13:26, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

"Poor monster AI"? What are you, 10 years old? OMGWTF!!!11 teh AI is teh st000pid! zombies should be on the ceiling using uber-plasma rifles and flanking you!!!111 It's the personal opinion of so few people that the AI was not where it should have been. You are one of those people.

Old enough not to use leetspeak. Many reviewers criticised the AI. Check out for yourself. That the AI is weak is a fact. Whether it's ok for a game about zombies is debatable, but many reviewers think it is a negative factor. In any case, claim of "Killer AI" on the box is a lie.

"over-reliance on scripted events"??? I think my head is going to explode. I would absolutely love to see a game without scripted events. Yea! Nothing happens in the game!

In Doom 3 monsters' behaviour is not very varied. What variety is there is achieved using scripted sequences. If you don't know the differences between a scripted sequence and a non-scripted AI sequences, read up something on game AI. Everybody else understands these concepts.

"Average story, forcing the player to read or listen to messages by hiding access codes there, lack of cut-scenes". Who actually wrote this? This is so juvenile, sounding like it was written by someone who hasn't even played the game. "forcing" the player to read messages? Oh, how dare they! id actually wants you to READ something in a game! Why, I thought the game was just mindless shooting. And lack of cutscenes??? Even better! All those cut-scenes you saw in the game were just part of your imagination. Those short interludes were definitely not cutscenes. Therefore there was a lack of them!

Those short interludes were few and far between. "Lack" doesn't necessarily mean "zero", it can mean "not enough".

"Many critical reviewers also mentioned the lack of innovations in graphics and sound, arguing that visual quality of DOOM 3 is comparable to many other games released in 2003 and 2004" What the hell is this crap? Lack of innovations in graphics and sound? Wow, gee, unified lighting and shadowing, the first of its kind in gaming, and true six-channel sound are not innovations. Even though no game had it before doesn't make it an innovation!!

"Wow, gee", I wrote in the original text about Secret Service 2. That game was released one year ago and it had unified lighting and shadowing. Despite being a "value title". Several other XBox games also released 6-12 months ago had unified lighting and shadowing. So unless your definition of "first of its kind" differs from the generally accepted one, Doom 3 lighting wasn't it. Also, as I wrote, 4 out of 5 directors of game development companies (not just some random losers) who played the game, said that the level of graphics quality is comparable with Far Cry (better in some respects, worse in others). There was even a reference, if you don't believe me.

This is utter garbage. I asked you to come up with a reasonable rewrite for the section but you still maintain your juvenile and baseless critiques of the game that only a select few of the gaming community agree with. NPOV now or revert.

You replaced a perfectly neutral section with badly written text, changing it into such nonsense as "When the game was released in 2004, the gaming public was polarised.... According to most reviewers, the game lived up to the "hype" surrounding it since its announcement.... Other reviewers complained of the lack of reverberation". You wrongly removed factually correct and relevant information and persist with your personal attacks on me. Please stop doing that. Calm down, put down your counterarguments in a rational way and support your claims with facts, while respecting what others say, and we can continue working together on the article. But stop vandalising the article and deleting facts. You can't revert reality. Paranoid 13:26, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Please, calm down and let's discuss the dispute instead of reverting. From Wikipedia:Dispute resolution: "When someone makes an edit you consider biased or inaccurate, improve the edit, rather than reverting it." Please, consider what you want to be changed in the latest version of "Reception and impact" instead of just deleting 2 pages of text. Express your specific concerns and suport them with facts and references. Then we can discuss it rationally and coolly and reach a consensus. Reverting is pointless and doesn't solve the dispute. Paranoid 13:42, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Quoting Carmack's .plan

Is it worth noting in this article that the choice to do DOOM 3 did not come easily? According to John Carmack, he and Paul Steed gave Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud an ultimatum that they must do DOOM 3 instead of Quake 4 or fire everyone. Adrian and Kevin agreed to do DOOM 3, but fired Paul Steed anyway. That is all I remember from the news about four years ago. Anyone know more and want to add it to the article? Kainaw 19:55, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

In regards to the Doom 3 decision, here is the link to [John Carmack's .plan] (June 1, 2000) where he announced that id is working on Doom 3. I may add this later myself. Paranoid 19:58, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why does the .plan have to be posted in the development section? It's about a page full of text not really contributing heavily to the topic or the article. Can't we just put a link to the .plans at the end or in the section? --G3pro

I fixed this. Paranoid 13:58, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I definitely think that this .plan should be within the wikipedia "universe" in some fashion, as it is easily savable data, text only, that tells the story in Carmack's original words. I don't know the whole etiquitte of this environment yet, but maybe a separate entry called "Paul Steed is Fired" or "Doom 3 Steed Firing" that is referenced from the bottom would help. Anyone want to tell me how this usually handled? --Jscott 03:20, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)Jason Scott

I don't think it's that important to include the text, but it can be done. Technically, if you just copy it, it will probably be considered a copyright violation, but if you intersperse your relevant comments on this original document between the paragraphs and the amount of comments will be comparable with the original text, this will be quoting and thus fair use. Paranoid 08:51, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This is one of Wikipedia's great failures, or perhaps it's simply a disagreement of approach. By depending so utterly on external links for primary sources, it ensures that what's left are the (by their nature) incomplete and semi-glossed summaries within the entries. Perhaps this is intended, so that every last possible shred of anything approaching litigation can be avoided, but it makes the whole of the site very bland and ultimately uninformative. It forces every primary source through a mottled filter of the person paraphrasing a perfectly servicable document, which itself will be modified by folks with various agendas of punctuation, style and approach. Watching the semi-poor rephrasing of the .plan I pasted tells me that this whole semi-important insight into the Doom 3 genesis will be eventually buried and lost. Obviously, I am at odds with Wikipedia. --Jscott 11:23, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree it would be much easier without copyright, so that we can quote, copy and edit other sources at will. Unfortunately, this is not how things are. One view is that this semi-poor summary can (and will eventually) be edited into a good one. Another is that we can simply link the relevant document - it's available in many places and even if it suddenly vanishes we can use Internet Archive. Also, personally I don't think it's important enough to warrant more than 1 paragraph, so quoting would be really wasteful. Just saying that there was initial disagreement is enough for the history. :) Paranoid 12:02, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Internet Archive only exists because a group of folks have more of a backbone than is being shown in this entry and over this mini-controversy. That said, you present me with a possible "out", that of incorporating original primary source with commentary and addition, resulting in both a more complete analysis of what was involved, while including as much of the primary source (albeit cut up) as possible. Thank you. --Jscott 20:38, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Various edits explained

Below are justification for some of the changes and text removals in the last edit.

"Contrary to what is written in the manual, in the actual gameplay, the pistol is automatic, meaning it is possible for the player to simply hold the fire button in order to shoot multiple rounds. "

The pistol *is* in fact semi-automatic. The misconception that it is automatic might occur because: when the player holds down the button used to attack, the marine will automatically pull the trigger of the pistol repeatedly for the player (if the weapon itself were automatic, the marine would not have to pull the trigger repeatedly for the player).

Factual error. Actually, the marine was transferred to Mars and then sent on a routine mission.

Show those critics who "acclaimed the in-depth story". Even one review at CGW that rated D3 100%, spoke of "quick in-game cut-scenes", not "Lengthy and frequent cutscenes".

"A science fiction writer was employed by id for the first time". It sounds unclear - like may be it was the first time in the industry.

"Similar to science fiction classics such as System Shock" - the fact that there are messages doesn't mean the game is a classic. I can write "similar to some of the crappiest games ever like <Crappy Game> there are hundreds of messages". Don't POV it.

Also, video disks are not messages, but corporate propaganda and informational videos.

"a rich look into the psyche" - sounds a little bit over the top.

"enemy-player combat scripts" - I don't understand what that means. "the strong AI takes over" - there is simply no strong AI in the game. The AI is not horrible, but neither is it great - it is merely adequate. Monsters run to you and try to attack without getting stuck and that's about it.

"graphics engine's ability to cast realistic, unified lighting to create moody, dark, tense areas of the Mars base." - Shadows are casted, not lighting. And being unified has nothing to do with the atmosphere. Besides, they are not realistic, they are merely dynamic. One can argue that the lack of ambient light is totally unrealistic. In the atmosphere light is scattering. Furthermore, light sources are not points, but areas. Finally, there should be secondary reflections from non-black surfaces. All these three factors create ambient light, which is sadly missing from Doom 3. BTW, lightmaps were capable of providing truly realistic (albeit without moving light sources) lighting for many years.

"the developers were still able to create very dynamic and interesting levels right after another" - this is merely your biased opinion. Personally I think that s single room in Max Payne 2 often had more details than entire levels in Doom 3. Compare the Police Station in MP2 with the whole D3 base from level 1. "The same level design is not used over again and there are various areas scientific or utility areas." - I haven't noticed much difference - all outside levels were the same, all Mars base levels were the same, only Hell provided some variety, albeit later in the game. "Every area is tied in with the rest of the Mars base to provide a coherent experience of being in an actual Mars base." - again, merely an opinion.

Factual error. Havoc is not used in Doom 3, the game uses id's own physics engine. Physics are only used in very limited circumstances:

• pushing all barrels and soft drink cans.
• pushing a small fraction of available lamps, boxes, chairs and notebooks (and a few other rare objects). Most objects, however, are glued to the floor and are indestructible.
• monsters staggering after being shot and falling after being killed.

Note that there is also almost no ways to interact with the physical environment besides shooting those few objects that respond. I've found only one type of light sources (seen about 3 times) that can be destroyed. Glass can't be destroyed (except by scripts), monitors can't be destroyed, etc. The environment is amazingly non-interactive by 2004 standards. Heck, Duke Nukem 3D was more interactive than this! A small test - how many interactive features can you name that are in Doom 3 and weren't in Duke Nukem?

Factual error. "id was forced to abandon the complex environmental effects" - any references?

---

The text below was removed, because it is either false or too biased (and if rewritten to be neutral will become irrelevant).

• Another critical feature of Doom 3 is the actual environment of the Mars base. Even though the possibilities for various environments in the base were minimal, the developers were still able to create very dynamic and interesting levels right after another. The same level design is not used over again and there are various areas scientific or utility areas. Some areas include scientific labs, nuclear reactor, waste processing, Hell, an archaelogical excavation site, an ancient burial site, materials processing, administrative offices, monorail, Mars surface, and teleportation facilities. Every area is tied in with the rest of the Mars base to provide a coherent experience of being in an actual Mars base.

• id also featured an environment which could be interacted with but did not allow interaction to disrupt the flow of the story or action, such as ripping a hole in the side of the Mars base to move through an area. Also featured is a state-of-the-art physics engine: HAVOK. This is the same physics engine as the engine in Source.

• Originally, John Carmack designed a new sound engine which was able to do the same environmental effects as in EAX capable sound cards, but on the CPU. However, due to a patent issue, id was forced to abandon the complex environmental effects and to use EAX technology in a future update.

Paranoid 12:32, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

AI enemy soldiers try to flank your position. This is not combat scripting but true AI. Prior to combat, it is a scripted action.

This is not "true AI". This is some crappy AI from Half-Life (not 2) era. If you compare Doom 3 with Far Cry, it doesn't really have much of AI. Saying that Doom 3 has some great AI in the list of features is a lie. It doesn't and there are two ways to prove it - either to read reviews (no review that I read mentioned great AI, although many mocked the poor AI) or to play the game. What zombie soldiers and imps do is extremely simple and basic. It's adequate to the game, may be, but "true AI" (whatever it means) it isn't.

Doom 3 uses the HAVOC 2 engine. HL2 uses a modified HAVOC 2 engine.

Sorry, but it just doesn't. Havok (it's spelled with K) site doesn't say anything about Doom 3, other sites don't say anything about Doom 3 and Havok, Doom 3 box doesn't say anything about Havok. All articles and reviews speak about id's own physics engine. Provide a reference for your claims if you want to argue.

one of Doom 3's features is a coherent environment. If you don't agree with that personally, you delete it?

I'd rather say bland and repeating, but I won't. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn't much to speak of in terms of coherent environment in Doom 3. There is nothing special and we have seen those same levels done much better (in terms of variety and coherence) years ago. There are some strong points about environments - for example, attention to detail in level design. This is obviously a strong point which is often mentioned by reviewers and is visible in the game. If you want, write about it. But please, not about some mystical coherence, which is not defined anywhere and about which it's not explained why it is special and different from other games. For example, is there more "coherence" in Doom 3 levels than in Far Cry? I am not arguing there isn't, I am just saying that it's too vague a concept to leave as it is.

See Patent Issue

See what? IIRC, there was some advanced sound functionality being developed, but JC said he doesn't like it and simplified the engine (rewrote it?) to support only the basic 6-channel sound. I have not seen any evidence that it is somehow related to the Patent issue (which is about a graphics algorithm). Again, if you can provide a reference, go ahead.

System Shock is a gaming classic from which the developers of Doom 3 said that they got a lot of their inspiration from.

Then write THAT (preferably with a reference, I don't trust your memory much now).

Bottom line: you are putting your biased POV into the article. The features of Doom 3 are listed. The critiques are listed by you. That's a balanced article (NPOV, if you will). Stop being a wiki-thug and shifting biases. How about changing a few words or doing some rewording instead of deleting?

I removed 3 sections - one was about environment variety and interesting levels. I haven't read in reviews that Doom 3 was somehow better than Painkiller, Far Cry, Max Payne, NOLF2 (I saw it compared with Halo, but only in the sense that id designers adopt the same copy-paste approach in level design) and I certainly didn't see it myself. The section was false and biased, so I removed it. The second part was about Havok, which was factually incorrect, so it was removed too. The third part, about patent issues related to sound engine, also was incorrect, to the best of my knowledge. I don't remove text, just because I don't like it, I usually need some valid reasons. So, please excuse me while I will remove these factually incorrect sections again. If you want them reinstated, I would appreciate if you find a reference proving your point first - after all, I made the effort to check havok.com and other sites before deleting your contribution, it would only be polite if you made some effort to check the facts too.

P.S. I am also wondering why you replaced the link to unified lighting and shadowing with unified lighting and shadowing. The first letter's case is irrelevant, so the simple link would work just fine.

Paranoid 14:31, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

While I agree with much of your arguments here, there are two that I disagree with.

First, Doom 3 does have AI controlled NPCs. The NPCs are not scripted. A scripted NPC is unable to choose what to do. It moves from point A to point B and shoots if you get near it. In Doom 3, the NPCs try to flank you. They make every attempt to move around to your sides, limited by the map. You claim that because the AI in Doom 3 isn't on par with Far Cry, it isn't AI. That is not true. Just because the AI isn't the best AI on the market does not mean that it is not AI. Instead of claiming that Doom 3 lacks any and all AI, you could claim that it implements a simplistic AI.

Things like "doesn't really have much of AI" wasn't meant literally. :-) Yes, Doom 3 HAS AI, but it is the very definition of "nothing special". Yes, zombies may flank you, yes some monsters will crouch and yes, imps can sidejump very beautifully. But it's the year 2004 and things like that stopped being amazing about 5 years ago. I remember being impressed with some monster (Berserker?) crouching in Quake II, I remember being impressed by soldiers in Half-Life, but that is no longer so cool. :) When we look at Far Cry, we have amazing and very life-like team tactical AI. Then we can write in the Far Cry article that the game has great AI. But when the game has AI which is as basic as that in Doom 3, this is not a feature, this is a lack of it.

You also allude to the claim in the article and in your discussion here that Doom 3 has absolutely no leading edge technology of any kind whatsoever. It does have unified lighting and shadowing. That is a rather important technological advance in real-time 3D. Most people probably don't think about it, but it is important in this game - as I'm sure they designed the game to showcase it. When an NPC is in a room flooded with red light, the NPC has a red hue. When they walk into another room with white light, they lose the red hue. If they walk from a shadow into the light, they go from dim coloring to bright coloring. In other 3D games, the NPCs are shaded at compile time. If they start in the shadows and walk into the light, they remain dark. If they start in a red room and walk into white light, they remain red. While this feature does little to improve gameplay, it is one important feature that is leading edge technology.

Kainaw 16:19, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I am not really saying that Doom 3 has no leading edge tech, I am just saying that unified lighting and shadowing was implemented a year before in several other titles. I am willing to admit that Doom 3 lighting is of better quality and more efficient, may be. I am just saying that although it would have been a revolution in early 2003, it no longer is one in August 2004. It's still cool, Doom 3 is still ahead of direct competitors in terms of lighting (although one can say they simply don't think unified lighting is worth losing soft shadows and radiosity), but it wasn't the first - that's all.

As for the changing colors, you are not actually correct. Even in Quake 2 (the first major title to have coloured lighting, thanks to the wonders of 3D accelerators) characters changed their color (hue) depending on where they were. They were darker in shadows, redder in rooms with red light, etc. The only difference is that in older games the whole character changed colour (brightness), but in Doom 3 every part of the character (every pixel - thus "per-pixel lighting") changes depending on the light falling on it. The thing is that dynamic lighting is only important when you have moving objects or moving light sources. And there aren't too many of them in Doom 3. Those that are could be implemented using workarounds (like in Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and every other game with some sort of shadows). And without unified lighting the environment would have soft shadows and ambient light, increasing image quality. Of course, there are things that would be impossible, like self-shadowing and per-pixel shadows on characters, but the game will really not lose that much. Paranoid 17:42, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

GTA

In the Web-integration selection, it says that Rockstar created sites for most of the urls in the game but everyone of them I tried worked.

DOOM 3 and RPG elements

It looks like someone completely missed my point when I said sometething like "it could be said this DOOM game gained some RPG elements", which was properly reverted, of course. First of all, of course there isn't character development. How obvious can that be? But let me be exact here. Character development in DOOM 3 is very small, and that's certainly not something you see on RPG games. But DOOM 3 is not an RPG game, and that's not what I said with my contribution.

Point two. Yes, interactions with the story aren't particularly complex. So? Missed the point again. What I was trying to say is, the interaction is specially complex if compared with the previous DOOM games. If you think of DOOM and DOOM 2, you'll notice pretty fast that DOOM 3 is a HUGE step from those games, because you can do a hell lot more with it, yet it doesn't get thrown into the RPG category for that alone, which I never implied. Again.

Point three. Saying that "other small details" are unrelated to RPGs is arguable, and reflects opinion. I never said "This DOOM game is almost like an RPG because of this and this". What I was trying to tell the reader is that this new DOOM game has several new features that were never seen before in the previous games, and that they do make people remember of RPGs. This isn't the end of the world, though. If you check the Computer role-playing game article, you'll see right at the beginning that "RPG gameplay elements can be found in RTS, FPS, TPS, and some other types such as MMO". We ain't dealing with uncharted waters.

The idea of "elements" is highly abstract and subjective, that's obvious. That contribution was meant to make the reader understand that these new features are new in the series, and that they point to an RPG gameplay feeling. Nothing is exact on that. It was never meant to be surgically accurate, but rather, to make people understand.

My two cents. – Kaonashi 02:06, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't think the game ought to be compared with the prequels. Arguably, there is almost nothing in Doom 3 that wasn't in Half-Life (original), but you don't hear people (neither in general, nor here at Wikipedia) talking about RPG elements in HL. Ditto for all other FPS games. So talking about RPG elements in Doom 3 misleading, regardless of whether there are some minor justifications for that. Paranoid 02:45, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Spoiler warning needed

This article (especially the story section) needs a spoiler warning. (Yes, there might be some people out there who haven't played it all the way through yet - I pity them too.  ;-D)

I don't know how to make one of those nice "spoiler" boxes like the stub box things so I'm not doing it myself, but it would be great if someone else could. (unsigned comment from some Wikipedian)

Request for info

The article dosen't say anything about the system requirements. Please post system requirements (e.g. CPU speed, minimum RAM memory, Processing unit, etc.). --SuperDude 04:14, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Mention of Tim Willits pre-id-employment levels in manual

This isn't entirely about Doom 3, but it was mentioned in the manual. Tim Willits apparently released some of his .WAD levels on the internet, like many Doom fans did (and still do), before he was hired by id. A Google search for his levels doesn't really yield any results; I suspect they may, though, still be sitting on some site that hosts old ftp.cdrom.com files. Does anyone know the names of Tim Willits' .WADs and if they're still available anywhere? --I am not good at running 05:55, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

• Raven
• Master Levels for Doom II (commercial) attack.wad and canyon.wad - Fredrik | talk 06:11, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

Nice, thanks! I definitely remember the first map in that .WAD before Doom 2 was released, as a popular Doom 1 deathmatch map. Willits is a bit of a sloppy texturer but I can see the potential they saw in his layout designs. --I am not good at running 06:52, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

By the way, Willits also made E4M5 in Ultimate Doom. And like with Raven, his sister Theresa Chasar helped out with that one. Fredrik | talk 16:09, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Mods

The article hardly talks about Doom 3's mods. Regrettably, I don't know much about this area (I only just started playing through the actual game properly =) but I'd like to see some of that mentioned, too - too bad my mod search skills aren't that good, but I know for certain they aren't all "duct tape" and "weapons that actually kick ass" mods! =) (Someone bloody well ought to make an article about Classic Doom 3, for example - looks like they pushed out a 1.0 release lately.) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 17:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Ambient lighting

There is an error on the page about the features of the engine. The Doom 3 engine is capable of doing ambient lighting, what it is not capable of doing is 'global illumination' (e.g. radiosity). I think the problem is that Doom 3 never uses that feature in game maps, and Quake 4 used it very badly in the single player maps(in my opinion) which has generally led to confusion about the capabilities of the engine. I have corrected this, by changing:

"A shortcoming of this approach is the engine's inability to render soft shadows and ambient lighting."

to

"A shortcoming of this approach is the engine's inability to render soft shadows and global illumination."

Despite this, these statements are still slightly incorrect since static global illumination effects can be approximated using custom textures with pre-baked detail or by using some custom shaders, and dynamic ones can be approximated using the scripts and the exisiting lighting model to some extent. Likewise, soft shadows can be produced by simply producing a 'jittered' light source by hand, using a strip of 8 lights for a fluorescent strip light for instance, which is no better (visual or performance wise) than what most soft shadow techniques do under the hood anyway. I won't argue the point though, since in any case it requires a lot of additional work to 'hack' the engine into doing these things, and Doom 3 certainly hasnt been designed for doing these things.

-- a noob who should prolly create a user account :)

also, under hardware performance: "(more than the built-in engine's framerate of 60 frame/s)" i think this statement is confusing, partly because of the grammar, also because there is no 'built-in framerate' that i am aware of. the default options will result in a cap of 60fps if you have a 60hz monitor because of the 'vertical sync' option, which stops the image from 'cutting' at low framerates, this can be turned off in the options menu however... so i removed it

that whole sections is a bit confusing, it seems to make no distinction between video ram and the regular ram, and is generally a bit sloppy. would there be any objections if I replaced it perhaps?

--Jheriko

I'm going to have to correct you there. The game internally self-limits to 60FPS by default regardless of hardware capabilities because anything higher than that will cause the game physics to potentially go out of sync. The limit is only ignored during the playback of a timedemo, since all calculations are pre-recorded. The limit can however be removed via setting the cvar "com_fixedTic" to either -1 or 1. V-sync is unrelated in this regard since it cannot override the internal limit.

Search this page for further details by looking for the aforementioned command. CABAL 10:41, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting me. I shouldnt have assumed that Doom 3 would work that way. Its a bit confusing, even the command itself is totally inconsistent since the name 'fixedTic' implies 1 would cap it, 0 would not, and -1? whats up with that? I have tested it out and it does seem that you are correct that the game plays badly if it is unset... I wonder what causes this... probably some multiplayer compromise i just dont understand. Is there any more information anywhere about this 'feature'? From what I understand of physics and rendering in general, there is no good reason to do this, but i can imagine its some compromise or optimisation to allow physics to be done with integers or some such...

I still have a small complaint about this part of the article too tho:

"While the game's packaging declared that 384MB RAM was required to run the game, it was highly recommended that around 1GB RAM be present in the machine. Having 512MB RAM or lower would cause the game to freeze for lengthened periods of time when entering a new room, due to the textures being preloaded into the limited memory. This could, however, be avoided by reducing the texture size to medium, which was recommended for video cards with 128MB of RAM in any case, and keeping the resolution at 800x600 or 640x480. It is possible, but difficult, to achieve smooth gameplay at 1024x768 with detail set to high on a machine with 512MB RAM. Alternatively, the data package containing the textures could be unzipped (the file was essentially a ZIP archive with a different file ending), speeding up file access."

Unzipping the file only helps load times afaik, since the files arent unzipped when they are copied into video memory, only on the intial load when the ram (and if you dont have enough ram, the virtual memory) is filled with textures and the rest of the data, models and geometry etc. Also in my experience the RAM is much less of an issue than the video ram or the speed of the graphics card, since when upgrading my system I have always noticed an increase in peformance from increasing the graphics card spec, yet when I removed 512MB of main system RAM to use in another system the performance decrease was too small to notice. I think this is probably because the main memory texture swaps happen less often than the swaps from main memory to graphics card, which cause the numerous hitches which arent accompanied by disk grinding, I think that only the less frequent disk grinding hitches are from page swapping. Basically I think it overstates the importance of the system RAM for the game, compared to the graphics card. In addition to this, I find it a bit hard to imagine the data for a whole doom level going much over 512MB esp since *all* of the map textures I have in my vanilla Doom 3 install barely reach that figure. Even including the model textures and model data, you would still need to use a very large amount of it (30-50% i would guess) to fill that much memory in one level.

Jheriko 16:52, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

You are correct on the assumption that its to allow for multiplayer stability. Game physics have to be synchronized across all clients to ensure the game plays out correctly. Apparently it had something to do with synchronity errors allowing people to cheat in multiplayer by tricking the server regarding your position. Do your own searching via Google. CABAL 12:51, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I did do some searching but I couldnt find anything useful. Jheriko , 12:43, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I removed the bit about unzipping the file... Jheriko 22:35, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Grammar of last shortcoming

• "One uncommon reception at best was that monsters had gibbed rather then for the body of every monster to not gib/disappear."

This point seems to not make any sense... Could someone please fix. korp7
hmm..
I deleted it! It was a stupid fan made and doesn't make sense. The editor was trying to say that evil doctor or the monsters. When the emps and others teleport to where the d00m guy is, it is controlled by a machine. Like pulling a switch up and down/on and off.

>x<ino 09:04, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

What? Master Deusoma 05:26, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Exactly... what? The explaination makes even less sense than the original quote.

Timeline

"The game was in development for ten years. In 1994 it was first shown to the public at Macworld Conference & Expo in Tokyo and was later demonstrated at E3 in 2002…" Is it me, or is this complete BS? -Ahruman 20:26, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

That was just vandalism by User:24.248.86.104. [12] Corrected it. AlistairMcMillan 22:05, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

BFG

What's wrong with BFG description? "BFG 9000 (Id thought up "Big Fucking Gun" first, then found a scientific name for it. which turned out to be "Bio Force Gun") – an extremely powerful energy charge weapon very capable of room clearing."

Actually it's "Big Fragging Gun", not "Big Fucking Gun" nor "Bio Force Gun" (Which was from the movie.), although I see no problems in calling it the Big Fucking Gun, if you want to be literal it is not.19:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

According to the latest revision of the BFG9000 article, “The abbreviation BFG stands for "Big Fucking Gun", as explained in Tom Hall's original Doom design document (Section 14).” (second paragraph) --70.25.168.90 21:50, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

NPOV

i think this is not npov

While not as remarkable as the technology that fuels it, the game itself is put together well enough to make Doom 3 legitimately great. --201.128.79.245 00:52, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

I thought exactly the same when I saw it. I've removed it. If someone feels it should stay at least reword it.--Outlyer 01:34, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Ancient alien's sacrifice/survival

[...]Quickly invaded by demons, this alien race created and sacrificed themselves to a weapon known as the Soul Cube [...] This cube, powered by the souls of almost every being of this alien race, was used by their strongest warrior to defeat and contain the demons in Hell.
[...]Having done so, the remainder of the alien race constructed warnings to any who visited Mars[...]
Duh? This should be reworded, the first sentence seems to imply that all of them (save for one) immolated themselves but the next one implies some more of them survived. --Outlyer 17:53, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

a deal with the soul cube?

Betruger takes the Soul Cube into Hell and apparently made an unknown kind of deal with the creatures there.
Uhm, wasn't the soul cube just taken/stolen/kidnapped? I didn't see any indication that the soul cube could do anything by itself (except talk).

• It means he makes a deal with the creatures in hell, brainiac.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Master Deusoma (talk • contribs) 01:26, 14 August 2006.
  • Watch it. Remember to be civil. My own recollection is that it was a fairly one-sided "deal"- the Marine grabs the Soul Cube, and the Soul Cube keeps telling him what to do. There's no in-game bargaining; hence the confusion. Captainktainer * Talk 08:57, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
    • The confusion was actually with the word "there", since there are "creatures" in the cube too (re-read the sentence with that in mind). Also, do we get to know if Betruger makes a deal, has his body/mind taken over, or even originally spawned from hell? I don't see a mention of any deal at all by anyone. Compare this to "Sarge". Is he evil or victim-forced-evil?

Weapons

Not simply wishing to plug my own work, but I've just been rewording the Doom 3 weapons article and wondered- why on earth do we need two lists of weapons, one in the main article and one on anotehr page? We could either lose the list on the main article, or incorporate the shiny new text (that I've just been copyediting) into the main article. Anyone agree? Bosola 01:51, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Moving unreferenced material from Trivia per WP:OR

I'm removing several sections for which the source is in doubt, and putting them here. Please archive separately if talk page archiving occurs. Please find sources for this material, especially the "lines of code" and "Tim Willits" sections.

Oh, oh! I know! The ones you specify are from the Doom3 manual. I assume info in the manual can be regarded as fact? Really, the removal seems to be due to less research than their initial inclusion.

• Tim Willits, the lead designer on Doom 3, started his career making maps for the original Doom and releasing them on the internet for free. id liked his work and hired him as a designer in 1995. --- word for word from the manual
• There were over 500,000 lines of script code and over 25,000 image files generated in the process of creating all of the graphical interfaces, computer screens, and displays throughout Doom 3. -- word for word from the manual
• The Soul Cube first appeared as part of the original design for the id game Quake by lead game designer John Romero. It was quickly removed from the game once other members of the id team decided to make Quake as a FPS similar to the original Doom games.
• The storyline was originally going to include another human antagonist called General Hayden, who would become corrupted by demonic influences and manipulate Sergeant Kelly, ultimately leading the Sergeant to his own downfall and corruption. Hayden would seem like the main villain until the player hunted him down and defeated him in Hell, only to return to Mars and find Betruger the true mastermind and leader behind the invasion. Hayden was removed from later drafts of the storyline in order to simplify the main characters for the sake of game flow.
• The British newspaper Daily Mail unsuccessfully called for Doom 3 to be banned before it was even released after the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, in which the murderer was allegedly believed to be inspired by the game Manhunt.