Doom 3 FTP

[Droo]

When I signed on to start downloading, there were 199 users on at the time and when I started downloading, my rate was 1.3Mb/sec. This is an authentic download, I was on Teamspeak with a few friends, one had already downloaded it and had started playing, the rest, like me were experiencing more or less maximum download rates. If you wish to download it you'll need SmartFTP or similar, the details are as follows:

login: dff
password: doom3
IP: 129.194.55.229/
Port: 162

Happy downloading.

[Shawn]

I fully plan on purchasing this. But since it won't be out in stores for 3 more days or so, I'm not against having an early preview. :) I'll try the FTP and report back. Thanks.

[Darth Viscera]

this game looks like it'll scare the shit out of me, due to it being so dark and scary looking. thanks :)

[Crystal]

When I was little, the orginal Doom scared the crap out of me.. with the darkness and the flashing.. and the scary noises :(

I can't play this one on my PC, so I have to wait untill a friend with a better PC buys it.

[Darth Viscera]

that's nothing. when i was little, the original Zelda scared the crap out of me. I couldn't stand being in those dark dungeons or whatever with those scary monsters and all that scary music :(

ima take a happy pill just prior to playing this to see how fucked up i can get in one night

[Shawn]

It must be getting hammered. I've tried a couple of times and haven't managed to get above 10k/sec.

[Darth Viscera]

i've been pulling it down at 125KB/sec since 6:25pm :\

[Shawn]

It's ok. I've been running a torrent from a private source. I should have it in about 2.5 hours.

One thing: If you guys really do like the game, please try to buy it? Same thing for anyone you know. In short, I agree with the general sentiment of trying to show id that PC gaming is still a profitable market.

[Darth Viscera]

ack, i just got past the initial cutscreen and already I'm scared shitless. Where's the option that lets you turn on the lights and makes bullets lethal?

[Droo]

I had one or two instances earlier this evening that when I returned to my computer I would find the download rate had plummeted to something like 8kbps. To resolve this all I had to do was close SmartFTP, restart my computer and resume the download; my download was then returned to it's full capacity. I've been watching Godsend then HP3 so I wont install it until tomorrow morning so any wee reviews of what you've played so far would be grand.

And I agree with Shawn about buying the game. I will be buying this either when it comes out or shortly after, I just thought I might as well download it; I pay for my internet connection after all; I might as well use it. :)

[Darth Viscera]

that's odd, the sound cuts out after about 3 minutes of gameplay

edit~
that's not right. 1024x768, AA off, low quality, all graphical options save bump mapping switched off, 30-50fps. 1024x768, AA 2x, high quality, all graphical options set on, 6-12fps.

[Droo]

Permanently? I heard from one of my friends that the sound is very quiet at one point or another but nothing about it cutting out. :\

[Shawn]

I heard rumors about it using SilentAlarm, but I haven't heard a single person verify said rumors.

[Darth Viscera]

Originally posted by Dru
Permanently? I heard from one of my friends that the sound is very quiet at one point or another but nothing about it cutting out. :\

restarting the game gets you audio back

and yes, the sound cuts completely out, it's not an issue of the audio just being un-normalized or anything

[Shawn]

FUCK ME. It's actually scary. Things just started to, uh, go to hell. I've killed a handful of the walking dead and I'm starting to get really cautious. I walked up to a sliding door and stood in the doorway, surveying the room ahead. Nothing immediately caught my eye as dangerous, so I walked in. Halfway through the room, the lights cut out. I see a figure shamble around the corner, carrying what I pray is not a chainsaw. I start to back up, hoping to make it back into the previous room before it spots me... and I realize that I'm not going back far enough. Shit. I start to panic as I realize the door locked behind me. That's when I knew Doom 3 had me hooked.

The ambient sounds in the game are fantastic.

For anyone interested, I'm playing at 1024x768, High Quality, 2xAA. Radeon 9700 Pro, 1gb Corsair XMS2700 and a P4 2.4b ghz. I get 30fps in firefights, and it goes all the way up to the 60fps cap when I'm just walking around. I'm actually surprised: I honestly didn't think I'd be able to play it at these settings.

http://img58.exs.cx/img58/4921/Doom-1.jpg - first appearance of an Imp. Don't click if you'd prefer to see it for yourself.

[Darth Viscera]

I'm playing at 800x600, HQ, 2xAA, seems smooth enough. This game thrives on video cards better than my poor Radeon 9600. Here's my benchmarks:

AMD Athlon XP2500+ (Barton)
1024MB PC3200 RAM
Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB
120GB 7200 RPM Western Digital 8MB cache

Resolution: 800x600
Video: Hiqh Quality
High Quality Special Effects: Off
Enable Shadows: Off
Enable Specular: Off
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: Off
timedemo demo1: 35.8fps

Resolution: 800x600
Video: High Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: Off
timedemo demo1: 23.1fps

Resolution: 800x600
Video: High Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: 2x
Fullscreen: Off
timedemo demo1: 23.2fps

Resolution: 1024x768
Video: High Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: 2x
Fullscreen: Off
timedemo demo1: 12.3fps

[Master Yoghurt]

I do not usually say such things, but...

<font size=6 color=red>HOLY SHIT!!!</font>

Im shaking. That was the most terrifying and immersive game experience I had for years. And I only played for a few minutes.

That is, I only played until a zombie popped up on me in the dark, scaring the beejuices out of me! I had some nice personal contact with the floor, as that... thing looks at me with glowing eyes as he is about to do something terrible to me... aaaaahhh!

[Master Yoghurt]

I went through a dark spot, had like 2% health left, surely not lasting much longer. I was fully alert.. and cautiously approached a door. Anxiously, I open up the door.. (is there anything in there?), and sure enough something is moving inside, there is an agonising moan but I cant quite make out what it is. Instinctively, I back off from the door with my shotgun ready.

Nothing.. dead silence.

I carefully appoach the door again, and turn on my flashlight, moving the cone of light across the chamber, and my heart stops as I see..

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/01.jpg

Arghh!! A freshly killed man hanging from the ceiling. But who.. or rather what killed him?

I carefully apporach the next door.. and before I know it, an Imp jumps at me! I panic, and run like heck with the monster trailing me closely behind. But then I take a wrong turn and I am trapped! As I turn around, I see the monster sending a fireball to me, and I drop to the floor, everything darkens.. :uhoh

[Shawn]

P4 2.4b ghz
1024MB Corsair XMS2700 RAM
Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB @ 330/660
120GB 7200 RPM Seagate 8MB cache

Resolution: 1024x768
Video: Hiqh Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 37.2fps

[Droo]

How do you obtain these statistics, guys?

[Darth Viscera]

CTRL + ALT + ~ to bring up the console

timedemo demo1

@nup, my results with the same settings on

Resolution: 1024x768
Video: Hiqh Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 15.4fps

and a test to see how fast it goes when it's just the CPU and not the GPU doing most of the work:

Resolution: 640x480
Video: Low Quality
High Quality Special Effects: Off
Enable Shadows: Off
Enable Specular: Off
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 43.4fps

I'm going to try moving my Doom3 directory out of my mass storage partition and into my system partition, which should be far less fragmented (although I've defragmented my storage partition recently) in order to determine whether or not that speeds up my framerate and puts an end to lag spikes whenever Doom3 needs to load a new texture.

edit~done, same as test above but 41.2fps, still lag spikes.

[Shawn]

I OC'ed my card slightly to eke out a few more fps, as well as using the beta ogl drivers. Also, while 2xFSAA wasn't a huge performance hit, I turned it off because I need all the help I can get. :)

[Darth Viscera]

beta ogl drivers? link? i'm just using Catalyst 4.7

[Shawn]

http://dark_god7.home.mindspring.com/atioglxx.rar - extract to your windows\system32 folder, overwriting the existing file. Back it up first if you want to roll back.

[Darth Viscera]

changed back to storage partition

OGL beta drivers
Resolution: 1024x768
Video: High Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 14.8fps

tried copying atioglxx.dll to the doom3 folder as suggested on SA, ran above timedemo again and got 15.3fps.

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Shawn
http://dark_god7.home.mindspring.com/atioglxx.rar - extract to your windows\system32 folder, overwriting the existing file. Back it up first if you want to roll back. That reminds me that I need to see about baselining and possibly overclocking my Radeon 9800 Pro here one of these nights. As for the drivers I'll snag 'em when I get home from work later today. :) Thanks Shawn.

[Darth Viscera]

I'm starting to think that picking up a Radeon 9600 Pro 256 last christmas wasn't such a bright idea after all, seems it's the bottleneck on my system ATM.

[Shawn]

It's not a bad card, but it's now a slightly old budget card. I'd recommend 640x480 with everything on.

Since I actually own it now, I'm going to post some screenies in the Gaming forum.

[Charley]

I don't think I should even bother with the system I have :(

[Darth Viscera]

looks like right now the best sub-$200 video card to get is the Radeon 9800 Pro 128. I'll have to remember that for Christmas.

[Shawn]

Originally posted by Charley
I don't think I should even bother with the system I have :( I saw someone who said they got it running on a GeForce 3 Ti200, so anything is possible. If I remember correctly, you have a GF4; If you have a 2ghz+ CPU, you should be able to get it running pretty decently.

[Master Yoghurt]

Originally posted by Charley
I don't think I should even bother with the system I have :(

If you have a GF3 or better, you should definitely give it a try. You were able to run Max Payne 2 fine? Well, this game runs silk smooth on my GeForce 4200. Ingame framerates may diverge from the timedemo results. Lately, I have been playing with these settings:

Athlon XP 2000 (1.67GHz)
512 MB 2100 RAM
Geforce ti4200 64MB
120GB 7200 RPM 2MB cache

Resolution: 640x480
Video: Low Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 18fps

.. but ingame the actual framerate is 50fps in quiet areas, and 25-35fps when the action heats up. It NEVER drops below 20. Definitely a lot better than 18fps, and very playable. If I were to reduce some of the eyecandy, I am sure the framerates would be better also..

For a game having some of the most advanced visuals ever, Id say it is surprisingly flexible to the hardware setup. John Carmack sure knows how to code those shaders and polygons efficiently. Finally, a comment from the guys at <a href=http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQy>[H]ard|OCP</a>:


For those of you that think you are not going to have the hardware that you need to play DOOM 3, the fact of the matter is that many of you will be just fine, although an upgrade may still be in your future. As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience. Even a subtle jump to an AMD 2500+ with a GeForce 3 video card that is two years old will deliver a solid gaming experience that will let you enjoy the game the way id Software designed it to be. That fact alone should let many of you know that you will not be left behind in experiencing DOOM 3.

[Master Yoghurt]

At lowest possible settings, these are the results of timedemo:

Resolution: 640x480
Video: Low Quality
High Quality Special Effects: Off
Enable Shadows: Off
Enable Specular: Off
Enable Bump Maps: Off
Vertical Sync: Off
Antialiasing: Off
Fullscreen: Off
timedemo demo1: 25.0ps

At these settings, it maxes out at 63fps and ~30 in combat with a 30-40 on average. I made a couple of screenshots with those settings. Notice the number in the top left corner, it shows the fps with FRAPS. In the first one, there is a firefight going on, and in the second one, there is not much going on, so the frame rate is near the max.

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/02.jpg

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/03.jpg

[Master Yoghurt]

I did some more testing. Just for kicks I turned upp all the graphics settings, high quality 1024x768 with 2x antialiasing, expecting it would 1. look fantastic and 2. move like a slide show and found.. yes it looked spectacular, but no, it did not move like a slideshow at all. In fact, for the most part, the motion was fairly smooth and it was quite playable at around 20fps.

However, in some areas when there were lots of action and 3-4 enemies attacking me at once, there would be moments where the movements feelt a little too jerky for my taste. In those scenes the framerate would drop to around 10-15fps, at peak times maybe a little below. But by all means, it WAS playable. I mean, I could move up and one shot kill mobs with my shotgun with not too much trouble, which does require some accuracy.

So I adjusted the graphics settings and found a nice balance of graphics quality and framerate. This is what timedemo says about my current settings:

Resolution: 800x600
Video: Medium Quality
High Quality Special Effects: On
Enable Shadows: On
Enable Specular: On
Enable Bump Maps: On
Vertical Sync: On
Antialiasing: 2x
Fullscreen: On
timedemo demo1: 17.6fps

In other words, not much worse than my normal settings, yet the graphics look much much better. The average is still between 30-40. It has to be said though, the framerate does drop to below 20fps in some fast pace scenes, but its not uncomfortable or jerky like in the high quality test. Motion is very smooth. I think I will keep these settings :)

[Master Yoghurt]

some screenshots 800x600:

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/04.jpg

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/05.jpg

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/06.jpg


The fun you can have with a chainsaw.. :evil
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/chainsaw.jpg

[Master Yoghurt]

Reviews are starting to pop up.. :)

Gamers-depot

http://www.gamers-depot.com/games/action/doom3/review/001.htm

Pluses:
+Best Graphics Ever on PC
+Immersive Atmosphere
+Stellar Audio
+Scares the crap out of you
+Great Level Design
+Still very much Doom

Minuses:
-Limited Multiplayer
-May cause congestive heart
failure

score 5.5 av 6


VIA Gamers

http://www.viavga.com/default.asp?PageID=115

Pros:
Awe-inspiring graphics, cutting edge 3D sound, fantastic artwork and level design, stunning character models and animations, sexy sfx, admirable AI, intuitive interface and top notch story and voice acting. Good fleshy single-player FPS experience – the best in years, if not ever.

Cons:

Lean on multiplayer content, no secondary fire mode (id Software really hate alternative fire modes for some reason) and difficult (is it possible?) to activate level editor program.

score 9.6

Gameinformer

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200408/N04.0802.1927.53022.htm

The hype around Doom 3 has been tremendous and is perhaps the most anticipated PC title outside of Half-Life 2. The wait has certainly been long but after what I’ve experienced today, well worth it. The visuals are jaw-dropping, the action is intense, and the storyline is both bizarre and engaging. While I did find a few annoyances, like enemies have way too easy of a time backing you into a corner and then attacking you without mercy, Doom 3 is really going to set the standard on future FPS titles on the PC and perhaps home consoles. Since I just sat down for some serious single player action, we’ll be bringing you more multiplayer details tomorrow. But for the money, the single player campaign is second to none.


PC Gamer (magazine review)
94%. Editors' Choice.
Highs: Extraordinary graphics and sound; incredible tension, atmosphere, and mayhem.
Lows: Some stabs at humor fall a bit flat.
Bottom Line: Just as we'd hoped, it's a non-stop ride of tension, carnage, and terror. A new classic.

(if someone finds scans or full text of this review, let me know)


PC Powerplay

Final Verdict:
For
- Gripping atmosphere
- Superb level design
- Perfect weapon balance
- Awesome graphics

Against
- We honestly can't think of any

Overall
A frighteningly intense experience and an absolute masterpiece of FPS design.

Score:
96/100

[Charley]

I've got an Athlon 2400 (I think)
Ge4 Ti4200
768mb DDR RAM

So I guess I might try this whenever I get my machine out of storage. Probably need to go ahead and order the extra fan though.

[Master Yoghurt]

You got a better machine than me! You should be flying! :)

[Darth Viscera]

then you'll get slightly better performance than Yog. maybe 20fps 800x600 medium quality with all the bells & whistles.

[Master Yoghurt]

Time for some more screenshots..

The lighting in this game is fantastic. Every lightsource dynamically reflects light from surfaces in real time as you move. No artificial lighting here, its extremely realistic. If you were to shoot out a lamp, the lighting change accurately. When there are no light, its pitch dark. The way this game plays with light, shadows and darkness adds to the horror experience in an amazing way.

There are lamps that flickers, explodes, fade out sometimes, it gets so dark you cant see a thing without your flashlight. Frequently, there are monsters jumping out of a dark corner you have not checked.


Here are 2 sample screenshots demonstrating the realistic lighting:

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/lighting1.jpg

http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/lighting2.jpg


The Doom 3 engine handles outdoor enviroments surprisingly well:
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/outdoor1.jpg


One of the bosses (slightly spoilerish):
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/boss1.jpg


The tagging at this place got really bad..
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/tagging.jpg


Give the man a toothbrush!
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/toothbrush.jpg


I have been told sitting in front of a computer too much is unhealthy.. but this computernerd is extreme:
http://www.thegjo.com/pics/screenshots/doom3/computernerd.jpg

[Marcus Telcontar]

timedemo gave me about 40fps running 800*600, medium quality, all options on.

1024*768 timedemo is 22.7, still very playable

640*480 with no options it's 58.9 fps

System is AMD 64 3000+
512mb DDR 2700
80Gb seagate 7200
Radeon 9600XT 128mb

[Master Yoghurt]

Nice system setup and some good framerates there, Mark :)

[Figrin D'an]

I'd try this, but it'll eat my video card. Maybe once I get better one.