Good job I've bought a 20.1" TFT screen!

Damn Blue, that header is just TOO HUGE, even when I set the screen to portrait mode

I'm sorry to hear the sad news. In time the pain will ease and you'll appreciate the time you spent with her.

Just hang in there - it does get easier.

I wonder how long a dvd disc is good for

The time data lasts on the DVD is one issue, but the lack of a true DVD standard could be the other.

Imagine buying a DVD-R recorder, to find out that one year later the DVD standard has been agreed: And its DVD+R.
This is apparantly the reason why the company I work for wont go for a DVD Jukebox system as a backup system.
Sounds suspect to me, but I see the logic - I just doubt it will be a major bastard if that happens.

Chaser is pants:
http://hatekill.yojutsu.com/?viewarticle=review_chaser

Dual CPU systems for games machines? Mad.
Don't think x2 CPUs = x2 performance - you'd be lucky with a 30% increase.

Plus not all apps support it and even fewer games do.

It makes better fiancal sense to buy a fast single CPU system and put the money you save from not buying a dual CPU system towards your next upgrade. Or just spend it on more/better equipment on the single CPU system you buy.

With working with various CAD programs I came to that conclusion. 2 x 750mhz, then 2 x 1ghz, then 1 x 2.8ghz.
Plus some apps don't crash as much with single CPUs.

I'm rambling again - Most of you probably know this stuff anyhow

Good times ahead for gamers i think

Yes, but expensive times also.
GFX cards are continuing to escalate in price. £400 for the new 5900FX? I hated paying £220 for the GF3!

Get a GF3

Don't get a GF3. I have a GF3 with an Athlon 2700XP w. 1GB RAM and got no more than 15fps in the alpha (maybe at a push 20fps). That's at peak!
Minimun was 2fps.

Let's say that with the optimising finished and the debug code switched off, I'd get 20% better performance (I'm sure any programmer would be happy with that).
That still leaves me with:
18fps maybe 24fps which may sound respectable, but not as a peak performance.
2.4fps minimum. So not really anything to brag about.

Whoopee! GF3 kanny take it capin! She's gonna blow!

For there to be a pre-calculated lighting option, it would require at least seperate versions of all the maps, and possibly other assets

I know, that's why as said:

Plus as it's all done in real-time, I can’t have the pre calculated Quake 3 style lighting as a lower setting

I know full well how Q3 levels are made etc. My point is, JC used to made engines that were so adaptable, that you could sacrifice a few minor details for an improvement in speed, and still get a good looking game.
But Doom 3 won’t have that benefit as "it's all about the lighting". If the lighting is the major factor to slowing the game down to unplayable levels, then when I switch the lighting off, I get a game so ugly that I'd rather look at Quake 3!

It's like lowering the settings in Quake 2 until you get a good speed out of it, but it looks worse than Quake. That never happened.

it is designed to run with those options enabled, not disabled

Are you saying then, that iD are basically saying "Your PC can’t run Doom3 with the lighting? Tough shit. Spend a couple of hundred bucks and shut up"? That's not the iD Software I grew to respect.


This comment was edited on Jul 20, 09:00.

One of the reasons ATI scores lower than the 5900 might be because with the 5900 you only have to do one shadow pass per light instead of two on all other cards

I agree with that. If it's proven then the shadows are the major factor to the low frame rates anyone with a geForce 4 or lower gets. All it means is for people like me, I'd have to pay out a couple of hundred of my hard earned cash to get this game to play well in a fairly decent res.

That annoys me - Carmack use to program engines that looked good and ran well on below standard PCs and Doom 3 runs like a dog with one leg on my PC. Doom 3 looks worse than Quake 3 without the lighting and shadows. Plus as it's all done in real-time, I can’t have the pre calculated Quake 3 style lighting as a lower setting, so it’s all or nothing with Doom 3.

Why didn't Carmack produce the Quake 3 engine originally for Quake? Answer: Because no matter how optimised his code was, no PC then would be able to run Quake with that detail. It's obvious, he knows it, I know it and you all know it. Doom 3 is the equivalent of that example. Yes, he wanted an engine that would last 5 years +, but he's (uncharacteristically) done so at the cost of having most PCs when it's released being unable to play the game at a decent res or detail.

Man, this is going to get heated

Saying the verdict of the game is "pointless" without having played a final representation build of the game

It's a preview - Hence why it's under the preview section

Couldn't you make a parameter that, when a user joined a multiplayer game, would check your config and turn on shadows or reject your connection?

That would be a bad idea. The fact is it's the lighting that's slowing everything down.
Look at the characters:
Other than the texture detail and bump/spec mapping, the polly count isn't much different from Q3.
The detail in the levels are questionable as I've only played through 3 levels and I doubt those will make it (as is) into Doom 3 anyway. But they didn't have huge poly counts anyway. More than Q3 certainly, but not huge poly counts.

Based on the Alpha (I know "it wasn't fully optimised") most people with average PCs will have to sacrifice the lighting to get the frame rate. So would you like to be kicked off servers, because 640x480 wasn't an acceptable res and to get better you switched off the lighting?

The Doom3 engine is all about the lighting. What other innovation is there in the engine?
I've read articles posted in Bluesnews where the designers where asked why Doom 3 seems to be quite a different game from the original Doom series (re: slower paced and less monsters)

Their comment was it was partly due to the engine being unable to handle huge hoards of monsters at once.
Designing the levels and so forth where not so much about making the engine look good, but not to let the engine look bad.

After reading those comments (I'll see if I can find the link again) I realised the Doom3 engine was surprisingly restrictive for an engine developed by Carmack. To the extent that that the game had to be developed around it's restrictions.

The source engine appears to have more useful features (lip sinc etc) that would make designers life easier. It isn't a one trick engine: Unlike the Doom 3 engine.

Check this link:
http://hatekill.yojutsu.com/?viewarticle=preview_doom3

It's very anti Doom3 but tries to justify why

just wonder if they're gonna hit the target date of Sept 30th

The engine is finished (has been finished sometime ago) and everything we've seen looks very polished and finalised. I have no doubts that they will meet the deadline, after all the last thing Valve wants is to be late (ala Duke Forever).

Notice they didn't call Unreal 2 a "smash hit"... :)

Ah, but it is! If you remove "mash" from "smash" and move the only "s" left next to "hit" then you get the best description of the game.

Doesn't it just look like Gearbox stuck a cut-down team of a few programmers and 1 or two artist/level designers on this one?

Halo PC can be summarised in one word - Afterthought.

Sad to know seeing as what it started off as.

Now almost two years later we're finally getting our port. A port with almost zero new content and none of what made the original design for Halo so promising.

It gets worse: Halo on the XBOX had co-op and the PC version wont. Gearbox were too busy making sure the internet code was upto scratch and hadn't enough time to implement the co-op.

I dont care how much Randy etc. makes out that you have new vehicles and weapons: A warthog with a rocket launcher and not a machine gun doesn't count as a new vehicle, nor does including vehicles in mulitplayer that were only originally available in single player.

Starbuck will be a woman? Has the world gone mad?!?

The cylons wont be machines? The wold has gone mad!

This comment was edited on Jul 13, 13:58.

Eeeewww! That wont go down well with the ladies.

Fine, now maybe we will get Diablo 3? Please.

Painkiller = Serious Sam with a better plot.

At least that's the way I'm reading it.

They buy out small, successful companies and then try to deny access and control for the people that made the company successful

I always thought about that. Let the games developers develop games, and the publishers fund and publish the game.

But in the real world, companies need to make profit, and publishers (who put up the cash in most circumstances) interfere to ensure they make profit. Mind you, a company as successful as Blizzard could surely fund their games internally and allow the publishers to publish it ala, iD Software?

RE: Blizzard
What we see on the outside isn't necessarily what’s in the inside. The company I work for recently (well, it's been a few months now) laid of one of the founders, to which all clients got fidgety and worried.
They thought that person was a key component to the company when in reality, they were pretty much a 5th wheel.
All fellow employees knew this as did the management, but that was internal info.

No disrespect to these guys who have decided to go it alone, but I'm sure Blizzard have other employees capable of making good games.