I bet you Valve will be releasing HalfLife 2 multimplayer tid-bits 2-3 days before QuakeCon. Hehehe.

Or better yet, Valve releases a playable HalfLife 2 demo. Even better!

It would be great if id released this preview as a demo, or as a "test" as they have released pre-demo software in the past.

With Splash Damage doing the multiplayer work on Doom 3, it makes you wonder if the push back of the release date is so that they can bring the multiplayer up to something decent.
Before they said it would be pretty basic.

Now im thinking that they are going to try and do an ET to the multiplayer side. That would be cool, squad based combat thru the dark station,..

We shall see i guess, but im hoping that they deliver a solid single and multiplayer game!


http://www.poorintern.com
- The Voices In My Fruit Loops Tell Me that a happy fredster is a fredster being force fed hot broken glass,...
This comment was edited on Jul 24, 10:51.

Splash is doing the multiplayer? Hmm, maybe Doom 3 isn't going to suck after all...

4 Player deathmatch? Please. That sucks donkey.

After the greatness that is the FREE Enemy Territory, Splash Damage has so much goodwill built up with me, that I would buy Doom 3 just for that.

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Cry 'havoc', and let slip the dogs o' war!

As long as whatever they do has a point, it'll be cool. If they're just doing multi for multi's sake and to stop people from bitching, then it'll suck. People will probably complain regardless, because it seems everybody in the gaming community just has to whine about something.

I think the delay is to not go toe to toe on the shelf with HL2 and to use that time to improve the multiplayer.

My $0.02

Only three weeks...

I strongly suspected that id would have something playable for QuakeCon this year. That's why the rumors of a Doom 3 delay seem so odd to me. Having seen the game in person at _last_ year's QuakeCon, the engine and development tools (I just LOVE the in-game-engine map editing) should have been quite polished for at least a year now. Surely they can have this guy ready to ship by Christmas?

4 Player deathmatch? Please. That sucks donkey.

Not neccessarily, if done right. And remember what Willtis said post-QuakeCon last year - the engine can do more than 4 easy, so mod makers go nuts.

the engine can do more than 4 easy, so mod makers go nuts.

Okay, stupid newb question time...if it can do more than 4 easily...then why limit it to 4?

-----------------------------------------------------
http://nicebreakers.gotdns.com
Cry 'havoc', and let slip the dogs o' war!

4 player may appeal to some, but it certainly won't to me, or many other clan oriented players. I remember reading that the DOOM3 engine is capable of supporting more players, of course, but it will take a mod and new maps to enable it. Let's hope some glutten for punishment programmer decides to quicly write a 16 or 32 player mod.

Back when "Quakeworld" (Quake 1 for Windows) went 32 player from the "stock" 16, there was a lot of stoked people out there, and a lot of busy mappers.

Then again, most modders may be burried deep into the Source engine, which will likely be 100 times more mod-friendly. Will be interesting to see.

Why should the source engine be any more modable? The mod community was born with an id game (Quake 1, although DOOM had some mod capabilities) and most of the modablity of HL came from it's Quake 1 origins. Seems a lot of people are deciding on unknown Doom3 and HL2 issues long before either game is out.

Cheers,
Quboid

Okay, stupid newb question time...if it can do more than 4 easily...then why limit it to 4?

Personnally i think the original descion behind this was time constraints, in that they wanted the game done by christmas and wanted to mainly focus on the single player side.

However as i posted below i think with Splash Damage having proven themselves with ET ID has handed them the source, textures etc and said "ok here it is, were pushing the time frame back a bit for the single player, see what you can do with the multiplayer"

Also to my knowledge there hasent really been much talk about the multiplayer recently so I think they are aiming for a solid all round game.

http://www.poorintern.com
- The Voices In My Fruit Loops Tell Me that a happy fredster is a fredster being force fed hot broken glass,...

I had a bad dream involving quakecon and now this announcement today...:) W0w! Freaking me out. Anyway, this is sweet news to all quakecon attendees ! (...like me )

>> Then again, most modders may be burried deep into the Source engine, which will likely be 100 times more mod-friendly.

Em, why? The source engine looks like it's got some good physics stuff in there and the water effect and glass distortion look very nice, but apart from that I haven't seem any shots or movies of it rendering anything the Q3 engine couldn't render. Animated face look good but them so do the hand animated faces in the Doom3 movies.
BTW do those years of writing facial expressions routines also mean the body movements are animated at the same time or do animators need to do those by hand still?

The next big leap in graphics is true real time lighting and D3 is the only engine demoing it at the moment( not seen any movies from Thief III yet ).

4 players in multiplays is a limit because of current hardware, due mainly to the number of complex shadows needing to be rendered. Think 5 light sources, 4 players, thats 20 complex shadows of diffent depths, angles and shades, with possible overlapping, not to mention all the other objects in the room that may be casting shadows, then you get the spectual maps & bump maps for every single texture visible ( including player skins ).
Then you have mussle flash and tracers from gun fire.

Maybe, just maybe, this time next year some of us ( those with the money ) will have the hardware required to handle 16-32 players.

Of course you could just disable all the real time lighting and go back to lightmaps, but then it would be no better then UnReal, Source, Q3 engine games.

Would be great for co-op (makes me shiver as I remember System Shock 2 co-op), but for deathmatch? They must be having problems getting their servers optimized.

Alright, I know squad based MP is in. I know teamplay is in. I know action is in. But I am hoping that D3 MP will be more like I always wanted AVP DM to be: Careful and Scary.

Imagine this: Instead of simply running around, shooting wildly at everyone with a different color (or uniform), you're sneaking around a dark base. Your opponents could be hiding in that volumetric shadow over there. They could drop from above behind you. I want the feeling I had in the origilal Doom SP in MP! That is, being scared shitless of the flickering light and the dark corner behind it, and shooting at walls because I was on the edge all the time.

4 player MP could be good for that.

Anybody here going to QuakeCon?
If so, can I come with you? I'm a really nice guy, I won't get in the way. I have been told I give really good he....errr...SO can I go?

hah

Xenopulse, you need to play Natural Selection for HL. It's exactly what you've described.