Finally getting into Doom 3

[PooshhMao]

Hi,

I must've spent well over 1000€ on parts for a new rig in anticipation for Doom 3 all the way back in 2003.
Even preordered it and stuff - still have the metal pinky statue thingy to show for it.

Time has not been too kind to it, however. Far Cry - coming out of nowhere - stole quite a lot of Doom 3's technical thunder, and Half-Life 2 made me forget about it altogether, for a while.

After trying to get back into it later on, everything just felt ... off. The guns felt awkward and unsatisfying, the grenades were borderline useless, the ragdoll physics stiff and unconvincing, the level design - despite the great art direction - uninspired. I knew that, someday, the day would come the community would make Doom 3 a game worth investing time in, and the release of Doom 3's source code and subsequent source port dhewm3 prompted me to start with a proverbial clean slate. I wanted to love Doom 3, and at least now it wasn't too far fetched it would actually let me, perhaps out of subconsciously suppressed frustration that Doom 4 would unlikely ever receive proper modding tools, a Linux port, or a source code release for that matter. Not that it would ultimately matter much to me, because I sure as hell haven't got the luxury to spend any serious amount of money on hardware that would be able to run it adequately.

So, today, I compiled a fresh copy of dhewm3's source from git (there's something really satsifying about playing a game you compiled yourself), spent an hour setting everything up and tweaking config files, and went mod hunting.

To my delight, there's one readily available that fixes Doom 3's biggest issue for me - it's weapons.
Enter Realistic Weapons (http://www.moddb.com/mods/realistic-wea ... eapons-v10) - this one tweaks all the values to what they should have been all along, and changes most of the sound effects. The shotgun is now much closer to classic Doom-levels of general usefulness, able to take out low-to-mid-tier enemies at sizeable distances, whereas before it was practically useless at any range other than point blank. The other guns are now generally better and more fun to use across the board.
This one's a keeper.

Next up - Ungibbable Bodies. (http://www.moddb.com/mods/ungibbable-10)
If there's one other thing Doom 3 did wrong, it was how enemies reacted to attacks in general. Demons simply did not give any feedback to being shot; gone was the subtle but important pain chance gameplay mechanic, which added so much to Doom's distinctive flavor. At least the zombies and Z-Secs did - somewhat - but stupidly, they melted away more or less immediately, exposing their skeleton for several seconds, accompanied by a downright [censored word] brain that seemed to spawn out of nowhere. That shit looked off.
So, what this mod does is preventing bodies melting away. It's not perfect, since there's no way to gib bodies at all anymore, but it's a good deal more satisfying (and less suspended sense of disbelief-interrupting) to have the bodies stay without disintegrating like a fucking vitamin tablet in a glass of carbonated water.

Then, there's a bunch of mods (SikkMod, Ultimate HD etc) that add all sorts of eye candy and improved textures, which is fine, but they decimate my frame rate and really, I'm really rather concerned with making Doom 3 fun to play than making it look good. It always looked good - great - to someone like me, who grew up on Atari VCS and NES. Icing on the cake.

Now I'm playing a bunch of custom maps. I'm forced to, since apparently, quite a lot of ogg sounds from both the first and RoE campaign were encoded in such a way that it causes esoteric crashes with my libvorbis library.
It's a long standing officially acknowledged bug, and fixing it is not trivial without having to fix a ton of other shit. No biggie though - custom maps don't use these sounds, and some of them turn out to be quite enjoyable.

So, while the gameplay is still nowhere near as fun, the community nowhere near as big, and the mods nowhere near as plentiful or interesting, I now believe that, someday, Doom 3 will be a viable alternative whenever I'm in dire need to shoot at demons.

[Redfox123]

i gave doom 3 modding a shot once

its okay though all i ever did was make the bullet casings stay forever but with a windows xp potato that has 1gb of ram... meh you can imagine the lag

[Viscra Maelstrom]

i've seen a lot of really neat stuff done in the Doom 3 engine, but i've never actually played them. i guess the problem with modding for Doom 3 is its conflicting choice of gameplay: it's designed like a horror game, so lightning and shadows play a big role, but it plays like a more contemporary run-and-gun shooter.

[Oberron]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

[wildweasel]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

Yes.

[maseter]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

You may want to get the Doom 3 BFG Edition, a re-release of Doom 3 featuring enhanced graphics, proper widescreen resolution support, better audio with more horror effects and a checkpoint save system. But unlike Doom 3, the BFG edition doesn't work on Windows XP.

For classic Doom 3 i recommend Venom's HQ Mainmenu mod
which adds widescreen resolutions to the in-game menu:
http://www.moddb.com/games/doom-iii/add ... q-mainmenu

And of course the legendary duct tape mod:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Duct_Tape
http://ducttape.glenmurphy.com/

This was fixed in the BFG release as well, they added an "armour-mounted" flashlight that could be toggled on and off at any time.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

You may want to get the Doom 3 BFG Edition, a re-release of Doom 3 featuring enhanced graphics, proper widescreen resolution support, better audio with more horror effects and a checkpoint save system. But unlike Doom 3, the BFG edition doesn't work on Windows XP.

doesn't the BFG Edition have no support for the older mods, thanks to the new engine it's running on?

[Naniyue]

DooM 3 just never felt like DooM. I still haven't even finished 1/4 of it. I did, however, get a map set that played like classic DooM that was actually fun: http://www.moddb.com/mods/classic-doom-3

You might want to try Quake 4. Same engine, I think, with a lot of available tweaks that made it run quite well on my lowly mini laptop.

[PooshhMao]

Hopefully, maybe, some day (nah), they'll open up Quake 4, Prey and ETQW, and all assets can be used together to mod with.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

i've still yet to finish Quake 4. i remember being incredibly underwhelmed when playing it, even moreso than Doom 3, which i actually finished a couple times.

[enderkevin13]

Which edition? BFG or normal?

[BFG]

Doom3 disappointed me, I completed it in 1 day. It was so damn easy. I remember when it first came out people were acting like it's a very scary game, so I even played it with all the lights off to help the atmosphere. The graphics though are primitive to 2010's technology but looked as real as it could be back then.

[Oberron]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

Yes.

Thanks a lot.

[Naniyue]

FINALLY slogged through the main scenario. Definitely sticking with DooM II.

[The Zombie Killer]

The resolution is a bit off on my PC. There are a bit large black on left and right. Can I set it to my desktop resolution?

You may want to get the Doom 3 BFG Edition, a re-release of Doom 3 featuring enhanced graphics, proper widescreen resolution support, better audio with more horror effects and a checkpoint save system. But unlike Doom 3, the BFG edition doesn't work on Windows XP.

doesn't the BFG Edition have no support for the older mods, thanks to the new engine it's running on?

You can run older mods as long as they don't modify game code (gamex86.dll) and I think modified shaders also don't work. Apart from that I'm pretty sure any mod will run (of course, the stock Steam version has the modding stuff locked out, but if you compile the BFG Edition source or one of its forks, you can use mods)