Thursday 10th July, 2003

Paul (daSmirnov) - 23%
Ransom Arceihn - 16%
Spineless-mush - 19%
Chapstick - 13%
You DOOMers suck! - 29%

Paul (daSmirnov) - 14%
Ransom Arceihn - 18%
Spineless-mush - 21%
Chapstick - 14%
You DOOMers suck! - 32%

Paul (daSmirnov) - 25%
Ransom Arceihn - 25%
Spineless-mush - 25%
Chapstick - 25%
You DOOMers suck! - 0%

Paul (daSmirnov) - 100%

Saturday 21st June, 2003

Thursday 19th June, 2003

"While gamers were still sticking their noses into their newly opened Q3 boxes that still had that new-game smell, John Carmack had already begun working on his next game engine. This engine evolved into what became Doom III, a sequel… no, not a sequel… not a remake… certainly not a rehash… Ok, let’s put it this way: a game that, among other things, brought back the anticipation and popularity of the original, as well as the feeling of loneliness and a dozen or so hell-spawned beasts. And of course, Mr. BFG, and we’re not talking about a certain Raul Dahl book here, either. Nope, we mean Big Freakin’ Gun! Note: the F is interchangeable, from the ‘Friendly’ to the, well, you know what I mean…"

Tuesday 17th June, 2003

Wednesday 14th May, 2003

Are you going to be getting DOOM III on PC or Xbox?

PC of course! - 80% with 1240 votes
Xbox version! - 11% with 175 votes
Both, I love DOOM! - 8% with 131 votes

A Doom movie has been peeking around corners and flexing its brown claws for quite some time, not long after the original game hit shelves louder than an exploding slime-barrel. The Doom game, for all those people who have been living in caves and drawing mammoths on walls in the last decade, is one of the greatest computer creations of all time and the first truly dynamic first-person shooter game. In 1992, John Carmack began programming a computer game so good, that he would later deserve to have a street named after him. Alongside him, worked a small but talented team of modellers, designers, programmers, et cetera. After lots of hard labour and some minor quarrels, the tiny disk was distributed. The year was 1993.

*Note: This article is 87% speculation, 10% comments on personality types that annoy me, and 3% factual information.

Tuesday 13th May, 2003

We kid, of course, when it comes to the reckoning of the Xbox's hardware potential. It would be hard to deny such after seeing this demo. The Xbox trailer featured equal or better graphics compared to what we've seen from the PC version recently, with near-perfect modeling and lighting from its grisly monsters and run-down underground environments, and more importantly, it showed far more different areas, creatures, and gameplay scenes than we've spotted in the promotion of the PC version so far.

Thursday 1st May, 2003

Sunday 6th April, 2003

"The latest issue of the Wired print magazine has a new article on the development of Doom III, id Software's upcoming and latest game in their celebrated first person shooter series. Among the more interesting tidbits in the article: Microsoft is offering lots of money to id to make an exclusive Doom III Xbox port (id hasn't decided yet if they will do so) and in addition to the already announced multiplayer add-on there will also be a single player mission pack for Doom III. There is also the possiblity of a program that could generate unique Doom III levels on the fly, according to the article. The article also contains a number of new screenshots from the game."

Wednesday 29th January, 2003

Sunday 26th January, 2003

Friday 15th November, 2002

"A GL2 driver won't give any theoretical advantage over the current back ends optimized for cards with 7+ texture capability, but future research work will almost certainly be moving away from the lower level coding practices, and if some new vendor pops up (say, Rendition back from the dead) with a next-gen card, I would strongly urge them to implement GL2 instead of proprietary extensions."

Tuesday 5th November, 2002

"No, this was not leaked on purpose.

Yes, we are upset about it, and it will have some impact on how we deal with some companies in the future, but nothing drastic is going to change in terms of what support is going to be available.

Making any judgements from a snapshot intended for a non-interactive demo is ill advised."

Friday 1st November, 2002

Thursday 31st October, 2002

Carmack vs Romero vs Spiderman vs Chez, who wins?
John Carmack - 50%
Spiderman - 29%
Comrade Chez - 13%
John Romero - 8%

Thursday 10th October, 2002

"What is it like working with Carmack?

Oh it's great, John is the visionary of the company, Doom in particular, he has the overall visual design, and it is then my job to instill what john wants down to the rest of the group, but you know, its great, I don't really understand him most of the time, but that's ok, no one else does either."

Wednesday 9th October, 2002

"Todd Hollenshead, CEO of the Mesquite, Texas-based id, said his company "really scrutinized the potential partners" who were interested in the project as there had been several failed attempts to bring the project to the big screen in the past. With the third installment of the game due out next year, the company didn't want to "swing and miss."

"Given how important the franchise is to us, we wanted to make sure that we didn't miss out on the opportunity to make a movie again," Hollenshead said. " 'Doom' is our baby, the crown jewel of our intellectual property franchises, and Warners' interest in it was more than just talk. It actually puts on paper that if they don't move at a satisfactory pace, we can take it somewhere else. We're just a little game developer here in Texas, not a big movie company, so we were more interested in a commitment to make a movie rather than talk about how excited someone was about it."

Monday 7th October, 2002

Tuesday 20th August, 2002

Monday 19th August, 2002

What do you think of what you've seen of DOOM III?
AHHHH! - 39%
It rocks! - 14%
OMG this is in-game? - 20%
We bow down! - 10%
It's okay. - 5%
It sucks! - 0%
Not another pile of poo from id, jeez. - 10%

Sunday 18th August, 2002

Saturday 17th August, 2002

Tuesday 6th August, 2002

Wednesday 5th June, 2002

Tuesday 4th June, 2002

"Monsters in DOOM III, as I already mentioned, stun with their awesome graphical appearance and smooth animations (which cannot be conveyed by static screenshots). However, there's always a room for complaint: can it be another Unreal, where enemies are scarce but trained specially to wage prolonged duels with player? "Of course not", - comments id's Mal Blackwell. "This is DOOM! We are not going to mimic Serious Sam where player is exposed to relentless attacks by hordes of identical enemies. Monsters will be more than adequate, sometimes they'll attack in tens, sometimes they poke around alone. We want player not to be aware of what's behind the next door, so that he would be up to storm the front every second of play. DOOM III is all about pressure and terror."

Sunday 2nd June, 2002

It's okay - 57%
It rocks! - 0%
It sucks so bad. - 43%

"The requirement for GF1/Radeon 7500 as an absolute minimum is fundamental to the way the technology works, and was non-negotiable for the advances that I wanted to make. At the very beginning of development, I worked a bit on elaborate schemes to try and get some level of compatibility with Voodoo / TNT / Rage128 class hardware, but it would have looked like crap, and I decided it wasn't worth it.

The comfortable minimum performance level on this class of hardware is determined by what the artists and level designers produce. It would be possible to carefully craft a DOOM engine game that ran at good speed on an original SDR GF1, but it would cramp the artistic freedom of the designers a lot as they worried more about performance than aesthetics and gameplay.

Our "full impact" platform from the beginning has been targeted at GF3/Xbox level hardware. Slower hardware can disable features, and faster hardware gets higher frame rates and rendering quality. Even at this target, designers need to be more cognizant of performance than they were with Q3, and we expect some licensee to take an even more aggressive performance stance for games shipping in following years."

Thursday 30th May, 2002

"We actually screwed up at E3 -- we should have been running it at high quality settings (uncompressed textures, anisotropic filtering), but we were chasing some problems the first day, and it got set back to medium quality. The problems had gone away, so we left it that way, rather than risk changing it back."

Wednesday 29th May, 2002

"It's the technological side that's drawing the most attention right now - and rightfully so. Doom III's graphics are as spectacular as the screenshots infer. Never in the history of PC gaming have we seen a game this cinematic in real-time. The graphics are so impressive, in fact, that id's having a hard time convincing people that they're real."

Tuesday 28th May, 2002

Monday 27th May, 2002

"You saw the demo, when we shoot at the box. The bullet is a polygonal model right now in the physics engine, so the exact intersection and object collision with the box is calculated. The bullet is, of course, high velocity, and then the info is transferred to the box and the box starts moving. It's the same thing with an enemy -- if you shoot him in the shoulder, he starts spinning or turning backwards, or you shoot him in the legs, he flips over. Based on where you hit him, it will be a different simulation each time."

Sunday 26th May, 2002

Saturday 25th May, 2002

"In the next scene, we got to see some of the other weapons from Doom, including an assault rifle and a high-powered shotgun. We were nearly as impressed by the sound of the demonstration as we were with the graphics--the atmospheric music, creepy sound effects, and roaring gunfire really helped bring the visuals to life. The hero's weapons seemed reasonably effective--until he came face-to-face with some of his more-dangerous foes. One was a monstrous-looking man armed with an enormous chaingun. It seemed ridiculous to fight him head-on, so the marine managed to lure him around a corner and took him out from behind. Another appeared to be a revision of the original Doom's pink demon. The front of this thing was almost wormlike and the back end was mechanical, and it rushed at the hero with violent force--it was really frightening. Another monster we saw was a zombie soldier with a vicious tentacle where one of his arms used to be."

"Tim started by loading up the first sequence of actual gameplay from the demo -- if you've seen it, it's the area where your character first runs into a group of zombies after everything in the UAC installation has (quite literally) gone to hell. To start, Tim showed off the astounding physics and collision detection of the engine by shooting a box off a shelf, and then shooting it around the floor. No matter where he shot the box, it spun and moved just the way you'd expect it to in real life."

Friday 24th May, 2002

"Doom III is pushing the fear factor over the raw action. As you make the worlds more and more believable, you are forced to tone down the "superhero" aspects of the game. I still think that a good game can be built around "toon time" action, but that isn't what Doom III is going to be about. The monsters are going to be much more independently fearsome, rather than just acting as moving gun turrets."

"The process of building the new engine went much more smoothly than anything we have done before, because I was able to do all the groundwork while the rest of the company worked on TeamArena. By the time they were ready to work on it, things were basically functional. I did most of the early development work with a gutted version of Quake 3, which let me write a brand new renderer without having to rewrite file access code, console code, and all the other subsystems that make up a game. After the renderer was functional and the other programmers came off of TA and Wolf, the rest of the codebase got rewritten. Especially after our move to C++, there is very little code remaining from the Q3 codebase at this point."