As your crosshair approaches the screen, it turns into a mouse cursor, and you can control the computer as you would a regular desktop PC. It just feels so natural.
I'm surprised that this wasn't copied more by other games. Probably because it doesn't work as well on consoles with a controller.
In Doom 3, you're still in control of your first person character, which is awesome.
Try it in the demo linked above, if you skip the cutscenes you can find a screen within the first minute of gameplay or so.
edit: scratch that, thing runs even on phone at 60fps
Oh man that makes me feel old. I remember first playing this on my tiny 12" powerbook from 2004... and back then It felt like a heavy weight that shouldn't quite be running on that machine.
I was an early adopter of the first Intel MacBook; and let me tell you - the difference (once we had a Universal Binary) was like riding a horse vs. driving a car.
Other than Final Cut Express and Logic Express performance, I found DOOM 3 to be one of the first major signs that Intel was meant to be and here to stay.
beautiful talk by carmack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1q49GxsPWM&t=4s&ab_channel=...
I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.
Don't get me wrong, it's a technical masterpiece, but one of execution rather than innovation.
It's main feature was dynamic lighting and shadows, which it accomplished with dynamic lights, normal maps and stencil shadows.
Dynamic lights and normal maps were nothing new even back then, I remember multiple titles using them, but not this well and not to this extent.
Stencil shadows were kind of unique, they worked by extruding the geometry from the light's perspective, and figuring out what was inside the light's shadow by counting front and back faces.
Unfortunately, since they used geometry, they looked really blocky and sharp, with no smooth edges unlike shadow mapping.
Imo they looked kind of bad, a step down from the beautiful pre-rendered lightmap shadows we enjoyed years before.
This is in sharp contrast to Half Life 2 released at a similar time, which had far more enemies and NPCs on screen at one time as well as much much larger maps to explore. I think in some ways Half Life 2s visuals have honestly dated better despite the less ambitious technology - the larger and more varied maps its lesser performance requirements permitted help a lot.
https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php at the technicql level there were some cool advances and the game in its production definitly felt like a leap forward that only a few game matched after (i could say mgs 4-5 and death stranding are close ones, final fantasy 15 while very weak story wise had others, but definitly no fps did what doom3 did)
Doom 3 as a game sure looked cool, though. The flashlight blew my mind back in the day.
Also I wouldn't put light reflection in the list of idtech 4's achievements if we're talking more than one bounce, it literally does not do that. idtech 2 did, precalculated of course.
Yeah, I always was perplexed by that tendency in Doom3… I mean, I get that lighting calculations aren’t tracing the effects of light past the first surface it hits, but does it have to be black when there’s no lights hitting a surface? Couldn’t they have done a cheap approximation of “ambient light” based on how many lights there are nearby, and use that light level as a minimum for totally occluded surfaces?
I remember reading that the choice to use black was literally a performance optimization because the renderer got to fully skip drawing surfaces that were fully occluded and it saved some render time. Then I also read that it was a design choice to give it a more panicked environment because you couldn’t see what’s in the shadows… but it always looked clunky to me, seeing fully black areas when there’s clearly a lot of reflective scattering surfaces around.
It was a significant leap, but it was the right time for it. In less than a year you saw other games doing the same thing or better - they had clearly been working on it as well. Doom 3 was just the first to come out, and Carmack did a lot to spread knowledge about it immediately (as he frequently does, which is wonderful).
I'm used to seeing Doom running on all kinds of platforms, but it's inspiring and humbling to see Doom 3 - a game I have vivid memories of being in awe of - running in a browser. It really highlights how far tech has come when I wasn't looking. In many ways, my old eyes don't see much different from Doom 3 high end graphics and the graphics of modern games.
I remember seeing primitive Flash versions of Half-Life, Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein running in a browser ten or so years ago and I thought that was amazing.
On a sidenote, I unironically love the dialogue in this game - it's so bad it's good:
Guy 1> I'm tired of running damage control every time he makes a mess.
Guy 2> Right, you're the control. And if that fails, I'm the damage.
I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are far more successful as Doom games than Doom 3. Like the original 90s games, they're fast-paced, with wide-open combat areas and hordes of enemies on screen at the same time. The technical choices they made with id Tech 4 meant that a game like that wasn't really possible with the hardware available in 2004.
Maybe they just shouldn't have called it Doom? But its design as a slow-paced horror game, what with all the tedious monster closets, doesn't compare well to Resident Evil 4, which came out only a few months later.
Doom 3 on the other hand is different; you very rarely have more than one enemy to beat at a time. That single enemy can absolutely shred you if you are not very careful, you have to consider each engagement carefully. The darkness and blood are tuned to intensify that "fear" feeling. Rooms are very small, limiting your ability to dodge, almost to the point of inducing claustrophobia.
Painkiller was released almost as the same time as Doom and was way more action oriented, even tho it contains its fair share of gore.
Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal gameplay is much closer to Doom 1 and 2. Both are very "push-forward" shooters.
Took a while but he was right.
WebGL warning: <Create>: WebglAllowWindowsNativeGl:false restricts context creation on this system. d3wasm.js:1:156185
Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed:
* WebglAllowWindowsNativeGl:false restricts context creation on this system. ()
* Exhausted GL driver options. (FEATURE_FAILURE_WEBGL_EXHAUSTED_DRIVERS)
Uncaught TypeError: GLctx is undefinedIt's early, but this is the future. No need for a console/native build, just pop open a browser and jump in.
What's the best version of Doom 3 these days to use on Apple Silicon?
When I think of Amazon/Tesla, I always associate it with early 2000s era science-fiction videogames.
Couple this with the fact that developers won't have to pay a 30% fee for distribution on the web, and you have the recipe for the next big games platform that's hardware agnostic by default. Very disruptive stuff.
It's certainly the use-case that received the most love.
I've personally used Sokol for a number of projects and it has been great. You get something much leaner and meaner compared to the Emscripten port of SDL, which otherwise seems to be the "default" when people do these things.
Also some of the planes in mobile Xp are terribly simplified (A320), the controls suck and the clouds render in pink on iPad Mini 6.