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Doom 3 Now Supports Surround Sound

Posted by Zonk on Mon Nov 29, 2004 10:35 AM
from the is-the-demon-there-or-there!?! dept.
Software Entertainment Games Linux
nukem996 writes "DOOM 3 v1.1.1286 for Linux has just been released. ALSA has finally been implemented so Linux gamers can finally play Doom 3 with surround sound! Along with surround sound support this release fixes a number of bugs. You can read Timo's release notes here. As usual the release is up on the idsoftware ftp server and there is a torrent."
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Doom 3 Now Supports Surround Sound 39 Comments More /

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  • Is it worth the £30-sthg? Some say it is repetitive and plotless...

    What about the GNU/Linux version? Does it have all the support/extras/&c as the MSW version?

    • Re:Is it worth buying? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29 2004, @11:05AM (#10943083)
      "Some say it is repetitive and plotless... "

      eh it's Doom for gods sake. I really dunno wtf people were expecting, some kind of blockbuster don corleone story that would win more oscars than ben hur. It's friggin DOOM!! the game where you pump soldiers on crack and ugly motherfuckers straight outta compton HELL, full of lead. It's not Final Fantasy, it's not Deus Ex. It's like the gaming version of all Arnold Schwarzenegger movies ever made. We all know we don't watch his movies for his deep insight heart wrenching masterpieces. We like gore and violence!! that's what DOOM IS!!! GORE AND VIOLENCE!!!!! so enough with the fucking whining and moaning about how it had a bad story and was repetitive. You want a fucking story, go watch bridges of madison county.
        • Actually, its funny, but the whole "monsters teleport in right behind you" is exactly what turned me off of Serious Sam. Not the best game to use for a counterexample, really.
          • You forget to mention that there was really no surprise to teleporting in the original Doom games. By the time you heard the sound, you could run 30 MPH and be a football field away from the monster if you wanted to.

            Oh yeah, and it didn't take ten shotgun blasts to kill an imp that jumps highway speeds towards your character, who gets outrunned by a Lark.

            The original Dooms didn't stoop to the level of epic spider battles either. If there's one thing common of all FPS games within the last five years, it's
              • It usually took one or two shots in the original Doom to kill an imp. I'm positive it takes more in Doom 3. And yes, I am shooting them center mass.

                As for teleportation, the idea is to have somewhere to go. It's obvious where they are going to appear, either by surround sound or the glyphs that appear on the floor, but like usual, the game makes it extremely easy to get stuck on a lip somewhere in a wall when you need to move the most. It would help if the game didn't overdramatize every single spawn eithe
      • Mister Romero, is that you?
      • well...actually a lot of the free software GNU games (like enigma or freeciv) can be quite addictive. And, possibly, better than forking out £37 (i think) for something that seem to claim is even more monotonous. Still Doom can't be that bad as it is a classic, ID seem a good co. and everyone's talking about it; wonder if my PC passes the spec though...

        My main question is if they officially support GNU--not clear on thier WWW site...

    • Re:Is it worth buying? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Is it worth the £30-sthg? Some say it is repetitive and plotless...

      I'd say the same about most popular pornography, yet people still buy it anyway.
  • please sign any petition helping Linux go in that direction.

    There is one petition asking for World of Warcraft [blizzpub.net] to work under Linux. Sign it and pass it on.

    • Re:if you want more games under linux (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Petitions are worthless. Unless the makers are Linux enthusiasts like Carmack, the only thing that matters is a demonstrated willingness to spend money. Buy some Linux games and more will follow.
    • I think we'll see a Linux port of Half-Life long before World of Warcraft...
      • I forked out 59$CAD to for the game. Right now I am using some old but legal version of Windows to play the game while waiting for my Powerbook order to come through. I would much prefer run this on my powerful desktop running Ubuntu than on a less powerful and more expensive Mac but it has left me with no choice.

        PS: Windows sucks too much for me to stay on it for anything other than games.

  • I'm using ALSA 1.05. I can set "s_driver alsa" and "s_NumberOfSpeakers 6" but I still get 2.0 audio.
  • I didn't want surround sound. I wanted the gamma to be increased so I could actually see things instead of shooting at siloeuettes.

    Maybe this is all still part of the 'atmosphere' scam that they put us through. No thanks iD, I preferred Doom 2. Faster, funnier, and better to play. If I'd wanted to shoot at blacker areas of dark screen, I'd have turned down the brightness on my monitor. Dark areas aren't scary. They're just annoying.

    • Re:Seeing In The Dark (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thanks for your opinion, GRANDPA!
    • How is the game funny?
      • The old Dooms were hilarious. The facial expressions, the whole senario. I loved the guys shifty sideways glances, and the way the imps keened over and the shotgun went BOOM-CHA-CUCK, in just the right way.

        I chuckle to myself whenever I play it now.

        I also set my monitors settings to normal, but that's another story.

  • Surround sound already supported? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Doom 3 already supports surround sound doesn't it? Or is this one of those "now also in Linux" things? The title could be made a little more clear I think.
    • Just last night my brother and I were trying out Doom3 with 5.1 sound (under Windows). It works pretty well, though we had to put the rear speakers closer together than you would have thought. And the weapons sounds are spread across all speakers instead of being biased to the front like you would think. At any rate, this must be a new-for-Linux thing.
  • is there a changelog anywhere?
  • This again brings up a major complaint of mine with Linux on the desktop. Lack of standards for companies to just use and get things done. Why didn't Doom 3 for Linux ship with this? Why does about every game I have bought in the past two years on Windows support surround sound just fine? The community needs to look at issues like this, and agree to come togther to solve them, instead of creating 5 ways to fix it.

    For now, and the forseeable future, my OS plans are this:
    Linux on the server
    Windows on the

    • You're blaming the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mornelithe (83633) on Monday November 29 2004, @04:58PM (#10946609)
      Why didn't Doom 3 for Linux ship with this? Why does about every game I have bought in the past two years on Windows support surround sound just fine?

      Allow me to rewrite your question from an opposite perspective:

      Why did id choose to write its sound code using an API that hasn't been actively developed by the community in years, and from which everyone is moving away? Why didn't they write code that works with what people are actually using?

      People are working on sound for Linux. It's called ALSA. It's what pretty much everyone using a 2.6 kernel will be using. It does desktop audio. It does professional audio. [1] It emulates OSS for legacy compatibility, but if you want to actually take advantage of its features, you need to actually use it.

      So, yes, why didn't Doom 3 on Linux ship with this? Because id didn't put in the extra effort, and because they wanted to support the old API for some reason. This isn't the fault of 'the community.' The API is already out there. ALSA didn't just suddenly gain support for surround sound. It's had it. The fact here is that id is just now including support for the current Linux sound architecture.

      Would you blame Microsoft if Halflife 2 only used features from DirectX 6 at first, and then in a later patch they updated it to use DirectX 9?

      [1] ALSA doesn't work too well on some cards unfortunately. The reason for this is that some companies refuse to release specifications in order for drivers to be written. This means that the developers (only a few people) have to reverse engineer the cards to write drivers. This is hardly the fault of 'the community' either, and really, they've done a remarkable job on some of them, considering what they've had to work with.
      • Of course you're ignoring the fact that OSS is a far superior API to develop for, and that OSS is far more mature and thus you are less likely to give the consumer a produce that is buggy if you have OSS support. Thus they put OSS support in first.

        The newest whiizbang-thingy is not necessarily the best choice.
        • This is the first time I have been moderated down incorrectly! Like blimey, what was trollish about that post?

          This place really doesn't like contrary opinion does it?
        • OSS may be more mature, and an easier API to develop for, but that doesn't negate my point.

          OSS is not free software anymore. There's an older version in the kernel, but if you want any current support, you have to pay for it. It can't be community developed.

          The 'Linux community' has produced an audio framework capable of whatever the original poster wants. ALSA can do surround sound. ALSA is community developed, and presumably what will be used in the future.

          The original poster wanted to know why Doom 3
      • First off I think the id choose OSS because they simply took the audio engine from Quake III. As far as I know all Quake III based games(et rtcw) are in stero, at least on linux. The real question I have is why didn't id use OpenAL? They already used OpenGL for the graphics part OpenAL is just as portable and compatible with everything(Linux OSS, ALSA, Win, Mac, BSD, ect).
    • It's not a matter of lack of standards at all. Linux has had support for 5.1 surround sound for years now, as well as a pretty good high-level API for gaming-oriented positional audio, too (OpenAL, used in many games including all Unreal2 engine games under Linux).

      It's really just id Software who's been slacking off, writing an half-assed sound backend (or, rather, using their shitty broken in-house backend for the fourth fucking time now) and saying "OK, it's good enough for release".

      Sadly, one can say i
      • The fact that you an idiot makes your opinion pretty worthless. Enjoy having no karma. Fool.

        Here's the beef: they actually made a port, and they won't make any money out of it. People like you would have found something to moan about whatever! Like shit! You people obviously completely ignore the fact that visually this game is exactly the same as the Windows game, you can play it all the way through and there are no stupid linux-specific bugs! They obviously were thinking cross-platform the whole time whe

  • Surround is quiet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zorilla (791636) on Tuesday November 30 2004, @05:15AM (#10951132)
    I just installed the new Linux version of Doom 3 over the first release and got to hear surround right away (after setting surround in the menu). One thing that bothers me - and this is occurs in the Windows version too - is that the rear surround channels are too quiet. There needs to be some sort of rear channel adjustment in the game if simply hardcoding the volume up conflicts with other people's configurations in which the volume is just fine.

    No other game that uses surround has this problem. The UT2004 demo used to have a quiet sound problem on all channels on both Windows and Linux, but that got solved rather quickly.

    I guess I should mention I have an SBLive! Value (4-channel version of the EMU10K1), but it shouldn't matter much, considering it has a pretty large user base.
  • Great. Now if only they'd 'support' surround sound for Doom 3 under Windows. Mine cuts out after 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. Neither iD nor Activision seem interested in acknowledging the problem, and I doubt they ever will, seeing as how they can't make any money off of the sound engine, thanks to Creative Labs. I'm tempted to install my copy under Linux, but I have an X800Pro. ATI+Linux+Doom 3 == ch-ch-choppy. At best.

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