Doom 3 Alpha Leaked

Alex_Ionescu writes "The Doom 3 E3 Demo Alpha has leaked to the public. It looks promising, altough I'm only getting 12FPS on a Radeon 7500. Did anyone else have the chance to play it and could post their FPS? Here are some sites with more information and screenshots: here , here, here, and finally here. "

I got a copy

[Aztek]

I got a copy from other places and trust me you guys arnt missing much. When id says 'alpha' they mean it.

download it hete

[Squeezer]

go to http://dcplusplus.sorgeforge.net and download it and then use it to connect to wes.homelinux.com. Search for doomiii.rar

newsgroup downloads

[MoceanWorker]

for those who don't want to bother with the mirror site and just download from newsgroups..

alt.binaries.games.worms is offering the Doom III Alpha copy..

there will be plenty of reposts.. so take your time :-)

My FPS...

[sailor420]

My machine is a p4 2.4 w/ a 64mb Radeon 8500. I have 512 megs DDR. Running at 800x600, medium detail, with bumpmapping enable, I am averaging around 20-25 FPS.

Try killing any and all non essential processes running in the background. Also, try killing and multiple monitors (just unclick the "extend my desktop...", you dont have to pull other cards out).

Re:what do you mean by leaked?

[Magila]

It was most definatly not on purpose. It is the demo that was shown at e3 and it most likely was leaked by someone at ATI. Id seems to have gone the silent route with it, they will probably never publicly discuss this incident.

Re:download it here

[Squeezer]

I should add that that is where I read it could be downloaded. I haven't tried it for myself.

that irc log is fake

[Anonymous Coward]

This was faked

do not buy a geforce 4mx for doom

[sfraggle]

> I have a GF4 MX on a duron 800 and I was getting 7 FPS

I'm not surprised. Carmack has already stated [webdog.org] that you should not buy a GeForce 4MX for doom.

Unreal alpha

[Dexter77]

Unreal alpha also leaked before it was released. It also required twice as much memory and processor power than the final version.

I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the 3D-engine efficiency before the final version is released.

Get Better FPS

[The Joe Kewl]

To get the leaked doom alpha running a little smoother or your POS system. Open the "doomconfig.cfg" in wordpad (not notepad, as it can screw things up sometimes). Scroll to the bottom of the file, and work your way up changing the following settings:

seta r_ext_compress_textures "1" seta r_colorbits "16" seta r_depthbits "16" seta r_mode "3" seta r_fullscreen "1" seta r_shadows "0" seta r_useStandardGL "1"

This should get your fps up a little bit, but you will lose some very nice eye candy!

Alpha Test != actual game

[Cornelius the Great]

Keep in mind that this version is the same version used at the E3 presentation, which means it was optimized for a Radeon 9700, which has been boasting some pretty impressive fps scores. I get only about 20 fps on my Geforce4ti/4200 (128mb version), and my framerate drops below 5 when more than 1 monster is on the screen.

If you want the demo, don't use filesharing apps...they've been too unreliable for the file. Try doin a search on packetnews for IRC channels that host the file (I got mine at addictz.net #datavault).

Re:QUAID

[gl4ss]

it's pretty playable(as what comes to speed) .. and very non-dukenukemware. that is, it looks like they'll get it done quite fast. and it's scary as fuck.

besides, part of the horror of the doom1 was for me that when too many moonsters came i couldnt possibly shoot em all because my comp slowed down

Re:Not interested...

[Ultraken]

First, high frame rate improves the responsiveness of the controls. The loop from monitor to eye to brain to hand to mouse to input to simulation to rendering to monitor should be as short as possible. The image on the screen is always just a bit behind--it's just a matter of how much behind. For a fast action game, you want the response to be as close to instantaneous as possible.

Second, high frame rateproduces a realistic sense of motion. Even though the integration time of your retina isn't particularly fast, higher update rates give an more convincing illusion of continuous time. Movies and television can get away with 24 fps and 60 fps (fields) respectively because the images displayed have motion blur built into them. Games don't have that advantage, so they have to "fill in the gaps" with high frame rate.

(And yes, I work in the game industry so I know these things. At Activision, the difference between Battlezone running in software at 30 fps versus Battlezone running with hardware acceleration at 60+ fps was astonishing.)

Re:download it hete ---useless, parent cant spell

[Directrix1]

I second this, the parent (of the parent) has no friggin' clue what he is talking about. No doom3 here, tried it. Its a hit and miss and a big waste of time, designed only to get you to dload dc++, which is a project that he is a member of. Mod the parent (of the parent) down.

Re:150FPS on ASCII White

[packeteer]

Actualyl i doubt ASCII White could go over 50 fps. Doom 3 requires video card power NOT CPU/RAM bandwidth. Super computers are mad for crunching large numbers quickly but are not designed for real-time creation of frames for a game. Maybe if you had one machine with a Radeon 9K it would work but even tthen still probably not because the latency to get the calculations back from the other comps would be too much.

It is a Debug Build

[Paladine97]

I checked it out and it is easily a debug build. There debug symbols are intact as well as linking to OutputDebugString. Therefore, it is HIGHLY unoptimized, so don't even count on getting any decent FPS.

Some performance tweaks.....

[Chicane-UK]

These are linked on some of the many different threads relating to this story, but for those of you in a rush and not wanting to look around.

Admittedly this will make the game look nowhere as amazing as it currently does, but these two tweaks (which you can enter on the console) worked wonders for me...

r_useStandardGL 1 - the default is set to '0' - using this toggle will disable the bump mapping.

r_shadows 0 - the default is set to '1' - using this toggle will disable the dynamic shadows which, whilst looking amazing, melt your computer.

Some other things worth noting that I have discovered... if you edit the 'runact.cfg' (which if you have downloaded this leaked copy, you will know you have to exec - and it takes about 5 minutes loading up textures and stuff) - if you comment out the bottom three of the top 4 'exec' statements to read like :


exec activate_demo1
#exec activate_demo2
#exec activate_demo3
#exec activate_intro


That 'exec runact.cfg' takes a hella lot less time and the game seems to run as normal.

One last thing.. should we even be talking about this? I know that John Carmack reads /. - I am sure it must be reassuring for him and the id team to see how much people are wanting (and enjoying) this game but he must be pretty pissed about the whole affair!

Re:Next generation game engines

[malevolence]

I got the editor to work after messing around with it for a bit. I had to use GTKRadient to create an empty project, then I copied the project file into the doom/base/scripts dir. Now it starts up and loads and I can play around with it. Only problem is that it is difficult to edit when your resolution is at 640x480 =(

Re:SWEET!!!!

[fudgefactor7]

A while ago I emailed Carmack and asked him what current hardware would play it (Doom 3) at a good rate. (My idea was 1024x768x32 @ 85Hz more than 30FPS). His response was that there was currently no hardware in existance (and this was just before E3) that would play Doom 3 at the specs I mentioned and that they were shooting for an 800x600 stock resolution. So, basically, if you do not have top of the line hardware when Doom 3 comes out, you are in big trouble if you want to run this at a good rez and speed.

Moral: save your money kids, you'll be getting those 3Ghz P4s soon (along with the NV30 or Radeon 9700).

Slashdot slashdotted?

[ThesQuid]

This just in! Slashdot has made the Drudgereport! [drudgereport.com] I wonder if the barrage of new traffic will be too much for the new servers to bear....

Re:what do you mean by leaked?

[einer]

The leak wasn't a very serious leak, despite the Drudge Report's alarmist headline [drudgereport.com], which reads "The most anticipated game in history: Doom III by ID Software has been compromised after an Alpha version was leaked... " [The link on their page actually points to this thread.]

Basically, an alpha version containing 3 levels, got out. This is far from the whole game, and the game certainly wasn't 'compromised.' Now, on to my point... ;) I think this leak is a 'good' leak that was not done on purpose. It serves as a great demo and is certainly no more harmful than the full blown warezed copies that are sure to follow.

Damnit.

[John Carmack]

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.

John Carmack

Doom3

[raiyu]

Ive been running it on a Ti4600, XP2000+, 512MB PC2700, 800x600, high textures and all of that just turned off the dynamic shadows, and Ive been getting about 25-30fps, except when doing some heavy firing with the machine gun, then I get down to about 15fps.

Im sure its been posted before, but if it hasnt a really good reference for getting started: http://www.ut2003online.com/doom3.html [ut2003online.com]

CPU bound, -fno-optimze

[DarkVein]

Probably nobody will read this. That's okay. Nobody should have to read anything they have to make an educated decision about believing or not.

The demo is completely CPU bound. I get the same framerates from r_mode 1 to r_mode 7 (400x300->1280x1024), on my Ti4600. Supposedly all optimizations were removed from this particular build for some stress testing that ATI wanted.

Now, I'm not sure what that stress test could be, in ATI's case. Probably s_noUpdates 1;s_restart; and notarget would knock most of the software-proccessed 5.1 audio and AI, so ATI might have wanted to do brute-force fillrate tests.

Anyhow, if anyone scrolls down this far, I figured they might want to know that the demo is CPU bound, completely unoptimized, and that the final game will, without question, be highly optimized.

Also, the binaries are stripped. :)

Re:150FPS on ASCII White

[Have Blue]

What Doom 3 really requires is what 3D cards give it: Very, very fast basic operations like matrix multiply and floating-point table interpolation, memory fast enough to move the textures and various color, Z, stencil, etc buffers around, the relatively simple shader execution engine, and a bit of general-purpose CPU for running the game logic and GL control code.

ASCI White is good at none of those things. It is a massively parallel computer designed for tasks that require very large amounts of general-purpose CPU. Running a single program thread on a single node is not very impressive; running a few thousand threads on all of its nodes at once makes it the fastest computer in the world.

I suppose that if someone bothered to make a version of Doom 3 that replicated itself across all of White's processors, rendered 3072 16x16 tiles at once, and recombined them into a 1024x768 frame, it would run pretty fast. But there still probably wouldn't be enough memory bandwidth between the nodes to run much faster than a decent desktop CPU connected to a Radeon 9700 over AGP 8x.