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. "

what do you mean by leaked?

[IoQuaTiX]

is this a 'bad' leak? or was it done on purpose or what?

SWEET!!!!

[tadheckaman]

This looks really nice... but will there be any hardware avalible that can play it?
*ducks*

Leaked by ATI?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this site [htgk.org], the demo was leaked by an ATI employee.

Shame on them...

QUAID

[D4Vr4nt]

Start the reactor!

Um.. Crap, I can't play it, I only have a Matrox G400. :P

Maybe they leaked the alpha on purpose because they knew practically no one can play it. Well unless of course you just stare at the ground the entire game.

Looks really cool though, do we get a chainsaw again?

It's Too Bad

[MBCook]

I don't like these software "leaks". They mess things up, IMHO. Let's take this program for example (I'll point out I haven't played it, I have a GeForce 2 Go and I'm not a masochist).

One possibility of what will happen is what seems common to me when things are leaked. People play it, and they like/dislike a certain feature. Then when it's taken out/changed, they complain, when they never would have seen it (or missed it) otherwise. When people get to play something like this, they seem to think that it's their game.

Another possibility is that people play it and think it's the best game ever (and when it changes, complain, as above). If this doesn't happen, then the other extreme does, and that one seems a bit common to me. People play it, it's got lots of problems (it's an internal alpha, what do you expect) and so they say it's terrible, etc when the work on it is no where near complete. So when it DOES come out, alot of these people have already made up their minds.

I do think that this is news, and I'm glad it made it onto slashdot, but I DON'T think that slashdot should be posting mirrors to the leaked alpha (I know they'd show up in the comments but still...)

Possible response from iD

[zaffir]

Taken from HTGK, no word on it's validity, but still interesting:

"Xian> ATI leaked it
Xian> oh we will. We are hoping our rep gets fired.
Xian> John sent them a flame mail yesterday basically saying "This has hurt our relationship"
Xian> haha, no
Xian> not really
Xian> they sent us a development laptop with a full build of Unreal Warfare on it
Xian> yep
Xian> Well, we deleted it
Xian> that's a whole can of worms we don't want to get into
Xian> yeah, well, ATI has clearly violated our NDA
Xian> we thought about that.
Xian> but, no
Xian> ATI is on our shitlist right now
Xian> we are not dealing with them until further notice
Xian> no, it's not public chiQ
Xian> We know ATI leaked it. We watermark all releases
Xian> Squiggle: ATI has a relaxed policy about pre-release software. Remeber, they gave us a laptop that had Unreal Warfare loaded on it 3 months ago
Xian> They don't seem to care about strict enforcement of NDA's
Xian> on a positive note, people seem to *REALLY LIKE* the leaked shit"

Re:QUAID

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a chainsaw in the alpha. give weapon_chainsaw give the player what appears to be the chainfist thingy from Q3, but it has no sound or animation and bizarrely see through. Also present are the plasma gun (give weapon_plasmagun) and rocket launcher (give weapon_rocketlauncher) from Q3. It runs fine on any recent machine i.e. Athlon XP or P4 with Geforce 3 or 4 or Radeon. There are some frame rate issues, but then it is an alpha.

My framerates and impressions.

[dnaumov]

System:

AMD T-Bird 1400, 512 mb ddr, Creative GF4 Ti4200.
Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3.
30.82 NVIDIA Detonator Drivers.

Running at 640x480x32, I average at 30 fps when using low quality settings. When there's heavy action on screen, the framerates drop below 5. The intro "map e3\intro" is absolutely jaw dropping, albeit beit pretty slow on my machine. After watching the intro and playing around with the 3 included maps, I have no wonders that people at E3 were complaining that "Stop showing us the pre-rendered stuff, show us the engine" to which ID employees responded with something along the lines of "Well, this *IS* the engine". My knowledge of English is not good enough to be able to express how impressive this thing is. The scary atmosphere, lighting, shadows, creepy noises. ID did it all right. This is far from the "real thing", as it's only an Alpha of the engine that was shown months ago and the full game is still months off. Still. Two Words: My GOD.

P.S: I hear that this thing also has Multiplayer and the Editor included as well, but you have to hack around to get them to work.

Re:Possible response from iD

[Daleks]

Xian> They don't seem to care about strict enforcement of NDA's

ATI does seem to habitually violate NDA, or at least confidentiality agreements. A year ago at MWNY ATI made a press release about how their new graphics chip would be used in the yet to be released new iMac. This PR came out two days before Steve Jobs was supposed to officially announce the machines. He got so pissed off he cancelled all ATI demonstrations for his keynote speech and even had ATI's built-to-order options removed on all of the new machines. This probably made NVidia very happy.

Re:Possible response from iD

[PhoenixK7]

And then later, Apple got impatient and violated nVIDIA's NDA by announcing an Apple machine with a GeForce 4 based card before nVIDIA's official launch date. [macobserver.com]

i'm sure it's just a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be just a coincidence, from what I've seen ATI seems to have upped their internet advertising alot recently. They have a huge obtrusive popup on gamedev.net, and of course there's that banner right up at the top of the page I'm viewing right now.

If I wasn't so trusty this would definitely smell like some marketing chicanery.

(OK I'm not that trusty, here's my conspiracy theory: ATI's next gen cards are out now but doom 3 isn't out yet. They leak the doom3 alpha to get high end consumers thinking about doom3 cards at a time when they still have the lead against NVidia. Throw in some 9700 ads all over the web to make sure people know where to get their high end cards.)

Nah, couldn't be.

Games showing too much?

[yorgasor]

Now I enjoy FPS as much as the next guy. I was hooked on Doom I/II more than anyone else I knew at the time. And when I first looked at the screenshots of this game I was shocked at the quality of the rendering, how much more realistic the scenes were than other 3D FPS games I've seen. It looked like it would be a fantastic game. But then I saw a few other screenshots of guys getting blown away, with their intestines hanging out, the various bullet wounds and blood splatter on the wall, and I felt a little uncomfortable. Everyone wants to see their games look more realistic, but where do we draw the line? Do we want to see every bullet hole? Every organ? Fingers, partial heads, various limbs and appendagest all being blown off? There seems like there's a point where this begins to be unhealthy.

Now I'm not saying everyone playing this game will turn into serial killers, or anything like that. I'm not saying it's going to be the downfall of our generation. Blowing up monsters, aliens, various creatures, 'bad guys' etc has been a big part of my life, and those games have all been fun without needing highly detailed portions of their remains scattered around the level.

I guess my question is, are other people turned off by more realistic, graphic gore? Will FPS games quest for more realistic games turn to be their downfall, or will they start to modify them so, although the texture & enemies look more realistic, the actual shooting will be less intense? Or will they include an option where the user can choose to play ultra-graphic violent mode, or a more toned down version appropriate for younger players?

Re:Um...

[|<amikaze]

violation-of-NDA and warez-illegal

OK, so what NDA did CmdrTaco et al sign that prevents them from spreading this around? What EULA did they agree to? They aren't breaking a contract, since they didn't SIGN a contract.

re: Damnit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you guys act positively then in this situation?

The leak is out, and known about it. Instead of having websites that are desperate to cater to id's wish (eg, Shacknews.com) by buying their heads in the sand and pretending this doesn't exist, or sending Christian around like a good little stormtrooper to cease and desist sites hosting pictures....

Why not officially release some pictures? Why not just make an official announcement thats somethings been leaked?

Re:Damnit.

[ShooterNeo]

Maybe this is begging the question, but WHY are you mad? It seems rather unlikely that this leak will hurt you in the slightest way in terms of sales of the future game. The people who have the hardware capable of trying it and are savvy enough to download it mostly know what "alpha" means. Anyway, if you were really worried about fans losing interest because of buggy demos, why release tech demos? I recall some of the Quake tech demos were extremely buggy and almost unplayable on some computers, yet it didn't seem to dampen fan enthusiasm.

The only thing I see that might be irritating is that ATI seems to have broken trust with you.

Re:Damnit.

[Moofie]

Stolen, huh? Stolen, like Mr. Carmack no longer has the code on his hard drive? Stolen, like somebody has removed the capacity from somebody else to use the product?

Stolen how, exactly? What was removed from somebody's ownership? What does the owner no longer have the full and unfettered use of?

Copying!=stealing, and anybody who thinks that this alpha leak is going to dampen enthusiasm for D3 is silly.

Re:Damnit.

[Chicane-UK]

John,

Whilst it is unfortunate that this was leaked, I think you should take some comfort in the fact that just about everyone who has tried this out is absolutely blown away by it. Not just by the stunning visuals, but by the scary atmosphere, the awesome sound, and just about everything else. This is the first game that has scared the hell out of me in ages..

The game rules.. I cannot WAIT to buy the full version.

Re:Damnit.

[Synic]

Copying bits illegally is still stealing. Just because it doesn't erase the original copy, does not make it legal to have a copy. Another example: if you get an advance copy of a book from a publisher and decide to make exact duplicate copies on printing presses and distribute them. Well, I think you'd be in a world of trouble. Still stealing. Didn't burn the original pressing typeset.