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xenphor

why's there no good doom 3 mod/engine development??

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Seeing as how the original doom has the most prolific mod scene it's strange to see that the much more advanced doom3 engine hasn't gotten the same attention. It has the potential to be much better.

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Da Werecat said:

1. Much more advanced = much harder to work with.
2. It's not flexible enough to attract lots of amateur game developers.


Pretty much this. id Tech 4 is probably one of the most difficult engines out there to work with.

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It also uses a particular format for it's DDS textures which doesn't work like the common format of dds most other games use, I think Far Cry was the same way.

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How could it be that difficult to work with if they licensed it out to other developers? Didn't Brink use it?? That game came out recently.

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Professional developers usually have resources to work with a modern/complex technology. Amateur developers usually don't.

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a company earns money through the games they make.

a hobby programmer on the other hand, needs to sacrifice his time and learn how the engine works, then program, while spending even more time to make the resources, and again more time to finish it up.

and usually all for free.

the estimated development time a team of 6 hobby mod developers would need for a one level mod, with new monsters, new source code, new textures, and new weapons might be around half a year to 1.5 years. UNLESS they do a really bad job. :)

why :
life is in their way. they do not have 8 work hours per day to spend on it.



edit : typo correction, sentence correction

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I believe a lot of it has to do with Doom 3's dynamic lighting and requiring a fair knowledge of C++ to make something playable because scripting.

Also Doom 3's built-in editor DoomEdit is extremely unstable but I don't think most people actually use it to map for Doom 3.

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Marnetmar said:

Also Doom 3's built-in editor DoomEdit is extremely unstable but I don't think most people actually use it to map for Doom 3.

Yeah but what else is as convenient as DoomEdit? Since DoomEdit is part of Doom 3, I have the native idTech4 engine support for game simulation, and I can easily switch out and into the game.

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Check the Doom 3: Phobos thread.

As for why it's harder, I have never mapped for it but I think I know the answer. It is harder because making something coherent and natural-looking is a lot more complicated because the default maps adhere to realism. I think that the quality of mods/maps is judged based on the original maps.

In short, we judge maps/mods in relation to the original game and the standards for Doom 3 mapping are therefore a lot higher (at least visually). To demonstrate this, observe how horribly maps that 100% emulate classic Doom in Doom 3 fail.

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DooM_RO said:

In short, we judge maps/mods in relation to the original game and the standards for Doom 3 mapping are therefore a lot higher (at least visually). To demonstrate this, observe how horribly maps that 100% emulate classic Doom in Doom 3 fail.


I agree. We judge too harshly sometimes on some of these map makers for what they create, due to the fact that they are not up to par with Doom 3 standard, and this puts off a lot of other map makers. Its sad really. Doom 3's modding community could have had so much potential. Maybe not as much as Doom 1 and 2, but it could have been really cool. Instead the mods and maps are few and far between.

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I think the Doom3 community got off to a bad start. Back in 2004 after the release of the game, there was a huge battle between Doom3 and Half-Life2 on both the tech and game side. In the public opinion Doom3 lost of course. Apparently news didn't reach the people on the most prolific Doom3 site; Doom3World. People there seemed obsessed about showing that Doom3 was the supirior game or tech and thus the project "Doom3 can do it too" was born. It was a project with the intention of showing that whatever Half-Life2 (or any other game did), Doom3 could do too. Many people, some talented some not, began working on this downtown setting complete with a time of day cycle. Long story short, the project failed miserably with an ugly poor performing result that was neither here nor there.

Had the obsession only stopped there it would have been fine, but it just went on and on for years. Mods implementing portals (like in portal), mods implementing vehicles, mods implementing water physics. The list goes on. Everything half assed. Nothing created for any purpose other than trying to show that "Doom3 can do it too". The projects that tried to do something, the projects with a vision have largely been ignored at doom3world. The only project that received a noticable amount of attention was Recall to Hell, but apparently mainly because it modified the look of the renderer. The people at d3w are very helpful when it comes to small editing requests etc, but they don't care about anything that isn't random renderer upgrades. Proper projects with a game vision isn't their thing and that's fine, but it's part of the explanation as to why Doom3 modding never became more than 3 big mods still being worked on after 9 years.
To put things in perspective, Phobos gets more support on Quake3world than Doom3world.

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Nothing can stop anyone from making Doom 3 maps. The game is almost as old as Doom 1, and it's open source too. If they're any good and look like classic Doom maps with an advanced engine (and not some amateurish tech-demo TC), I don't see why the Doomworld community wouldn't notice them. It's hard, but it's humanly possible. I guess someone needs to step up and make some Quake-quality Doom 3 maps, with fast gameplay and many monsters. Lower the stake a bit.

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The problem is that nothing in Doom3 (or barely its engine) supports the direction you're proposing, making it a very substantial undertaking.

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