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Professor Sir

What is the weirdest glitch you've seen in Doom 3 or BFG Edition?

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I hope I'm not the only one to say that Doom 3 is buggy. REALLY buggy.

So what's the weirdest bug you've seen?

For me, it was a pair of ragdoll glitches I encountered in BFG Edition. I tend to use my fists on groups of zombies for the fun of it, and I wiped the floor with them. However, one of the ragdolls was just frozen in the position it was in when I killed it. It still looking like it was trying to lurch at me, but stuck in place. I could walk through it because that's just how ragdolls work, but when I came back after discovering the code to a weapons locker, it hadn't despawned as usual!

The other ragdoll glitch I encountered was again during a punch fest, and one of the zombie ragdolls was half stuck in a wall. With the two hit boxes colliding, the zombie appeared to flail its limbs wildly until it was slowly absorbed by the wall and then spit back out across the room. I know ragdolls have problems with walls in every game, but that was just ridiculous.


Oh and one time an Imp threw a fire ball at me then fell through the ground into oblivion.

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I coulda swore there was a glitch in BFG Edition that gave you infinite shotgun shells, but it turns out this is normal behaviour.

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  • Running so fast under influence of the Artifact that I confused the sentry bot following me. It insisted that I follow it back to the checkpoint it missed and THEN proceed onward.
  • Finding an invisible clip brush in the middle of a hallway in the same area in RoE, that wasn't there in the original version of the game. Nearly blocks off the entire hallway.
  • Having animated textures desync during RoE cinematics (possibly due to the Artifact's time manipulation). Never happened during vanilla RoE, but *did* happen if you warped to normal Doom 3 maps and used the Artifact in those...
  • Certain enemies falling through the ground as noted above. I think they spawn partway in the floor and from there, they're just gone. Standing on the same spot they fell through doesn't result in clipping into the void yourself, after all...
  • Game crashed in Delta Labs when an imp threw a fireball at me, complete with GameCube-style stuck sound - *BRRRRZZZZZZ*

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In the original Doom 3 (version before 3.1 patch) I experienced a glitch. I started level 1 and suicidally jumped into the pit right at the start. I respawned in level 3.

Also I've seen some broken physics with monster corpses, when they partially merged in walls/floor and wildly jerked around. Once I played a D3 mod which made the corpses of killed monsters to stay forever (never disappear), and then this glitch happened. The corpse kept its motion for several minutes, shooting it didn't help much.

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scifista42 said:

In the original Doom 3 (version before 3.1 patch) I experienced a glitch. I started level 1 and suicidally jumped into the pit right at the start. I respawned in level 3.

That only worked in the unpatched version unfortunately. The game originally assumed it was impossible to die in Mars City, even though it's very easy to do so (jump in that pit, or find a place you can take falling damage and repeatedly leap off it til your theigh bones apparently get driven up into your thorax). It being supposedly impossible, it assumed the next time Mars City would load that it should load the invasion map instead of the "clean" one, the assumption being you must have just come back from the Underground if it is loading again.

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Professor Sir said:

I hope I'm not the only one to say that Doom 3 is buggy. REALLY buggy.

Odd. I've always noticed how clean of bugs Doom 3 is. That long development time must have gone into the QA.

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Yeah, id games, whatever people might say about gameplay, are one of the most polished products in the industry. Both DOOM 3 and RAGE are essentially devoid of any bugs, even at 1.0 versions. There never really was anything serious to fix in patches. To say D3 is buggy (let alone 'REALLY buggy') is just offensive.

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Well, most of Rage's glitches were caused by driver issues rather engine-side. It's just that Carmack decided to trailblaze through OpenGL's terra incognita, where features were described on paper and supposedly implemented, but never actually used or tested by any code before his.

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NON bfg edition:
Having worked with Doom3 (on a mod basis) for more than 9 years, I can safely say that the game itself is remarkably unbuggy. That said, the engine has a few problems in a couple of areas.

  • The dancing ragdolls have already been mentioned.
  • The player/world collision response code is a little iffy sometimes when geometry isn't super clean. CollideAndSlide? :).
  • There is a bug with decals where they at a distance will z-fight with whatever surface they're directly in front or back of. I believe this might be caused by having too great a difference between the camera frustum's near and far planes. [If Doom3 works that way of course]
  • The netcode
When editing the game you'll encounter a million other weird bugs though. Especially if you push the limits a little.

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Shaviro said:

  • There is a bug with decals where they at a distance will z-fight with whatever surface they're directly in front or back of. I believe this might be caused by having too great a difference between the camera frustum's near and far planes. [If Doom3 works that way of course]

I think that's actually an almost universal thing with 3D engines; the precision of the Z buffer gets worse as you near the limitations of the frustum. It is highest near you, and lowest furthest away. That's my understanding anyway.

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Back in my days of running the original Doom 3 on outdated hardware, I remember one bug that plagued my experience a few times. I'm not sure if I was still running a GeForce 2 or had upgraded to the hand-me-down GeForce 4 from later on, but when I'd play Doom 3, my performance would like gradually slow down and get reeeeaaally bad until suddenly everything except the HUD and the gun models would just go completely black. Everything was still physically there, but I couldn't see it at all. On the plus side, at least my framerate finally went up! As far as I can recall that's the only time I ran into any truly weird bugs in Doom 3.

EDIT: I actually found the post I made about this very bug, all the way back from 2005! http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-3-general/30152-screwed-up-graphics/

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Quasar said:

I think that's actually an almost universal thing with 3D engines; the precision of the Z buffer gets worse as you near the limitations of the frustum. It is highest near you, and lowest furthest away. That's my understanding anyway.


That is also my understanding, however I have never seen Doom3 clip anything away because of distance. Not even when falling through the level and into the void for minutes. I have heard of games that don't use far plane clipping and Doom3 could be one of them.

Throughout the past years I have been slowly but steadily learning how to write a 3D engine. One of the problems I've encountered has been imprecision between close geometry at a distance, resulting in z-fighting. The fix was to lower the distance between the near and far clips. This allowed for geometry to be closer to eachother without z-fighting at a distance. So I'm guessing the precision of the z-buffer is dependent on how far you want to "stretch" it.

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