Doom 3 version Aug 2004

[roboticmehdi2]

Does anyone has Doom 3 bought very early?  Like August 2004 or preferably just 2004, but not 2005.

 

I want to test the earliest released version executable, I was hoping if someone who has it could send me it, but excluding game data files (pak000.pk4-pak004.pk4)

 

Be safe.

[Pankrat]

An earlier version required a CD in the CD-drive. I have one, but now I can’t get it because of quarantine.

[Pankrat]

Wrote in a PM.

[roboticmehdi2]

Thank you very much !

[Doom fan]

Is it possible to make the game a two walds from doom 2 eg chillax and port similar ones to 3? I would love to see them with a doom 3 look.

[Dark Pulse]

Hell of a necrobump, but the answer is a very obvious "no." They're fundamentally different engines; you'd have to literally recreate the maps entirely from scratch. What you're asking is basically the equivalent of saying "Can I play Wolfenstein 3D in Return to Castle Wolfenstein?"

 

Also it will probably make many GPUs cry when you try to render dozens/hundreds of monsters at once.

[Doom fan]

I don't think the need for a machine would be a problem, since you can already get a 2060 card at a discounted price, which can be in a machine suitable for a game, or from 1660 onwards. It is not even worth talking about the rest because they are very weak and outdated.

[Dark Pulse]

3 hours ago, Doom fan said:

I don't think the need for a machine would be a problem, since you can already get a 2060 card at a discounted price, which can be in a machine suitable for a game, or from 1660 onwards. It is not even worth talking about the rest because they are very weak and outdated.

You're considerably underestimating how much polys it would have to push.

 

Let's take MAP13 for example, one of the first really big maps I can think of.

• Monster count on Ultra-Violence: 5316.
• Monster types on Ultra-Violence: 1860 Hell Knights, 1542 Revenants, 760 Imps, 366 Demons, 282 Cacodemons, 208 Barons of Hell, 142 Archviles, 48 Mancubi, 41 Cyberdemons, 40 Arachnotrons, 26 Spider Masterminds, 1 Former Human, and a partridge in a pear tree.

I don't know the polygon count of each monster offhand, but I know that for games around that vintage, 2000-4000 polygons was pretty commonplace. A post I found said that enemies generally came in three varieties: 1500-2000, 2000-2500, 4000. (This is ignoring that the source models were extremely high poly, in the range of 350,000 - 1.5 million, but we're ignoring that as it was basically only used to generate the normal maps and apply them to low-poly meshes.)

 

Not even Chillax will throw all its monsters at you at once (...usually), so let's say you ran into 500 of those Hell Knights all at once, and let's use a midway estimate of 3000 polys.

 

3000 polys x 500 monsters = 1.5 million polygons in view off monsters alone.

 

A 2080 Ti can render about 17 billion triangles. However, polygons are not triangles - and the amount of polygons scales dramatically with how complex the shape is. A 3-sided figure (i.e... a triangle) only needs, of course, one triangle rendered. But a four-sided figure (think square, rectangle, rhombus, parallelogram...) needs 8. A pentagon needs 35. A hexagon, 110. A septagon, 287. An octogon, 632. And it keeps going up and up and up.

 

Obviously we can't define Doom 3 monsters into such simple shapes so easily like that. As a pure fudge factor though, let's assume a decahexagon - that is, 16-sided. That's 37,424 triangles to render one monster. Times 500, and we get 18,712,000 triangles per second.

 

Note that this isn't counting level geometry (which also has to be rendered), lighting (which also has to be calculated), texture passes (which have to be run), AI (though that runs on the CPU), and so on. Now do that sixty times a second if you want optimal speed.

 

And of course, that's on a top-of-the-line, $1000+ GPU. And this isn't counting API overhead, the fact that it's probably 500 separate draw calls as opposed to one "draw all 500 of these monsters at one time," the actual rendering used (likely OpenGL since this is Doom 3, though a derived engine may have a Vulkan renderer maybe), and so on.

 

In short, it quickly adds up - and quickly becomes really difficult to do.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Dark Pulse

[Doom fan]

Then this can only be accomplished after many, many years, when have procik vidikarik come out that can cope with it?

[Dark Pulse]

Well, if it were down to the GPU, the answer would be "right now."

 

The problem is, it's not. The bigger issue is the CPU.

 

Doom 3 came out in 2004, and you're specifying that version. That version assumed what was common for the time: One CPU core, so everything runs on one thread. (The BFG re-release, on the other hand, makes good use of multithreading and multiple CPU cores.) This effectively means that the GPU is always and forever going to be bottlenecked by the CPU's single-threaded performance, and while the CPUs are a lot faster now than they were back in 2004, the simple fact of the matter is that (to continue using my example) processing 500 enemies' AI, their projectiles, keeping track of the game state, etc. is going to mean lots and lots and lots of number crunching.

 

This is the exact same reason you can load up NUTS.WAD in GZDoom, shoot once, and watch your framerate plummet to less than one frame per second. It's more doable in different engines and at lower resolutions, but calculating all that AI, plus the GL light stuff, plus the game state will bring many engines - and many PCs - right to their knees.

 

Now if all you were doing was rendering a still image, with no AI to factor in, and a static game state? You could probably do it with relative ease. But then it's not so much a game as it is an image where you can move around in 3D space.

[Doom fan]

Would you invest in an i9 10900K and an rtx 3090?

[printz]

On 8/7/2020 at 8:03 AM, Dark Pulse said:

Also it will probably make many GPUs cry when you try to render dozens/hundreds of monsters at once.

Also the monsters will need to be heavily tweaked to work correctly in big groups. Right now just placing like 12 imps in a room will result in a deafening screech because all of them will scream at a high rate. And as you said, it will consume a lot of time because all of them will fire simultaneously at you fireballs with detailed special effects. This is actually similar to playing classic Doom nuts.wad on -fast, which seems to be much slower than non-fast, due to all the simultaneous processing.

[Doom fan]

Yes, it's quite interesting. Now we’ve got the performance of the video card and looking at it with these would already be suitable for it.