Silikone

Just read that now, and it seems like tying the timer to the sound system wasn't a first time. Wolfenstein 3D could use a whopping 7000Hz (though only 700Hz with the code commented out) primary clock for the game to base its timing on. Still not sure where that aforementioned fractional number stems from, though. I can't find a way to derive it from the PIT frequency.

It's no secret that Doom runs at half the rate of the VGA 70Hz display mode, but after finding a number on the internet that seems to be specific down to the microseconds, I wanted to know how it could be measured. Unfortunately, with the Doom source code being a derivative of the original build, many low-level OS specific adjustments don't apply to the real DOS game. Thankfully, Heretic's source code reveals a lot about the inner workings of the great thing that was bestowed upon us back in 1993. Interestingly, a series of functions involved with using the hardware timer for interrupt requests is commented out, and instead, a call to the infamous DMX library is made with the integers 140 and 35 respectively. That a sound library is responsible for controlling the passing of time is pretty peculiar, and without access to its source code, I cannot find anything that supports the aforementioned fractional number. Even going by the video refresh rate divided by 2 yields a different number than the one provided.

I've noticed that there are a few indexes in the Doom palette that are identical. This is ostensibly wasteful, and there could have been more room for diversity of color without them. Is there a particular reason for this, like some kind of performance optimization for accessing adjacent bytes during rendering?

Any examples of optimized custom Doom palettes?

This makes me want to compare the frame rates directly between Doom and Heretic, and see how consistently this 10-15% performance gain applies.

So the shotgun's damage can vary a lot due to the randomness of each individual pellet, but as the RNG in Doom is very limited with its single byte array, the actual total damage is probably far higher than what would be the minimum had the RNG been perfect. If I am not mistaken, the engine would shift the array by one for each pellet in the shotgun and assign them damage calculated by the entry in the array, unless there are some things in between like trajectories. With this in mind, it should be possible to determine what the lowest possible damage by one blast is. Any clues?

I made a small program and can confirm that I get the same results with the set amount of calls. It should be easy to check how many calls are actually made in-game. Compare the RNG index inside the A_FireShotgun function before and after each P_GunShot call, and then dump those numbers somewhere. I'd try it, but I don't know how to set up Linux Doom, and I don't know if a nice sourceport like Zdoom follows the same RNG rules.

If that's the case, I wonder if a schutzstaffel can survive a point blank shot.

Very interesting. But the 45 being for non-foes (or is it?) only makes it pointless, so why is it in the Doom wiki graph? when exactly are the different amount of calls made when you hit an ordinary enemy?

So what was the benefit of using triple buffering in Doom? Why did they go back to mode 0x13 in Heretic?

Why 5 different Doom games?

Is there a way to identify Doom retail packages that include the pre-order bonus? I know that RAGE had the pre-order edition of the game on the shelves long after its release, so maybe the same could happen with Doom?

Id Tech 5 ran perfectly fine on my 8800, but DOOM struggles on my GTX 760.

Looking at the console, it even has variables that look like something straight out of Id Tech. It's a shame that the engine is so poorly documented. I would so much put Riddick assets in Doom 3 and vice versa to see exactly how the graphics pipelines differ.

I always liked the engine of Doom 3 and the things it did that are still considered novel today. However, after playing the 2004 version of Riddick, I can now easily see the shortcomings of Doom 3. Both games look very similar, and they were released around the same time. Riddick came first, though its PC version arrived later. Both games are powered by engines that almost appear identical. Indeed, they use many of the same algorithms, and they both run on OpenGL. However, comparing both, Riddick seems to have quite an edge. Characters are less blocky, self shadowing is enabled on everything, textures are sharper at the cost of being compressed, it has dynamic bloom, corpses don't disappear, and there is even soft stencil shadowing that had a way larger hit on performance than it was worth. Was Id Tech 4 really inferior? I certainly don't doubt that John Carmack did a lot of optimization magic. What is the secret behind Starbreeze's development?

How are they inferior? They pretty much work the same way with the exception of self shadowing characters in Riddick. It's true that this causes artifacts, and shadow mapping suffers from a similar problem with flickering edges on steep angles, but no self shadowing at all has its own ugly moments.

It is. This is from the original 2004 release, which honestly looks better due to the lack of post-processing.

Is it known how many retail versions of Doom 3 PC have been released? I'm kind of interested since I have personally seen at least three English European variations. The first I have seen is a jewel case containing 3 CDs. I don't know what the rest of the package looks like, but I am going to assume that it's a large box often seen in the 90's. The second variation I have seen is three CDs inside a keep case, rather than a jewel case, and it appears to be much more common on Google images. The last I have seen is a Best of Activision budget range release, which is obviously a later re-release. There are also the localized versions of Doom 3 that I personally wouldn't take into account. Last but not least, I bet there is a whole different branch in North America. Edit: The European jewel case may be some sort of OEM release, but from where exactly?

I've looked around for benchmarks from 2004, and none of them seem to crank Doom 3 up to the ultimate settings. As a fanboy, I'm curious to see the best possible results from playing at 1600x1200 with settings on ultra and 16x AA. I can imagine that a system like this would do the job: -NVIDIA 6800 Ultra SLI -High-end Athlon/Pentium 4. -Preferably 2 GB of RAM, if 1 isn't enough. -A bit overclocking here and there -Everything else, like SATA HDDs.

I bet there are some Doom veterans here who ordered Doom back in 1993 or early 1994. I've been wondering whether it came with a big package full of art and gadgets, or if it simply contained a disc (or floppy?) without any special label. I'm also wondering if Id only shipped the initial version, or made new copies to send the latest version directly.

What about the original Doom 2 release? Did it contain floppies?

Was there really no version 1.0 registered? The release date of 1.0 and 1.1 are six days apart according to multiple sources. Unless it took more than six days for Doom to arrive, what would you get if you ordered Doom on the 10th of December?

Could you perhaps also list the files in the floppies?

CD eh? Where was this available from?