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cloogshicer
atomlib
Kind of like real life as well. I always lower my weapon or item whenever I approach a terminal or a touchscreen in an elevator.
bombcar
Strange, I always shoot the computer first - only if it is invulnerable to bullets do I know it’s actually important.
mattigames
Same approach I take with NPCs.
oblak
Me? I am old school and just clip right through some surfaces.
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PoignardAzur
If I understand your description right, I think Prey (the Arkane one) does the same thing. It does feel pretty awesome and natural; really helps you feel like you're in a corporate world with touchscreens everywhere.
cloogshicer
The new(-ish) Prey comes close, but if I remember correctly, it still sometimes locks on to the screen you're controlling, taking you out of the action.
In Doom 3, you're still in control of your first person character, which is awesome.
Try it in the demo linked above, if you skip the cutscenes you can find a screen within the first minute of gameplay or so.
scheeseman486
The Duke Nukem Forever 2001 leak handles in-game display interactions in a functionally identical way. Not discounting parallel discovery (or even that it was first) but id software and Apogee/3D Realms had a relationship.
rmuratov
They did something similar in Prey 2017.
Keyframe
I know it's 18 years old game by now, but in my mind it's the first wave of "next gen" games (normal maps, unified lighting, etc..) so it's still kind of amazing seeing this running at 60fps on a paltry laptop (razer blade stealth) and on linux in a browser at that!
edit: scratch that, thing runs even on phone at 60fps
tomxor
> I know it's 18 years old game by now, but in my mind it's the first wave of "next gen" games
Oh man that makes me feel old. I remember first playing this on my tiny 12" powerbook from 2004... and back then It felt like a heavy weight that shouldn't quite be running on that machine.
lostgame
Oh, God - I, too; experienced DOOM 3 for the first time on a PowerPC Mac...not exactly a pleasant experience.
I was an early adopter of the first Intel MacBook; and let me tell you - the difference (once we had a Universal Binary) was like riding a horse vs. driving a car.
Other than Final Cut Express and Logic Express performance, I found DOOM 3 to be one of the first major signs that Intel was meant to be and here to stay.
EugeneOZ
Well, on MBP M1 (Ventura) it drops from 63 to 15 sometimes (levels loading?).
finikytou
doom3 is a masterpiece of gaming. it represented a radical shift in how 3d was used in games, hardware shift, light shift in terms of how to light and reflect light in an environment. in terms of game design this is the pinnacle of the genre. it is to this day my favorite FPS by far.
beautiful talk by carmack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1q49GxsPWM&t=4s&ab_channel=...
flohofwoe
I don't know... it's definitely a masterpiece of rendering technology, but IMHO not as a game. Compared to classic Doom or the Quake games, it took too long until the action started, and everything felt so slow and sticky! It was the first Id game I couldn't really get into, and the first I didn't play to the end.
cpuguy83
This was the first (only?) game that legit had me jumpy. I remember one part of the game where I was in this room and a monster walked across the window, saw me, then came around and started pounding on the door. Each time the door dented a bit more until it gave out.
I don't think I saw a game before Doom3 that was quite like that.
torginus
I think it might even be argued its rendering techniques either weren't that revolutionary, or turned out to be dead ends.
Don't get me wrong, it's a technical masterpiece, but one of execution rather than innovation.
It's main feature was dynamic lighting and shadows, which it accomplished with dynamic lights, normal maps and stencil shadows.
Dynamic lights and normal maps were nothing new even back then, I remember multiple titles using them, but not this well and not to this extent.
Stencil shadows were kind of unique, they worked by extruding the geometry from the light's perspective, and figuring out what was inside the light's shadow by counting front and back faces.
Unfortunately, since they used geometry, they looked really blocky and sharp, with no smooth edges unlike shadow mapping.
Imo they looked kind of bad, a step down from the beautiful pre-rendered lightmap shadows we enjoyed years before.
giobox
It's also a game that arguably was directly limited by its advanced rendering techniques; the number of enemies on screen at any one time rarely exceeds four IIRC, corpses vanish almost immediately to reclaim resources, most environments are quite small with few open or large spaces to explore. Id had to ship something that could actually run on customer computers of the era.
This is in sharp contrast to Half Life 2 released at a similar time, which had far more enemies and NPCs on screen at one time as well as much much larger maps to explore. I think in some ways Half Life 2s visuals have honestly dated better despite the less ambitious technology - the larger and more varied maps its lesser performance requirements permitted help a lot.
bombcar
Doom 3 wasn’t the same kind of game as Doom and Quake were. Serious Sam was more on that line - Doom 3 was an entirely different game type even though it had the same lineage.
msikora
Same for me, it looked nice, but never got into Doom 3. On the other hand the new Doom games, especially Doom Eternal, go back to the roots and are one of the best FPS games out there, at least for single player that is...
retinaros
to this day it is for me the only fps that i felt was art. almost like a very good movie. better lit than most of what hollywood produce now. sound design was awesome, it had so much style and atmosphere, and it was really minimalist to an extent that each interaction was important each enemy was a strugle. defintly different from all the other doom games hence why it was never as popular as the others but there was so much depth in its shadows than it reminded me of how great composers use silence in music
https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/renderer.php at the technicql level there were some cool advances and the game in its production definitly felt like a leap forward that only a few game matched after (i could say mgs 4-5 and death stranding are close ones, final fantasy 15 while very weak story wise had others, but definitly no fps did what doom3 did)
dvlsg
I got super annoyed at enemies popping in behind me out of thin air, too. Felt like a cheap way to surprise the player, and it got old really fast.
Doom 3 as a game sure looked cool, though. The flashlight blew my mind back in the day.
scheeseman486
Stencil shadows were not particularly influential, everything now is either lightmaps or RT. If anything I'd argue that The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay did what Doom 3 did technology-wise (stencil shadows, normal mapped models and environments) and used it better since the lighting tech had real impact on gameplay systems other than "you can't see". Butcher Bay even released before Doom 3 did, on console hardware no less. Having played Butcher Bay before Doom 3, the latter was an deep disappointment.
Also I wouldn't put light reflection in the list of idtech 4's achievements if we're talking more than one bounce, it literally does not do that. idtech 2 did, precalculated of course.
ninkendo
> and used it better since the lighting tech had real impact on gameplay systems other than "you can't see"
Yeah, I always was perplexed by that tendency in Doom3… I mean, I get that lighting calculations aren’t tracing the effects of light past the first surface it hits, but does it have to be black when there’s no lights hitting a surface? Couldn’t they have done a cheap approximation of “ambient light” based on how many lights there are nearby, and use that light level as a minimum for totally occluded surfaces?
I remember reading that the choice to use black was literally a performance optimization because the renderer got to fully skip drawing surfaces that were fully occluded and it saved some render time. Then I also read that it was a design choice to give it a more panicked environment because you couldn’t see what’s in the shadows… but it always looked clunky to me, seeing fully black areas when there’s clearly a lot of reflective scattering surfaces around.
Minor49er
Have you ever played Prey (2006)? It used the same tech, had some extra capabilities like walking on walls and ceilings, and was probably even more intense in the body horror department
oblak
You forgot about the portals. It had portals before Portal. It also features some pretty cool weapons and other mechanics. Pretty cool game. Too bad Human Head never got to finish the second one
son_of_gloin
Half-Life 2 came out around the same time and I think had better graphics, story, and realistic physics.
Groxx
ehhh... Doom 3's limitations were painfully obvious when it launched. The shadows and pure blacks were a nice stylistic workaround for handling only a single light source, but later levels went crazy with filling the world with glowing fog to make larger rooms even remotely usable. It felt more like an elaborate tech demo than a game at times.
It was a significant leap, but it was the right time for it. In less than a year you saw other games doing the same thing or better - they had clearly been working on it as well. Doom 3 was just the first to come out, and Carmack did a lot to spread knowledge about it immediately (as he frequently does, which is wonderful).
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anthk
A tech demo you say. Obvious. Doom, Doom2, Quake and Unreals and nothing more than FPS clones of the same concepts to sell engine features to third parties.
sebazzz
The Doom 3 demo scared the crap out of me the first time I played it, that scene in Mars City Underground. It still does in some way.
ramesh31
It was the last true generational leap in PC gaming. It took consoles at least 5 years to catch up. Something we'll never see again now that all AAA games are exclusively built for console limitations, with PC ports as an afterthought.
Narishma
Not really. It took less than a year for the Xbox version to release.
That same year Quake 4 launched using the same engine on Xbox 360.
csmpltn
Death Stranding is, in my opinion, another such leap.
footlose_3815
[dead]
erwinh
seems not that long ago "can it run doom" was the benchmark, now we are already up to doom 3.
epakai
Yeah doesn't take much these days. I played with dhewm on a surface go, and performance was amazing for a dinky 6W cpu even with the high dpi display.
spullara
Depending on if you are talking about a recent iPhone, it may be faster than the laptop.
madrox
I'm getting ~15 FPS on this demo, which is roughly the same FPS I got on my potato PC when Doom 3 launched. Really brings me back.
I'm used to seeing Doom running on all kinds of platforms, but it's inspiring and humbling to see Doom 3 - a game I have vivid memories of being in awe of - running in a browser. It really highlights how far tech has come when I wasn't looking. In many ways, my old eyes don't see much different from Doom 3 high end graphics and the graphics of modern games.
jamesfinlayson
> It really highlights how far tech has come
I remember seeing primitive Flash versions of Half-Life, Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein running in a browser ten or so years ago and I thought that was amazing.
daniel-thompson
Very impressive! Few minor artifacts with shadows and the fps counter shows 63, but otherwise, works great on Firefox on my 2021 M1 MBP.
On a sidenote, I unironically love the dialogue in this game - it's so bad it's good:
Guy 1> I'm tired of running damage control every time he makes a mess.
Guy 2> Right, you're the control. And if that fails, I'm the damage.
omegalulw
Personally, I love cheesy dialogue in games like this.
astlouis44
The same author also did a port of Arkane's Arx Fatalis to WebAssembly. Interestingly, both Doom 3 and Arx are now owned by Microsoft with the Zenimax acquisition, so it would be interested to see these two games on the frontpage in a gaming section when you open the Edge browser.
anthk
That's because both engines are under a libre license. Check Arx Libertatis.
olivierestsage
It will be interesting to see how this game's legacy will ultimately be viewed. For the first decade or so after its release, it got a lot of flak for certain design choices, like the limited access it gives the player to the flashlight, that don't seem like such a big deal anymore.
spatulon
Note that they remastered the game in 2012 as "Doom 3: BFG Edition", and that included the ability to use the flashlight while holding weapons.
I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are far more successful as Doom games than Doom 3. Like the original 90s games, they're fast-paced, with wide-open combat areas and hordes of enemies on screen at the same time. The technical choices they made with id Tech 4 meant that a game like that wasn't really possible with the hardware available in 2004.
Maybe they just shouldn't have called it Doom? But its design as a slow-paced horror game, what with all the tedious monster closets, doesn't compare well to Resident Evil 4, which came out only a few months later.
nailer
It’s more the genre change from action to horror. Serious Sam felt more like a Doom sequel than Doom 3 did.
rob74
Well, if you paid attention, Doom 1 and 2 were "horror" too (the amount of "creatures from hell", mutilated bodies hanging around as decoration, enemies exploding into giblets of bloody meat etc. are pretty sure giveaways), but the technical limitations of the time prevented them from being as scary as Doom 3.
IMTDb
"Horror" is more than just the setting, it's mainly about the gameplay. Doom 1, 2 and eternal are more action than horror. You have lots of relatively "weak" ennemies to kill. The blood and gore just intensify that "happy trigger" feeling. Rooms are bigs, allowing you to move freely to avoid projectiles.
Doom 3 on the other hand is different; you very rarely have more than one enemy to beat at a time. That single enemy can absolutely shred you if you are not very careful, you have to consider each engagement carefully. The darkness and blood are tuned to intensify that "fear" feeling. Rooms are very small, limiting your ability to dodge, almost to the point of inducing claustrophobia.
Painkiller was released almost as the same time as Doom and was way more action oriented, even tho it contains its fair share of gore.
0x457
Yes, but it's not that simple. Doom 3 is pretty "horror" compared to any other Doom game. I would put in the same basket as Dead Space games.
Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal gameplay is much closer to Doom 1 and 2. Both are very "push-forward" shooters.
nailer
That’s true, it’s more the gameplay shift (jump scares, less enemies on screen at once, no power fantasy) than the aesthetic shift.
wussboy
I remember playing around with the Serious Sam level editor. A buddy of mine made a map that was just a small hut in the middle and monster generators scattered over the next hill. Endless mindless hordes of monsters came over that hill and you and your buddies just needed to hold out as long as you could. Pretty amazing for, what, 1999?
notjustanymike
Downloading the duct tape mod was practically a requirement.
pdntspa
The flashlight mechanic really gave it a nice horror vibe the originals were missing. Like do you want light? Or do you want to kill things? Choose!
skocznymroczny
The originals had a lot of horror vibe. It might not seem like it nowadays because players are used to it and there's many mods like Brutal Doom trivializing the content, but original Doom was scary. There was no other game like it at the time, and the growls of the monsters, the flickering lights, rooms getting dark when you grab a key and monster closets opening, body horror elements on walls and decorations. Doom 3 felt actually milder, it just was more annoying with the darkness everywhere.
omeysalvi
Doom 3's design suffered due to its programming innovations. Since the game developers wanted to show off the real time lighting, they opted for a horror like design that showed off the tech. It kinda drove it away from the thing that made the original Doom games fun - fast paced fps action
tommica
This is really cool - was too afraid to play this game as a teenager, but it's great to see it in this context!
ugjka
Yeah, D3 wash such an adrenaline rush
djmips
One background article on Doom3 renderer. I'm sure there's more from Carmack himself. https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_bfg/renderer.php
oblak
Dr. Malcolm Betruger: Amazing things will happen here soon, you just wait.
Took a while but he was right.
amelius
How long until Linux runs in WASM, with Doom running in it on Wayland?
fsiefken
might already be possible with webvm, cheerpx and greenfield https://leaningtech.com/webvm-server-less-x86-virtual-machin... https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
williamstein
There's several regularly updated Linux emulators running in WASM here: https://copy.sh/v86/ I don't know if doom runs in any of them, but it would be slow.
daurnimator
Fails to load in firefox 105.0.1 (64-bit ArchLinux) for me.
WebGL warning: <Create>: WebglAllowWindowsNativeGl:false restricts context creation on this system. d3wasm.js:1:156185
Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed:
* WebglAllowWindowsNativeGl:false restricts context creation on this system. ()
* Exhausted GL driver options. (FEATURE_FAILURE_WEBGL_EXHAUSTED_DRIVERS)
Uncaught TypeError: GLctx is undefinedtyingq
Supposedly a firefox bug. Try about:config => webgl.force-enabled = true
ddoolin
FWIW, working on Firefox Dev Edition on 64-bit Arch for me.
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Something Doom 3 handled amazingly is how computers are controlled in first person.
As your crosshair approaches the screen, it turns into a mouse cursor, and you can control the computer as you would a regular desktop PC. It just feels so natural.
I'm surprised that this wasn't copied more by other games. Probably because it doesn't work as well on consoles with a controller.