Doom 3 Linux Client

Brad writes "LinuxGames.com is reporting that the Doom 3 Linux Client has begun private testing. The Doom 3 Linux server has already been completed and will be released with the next win32 release."

Cool

[ChopsMIDI]

I'm excited to see what kind of performance difference there is between the Win32 and the linux client.

The Native Linux Client for Quake 3 ran MUCH faster for me than in Windows....to the point that I stopped playing Q3A in Windows altogether, simply because I could crank my Resolution much higher in Linux and it ran perfectly (like 100 FPS).

I hope it's the same for Doom3....It'll be like a free hardware upgrade.

Cedega

[Ford Prefect]

I downloaded the Windows demo earlier this week, in the hope of getting it to run on my (somewhat rubbish) PC. Of course, my games-only Windows 98 installation turned out to be somewhat insufficient - while the demo installed, it refused to run. Some hex-editing of the Doom3.exe as recommended for the full game turned out to be worthless, making it crash immediately after launch.

So, I decided to give Linux a try. I found a clever shell script for downloading the latest Cedega from CVS [linux-gamers.net], and gave that a try. It worked brilliantly.

Absolutely no visual glitches, no audio glitches, and completely, utterly and boringly stable. Only criticism was that the frame rate was rather low, but I'm not surprised - my PC's below minimum specs processor-wise (1.1GHz Athlon), although merely low-end graphics-wise (128MB GF4Ti).

It'll be interesting to compare the performance of the native client with the running-on-Cedega one - I really wonder how much processor time Cedega takes to do all its API-translation thing.

As for the game? It's ... Interesting, but highly derivative. Pretty atmospheric, and an intriguing engine - but gameplay was rather dull, and the poor sound-effects really didn't help. Footsteps sounded horrible and far too repetitive, likewise a lot of the other sounds. Plus the repetition wasn't confined to the audio, with way too much scripting and linearity...

Will I buy the game? Probably, eventually, but only when it's come down in price. ;-)

Re:They don't use DirectX...

[Ford Prefect]

Rather, they use OpenGL and a thin API over the other parts of DirectX (sound, input). OpenGL is cross-platform.

If it's anything like Quake 2, it'll have its own internal sound and display APIs, with some simple platform-specific stuff at the very end. I get the impression Quake 2 could be ported to a new system just by writing a couple of new files and using that as the target...

Actually, slightly irrelevantly, I've been busy poking around in the demo's .pk4 datafile, and most of the data is already portable. Textures are DDS or TGA, audio is OGG or WAV, and everything else is text-files. Models, animations, scripting, even the sodding maps - it's plain, human-readable text!

It's not XML (heh), but it's definitely not some endian-specific binary garbage...

Re:Cool

[FueledByRamen]

On the performance differences side, I had the same experience. The machine was an AMD K6/2 400 with a 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 16MB AGP - Windows 2000 and (Redhat) Linux dual boot.

Under Windows - Quake3 was fine in 1024x768, slow to the point of unplayability at 1280x1024.

Under Linux - After finally getting hardware 3d acceleration working (wow, I never want to hear the words "Glide OpenGL Wrapper" ever again...) - completely playable in 1600x1200, highest detail settings, at 50 FPS (bottoming out at 30FPS with too many rockets onscreen). On a Voodoo 3. I was absolutely amazed.


I doubt the differences will be THAT pronounced (I blame it on 3dfx's Windows drivers being horrible), but it certainly would be nice to have the Linux port of Doom3 running faster than on Windows.