Dhewm3 – Doom3 Source Port | Hacker News Reader

Dhewm3 – Doom3 Source Port

dhewm3.org

87 pointsLammy30 comments

Vaguely related: there's also a project to rewrite the DOOM3 engine in Ada. It's incomplete though, and rather inactive.

https://github.com/AdaDoom3/AdaDoom3

Isn't that madness?

Rewriting in Ada means it will be easier for NASA to approve for use on a Mars colony.

/joke

In a few decades, maybe there'll be people saying "our teleporters wouldn't have accidentally opened portals to hell if their software had been written in Rust/Ada".

It's been said that C's undefined behaviour is permitted, in principle, to cause demons to fly from one's nose. [0] I guess the nose part is all they got wrong.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nasal-demons.html

Madness in terms of the effort involved for the payoff, perhaps, but Ada doesn't seem like a terrible choice of language for a game engine. John Carmack once said he'd use Ada for game engine code if only it were easier to hire game programmers who knew the language. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/00Q9-ftiPVQ?t=976

I'm so glad that id Tech 4 made it out before Carmack left. I'd love to see it become a base least-common-denominator for real-time 3D.

It was also ported to WASM, for anyone interested:

https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/

Why iodoom3 didn't catch, but dhewm3 seems to we active?

The about section doesn't talk about iodoom3.

I wish ID software just released files for old games in public domain. I do not think they are making any significant money off it right now.

I think it’s wonderful they way it is. Code is gpl so tons of ports. But because of this more people buy the game so they get money.

ID software is owned by Zenimax which makes a considerable sum from their franchises. There's a surprising long tail on the originals too.

Zenimax got bought by Microsoft.

They agreed to be bought by Microsoft, the deal hasn't been finalized yet

They're plenty cheap on all the major game stores and overwhelmingly easy to find download links to. Not sure that sort of thing is necessary

The list of mods is impressive.

I wonder if one needs the doom 3 data pack (owning the game) in order to play the mods that are new games.

If they use their own assets (e.g. the dark mod) you don't need the original game data

What's this a port to/from? It's not totally clear from their page?

In doom a “source port” means someone has taken the original engine as released by id, made modifications (could involve support for different architectures, or could just be tightening some features up, adding enhancements or cosmetic upgrades or even just making the game buildable on a modern dev environment) and released that modified version. It’s not the same as when we talk about “porting” games originally released on (say) PSX to PC, there’s no from/to to speak of

So it's a fork? Is there any need for new terminology?

"The Doom source code was released to the public on December 23, 1997. Although Doom was originally created for DOS, the release was of the Linux version, and the source code had to be ported back to DOS and to other operating systems. Hence the term "source port", which out of custom also is used for those modifications which are not technically ports to another platform. The term itself originates from the first source port, DOSDoom and its 0.2 version. "[0]

Term has been in use since 97, not exactly new.

[0]: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Source_port

From the idTech 4 source code as GPLed in 2011, to "any system that supports OpenGL 1.4 with ARB shaders, SDL and OpenAL". DOOM³ had third-party proprietary Linux/Mac releases back in The Day, but now it's open source and available on many other OSes too.

Why would I want to play this instead of the bfg edition? I know the bfg edition has a few minor differences but, other than that, it’s generally better than the old version.

Game breaking bugs? Check. (allegedly fixed in post release patches) Unskippable cutscenes? Check. Reduced FoV? Check. An auto save system that pauses the game to save unlike the original which did it seamlessly? Check. Lighting ‘improvements’ that make textures look washed out? Check. More ammo and health for a game that already had too much? Check. Significantly increasing walk, run, and crouch speed to make an already easy game even easier? Check. Flashlight projected shadows missing? Check. (Only after bitching from the community did the devs reimplement it...condescendingly..) Removed the flashlight and replace it with an armor mounted one that's on the opposite side and projects light in the opposite direction that your gun faces and is super uncomfortable to use, along with setting a time limit on the flash light usage (yet regens so fast the limit might as well not exist so why??)? Check. Other dumb changes like changing Kelly's armor color (but neglecting to change it in some pre rendered videos so now it's inconsistent)? Check. Getting rid of the hazmat suit and completely ridding all tension from Erebus Research in RoE? Check.

It's not minor. It completely ruins the game and it's an abomination. 120 fps, vr support and lost mission do not make up for what they did to this game. Add to all this that on release they delisted the original versions of Doom 3 and Roe on steam.. I don't know it was just timing on them leaving Activision for publishing in the wake of being bought by Bethesda or them just thinking they were 'obsolete' and only put them back after back lash.. but I've become cynical after how they mangled this game.

Dhewm3 is absolutely the way to play this game now, and with a patch applied prior to compiling you can even get 120fps if you really want it.

Thanks for this. I actually considered buying the bfg edition a while back so I could relive a bit of my childhood. Glad I didn't now as they seem to have ruined a lot that was good about Doom 3.

Also, whenever I have done that with games it actually ruins the memory. In my memory N64 games looked lifelike. Doom 3 looked like a Pixar movie. I happened to see Goldeneye running on a CRT TV at some hipster gathering and couldn't believe how bad it looked. I wish I hadn't seen it.

Doom 3 holds up pretty well actually. People revisiting it via YouTube with the original game often disagree because of an unfortunate bug that causes the image_downsize variables to increment, so despite cranking the settings in the menu the texture settings are at minimum. As far as either the player or viewers is concerned since the setting is at max that's just how the game must have looked.. It further contributed to the falsehood that BFG Edition looked 'better'. It can be fixed with an autoexec but Dhewm3 fixes it.

If you want to scrape back some of that nostalgia you could replay Goldeneye in 1964 GEPD. It boils down to being an emulator that overclocks the emulated hardware to brute force 60 fps.. framerate being the biggest problem with these old N64 shooters. Other things like adjustable field of view, properly hooked and responsive mouse/keyboard support make for a slick experience. It trivializes 00 Agent mode but playing in 007 Mode and turning up the enemy AI accuracy and response times can drastically even things out. The emulator can do the same stuff for Perfect Dark too, though that game at least has the remaster on Xbox that is quite solid.

Very interesting thank you.

It's an art direction thing. BFG has brighter lighting overall and builds in an equivalent of the popular "duct tape mod" https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Duct_Tape

This source port is a nice way for people to be able experience the game in its original presentation without having to pick BFG for technical reasons due to newer computers/OS causing problems with the 2004 game.

LGR did a DOOM3 retrospective recently that's also worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vV1nYjNnRE

I don't consider the armor light an equivalent to duct tape. Duct tape at least attempted to balance things. The light was only available on the shotgun and machine gun, and had a smaller cone of light projected compared to the full size flash light. BFG Edition's flash light added a battery that drains slowly and recharges very quickly. I'm not sure why they bothered with the battery since in practice it's unlimited use.

IIRC the BFG engine is better optimized for modern architectures. It uses more cache-friendly data structures as opposed to the linked list-heavy original, among other things.

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