If there is a Doom 3 public demo...

[Zaldron]

Ah, Q2Test, I had so much fun with that one. Specially because the physics were a bit odd, and you could make grunts fly 50 meters in the air with the shotgun.

[Tetzlaff]

Lord FlatHead said:

There's also the leaked IHV test from Macworld 1999 that shows just how crappy the Q3 engine was once.

I played the IHV test version of Q3 as well, and the graphics already were great, so what´s the talk about "crappy engine"? There were even some cool effects that didn´t made it into the final game, like the particle effects for Plasmagun and Railgun! The crappy parts were only that the included levels were kinda unfinished. But the athmosphere was so cool, a lot more creepier and hellish than the final version :)

[Mastaba]

Apparently someone made a decision to minimize the creepy stuff. I guess that's why Brandon James left id. His prototype Q3 maps were the creepiest looking.

[Lord FlatHead]

Tetzlaff said:

so what´s the talk about "crappy engine"?

Well, if you still have it, go over to the room with the fleshy pillar in km_portal.bsp and fire a rocket. The walls get all flashy and jumpy as the dynamic light moves over them - this doesn't occur anywhere else in the test IMO, so it might just be a problem with that shader.

And you're right, the dark hellish look was kinda cool. I would've liked to see more of that, instead of crappy 'base' levels like Q3DM12.

[dsm]

Tetzlaff said:

I played the IHV test version of Q3 as well, and the graphics already were great, so what´s the talk about "crappy engine"? There were even some cool effects that didn´t made it into the final game, like the particle effects for Plasmagun and Railgun! The crappy parts were only that the included levels were kinda unfinished. But the athmosphere was so cool, a lot more creepier and hellish than the final version :)

The latest patch I downloaded updated some of the weapons with some special effects (you had to type a command in the console), adding blue sparks to the plasma pulses, a corkscrew tail to the railgun, an extra effect to the rocket launcher's explosion and a fourth effect that I don't quite remember.

Speaking of particle effects, I recently tried JDoom for the first time, and while I still prefer PrBoom (doesn't freeze up so often), I must say that I'm really impressed by the quality graphics and effects of JDoom - that plasma rifle's effects beat Q3A's plasma pulses anytime and even rivals the eye candy of RtCW's flamethrower.

I hope that a very similar (but even better) "shiny bright" effect makes it into Doom 3's plasma rifle (IF there's a plasma rifle in D3).

Thanks to Keränen for such an awesome port :-)

[Shaviro]

dsm said:

The TA demo on the other hand was above 100 Mb, but it had more detailed maps, fmv videos and bots included.

Some of those maps are great!

[Tetzlaff]

dsm said:

The latest patch I downloaded updated some of the weapons with some special effects (you had to type a command in the console), adding blue sparks to the plasma pulses, a corkscrew tail to the railgun, an extra effect to the rocket launcher's explosion and a fourth effect that I don't quite remember.

Yeah but those are not the same like in the IHV test (the plasma effects in IHV test looked way cooler). The spiral railtrail was coded by the Alliance CTF mod team an then donated to id for the 1.30 PR and the new Lightning gun effect (the fourth one you didn´t remember) was donated by the CPM mod team.

[Tetzlaff]

Shaviro said:

Some of those maps are great!

Yes, Team Arena has some pretty cool maps, I especially like Fallout Bunker and of course Overdose (mpterra1), the terrain classic :)
Unfortunately TA wasn´t really succesful, it came out too late, was too expensive and too incompatible with standard Q3, and I prefer the CTF gameplay of the Q3 Threewave mod anyway.

[RRROOOAAARRR]

I was really outspoken against TA when it came out...with time I can say its biggest failing, by far, is not having enough maps. The new maps that are there are great, and MpTerra2 "Distant Screams" is IMO one of the best maps for anything, ever...but there are simply nowhere near enough new maps to make it feel worth the £££.

[Zaldron]

Well they only sold 17,000 copies of TA. I guess they could give it for free now or something. It's not gonna generate any more profit for id.

[RRROOOAAARRR]

17K...? Is that all? Wow, must be the only time ID have really dropped the ball as such...if only I'd been on the team...:-)...