Currently Playing

[DoomRulz]

OK, good. You're breaking it in then.

[Darkness]

Finished Half-Life 2 for the first time ever. Has been on my list for a long time. It didn't start off well for me until midway through the story when I was able to control the alien creatures. Then I started loving it. Just started HL2 Episode 1 today.

[Randomizer]

Metro Last Light. Achievement hunting & trying to get the good ending (saving D6). I got 2033(the book) and I'm reading it as I go along. 

Halo 4, Call of Booty Duty Black Ops II and Army of Two: The 40th Day on co-op.

[MoonerSK]

Metro Last Light. Achievement hunting & trying to get the good ending (saving D6). I got 2033(the book) and I'm reading it as I go along. 

The game starts to make less and less sense as you're going trough the book

[Randomizer]

As soon as I see any sign of brain-f**king, I'll stop.

[Sabby]

A lot of Warframe.

[MoonerSK]

As soon as I see any sign of brain-f**king, I'll stop.

It's there from the very first moment actually.

[DoomRulz]

Finished HL2: Episode One, now I'm going to start Doom 3: RoE with Vertigo's mod. I'm going back and forth between the two. Getting Doom 3 to run in widescreen format is a pain in the ass.

[Vertigo]

Easy solution - open your Autoexec.cfg (you'll need the one in ../Doom 3/d3xp/ for Resurrection of Evil) with Notepad and add these lines (assuming you want 1080p widescreen in 16:9 ratio, as is standard):

seta r_aspectratio "1"
seta r_mode "-1"
seta r_customHeight "1080"
seta r_customWidth "1920"



(Moving this from the Doom 4 thread)

[Did you modify Half-Life 2 as well?]

Nah.. I think HL2 had at least as many problems as D3 had, but they're generally things it'd be hard to change.

Why do you say that?

My opinion, HL2's saddled with a poor selection of enemies (and pacing thereof), lots of ugly art design (by necessity to some degree, being set in a post-apocalyptic, Orwellian Eastern European city), blandly generic guns and shooting (ZPEFM aside, but I wouldn't want to go through the whole game with that thing humming away), and a disappointingly limited amount of time with the game's unique selling point, the well-crafted NPCs.
I also thought it was fundamentally ugly even at the time, but they've added the Orange Box engine's pretty HDR light rendering and higher-res textures more recently. Textures still look unnecessarily blurry to me, but that's common in older games (and pretty much everything on Source).

Oh, and it immediately irked me that the game solved literally none of HL1's numerous questions, but finished off with a whole bunch of new ones. Very much the Lost school of tantalising/irritating the audience with enforced and excessive mystery.
There's also the issue that the game's unfinished, with the story left on a cliffhanger for 8 years. HL1 felt self-contained; HL2 doesn't, even with the episodes included.

With all that said, HL2 Episode 2 is one of the best story-driven FPSs I've ever played. Much more visually appealing, far greater gameplay and enemy variety, less nauseating vehicle handling, and most importantly, a shit-tonne more NPC interactivity and richer, more emotionally powerful storytelling.
It's that episode which lived up to HL2's original promise, in my opinion.

[DoomRulz]

Finished Half-Life 2 for the first time ever. Has been on my list for a long time. It didn't start off well for me until midway through the story when I was able to control the alien creatures. Then I started loving it. Just started HL2 Episode 1 today.

Isn't it an amazing game? Episode One is equally fun, though very short (which is to be expected, I suppose). I love the shotgun in HL2. It's just so much fun to blast away with.

Easy solution - open your Autoexec.cfg (you'll need the one in ../Doom 3/d3xp/ for Resurrection of Evil) with Notepad and add these lines (assuming you want 1080p widescreen in 16:9 ratio, as is standard):

seta r_aspectratio "1"
seta r_mode "-1"
seta r_customHeight "1080"
seta r_customWidth "1920"

I'll give that a try, thanks. I initially modified the DoomConfig file for both D3 and RoE; was that not good?



(Moving this from the Doom 4 thread)

[Did you modify Half-Life 2 as well?]

Nah.. I think HL2 had at least as many problems as D3 had, but they're generally things it'd be hard to change.

Why do you say that?

My opinion, HL2's saddled with a poor selection of enemies (and pacing thereof), lots of ugly art design (by necessity to some degree, being set in a post-apocalyptic, Orwellian Eastern European city), blandly generic guns and shooting (ZPEFM aside, but I wouldn't want to go through the whole game with that thing humming away), and a disappointingly limited amount of time with the game's unique selling point, the well-crafted NPCs.
I also thought it was fundamentally ugly even at the time, but they've added the Orange Box engine's pretty HDR light rendering and higher-res textures more recently. Textures still look unnecessarily blurry to me, but that's common in older games (and pretty much everything on Source).

Oh, and it immediately irked me that the game solved literally none of HL1's numerous questions, but finished off with a whole bunch of new ones. Very much the Lost school of tantalising/irritating the audience with enforced and excessive mystery.
There's also the issue that the game's unfinished, with the story left on a cliffhanger for 8 years. HL1 felt self-contained; HL2 doesn't, even with the episodes included.

With all that said, HL2 Episode 2 is one of the best story-driven FPSs I've ever played. Much more visually appealing, far greater gameplay and enemy variety, less nauseating vehicle handling, and most importantly, a shit-tonne more NPC interactivity and richer, more emotionally powerful storytelling.
It's that episode which lived up to HL2's original promise, in my opinion.

In terms of graphics, I think the Source engine is on the same level as id tech 4. id tech has amazing lighting effects and while this isn't part of the graphics, I think the animation in Doom 3 was more fluid than Half-Life 2's. Both engines feature great bump mapping, but still have their equal share of blurriness. From a distance, everything looks fantastic but as soon you look at everything up close, everything is muddy. The fine details just aren't there though I suppose that's due to the limitations of tech back then.

I can't comment on the questions bit because I haven't played HL1 in ages. I found it very tedious and a bit of a chore to finish. Half-Life 2 was much more fun. Side note; people seem to relish in critiquing Doom 3 for linearity and simultaneously, will praise HL2's gameplay when really, both are equally linear if you think about it. The only difference is that Half-Life 2 has more open areas.

Episode 1 was tons of fun, no doubt. I'll download Ep 2 in a week or so.

[Vertigo]

I initially modified the DoomConfig file for both D3 and RoE; was that not good?

Nah, that's fine. Even in a worst-case scenario, if you'd used the wrong syntax and broken the file, you can just delete your DoomConfig and the game automatically generates a new file next time it's started.

In terms of graphics, I think the Source engine is on the same level as id tech 4. id tech has amazing lighting effects and while this isn't part of the graphics, I think the animation in Doom 3 was more fluid than Half-Life 2's. Both engines feature great bump mapping, but still have their equal share of blurriness. From a distance, everything looks fantastic but as soon you look at everything up close, everything is muddy. The fine details just aren't there though I suppose that's due to the limitations of tech back then.

I can't comment on the questions bit because I haven't played HL1 in ages. I found it very tedious and a bit of a chore to finish. Half-Life 2 was much more fun. Side note; people seem to relish in critiquing Doom 3 for linearity and simultaneously, will praise HL2's gameplay when really, both are equally linear if you think about it. The only difference is that Half-Life 2 has more open areas.

Agreed, Source and IdTech 4 were fairly close-matched. I think Source had richer specular effects, and offered better performance for rendering distant objects; IT4 had a few tricks which Source still struggles with in its recent builds, such as dynamic lighting, sound occlusion/positioning and particle processing.
And yup, texture resolution (surface blurriness) is a major problem in both HL2 and D3. I think the justification was install size as much as performance - a few extra gigabytes is nothing now, but in the early/mid 2000s, it was a major chunk of your hard drive.

Have you tried playing Black Mesa? Basically a modernised version of HL1. If you struggled finding interest in the original game, you might have a better time with this one.

[DoomRulz]

I initially modified the DoomConfig file for both D3 and RoE; was that not good?

Nah, that's fine. Even in a worst-case scenario, if you'd used the wrong syntax and broken the file, you can just delete your DoomConfig and the game automatically generates a new file next time it's started.

In order to properly get widescreen resolution in D3, do I need to create my own Autoexec file? There isn't one to begin with.

In terms of graphics, I think the Source engine is on the same level as id tech 4. id tech has amazing lighting effects and while this isn't part of the graphics, I think the animation in Doom 3 was more fluid than Half-Life 2's. Both engines feature great bump mapping, but still have their equal share of blurriness. From a distance, everything looks fantastic but as soon you look at everything up close, everything is muddy. The fine details just aren't there though I suppose that's due to the limitations of tech back then.

I can't comment on the questions bit because I haven't played HL1 in ages. I found it very tedious and a bit of a chore to finish. Half-Life 2 was much more fun. Side note; people seem to relish in critiquing Doom 3 for linearity and simultaneously, will praise HL2's gameplay when really, both are equally linear if you think about it. The only difference is that Half-Life 2 has more open areas.

Agreed, Source and IdTech 4 were fairly close-matched. I think Source had richer specular effects, and offered better performance for rendering distant objects; IT4 had a few tricks which Source still struggles with in its recent builds, such as dynamic lighting, sound occlusion/positioning and particle processing.

And yup, texture resolution (surface blurriness) is a major problem in both HL2 and D3. I think the justification was install size as much as performance - a few extra gigabytes is nothing now, but in the early/mid 2000s, it was a major chunk of your hard drive.

Have you tried playing Black Mesa? Basically a modernised version of HL1. If you struggled finding interest in the original game, you might have a better time with this one.

I've recently heard of Black Mesa. I will definitely give it a try. I always like seeing older games reborn like that. Remember Classic Doom 3? Fantastic stuff, even if that shotgun model in the final revision was a weird, pixelated stick insect.

[Vertigo]

You should have an Autoexec.cfg in both ../Doom 3/Vertimod/ and ../Doom 3/d3xp/ after installing my mod.

(Also, if you didn't see this in the Readme, you need to delete /d3xp/Pak544.pk4 if you still have it from the old version.)

[Bjørn Half-hand]

Still playing through Witcher 3. 95 hours in, only a handle of side and witcher quests left and I'm pretty sure I'm doing the last of the main quests now.

[Sabby]

That game is like pushing a boulder up hill, but every step was enjoyable and worthwhile.