You know. Played some of Doom 3 again.. It's textures mechanism looks really dated.

Uh that's interesting but.. is that even, remotely, relevant to the blog post?

Well I thought I would bring the thread to life seeing as it was related to textures. (Plus I remembered that point due to your mention of textures.) I was actually really surprised (unfairly I guess) to see poor textures like that. I guess when the game came out it was difficult to increase the quality of the textures due to the already difficult to meet hardware requirements. (It is an old game... 2004, not THAT old, but compare 2000 games to 1994..)

Terrains, not textures =P

Haven't played Doom 3 in, well, ages, so I can't really remember what the texture quality was like. Will need to revisit it sometime.

Yeah. Played the Resurrection of Evil?

Ahh, terrain! Nice!

As I can only offer that unintelligent comment at this time of night, I'd better also say: Even when Doom 3 came out, it was criticized for having a lot of really low-res textures. It didn't make much sense. In the first location, you can see a smudgy, blurry, low-res UAC logo on a couple of crates.

Unintelligent!? You said just enough, which is really intelligent. :)

Brevity is the soul of wit ;)

And no, I haven't played Resurrection of Evil yet. I might pick up the XBox version if I stumble across it cheap enough.

I didn't notice the terrible textures (Though perhaps because I only played the XBox version of the game) however I am not surprised they were lazy in the texture department when they certainly were in the gameplay!

I don't think the Doom 3 game play was that great actually. It was really _LONG_ especially compared to their earlier games, which are fresh in my memory. :P Doom 3 actually took me a while to complete, I am not sure why.. I only managed to finish it because of the PDAs. :P But the textures are a minor issue really. 

Didn't you buy the ID Software pack on steam?

Nah, didn't get the ID Pack on Steam, I haven't really been fond of their post John Romero output.

If you feel a game is too short, generally that means that you really enjoyed it - So I think the inverse might be true with Doom 3.

It looked pretty nice thanks to John Carmack's ability to create incredible graphics engines,  and the atmosphere was great, but frankly the gameplay was lazy. Constantly needing to switch from your weapon to flashlight, and spawning monsters behind you frequently do not a good game make.

John Romero?

Well I base that on the time it took me to complete it.. But it was a long game. When I played Doom 3, I hadn't played a FPS for YEARS before I tried to complete it.. The previous FPS I played were Quake 3 and Doom. I actually played doom quite a lot.. Loaded on my laptop amongst other things.

Yeah. I think it's well accepted that IDSoftware make Engines not games though.. Although I don't think it would be a good idea to LEAVE the direct to customer game market as they would need to continually understand what games need in the background. On that note read some of their news:

http://www.idsoftware.com/

Seems they have done a lot of iPhone porting. :S

John Romero was the creative inspiration behind many of IDs early titles, but got too big for his boots and was kicked out, but his reputation wasn't destroyed until many years later when he produced one of the worst and most expensive games ever: Daikatana.

Seriously, dude, you need to read Masters of Doom speaking of which, have you seen...

Yeah I have seen those before.. My god the speech was horrible. :P

Interesting.

I have read Masters Of Doom - Excellent book :)

At least Ion Storm gave us Deus Ex and Anachronox.

Played Deus Ex a little bit, I could definitely grow to like it.

Anachronox is one that I've never played - but would really like to.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780749924898/Masters-of-Doom This book?

I bougjht Dues Ex.. Need to play it.

What is Anachronox? Iron Storm?

Yes! that's the one.

You need to read that book. You need to read that book now.

Actually I could send you my copy after I've read it a second time.

Which reminds me, I promised to send you Dot Bomb - Just email me your postal address, don't worry about shipping, just consider it a favour.

I was going to buy it.. Since there is no postage from that UK place, if it costs around $7 AUD to send (a single book), as I have to send it back I might as well buy it with free shipping.  (The books should be around 14 AUD from bookdepository.)

Heh after reading Superfreakonomics? :P I have a STACK load of books I need to read too.

Yeah I have quite a stack of books that I need to get around to reading, but I am making a real effort to get through them. For me, books are becoming the new Internet!

Come to think of it, at the rate I've been reading this year, I'm likely to surpass my entire 2009 total within a couple of months.

You absolutely should just buy the damn book! Given your newfound interest in the early works of ID Software, it's a must read.

Actually my interest in ID Software is not newfound. I up until 2006 ish I had a policy where I would play every ID Software game I could get my hands on, but no other. Hell I even compiled Quake 2 for Linux as soon as the source was released.. 

I don't read as much as I would like. I think I read more content (my childhood books were small and I read many of them) from books than I did any other year of my life. And this was all due to catching the train and bus for just under 3 hours ever day. (Really transport where you don't have to DO anything is really nice.)

So buy the god damn book.. (They are coming out of the walls.)

Oh as for dot bomb?

I know this is an old thread, but I just had to point out that Ion Storm (Dallas) made Daikatana and Ion Storm (Austin) made Deus Ex - Two different studios.

That's true, but even if they were made in two different locations by two different sets of people, both studios were founded by the same people so... hmm, I don't know.

How on earth did this become my most popular (by comments) blog post of all time?

What does google Analytics say? 

Heh, I didn't literally mean that, it's just that the topic of this post is rather inconsequential (At least compared to some of my more important announcements) and yet for some reason more comments have been posted on this then any other post on my entire site

More important posts probably have less of a chance for a topic change as people view them more seriously?

Possibly, that's an interesting point.

There's an NZ political blog that I follow that every now and then has a blank post with the title 'General debate' for his readers to use as an outlet talking about whatever. Maybe I should try something like that every so often.

I don't think intentionally spurring a conversation about nothing will work.. But putting something that might generate replies but has no serious implication might generate a lot of replies.. I remember when Slashdot had 'slashback' it was kind of a summary of longer arching posts from the past couple months. It generally had a 'speculative' feel if you know what I mean.

On one of my mailing lists I use 'randomly' generated conversations using markov chains which was interesting.

heh, curious.

I'll give the 'general discussion' blog post a try sometime with a suggested topic, just to see how it goes.

Asking for comments? I guess it's matter of looking around and trying it out.. Do you know how many followers you have?