I'm Going To Sing The Doom Song... Soon

• 14th August 2004 at 12:52

So, guess who bought Doom 3 yesterday morning?

And guess who ordered a new machine to play it on, the day before?

And guess who paid £10 for next day delivery?

And guess whose new machine still hasn't arrived?

On Thursday, I made sure that everything I ordered was in stock, placed the order at 11am, and then yesterday I emailed them asking why it still said it hadn't been printed. They said 'Oh, the graphics card is not in stock'. I pointed out that it was, and they went 'oh, ok, we'll post it then', but they appear to have refused my request for Saturday delivery at no extra charge. Which I think is a bit rude, seeing as it's all their fault.

So now I have a top-of-the-range graphics-intensive benchmarking tool, and no machine to test it on.

Well, that's not entirely true though, is it... I had to try Doom 3 out on my current machine. In one word, sad. In two, very sad. Everything was turned off, and so the Gouraud shading was non-existent - you see someone's face half in the light, and know it's supposed to be pretty, but actually half of their face is lit, half of it is not lit, and they meet in a stark line down the middle of his face. Want to read the signs to work out where the hell to go? Sorry, not in 640x480 with low quality textures... Hey, what's that, is it a monster? I can't tell, it's moving so my computer is having to do some extra calculations, which means I'm getting about 1 frame a second. Ow, the red must mean I'm getting attacked, but where's the monster? In the past 3 frames/seconds I've seen 3 red slashes and my health has, oh, I'm dead.

I think it should be good when I can look around in the game at more than 1-30fps and with some of the visual effects turned on. Like graduated surface shading, I'm looking forward to that. But I appear to have to wait until Monday for that :)

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