Doom 3 Bug

It's a legal copy I swear [grin]

It does it no matter what resolution I run it with the demo. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that I was playing it on my laptop. Curresed ATI onboard graphics cards...

Sounds like you have self-shadowing turned on. It's a side-effect of shadow volumes that is quite ugly, and I think is completely unnecessary. There are workarounds (some simple, I devised a small translation away from the camera, some more ingenious ilke using depth biases) that make the shadows EXTREMELY smooth, and on one example I had, there was an ENORMOUS improvement in IQ.

But Doom3's workaround was more hacky than those. The level designers just disabled writing one of the figures in the initial depth pass (meaning it doesn't receive any shadows: not from itself, not from other creatures)

Self-shadowing...is that where you're looking at the world from inside a shadow? I read a thread on that - and how Carmack fixed it - a while back. Interesting stuff.

I found that turning the detail level from High to Medium eliminated the problem, which leads me to believe it could be a normal map compression issue. Perhaps my 128mb isn't big enough to handle uncompressed maps. Thanks for the replies; I'm off to save Mars [grin]

IIRC, Carmack really didn't have as much control over the Doom 3 development, he worked only on the core engine, which was brilliant, but the scripting/interaction scripts were probably written by programmers struggling to understand his wild and wacky code, and maybe thus the hacks and work arounds.

*shrugs* Who wants to look through all that code anyways?

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Original post by Tim Cowley Just bought a new card (5900XT) fired up Doom 3. Runs fine on high quality, but there's one glaring issue: one side of any character is completely black - like in shadow or something. I remember seeing a post on this some time ago here (involved inverted normals I think), but can't find it. Anyone know of a fix? Specs: WinXP Athlon XP 2600+ 512 DDR LeadTek GeForce FX5900XT 128DDR on NVIDIA's 66.93 drivers

The models themselves have got the vertex normals down the central line flipped oddly so that they appear to make one half of the model dark. My software rasteriser has this problem with the DOOM3 models as has the DOOM3 engine in High/Ultra. Someone suggested that there was a special shader that stitched the two halves of the model together and fixed the normals which failed on certain cards.

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Original post by benryves Someone suggested that there was a special shader that stitched the two halves of the model together and fixed the normals which failed on certain cards.

That was me. I recall reading something about that in an interview with Carmack.

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Original post by Sander Quote: Original post by benryves Someone suggested that there was a special shader that stitched the two halves of the model together and fixed the normals which failed on certain cards. That was me. I recall reading something about that in an interview with Carmack.

Ah, sorry.