Doom 3: Phobos

On 9/27/2020 at 2:34 PM, Caffeine Freak said:

And, Episode 2 is here:

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/phobos/downloads/phobos-episode-2-v20

Oh my God. My early (wrong) impression was that Episode 1 was all that you could manage, due to Doom 3's difficulty of modding. I'm glad I was wrong!

I beat Episode 2 yesterday on Ultra-Violence. I ended up marathoning the whole thing in one session because it was longer than I expected (in a good way), here's my poorly organised thoughts on it:

• The plot is by far the best part of this mod. I'm honestly impressed with much it's engaging me and I'm really curious to see where it goes next how it fully links up with Doom 3's plot.
• It felt a lot easier to get lost in this episode's levels compared to E1 or unmodded Doom 3. I think this mod could benefit from some kind of way to remind you of your objective (since the PDA isn't a thing in this mod) so you don't end up wandering aimless for ages. I'd say an automap of some kind would be helpful but I imagine that would be prety difficult to implement.
• Puzzles also felt more cryptic and sometimes dragged on for too long; I'm mainly talking about the moving platform section with the different coloured rails. I got stuck there for way too long.
• I think the monster variety could be better? Like I was a bit dissapointed that the new monsters such as the Pain Elemental and the Arachnotron only showed up once, and even then some of Doom 3's more common enemies like Maggots and Wraiths felt rare compared to the large amount of Imps, Commandos and Z-Secs.
• On the technical side, I find it odd the pressing Q to swap to the Grabber doesn't swap back to your last weapon when press again like with the pressing F for the Flashlight. Also some of the reflections in the game act very odd, but this might just be due to my AMD GPU (like how turning Bloom on messes up the FOV).

I hope this doesn't sound too harsh; even with my gripes I think the mod is worth playing and I look forward to seeing what Episode 3 has to offer!

11 hours ago, Yoshiatom said:

 

• On the technical side, I find it odd the pressing Q to swap to the Grabber doesn't swap back to your last weapon when press again like with the pressing F for the Flashlight. Also some of the reflections in the game act very odd, but this might just be due to my AMD GPU (like how turning Bloom on messes up the FOV).

Also speaking of that, the water and mirror distortion affects objects in front of it, but i don't know if that's fixable. Below are some screenshots demonstrating that:

distortion.zip

I'm glad people liked the improvement on Ep1 and that they are also liking Ep2 so far.

Huh strange. I was able to play Phobos last year fine but for some reason after re-installing it again it's become hyper-zoomed in during gameplay. This is all I see, I can move the camera and hear sounds, but it's so zoomed. Here's a screenshot:

It's fine in the Phobos main menu and it's fine in vanilla Doom 3 gameplay. It's only when playing Phobos does this hyper zoom happen. Tried changing resolutions, toggling full-screen, and re-installing the mod but none of them have fixed it. Not sure what's causing it, does anyone here have an idea?

3 hours ago, AtimZarr1 said:

Huh strange. I was able to play Phobos last year fine but for some reason after re-installing it again it's become hyper-zoomed in during gameplay..... Not sure what's causing it, does anyone here have an idea?

I had the same problem. I made an autoexec.cfg in "Doom 3/base" "Doom 3/d3xp" and "Doom 3/tfphobos" with the commands mentioned here and it fixed it. I have no idea which commands fixed it, but it worked. Just make sure to change screenheight, screenwidth and aspectratio to fit your screen resolution.

@AtimZarr1: I had the same problem and disabling bloom solved it for me.

Didn't E1 have that issue with bloom as well?

12 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

@AtimZarr1: I had the same problem and disabling bloom solved it for me.

That fixed it, thank you.

16 hours ago, sluggard said:

I had the same problem. I made an autoexec.cfg in "Doom 3/base" "Doom 3/d3xp" and "Doom 3/tfphobos" with the commands mentioned here and it fixed it. I have no idea which commands fixed it, but it worked. Just make sure to change screenheight, screenwidth and aspectratio to fit your screen resolution.

Thanks for this as well, I had forgotten about using an autoexec.cfg in my latest Doom 3 install.

8 hours ago, kristus said:

Didn't E1 have that issue with bloom as well?

Here are Twitter posts where they mentioned a Bloom bug from earlier this year.

Strange. Looks like it can happen on Nvidia gpus too, got an Nvidia gpu here.

Played Episode 2 and I loved every minute of it. Some of the puzzles are a bit obscure, but I didn't have too many troubles. While Episode 2 didn't have some of the big, Mars City setpieces like Episode 1, the combat in this episode felt much more frantic and the new weapon and movement mechanics make the game so much more enjoyable to play than stock Doom 3. The new shotgun model is wonderful and I actually find myself using it! My only concern now is how many more gimmicks can you use to prevent the player form seeing the NPCs they interact with; talking to a vent with Leea behind it was a little... odd.

Can't wait until Episode three to see how this whole story wraps up.

Random thought here: after watching a lot of gameplay footage, I'm honestly surprised at how many players don't have the SSG auto-reload for them---in other words, they have to tap the FIRE button an extra time or hit RELOAD, otherwise nothing happens after firing. I wasn't even aware that was an option. Certainly seems to make the game more challenging from what I've seen, although I'm sure it's a tactical advantage in some cases to be able to quickly weapon swap without having to commit to the reload animation. 

I'm currently re-playing the whole mod starting with the prologue, because I wanted to recollect the story (and because it's worth replaying anyways). Haven't reached the new episode yet. But I think I noticed some polished details in the previous episode. For example, when the doctor talks to you in the CT scanner room, you can now actually see his silhouette through that window (or did I just remember it wrong that you saw nobody previously?). The new shotgun model is excellent.

The people behind the glass on the Scanner room were already present in te first release, but some Ep1 elements has been revisited, yes.

Mod of the year 2020 has begun. Vote for us! We reached top 100 mod in 2018. With the release of episode 2 we can do it again!

https://www.moddb.com/mods/phobos

We reached top 100 this year! Thank you for voting! Now we need to go even further. So please vote for us again here:

https://www.moddb.com/groups/2020-mod-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote6603

And new screenshot:

More screens from episode 3

Episode 3 this year!?

As in 2020?  ;)

It's so difficult to say. Back in 2019 there wasn't a single doubt in our minds that Episode 2 would come out that very year, but we ended up releasing it late 2020. Episode 3 is pretty far along on most counts, but I don't want to say a 2021 release is a sure thing. We're aiming for it and it seems to be realistic, but you never know with these projects. We also don't have any shareholders or publishers, so if something doesn't work quite right we will spend the time it takes to fix it :)

Time for some feedback for Episode 2.

Again I‘ m impressed by the professional quality of the mod!

Story

- Starts to get interesting. In prelude/Episode 1 it felt somewhat detached from the things that happened on Mars, but now you can slowly understand why the protagonist is on Mars.

- I never really asked myself what life on earth would be like in 2145 in the Doom 3 universe. I vaguely imagined a future similar to the Robocop movies, with mighty megacorporations in charge (the UAC being one of them).

Now in Phobos, it seems a lot has happened. Looks like the USA is gone and (partially?) replaced by the FCE, the Federal Commonwealth of Earth. Phobos' protagonist lived his youth in a rather peaceful and idyllic seeming American village or suburb. But it turns out it is some kind of gated community that is almost as restrictive as a prison camp. Is there some Hunger Games like stuff going on?

He and his girlfriend try to escape this idyllic resort/prison camp, but have no luck so far. Ironically the claustrophobic corridors of the UAC Mars bases later seem to grant him more freedom than the life on earth inside the gated FCE resorts.

- While the story is interesting and the flashback environments look beautiful and convincing, I don’t like it too much how they are implemented into the gampelay. Not sure if simple cutscenes would have been a better choice. Now you have this flashback scenarios, but they feel detached from the main game, because you are slower and less interactive, you are in „story mode“. You have to do some very simple tasks in order to progress the story further, like in very simplistic adventure game.

It starts to shine though when the scenery gets surreal. For example that never ending, more and more claustrophobic spiraling rooms in one scene.

Also the involuntarely funny, always invisible girlfriend, hidden away behind a fence or in the dark or inside ducts... although I understand that it would be difficult to animate a convincing model for her character in-game.

Samantha Miles on the other hand works very well as a character and how she communicates with you in-game. Thankfully with a much better mugshot now.

On 5/3/2021 at 9:26 AM, geX said:

New update with screens and info on Episode 3:

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/phobos/news/the-mezzanine

 

Those screenshots look really good. I especially like the liquids on display. It's been a while, but if memory serves me right, liquids were a problem in the Doom 3 engine and most maps/mods I saw back in the day had workarounds that looked terrible. 

So far you don't directly interact with liquids in Phobos, but I really like how rerouting the fuel streams in episode 2 grants you access to new parts of the level. It's an excellent example for a convincing environmental puzzle.

The fuel station is one of my favorite scenarios in Phobos:

Currently replaying this for the umpteenth time and found a small room in the fuel station with a number pad and have been combing the entire map looking for the code.

Yeah, that secret! I had no luck either…

There seems to be a scribble of an aeroplane as a hint. So I had the idea to check my mails if there is a flight number for that flight I just missed in episode 1 … but wait, there is no PDA in Phobos :/

8 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

There seems to be a scribble of an aeroplane as a hint

@Lippeth: Cool! Thanks for putting the spoiler tags in. I just replayed the level to try it out by myself... nice easteregg!

Looks like I was on the right track with the flight number. Just not dedicated enough on my first playthrough to re-load an earlier save to find that flight number...

Why did you remove the PDA, Team Future? It would have come in really handy in situations like this. Nevermind though. It's always fun to revisit the levels.

Aaaannd after a long period of hard-working silence, I am glad to showcase our first teaser trailer for Episode 3:

Wow, that was spooky encounter :)

Yeah Caff here wanted to try something different with this level. It turned out really well :)