Doomed

Description
I\'d imagine most people here have played, or at least heard of, Doom3. Widely acclaimed as one of the scariest games ever, Jenova *Rebirth* has attempted to bring its style into Jedi Academy and although I\'m afraid we\'ll have to resign ourselves to the fact that Jedi Academy is not Doom3, all technical comparisons with the D3 engine aside, I have to say, Jenova has given it a pretty good shot.

My favorite area, and by far the most detailed, was the control room, where you get attacked by the Pinky demon in Doom 3. The sun lighting through the windows here was particularly effective, and the floor was crafted in 3D using individual blocks. This and other areas have been taken straight from Doom3’s design, so most of you should have little trouble recognizing many of the locations. The good thing about this map was that there was plenty of detail to the environment, especially in the areas which they player couldn’t access – for example, when traveling between areas with the tram or looking out a window, you can usually see the Martian terrain. There is also a re-creation of the teleport system you use in Doom3, complete with sounds and weird-looking tunnel.

The lighting in this map is also in step, (as far as JK3 allows) with the original designs, although whilst dark gloomy areas work well in SP campaigns, for multiplayer maps, such vast sections of darkness are somewhat of a nuisance, especially when fighting with guns. I also feel more could have been made of the shadowing – techniques such as alpha-shadowing and ‘receive shadow’ brushes could have improved the atmosphere. On the whole though, the lighting was quite impressive. The only exceptions were with the little notices you can read on the wall which for some reason, were glowing. I don’t know about you guys, but paper doesn’t usually glow where I’m from. ;) The general architecture also was of a decent standard; perhaps not the most original, but re-created fairly well. Jenova has also tried to simulate the bump-mapping as seen in D3, but I’m afraid to say that JK3 doesn’t handle it anywhere near as well as more modern games.

Now, I was just about to wrap this up when I thought to check the general visibility structure of the map. I hadn’t noticed before, but as it turned out, it’s engineered extremely badly. The entire map is usually drawn to the player, which causes extreme framerate drops on less than top-spec pc’s. This was an extreme disappointment for me, as the rest of the map is of such a good quality. To conclude, well… it’s certainly a fairly good map which shows high proficiency with radiant, but for those who are looking to see Doom3 exactly as it was in the original game, you may be disappointed. Oh yeah, and the bots tend to get stuck running around the central control room, but at least the support is there.

New Textures: Yes
New Sounds: Yes
Bot Support: Yes

~Szico VII~