The developer behind a series of mods bringing classic PC games to standalone VR on Oculus Quest is taking on the task of porting Doom 3.
Last month Simon Brown, aka DrBeef, successfully got 2001’s well-loved first-person shooter Return To Castle Wolfenstein running in standalone VR. This month he believes he can bring over 2004’s Doom 3.
When DrBeef and collaborators released the RTCW mod the thought of porting newer games at an acceptable frame rate seemed unlikely, given the limitations of Quest’s processors. DrBeef says recent improvements to an existing Doom 3 engine made by Emile Belanger will give the game “a multithreaded renderer, which was enough of an fps boost for it to run pretty well on the Quest.”
“There are obviously some concessions have to be made,” DrBeef wrote to me. “But it runs surprisingly well without having had to axe too much in terms of effects.”
The project takes Oculus back to its original Kickstarter campaign in 2012. The campaign promised an “EARLY RIFT DEVELOPER KIT + DOOM 3 BFG” to people spending at least $300 to back the startup. That partnership between Doom studio Id and Oculus ultimately never materialized, though, as the relationship soured when prolific technical worker John Carmack left Id and went to work at Oculus instead.
DrBeef previously brought the original 1993 Doom game to Quest as well as the original Half-Life game from 1998, among others. DrBeef’s mods typically require you drop the game’s files into a folder on the Quest, and the full games can often be purchased for $5 or $10 on services like Steam.
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