Doom 3 marine screenshots

Final version of Doom 3 source port, dhewm3, available for download, supports 4K, OpenAL and more


Daniel Gibson has released the final version of dhewm3. In case you weren’t aware of, dhewm 3 is a Doom 3 GPL source port, known to work on at least Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD, and its goal is to bring Doom 3 with the help of SDL to all suitable platforms.

Compared to the original Doom 3 game, dhewm 3 supports 64-bit systems, SDL for low-level OS support, OpenGL and input handling, OpenAL for audio output, OpenAL EFX for EAX reverb effects, better support for widescreen (and arbitrary display resolutions meaning that you can run 4K or even 8K resolutions), a portable build system based on CMake and cross-compilation with MinGW-w64.

The final version of dhewm 3 adds support for some Mods via custom SDK: Classic Doom3, Fitz Packerton, HardQore2, Denton’s Enhanced Doom3 and Rivensin (formerly known as Ruiner), adds support for High DPI displays on Windows, scales menus, fullscreen videos and the PDA to 4:3 (with black bars left/right) on widescreen displays so they don’t look stretched/distorted, uncaps the framerate and more.

Those interested can download the latest version of dhewm 3 from here and below you can find its complete changelog.

  • Support for some Mods via custom SDK: Classic Doom3, Fitz Packerton, HardQore2, Denton’s Enhanced Doom3 and Rivensin (formerly known as Ruiner).
    -dhewm3-mods_1.5.0_win32.zip contains prebuild Windows game DLLs for those Mods (except Rivensin) and a README that tells you where to get the game data
    -This has also broken backwards compatibility with 1.4.x game DLLs, that’s why this version will be 1.5.0 and not 1.4.2.
  • Supports High DPI displays on Windows now
  • Scale menus, fullscreen videos and the PDA to 4:3 (with black bars left/right) on widescreen displays so they don’t look stretched/distorted. Can be disabled with r_scaleMenusTo43 0.
    No, this unfortunately can’t be done for the HUD (except for the crosshair), because it also handles fullscreen effects (for example when receiving damage), and those would look bad with black/empty bars on left/right.
  • Commandline option to display some help on supported commandline arguments: -h or –help or -help or /?
  • (Experimental) uncapped framerate, enable by entering com_fixedTic -1 in the console (can be set back with com_fixedTic 0).
  • Providing binaries for Linux amd64 (x86_64) now
    Should work on any halfway-recent distro, needs libSDL2-2.0.so.0, libopenal.so.1 and libcurl.so.4 installed
  • Updated some libraries bundled in the Win32 build: SDL2 2.0.9, OpenAL-soft 1.19.1 and curl 7.62.0
  • Support for the AROS and OpenBSD operating systems
  • Several bugfixes

Kudos to jim kern for informing us!