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Multiplayer Tips (needs to be ported to the wiki!)

Big Guns:	If you're new, you're gonna want to use the powerful weapons. The rocket launcher, plasma gun, and shotgun are ideal. Avoid the other weapons as they will need you to have some decent aim, while these weapons don't. The rocket launcher will take out anything nearby, the plasma gun does a lot of damage, and the shotgun is deadly at point blank. Make sure to choose wisely about which weapons you use based on how close the enemy is.
Doors:	Do not just expect to run through a door without getting riddled with bullets. People will be camping so be very cautious when moving from room to room.
Hiding:	Hiding is actually key to DOOM 3 multiplayer. Hiding near power-ups can also be a good idea for when a player comes around to grab it, you can frag him. Remember though, don't stay in the same spot too long, people will catch onto you.
Keep Moving:	If you want to survive in multiplayer, you're going to have to learn how to move as well as when and where. Running around blasting everything won't get you to the top of the frag list in this game.
Keyboard Configuration:	Make sure you have your keyboard configuration set to how you like it. You'll need to know what keys do what so you're not scrambling around in battle.
Lights:	In some levels you will be able to do things which affect the light. If the lights go out, your best bet is to wait and hide for the other players.
Listen & Look:	Doors and lifts will make noise if used so be sure to listen. It will be key for trying to find the enemy, especially in one on one. Also, watch for any pickups that are missing, that will mean the enemy was there not long ago.
Med Kits:	Getting health pick-ups are key to DOOM 3. Memorize where the med kits spawn so if you need them you know where to go.
Power Ups:	Power-Ups are another very important thing to surviving. You'll need to keep in control of them so others don't get a chance to get them.
Using Grenades:	Grenades can't be underestimated in this game. They can be great for dropping down to lower levels or into power-up areas if you know someone is camping there waiting for you. Be careful you don't hold them to long, they will explode and kill you if you do.
Weaker Players:	If you see that there are people in game who are new, go for them. The veterans will be preying on you anyway, so you go for the newer people. If you know there is a veteran in the server who is just killing everyone in his path, avoid him. Even if you can't top his frags in the end, it's better than getting a ton of deaths.

Monsters (needs to be ported to the wiki!)

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Doom 3 -- Monsters Missing (12 comments)

Performance Tweaks (needs to be ported to the wiki!) This is a Doom 3 performance article written by Neoseeker And TweakFactor. This is the very first and most basic version of this document. If you have additional comments, suggestions, or questions, please visit our Doom 3 Performance Tweak thread in the forums!

Doom 3 Performance Tweaks and Tips

Unpack the PK4 files

Want to increase your Doom 3 single player performance and don't mind using an extra 2 Gb or so extra hard drive space? Then try this tweak. It involves unpacking the compressed sound, video and texture files Doom 3 uses and placing them uncompressed on your hard drive. Once the files are uncompressed, Doom 3 won't have to do it on-the-fly, and your game play will benefit greatly. This will against Texture Thrashing, which occurs when you move into large areas. You might notice that problem as stuttering, pausing, or jittering during gameplay. This and the next tweak help reduce that and smoothen your gameplay.

All of these compressed files are located in PK4 archives, and you can use WinRAR to unpack them into your Doom 3\base folder. There are five files to unpack: pak000.pk4, pak001.pk4, pak002.pk4, pak003.pk4 and pak004.pk4 and they're all found in \base under the main Doom 3 folder. (People have experienced crashes or the inability to connect to a server while attempting to play multiplayer Doom 3 after performing this procedure, so if you want to be able to restore Doom 3 to its original settings, make a backup of the \base folder and all the files and folders it contains.)
Start unpacking the pk4 files to the \base folder, saying “Yes” to overwrite any existing files. Since you've backed up the \base folder it's now safe to delete the pk4 files – and also necessary if you don't want the game to continue trying to access them.
Now for the final step; go into Doom 3\base and edit the file called DoomConfig.cfg. You'll want to increase the number of the setting that says seta image_cacheMegs "20" to something like one quarter of your total system RAM. For example, if you have 512 Mb RAM, set seta image_cacheMegs to "128". (Remember to replace the original \base folder when you want to play multiplayer.)

It's time to fire up Doom 3 and change the game setting to High Quality and increase your resolution. Play with the settings until you're happy with the performance and enjoy your improved load times, higher frame rates and better image quality!

Increase the image_cacheMegs setting

This setting also helps against Texture Thrashing. You won't notice any increased overall framerates but it should make the game feel smoother during transition areas such as enterring new rooms, moving into large areas, and opening doors, basically anywhere there is a need for texture swapping.

In your DOOM3/BASE folder open doomconfig.cfg using notepad
find "seta image_cacheMegs" and change the number value to roughly 1/4 or even 1/2 of your total available system ram (512 = 128, or 1GB = 256);
Look for “seta image_useCache” and set that to “1”.
Find “seta image_CacheMinK” and set it higher than default or else the game crashes when loading. People are recommending “20480” as a starting value but others have tried higher values.

Disable Anti-Aliasing

Most of you already disable AA to play the game, but some people invariably forget to turn this off. The visual quality for 2X AA in Doom 3 is negligeable compared to the performance you can gain when turning this feature off. If you are running a midrange setup (ATI 9600XT, 9700PRO, 9800PRO, and below, or Nvidia 5700, 5900, 5950 and below) it might be worth turning detail higher rather than using AA.

TweakGuides.com DOOM 3 Tweak Guide

Koroush Ghazi from TweakGuides.com has published a very detailed tweaking guide for the game explaining the simple tweaks to the most advanced. The guide is a must read, check it out here!

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Please Delete : ERROR (2 comments)

Problems and Fixes (needs to be ported to the wiki!)

Doom 3 Common Problems and Fixes

Check out the Problems/Fixes Forum Thread if you have additional tips/solutions and or problems.

Getting Started

This page is here to try and compile common problems and fixes that people are reporting for Doom 3. This includes sound fixes, crashes, hangs, freezes, corruption, sound stutters, graphic stutters, and other type of technical issues. Before you start really looking into fixing your problems please do the following:

Defrag your HD - a fragmented HD can result in additional stutter or thrashing during disk access
Update your motherboard BIOS to the latest version
Update ALL your relevant drivers: Sound card, video card, and motherboard.
If you are using an ATI card, make sure to try the Catalyst 4.9 BETA drivers, which include some fixes for Doom 3
If you've made any tweaks to the config file or changed settings that caused problems, you can try and restore to a default Config file. To do so go to your /doom3/base/ directory and rename the doomconfig.cfg to something else. When you restart your game it will create a default config file.

Even if you've never had problems with games before these initial steps MAY solve your problem because Doom is so much more intensive on your entire system.

Problem: The game stutters, especially when doors open or when enterring a large room or turning a corner into a large area.

This is caused by Texture Thrashing. Textures are cached in the game either in video memory or in RAM. Textures are swapped in and out of RAM, Video memory, and disk. When enterring a new area your system is trying to push all the textures from system RAM back into video memory. The AGP bus just can't handle it. Solutions to try:

If you are using an ATI video card, download the latest betas 4.9 with optimized OPENGL for DOOM 3.
Turn down the detail one level or lower the resolution by one level. Most people find that turening down the detail level one knotch will do the trick. Use the resolution as a last resord.
To decrease tearing effects turn on Triple Buffering and VSync.
In your DOOM3/BASE folder open doomconfig.cfg using notepad, find "seta image_cacheMegs" and change the number value to roughly 1/4 or even 1/2 of your total available system ram (512 = 128, or 1GB = 256); Look for “seta image_useCache” and set that to “1”. Now you will need to find “seta image_CacheMinK” and set it higher than default or else the game crashes when loading. People are recommending “20480” as a starting value but others have tried higher values. Note: This will NOT raise your overall framerates but it will make the game feel smoother during transition areas such as enterring new rooms, moving into large areas, and opening doors, basically anywhere there is a need for texture swapping.
Check your video card settings and make sure AA is off and other performance effecting settings are off. Doom 3 runs quite a bit better with AA off.
Enable Sideband-Addressing in your motherboard BIOS if you haven't done so already.
Double check your BIOS to make sure your AGP is at maximum AGP setting (ie 8x)
VIA and nVidia Chipsets: Install the latest GART drivers (these affect AGP addressing)
You can try our performance tip for decompressing the PAK files. This will result in a major performance boost, espcially for lower end machines. You might want to read more about this in our performance tweaks section.
Overclock your Video RAM if you know what you're doing. Note that overdoing this can FRY or damage your card. You might also push it to the point where there's corruption, spots, speckles, or other artifacts during gaming. This is probably something you don't want to try if you don't already know how to do it safely and properly.

Note: It'd be interesting to see whether PCI-E can solve this problem. or whether new tweaks are required on PCI-E based cards. Let us know in the forums!!!

Problem: Audigy owners get a "Surround Sound not detected error"

1. Open Sound Blaster Mixer control. Uncheck "Synronize with Control Panel". Say NO when asked to reboot. 2. Go to your Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia and select your speaker setup (i.e. 5.1 ) in the drop down menu. This works on Win XP and maybe in Win2K.

Problem: I have an Nvidia GeForce Ti 4200 or 4600 128MB type card and the game freezes for a while and then all lights turn off

Further symptoms: You might see coronas and in game displays, but the flashlight no longer works and everything is black or dark. This seems to happen in different areas for different people. To solve this visit www.omegadrivers.net and get their latest drivers.

Problem: Blurry text when in menus and/or ingame PDA screens.

This is a common problem for some games of this type. The text is originally created in a certain resolution, and you're rendering the text in a resolution that's LOWER than the original intended resolution. This and/or you are using anti-aliasing that causes the text to be blurred by the AA algorithms.

Turn off any special filters, like Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering
Restore the default config settings by renaming the /doom3/base/doomconfig.cfg file and reloading Doom 3. There are some settings in the config file that scale textures, and if you set these to values too low it will cause the text to be very hard to read.
Try setting “image_lodbias 0” in the console. Press (CONTROL ALT ~) and type that command in. I don't know what this setting does but it appears to fix some instances of blurry text.

Problem: Graphical glitches - white snow, black or white dots/specs, corruption, or strange textures or colours

The most common problem here is either a damaged video card or some components overloading/overheating. In this case I'd recommend checking your video card, CPU, memory, and PCI/AGP bus to make sure they are running within spec. Most importantly: an overclocked video card can result in corruption of this type, and the same can be said of System or Video RAM. Try restoring these to defaults and see if you the problem persists. Also, check to make sure FASTWRITE is disabled in motherboard BIOS and/or SMARTGART (found in ATI display control panel). Some users with white snow problems might need to do a clean install of their drivers. To do so, REMOVE your video drivers from the Windows Hardware Manager (Control Panel > System > Hardware tab > Device Manager button). Uninstall all the drivers. Restart your system. And reinstall the LATEST video drivers. As a last resort you can try using a DRIVER CLEANER - but be warned that driver cleaners can sometimes cause major problems in your configuration.

Problem: The game crashes or hangs

There are a HUGE number of factors that can cause this problem, and honestly speaking its impossible to diagnose each one individually here. Instead, we'll give you some general things to try:

Make sure all your drivers, BIOS, and everything is 100% updated.
Make sure your system is 100% clean when you run the game. Disable virus scanners, shut down any programs that are not required.
You might want to bring up Windows Task Manager (CTL - ALT - DELETE + T) and kill off any tasks that are not critical to the operation of your system.
Make sure your system hardware is stable: restore all your CPU, memory, video card, sound card, and AGP/PCI busses to original spec and see if this helps.
Make sure your system is not overheating.
Make sure your swap file is not forced to a size that might be too small for Doom 3. To check this, go to Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Click "Settings" button under the Performance heading > go to Advanced Tab > click "Change" button under "Virtual Memory" heading. Make sure the min and max settings for your paging file are at least 1.5x your total physical RAM size. If you have 1GB of RAM or more its sufficient to use 1X your physical RAM size.
Disable sound altogether to see if its yet another Sound related issue. You can disable your sound card in the Hardware Profile manager of Windows.

Problem: You can't alt tab out of the game properly.

I have no idea how to fix this. I've just noticed myself and find it to be very annoying. No other current day game has this problem that I've played so I think its Doom specific. If you have any information on this problem PLEASE LET US KNOW In the forums!!!! UPDATE: There is a mod out so you can minimize the game properly. The mod can be downloaded here.

Weapons and Melee (needs to be ported to the wiki!)

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weapons (10 comments)

Keypad Combinations (needs to be ported to the wiki!)

Cabinet	Level	Area	Code	Location	Contents
001	Mars city	Maintenance	396	Adam Berneche's PDA	bullets
003	Recycling 2	Monorail Access	483	Nick Sadowayj's PDA	grenades, plasma cell, armor, clips
009	Alpha Labs 1	EPD Lab	752	Kyle Berger's PDA	lg. med. kit, armor, grenades, clip
013	Admin	Alpha Labs Hallway	586	Alan Dorweiler's PDA	Grenades, Shells, Clip, Armor
017	Mars City	Infirmary	347	Dr. Mark Caseon' s PDA	shells, clip, armor, lg. med kit
023	Mars City Und.	Energy Stabalization Unit	531	Grant Bastion's PDA	sm. armor, shells, lg. med. kit
038	Alpha Labs 2	MFS Compressor	409	Andrew Chin's PDA	armor, clip, grenades
039	Alpha Labs 2	Coolant Control	102	Walter Connor's PDA	clips, armor
047	Alpha Labs 3	Hazardous Materials Lift	123	Mark Lamia's PDA	grenades, clips
048	Alpha Labs 3	Coolant Monitoring	123	Mark Lamia's PDA	plasma cells, ammo belt, lg. med. kit
049	Alpha Labs 3	EFR Staging Room	123	Mark Lamia's PDA	sm. armor
054	Communitications	Security Office	246	Ben Wolfe's PDA	grenades, armor
054	Monorail	Siite 2 Boarding Platform	142	Charles Hollies's PDA	armor, rockets, grenades
063	EnPro Plant	Power Core Access	972	Theresa Chasar's PDA	plasma gun, cells, sm. med kit.
064	Alpha Labs 4	EFR Master Valve	651	Henry Nelson's PDA	sm. armor, clip, plasma cell
078	Monorail	Delta Security Checkpoint	364	Karl Cullen's PDA	lg. med. ket, clips, grenades
079	Monorail	Delta Security Checkpoint	364	Karl Cullen's PDA	lg. med. kits, clips, grenades
103	Delta Labs Lvl 2B	Maintenance Corridor	259	Francis Jackson's PDA	plasma cell, shells, lg. med. kit
104	Delta Labs Lvl. 4	Delta 4 Security	579	Jack Gilbert's PDA	rockets, armor, ammo belt
112	Delta 2A	Records Office	538	Frank Cinder's PDA	sm. armor, cells, shotgun
114	Delta 2A	Operations Server Room	715	Note on Cabinet	backpack, armor, clip
116	Delta 2A	Delta Security	972	Laptop in Delta Security	lg. med. kit, armor, plasma gun, BFG cell
116	Delta 2B