2006 review by me of openco-op mod on GameSpy's PlanetDoom

The writing contained here is years old and GameSpy no longer exists but they are a reflection of the work I used to do then. Some of the links found in these posts will no longer work however they will remain as part of the original work. These posts are under the label: Outdated articles and works.

This week’s mod review concentrates on co-op. The favorite of many who would like to play with friends over the internet, or on LAN. For fun, or for the greater good of defeating evil in a group. There are co-op mods out that look great but there is one that is bound to catch interest more. I feel open Co-op mode version 1.1 has done that.

This mod is simple to use but hides some great features under the bonnet. First thing to notice will be the difficulty settings. Lowest difficulty is called ‘easy’ and the highest difficulty is called ‘pure evil’. The server also lets you adjust bit rates and concentrates mainly on co-operating. The authors do this by implementing functions such as health pool and progress limiters. On their website the authors have said that the mod is using quake 4 network code.

I got together with a friend to play via our remote VPN LAN connection. Despite the overheads added on by the VPN connection the latency was lower than standard Doom 3 multiplayer. The quake 4 code certainly shows advantages here. Stable pings, smooth game play and despite the latency that was present, it was hardly noticeable during play.

The impressive part of the mod was the progress indicators that forces a player getting a little too ahead to wait for others to catch up before being able to trigger a KEY trigger point. Other trigger points can be triggered by a single player. The difficulty setting is dynamic, where, the monster strength changes based on the number of players on the server. On pure evil, the monsters are too evil to be taken by one player forcing co-operation. The players also cannot spawn after being eliminated unless there is enough health in the health pool. Thus forcing more co-operation and building the health pool becomes important. The Health pool is increased each time a player with 100% health goes over a health pack or activates a health unit.

What I did not like about this mod was that the trigger points that stop a door from re-opening can end up blocking other players. Although this enforces co-operation sometimes it can be frustrating. However, I think that adding more progress control should solve this issue altogether by the mod makers. Players who play co-cooperatively and stick together will not notice this problem.

Give this mod a try. We had to set the bit rate to 512 kbps to prevent connection loss to the server so the bandwidth demand can be high. However on a local LAN, this is not even worth mentioning. If you have a high speed DSL/cable/other connection with a 512 kbps upload, you should be able to host a nice co-op game. I will certainly watch the progress of this mod as I believe it has already proven itself as a good co-op mod and it can only serve to get better. Looking at their website, it looks like they also have RoE co-op working as well.

The mod can be found at http://www.d3opencoop.com/

--Reviewed by Shadow Master