Into Cerberon FAQs (frequently-asked questions)

Into Cerberon is a mod for Doom 3 that will bring the six-degrees-of-freedom action of the classic FPS game series Descent into the high-powered graphics engine of Doom 3.

Into Cerberon will be released as it becomes finished. We plan on making new releases as soon as major feature milestones are complete.

If you like to live on the bleeding edge, keep an eye on the forums. So-called "internal releases" are issued without fanfare, but publicly, on the Internal Discussion forum for testing of new features and bug fixes. Enthusiastic fans are welcome to download them and playtest along with the team.

No. The goal of Into Cerberon is to make a new game that feels like Descent. As in, if we sit a Descent player down at a copy of IC, then they should go, "Yeah, this is basically Descent".

Generally speaking the Doom 3 engine lets us do a lot more than any of the Descent engines ever could, and that means a lot of improvements as well as removing some old crutches (like circular bounding boxes for the ships). Team members also have their own ideas about how the game should play and feel; for more information, see our design documents and works of fiction on the downloads page.

For the most part we will be coming up with our own maps and not reproducing classic Descent official or fan-made maps.

However, there's nothing stopping other people from making such maps. The Doom 3 map editor is pretty easy to use (though admittedly nowhere near as intuitive as the original Descent map editor, which had to interface with a far simpler engine).

Naturally. And not only will we try to build the mod to take new maps, but we'll try to allow servers to host unofficial new ships and ship textures as well.

Core Decision is a commercial Descent-like game being made by HighOctane Software.

Into Cerberon is not associated with Core Decision or HighOctane Software. We're a mod team, they're a game company. Our work will be released free, theirs will culminate in a commercial game. There is no relation, really.

Read the Requirements Doc, available in the downloads area. The requirements document is our comprehensive "list of things we want to do in the mod", including weapons, gametypes, control schemes, etc.

Visitors are also welcome to register to the site and post questions in the General Discussion forum. Even if it looks like nothing else is happening with the mod at the moment, team members are always vigilant about answering questions!

The name "Into Cerberon" comes from the name of a music track in the classic first-person-shooter game, Quake II. The music in Quake II was composed by Sonic Mayhem (who also later did some stuff for Quake III); the track in question is called "Descent Into Cerberon".

HeXetic thought it would be a fun tongue-in-cheek way of referring to Descent in a manner that harcore Quake/Doom fans would understand.

Plus, it's a great lead-in for a possible singleplayer story line. "Cerberon" could be any number of wicked or villainous things or places...

It's a possibility. A lot of the team members are interested in doing a campaign, but whether we have enough skill and talent to do it is another question. There's also the issue of "too many cooks spoiling the broth" - i.e., everyone has their own view of how the singleplayer story should go.

For now, we're concentrating on the basics of multiplayer combat.

The system requirements for Into Cerberon are roughly the same as for Doom 3. At the very least, you will need a GeForce 4-series graphics card, a 2.0 GHz CPU, and 256 MB of RAM. Such a configuration will let you play at 640x480 at "medium" detail or 800x600 at "low" detail.

For respectable performance you will want a GeForce 6-series graphics card, a 3.0 GHz CPU, and 1 GB of RAM. Such a configuration will let you play IC (and Doom 3) in 1280x1024 at "high" detail level.

Into Cerberon binaries are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux editions of Doom 3.

In terms of weapons, several of the Descent staples will be returning much as they were, but the team also has their own ideas about new or slightly different guns.

Broadly speaking, the IC team plans to include the following "classic" Descent weapons relatively unchanged from their original incarnations:

• Upgradeable laser cannons (incl. quadfire)
• Minigun
• Plasma Gun
• Spreadfire
• Dumbfire missiles
• Homing Missiles

Yes, it is already present in the current release, and it can be controlled by a game server operator using a console variable.

"Tri-Chording" is name given by Descent players to the speed boost obtained by moving in all three axes at the same time. Originally introduced due to an overly simplistic calculation in the Descent movement code, the Descent developers later came to realize that the speed boost "felt right", even though the physics is obviously wrong.

The IC team members, being novice Descent players, were initially unaware of "tri-chording" and did not plan on including it. Later playtesting and feedback showed that the game did not, in fact, "feel right" without it, so it was added.