Doom Thread, Knee Deep in the Mods Edition

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Rise of the Triad had a weird engine. Being Wolfenstein 3D-based, it was extremely limited in terms of actual level architecture, yet it had a number of sprite-based objects that you could stand on top of which allowed for fake RoR. It also had jump pads, vertical aiming, and room brightness that could be changed by destroying torches. IMO, I think it would have been a much better game if they tried to replicate Doom's level geometry instead of stretching out the Wolf3D engine. It had neat outdoor levels, as many of its features lended themselves well to open, vertical gameplay, but its indoor levels fell kinda flat by being too reminiscent of Wolf3D... in an age where Doom and Doom II were already popular.

I've emulated Doom64 before, but I haven't played it much mainly because the levels are SO DARK that you can't make anything out. Again, much like Rise of the Triad, it used a curiously outdated engine for its time, and one that didn't at all showcase the n64's capabilities. If I ever get around to playing it again, I'm definitely going to give it a fairer chance, and I'll probably use Doom64EX instead of an emulator, since n64 emulation tends to be very crappy for anything that isn't a first party Nintendo or Rare title.

It still boggles my mind how they managed to fake room-over-room in Duke3D, because they managed to make it quite seamless. I mean, the effect is noticeable if you go underwater or down a manhole into the sewers, but other than that they did a really bang-up job with it. I've often contemplated trying something similar in a Doom map, but of course vanilla Doom doesn't allow for silent teleporters... and developing specifically for ZDoom is much less impressive since it's basically a modern faux-retro FPS engine that just so happens to be compatible with Doom.

Well the game started out as a sequel to Wolf3D. By the time the DOOM engine was ready to be licensed out, I'm sure they would have had to scrap a 100% complete game and start over.



But it has colored lighting and higher res sprites!

I think it's pretty decent for being a brand new, third party DOOM game. They seriously missed out by not including multiplayer, though...and I'd probably own it today instead of the lackluster Quake port =(



I haven't tried DOOM64EX yet, I played it in DOOM 64 Absolution back when it came out. It was a lot of fun, but there were two spots where it seemed to be impossible to "jump" over pits, so I had to cheat to get across.



Not true =( N64 emulation is pretty hit-and-miss regardless of who the dev or publisher is.

The only exception I know of is that they usually try to get Super Mario 64 to work well. All you can really do is try using different video plugins and see if things improve for your game.



I did it in Quake, it worked really well (as long as you don't use an engine with client movement prediction). I made an illusion stairway that only takes a few seconds to climb, but when you get to the top and look down, you're much higher than you thought you were. I was also playing around with replicating the "Lost Woods" effect from the first Zelda game.

Slightly off-topic, but I wish Spawns were just illusions. Vicious little bastards. Agility plus kamikaze attack is an extremely annoying combination.

I live in hope of a Quake sequel that'll incorporate the gothic/lovecraftian horror and use surreal and unnerving level-design. Kind of taking the concept of static portals from Prey but turning it up to 11, so the worlds are separate segments all joint up with seamless portals in an effort to create geometrically impossible layouts that serve to disorientate and frighten the player.

I almost forgot that ROTT started out as a Wolf3D sequel, but you're right, it probably would've been too much work to rebuild it from the ground up to be more Doom-like. Personally, I would have liked to have seen it use the Build engine. I think the vanilla Build engine could easily replicate most of ROTT's features, if not all of them.

As for Doom 64, it just struck me as bizarre that they released a Doom game in 1997, using a similar engine to Doom on the PC. I don't doubt that it's a good game, I just think it's odd that that's what they did. And I agree, multiplayer would've been a killer feature to have, since Doom co-op is fun, and there weren't any console Dooms with splitscreen until the Xbox port of Doom 3(!) I believe.

You're right about N64 emulation actually, it's just that Nintendo/Rare games seem to get more attention. Not to mention, the very first N64 emulators were pretty much designed just to run stuff like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Goldeneye, and not anything that employed bizarre third party microcodes or hardware tricks. I have high hopes for Cen64 however, I think it'll be the true savior of the N64 emulation scene, and it'll hopefully bring it up to a level it should have been at years ago hadn't it been for scene drama and closed-source shenanigans.

Quake uses a 3D engine, so room-over-room is trivial, but the stairway you described sounds pretty neat. It would've been interesting to see the Lost Woods effect in action too.

Spawns are actually bugged; they're supposed to turn around and face the player before they re-jump, but for whatever reason, some of the lines of code got swapped around, so they just jump forever until they die or get stuck somewhere. There's a function for all jumping monsters that says if they get stuck, try jumping, otherwise go back to running. Spawn has that swapped backwards. I have no idea why it would have been done intentionally, but it seems like a weird mistake to make.



I doubt we'd ever see it from id, since nobody still works there anymore =( But maybe something from fans.

Have you played Contract Revoked or The Lost Chapters? http://kell.quaddicted.com/



Well it worked for Goldeneye

You mean the Goldeneye Zdoom mod? I've played it, it's kinda neat... but I don't consider ZDoom to be anything like vanilla, since it has things like advanced scripting support, 3D floors, mouselook and jumping... I mean, it still has Doom at its core, but so many things have been added to it, that you can hardly call it the same engine.

No, I mean the actual Goldeneye 007 game for N64. The levels aren't much more advanced than DOOM, you're still prettymuch stuck to the floor.

It seemed like quite a backwards step after games like Quake and Quake II, but then a lot of stuff in the game was ahead of its time, like the AI and having different mission objectives (and extra ones on harder difficulties).

And the guns felt really, really good to fire. id's guns always felt kind of...mushy and imprecise.

The Spawn is bugged? Ah, that makes sense. It always seemed OP to me. My strategy for fighting them was to try and kill them before they became aware of me. Once they start hopping it becomes a nightmare trying to kill the things without being blown up. If I could better understand the source code I might be able to fix that myself.

As for the Quake fan project, there seems to be little demand for one. I had been thinking of trying my hand at such a project, but it's a mammoth undertaking, especially with my design ideas. The Darkplaces Engine would be perfect, but I don't think it has any way of creating seamless portals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwGT4OY7R78), so designing levels that are geometrically impossible goes flying out the window.

I haven't come across the stuff in the link you provided. I'll check it out.



Really? I don't find them "mushy and imprecise" at all. On the contrary, I've never felt more satisfied with shooting than in id's games, and I always know where my shots are going to hit. Doom 2's Super Shotgun remains one of the most awesome weapons I've ever used in a game.

Here's a mod that has them fixed: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files ... remote.zip

People were complaining that it made them too easy to kill, though =)



Yeah, I don't think that specific feature is possible unless you program it into the engine yourself, but you could probably fake it using cubemap shaders like Quake 3 does. I was going to try something like that for a speedmap competition once, but I never wound up finishing it.

Or you could just make your mod for the Prey engine.



Yeah, maybe I didn't choose the right words, but I mean without engine mods, you've got these projectiles that are actually big cubes, flying towards monsters which are actually much bigger cubes. Or you've got trace attacks that spawn these big, chunky pixels when they hit something.

It works for those kinds of games, but you can't shoot an Ogre in the foot and watch him hop around before head-shotting him. Goldeneye, you can shoot between their legs, you can shoot their gun, you can shoot their hat off...it just feels really cool to be able to do that, and I've never seen another game like it that wasn't Perfect Dark.

Thanks for the link to that mod. I'm playing through Dissolution of Eternity on Nightmare mode now, and there's enough complete bastards in that expansion pack as it is, last thing I need is that beefed up version of the Spawn being made even stronger thanks to a bug.

This video is of relevance to our specific discussion, and a bit more closely related to the thread. It's not a Doom mod, rather a ZDoom engine mod.


Buggy as all hell, but it demonstrates the sort of portals I'm talking about, only in Doom. I think it's really cool and, if used subtly, allows for some incredible level designs. I can definitely see it working in the Hell style levels of Doom. They already were pretty surreal, adding that kind of thing into them could be used to great effect.

Oh yeah, I'm sure DoE has the same issue, I'll take a look later.

Try this: http://www.mediafire.com/download/hblio ... eprogs.zip

Extract it into your DoE folder, which I believe is "rogue"? Should work, but I didn't test it out.

I confess, I haven't actually played Goldeneye that much, mainly because its spiritual successor, Perfect Dark, does nearly everything GE does, but better. Nearly everything except let you play as James Bond, and allow you to drive a tank.

I'm not really sure how to compare GE/PD's levels to Quake/Quake II, other than that GE and PD kept the "use" key and have more inanimate objects to blow up. Then again, you never really see any drastic changes in level architecture happen in front of you on GE/PD, nor do they give you nearly as much freedom of movement, since you can't jump or swim or propel yourself with explosives. Running diagonally does give you a pretty nice speed boost however, much like SR40/SR50 running on Doom, or trichording on Descent. It always disappoints me when I play a newer game and running diagonally or jumping repeatedly (like on Quake 3) doesn't make me move faster.

I agree about the guns, they're insanely precise on GE/PD, and I like how they employed location damage. I can't say I've played a lot of shooters that implement it nearly as well, since the most many shooters offer is headshots, and that's it. It would be nice to be able to shoot a Scout in the legs on TF2 and have him start hobbling, or blow someone's arm off on Halo so they can't dual weild. Maybe I'm sadistic, I don't know.

I also really, really liked Perfect Dark's explosives, since they worked almost completely unlike explosives in any other game I've played. Instead of having a quick "boom", explosions happen over a longer duration, and have a wider area of effect. It could partly be because of the game's framerate issues, but grenade launchers and proxy mines on that game just felt f*****g DEADLY. It also allowed you to stick explosives to people a year before Halo, and if what I've heard is correct, you can do the same with mines on Goldeneye, so really it's more like 4 years before Halo.

I like the single player missions in GoldenEye a lot better. And plus, it's my favorite Bond film.

But yeah, PD has the edge in multiplayer, except you can't be Boris, and the music isn't as good (I always mute it), and I don't really care for a lot of the alien weapons.

But the tranq weapons are probably my favorite for goofing around.



Well that was a bug, having X and Y velocity added together. I actually need to look into fixing it for a dash feature I was programming. Right now I just did it the lazy way and capped max velocity.

I'll honestly admit that I didn't care much for most of the single player missions past Area 51 on PD, though I kind of dug the Pelagic II mission since you could fire through those tiny windows on the doors and take out the guards on the other side. But yeah, I definitely need to play GE's campaign some more.

I really liked PD's soundtrack, and I remember playing it through this stereo I borrowed from a friend that had a small, yet powerful subwoofer. I'm kind of a sucker for techno/electronica type stuff though. As for the alien weapons, I'm not big on most of them either, but the Mauler was like a cool prototype for the plasma pistol on Halo, and the FarSight XR-20 is just legendarily overpowered with its ability to track targets and fire through walls, never minding the fact that it's also a one-hit kill. I definitely have to agree with you on the tranquilizer gun though, watching bots spin around after being hit with it a bunch of times was fun.

I know that the XY movement velocity combining was a bug on GE/PD and Doom, but I honestly think it's something more games should intentionally include as a feature. That, and Unreal Tournament's tap dodging.

Hey guys,

I felt the need to bump this thread to let you guys know they are doing the Doom Open Beta right now, click on the link to get started.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/350470/