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icarusweb: Is Merlin your real name?
SpiceOne: Yes, my dad has the same name, I'm actually a Junior.
icarusweb: Cool name. Spice ZDooM is great - what inspired you to make the mod?
SpiceOne: I was playing ZDooM with a friend of mine over the internet and one of my friends I know personally was creating a character for GURPS (a role playing game we play), anyway, the Doom game pretty much went like it always goes, I was pretty much bored with the concept of plain doom. So I told my friend "What if you could play as different creatures?", he replied with "You have the source code, why not do it?".
With a week of programming and discovering just how ancient the doom source code actually was, I brought to light the Spice ZDooM project.
icarusweb: Do you know what Randy thinks of your version?
SpiceOne: No, I have never talked to him, or even mentioned the idea of it to him.
icarusweb: Will there be new versions of Spice ZDooM as new versions of ZDooM come out?
SpiceOne: I'm not really sure, I don't really like the way ZDooM handles network code so I may have to stray away from it on my own off-shoot completely. I have a lot of big plans for Spice ZDooM, after all, it's meant to revive a lot of doom game play. ZDooM is great in a lot of ways, but for what I'm trying to do I run into a lot of pit-holes.
icarusweb: Any plans to collaborate and make this a permanent feature of the regular ZDooM port?
SpiceOne: I never thought of doing that, I sort of just go my own way, I really don't like to rely on others to take care of some part of a project (I have been in many game programming projects that failed because of it). My motto is, if it's going to get done, you're probably doing it alone.
icarusweb: What's the significance of "Spice" in "Spice ZDooM"?
SpiceOne: SpiceOne is my screen name most of the time, it was either Spice ZDooM, External ZDooM, or Outlaw ZDooM. Spice seemed to sound the best to me. It has no other real significance. Spice 1 is a gangster rapper, and I get tired of people bringing a reference to Spice Girls, it's not a Spice Girl thing.
icarusweb: Glad to hear it. Is bot support going to be added any time in the near future?
SpiceOne: I have been looking into that, I plan on supporting it in the game, and I also have plans to make a multiplayer-mod where one person would play as all the creatures in a single player level and switch between them as necessary while the players battle it out with them. This idea was brought to me by a regular visitor of #doomroom on EfNet, Linguica (for those of you hiding under a rock, Linguica is the head honcho at DooMWorld - Editor). We have been discussing a lot of ideas which would bring a lot of light onto the Spice ZDooM project.
icarusweb: Where did you learn to code?
SpiceOne: I am pretty much completely self-trained in all areas of programming. I started out at age 11 with Turbo C++ in dos, and the reasons I did was that I always wanted to make a video game. Reading the help files and clib documents I pretty much started getting the hang of Turbo C++ but it wasn't enough to program a real video game. I quickly got into MUD programming (Online text role-playing games) which helped to increase my skills in data management for programming, and when I got a hold of Watcom C++ my game programming skills sky-rocketed. I pretty much avoid DOS all together now and focus my attention on Win 32 and Linux now. For all those interested in programming, don't be discouraged because you didn't learn in a week, if you force yourself to keep trying, you will succeed. And don't be afraid to contact me if you have any questions about it.
icarusweb: When is the final version of Spice ZDooM likely to be released?
SpiceOne: I have no idea really, there was no planned schedule for Spice ZDooM, I work on it as I have time, but I have a lot of other projects that currently have my attention as well, and therefore I don't have all the time that I would normally have to work on it. So I guess my official answer would be "It's will be final when I get finished".
icarusweb: Any future projects we should know about?
SpiceOne: I plan on taking the idea of Spice ZDooM to other Sources, such as Hexen and Heretic. And for those who are interested in things that have nothing to do with Doom-style games. I also work on an online graphical game called "Venoshia", and a console-style RPG called "Legends of Crystal Falls". These two project's web pages can be found at:
Venoshia - http://venoshia.pulsarsolutions.com/
LoCF - http://locf.pulsarsolutions.com/
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