Evil Unleashed - New Screens on Page 2!

Find the original zdoom thread here



In DOOM, you play one of four off-duty soldiers suddenly thrown
into the middle of an interdimensional war! Stationed at a
scientific research facility, your days are filled with tedium
and paperwork. Today is a bit different. Wave after wave of
demonic creatures are spreading through the base, killing or
possessing everyone in sight. As you stand knee-deep in the
dead, your duty seems clear-you must eradicate the enemy and
find out where they're coming from. When you find out the
truth, your sense of reality may be shattered!



The game takes up to four players through a futuristic world,
where they may cooperate or compete to beat the invading
creatures. It boasts a much more active environment than Id's
previous effort, Wolfenstein 3-D, while retaining the
pulse-pounding action and excitement. DOOM features a fantastic
fully texture-mapped environment, a host of technical tour de
forces to surprise the eyes, multiple player option, and smooth
gameplay on any 386 or better.



Id has added the ability to have animated messages on
the walls, information terminals, access stations, and more.
The environment can act on you, and you can act on the
environment. If you shoot the walls, they get damaged, and stay
damaged. Not only does this add realism, but provides a crude
method for marking your path, like violent bread crumbs.



Another touch adding realism is light diminishing. With
distance, your surroundings become enshrouded in darkness. This
makes areas seem huge and intensifies the experience. Light
sourcing allows lamps and lights to illuminate hallways,
explosions to light up areas, and strobe lights to briefly
reveal things near them. These two features will make the game
frighteningly real.



Wolfenstein's walls were always at ninety degrees to each other,
and were always eight feet thick. DOOM's walls can be at any
angle, and be of any thickness. Walls can have see-through
areas, change shape, and animate. This allows more natural
construction of levels. If you can draw it on paper, you can
see it in the game. Floors and ceilings can also be of any height,
allowing for stairs, poles, altars, plus low hallways and high caves,
allowing a great variety for rooms and halls.



DOOM not only achieves smooth, seamless gameplay with a high framerate and smooth control on the user end, but with the addition of outdoor areas. In DOOM, you can go in and out of buildings, look into other rooms through windows, and even traverse the entire overworld on foot or via monorail through an advanced, never-before seen hub system!

John Carmack, Id's Technical Director, is very excited about
DOOM: Wolfenstein is primitive compared to DOOM. We're doing
DOOM the right way this time. I've had some very good insights
and optimizations that will make the DOOM engine perform at a
great frame rate. The game runs fine on a 386sx, and on a
486/33, we're talking 35 frames per second, fully texture-mapped
at normal detail, for a large area of the screen. That's the
fastest texture-mapping around-period.

Texture mapping, for those not following the game magazines, is
a technique that allows the program to place fully-drawn art on
the walls of a 3-D maze. Combined with other techniques,
texture mapping looked realistic enough in Wolfenstein 3-D that
people wrote Id complaining of motion sickness. In DOOM, the
environment is going to look even more realistic. Please make
the necessary preparations.

The first episode of DOOM will be shareware. When you register,
you'll receive the next five episodes, which feature a journey
into another dimension, filled to its hellish horizon with fire
and flesh. Wage war against the infernal onslaught with machine
guns, missile launchers, and mysterious supernatural weapons.
Decide the fate of two universes as you battle to survive!
Succeed and you will be humanity's heroes; fail and you will
spell its doom.

Our Team:

Hugo Farias: Programming, Mapping, Graphics, Project Director
Jeffrey Shark: Style direction, Quality Control, Mapping
Job: Mapping
Daniel Langegger: Mapping
Captain Toenail: Mapping
Fernito: Mapping
Pottus: Mapping
Leo Hendricks: Music

Sounds like a lot of hype, but I Hope it runs on my 386SX/16. ;-)

hex11 said:

Sounds like a lot of hype, but I Hope it runs on my 386SX/16. ;-)

It depends. If it's actually capable of running ZDoom with continuous ~35 ACS Scripts in the background, then yeah.

I don't know what that means, but my Packard Bell has 4 MB RAM and a 1 MB Trident VGA card! That should probably be enough! ;-)

Looks nice

what's a computer

But really, this is actually kinda interesting as far as these things go.

Thank you for posting this interesting article

I don't see why anyone would want to make a doom bible inspired project in zdoom, though.

Grain of Salt said:

Thank you for posting this interesting article

I don't see why anyone would want to make a doom bible inspired project in zdoom, though.

I'm excited at the possibility of playing Doom as it was originally intended. I doubt I'm the only one. The Doom Bible can finally become something to be played, not just read.

Would be nice to finally see the Unmaker weapon in the original Doom as intended.

Grain of Salt said:

I don't see why anyone would want to make a doom bible inspired project in zdoom, though.

Because the Doom bible was technically a lot more ambitious than Doom ended up being, and required a lot of features which just never got into the vanilla engine, but which are actually found in ZDoom. Like level hubs, inventory items, decals (also known as "violent breadcrumbs"), as well as a simple and well-documented modding interface allowing to easily implement the various gizmos defined in the bible but never created for real. Like, say, the chaos field generator:

The alternative would be what? Taking Chocolate Doom and then hardcoding all the needed stuff in C? That has been tried. And failed. Even if you succeeded, though, you'd end up with a TC that requires its own port to run, and this is basically awful. It lacks forward compatibility and portability unless you keep maintaining the mod. And then people will make a patch or something to play your mod in ZDoom anyway instead of using your aging custom engine.

Or one could try a Doom bible project that remains within the constraints of vanilla Doom. Then you have to do some adjustments to fit with the engine. Namely, you have to drop everything that makes a difference between the original vision from the bible and the final product. You might end up with something very good (Id did, after all, and you could make another DTWID this way) but it will just not be a Doom bible project.

Neither zdoom nor vanilla modding can produce an authentic representation of the doom bible's plans. It comes down to which way you'd prefer to fail.

If you use zdoom you're sacrificing the 1993 behaviour of doom for a feature set, whereas I personally would rather sacrifice a certain amount of the feature set and retain the look/feel/behaviour of 1993 doom. I'd rather play a vanilla megawad that expands on the doom alphas than a zdoom wad that fits more of the doom bible criteria but which is also overwhelmingly rooted in the present.

Gez said:

all the needed stuff in C? That has been tried. And failed.

Grain of Salt said:

I'd rather play a vanilla megawad that expands on the doom alphas than a zdoom wad that fits more of the doom bible criteria

Sodaholic said:

I understand that you don't like projects with custom EXEs, and that's fine, but I really do want to clarify that my project isn't Doom Bible based. The Doom alphas showed a very clear general design in gameplay, that was complete enough to show how the game probably would've played out, all it lacked was actual playability. All my project is trying to do is create a playable version of the alpha game design.

No actual hubs, just the ability to return to levels (don't even know if I'm going to keep this), no extra characters, none of the cut Doom Bible enemies, none of the extra weapons (only the ones in the alphas, which was pretty much the final armory, except that the Dark Claw was in the Plasma Rifle's place), no extra cards beside the red, yellow and blue ones, so on and so on.

My version is not based on the Doom Bible at all.

lol

Grain of Salt said:

If you use zdoom you're sacrificing the 1993 behaviour of doom for a feature set

Nothing you do today is gonna feel like an old thing anyways, unless you have some sort of time machine.

I think anything you try with plain old vanilla DOOM will fall short of Tom Hall's ideas, unless you go hacking up some code. If you can get the doomsrc to build in DOS (maybe using allegro or whatever instead of DMX, etc.) then you could make that your target platform instead of worrying about constantly maintaining a patch for some port. Then you don't even have to worry about compilers, just stick with the old Borland C or something static like that.

But it sounds like a lot of work! It might be better to look into vanilla Strife modding, to see how much closer it can get. After all, it has the hub system and various adventure game elements... Probabably not every aspect of the DOOM Bible is doable, but it would be closer than with vanilla DOOM. And it could actually run in DOS.

But probably not "fine" on 386SX/16. ;-)

There's little point in keeping the renderer close to the original software mode and resolution size, also there's gameplay and/or compatibility options to make it fuction closer to the original experience, but I am unaware by how far currently.

hfc2x, is there an argument concealed somewhere in that mish-mash of quotes?

hfc2x said:

Nothing you do today is gonna feel like an old thing anyways, unless you have some sort of time machine.

The point isn't to "feel like an old thing". The point is to accurately reproduce id's specs for doom circa 1992/3. We literally have versions of the doom engine from that time; we know that tom hall's doom would essentially have had the engine of vanilla doom.

Can't see any long stencil-like shadows on the shots. It makes me sad.

Avoozl said:

Would be nice to finally see the Unmaker weapon in the original Doom as intended.

It'll be in there!

Grain of Salt said:

hfc2x, is there an argument concealed somewhere in that mish-mash of quotes?


The point isn't to "feel like an old thing". The point is to accurately reproduce id's specs for doom circa 1992/3. We literally have versions of the doom engine from that time; we know that tom hall's doom would essentially have had the engine of vanilla doom.

I would have to disagree.

From reading the Doom Bible, you would have needed a version of Doom with support for polyobjects (swinging doors on bathroom stalls), a way to simulate room-over-room effects, ACS, etc. Furthermore, Tom Hall's vision of Doom would have been MUCH too large and complex to be able to run on the computers of the day. John Romero has said that.

I'm not sure that the little square light cubes are demonstrating the believable lighting being talked about in the article. ;) Doom's lighting, especially when it comes to sharp lighting like this in high contrast scenes like shots 1 and 2, generally works best when the lighting is based around larger architectural structures rather than having it be very bright in a 64x64 square under some ceiling lights and nowhere else.

Also, it's a bit strange that the crates in shot 1 have been absolutely painted with blood, yet the blood instantly stopped with a sharp line cutoff when it reached the immediately adjacent carpet.

There are also some resource-related oddities in view: the moon in the sky appears to have some stray bright pixels around its left side, and the wall signs (like the green one in shot 3) pulled from one of the Doom prerelease versions look like they were pulled from an unfinished product (...because they were :P). A lot of the resources were just plain unfinished at the time the alphas were produced, and as such they don't really fit naturally into levels.

Grain of Salt said:

hfc2x, is there an argument concealed somewhere in that mish-mash of quotes?

Sort of. It was some drama that happened on the ZDoom thread long ago that was heavily related to what you say you'd prefer to play.

Grain of Salt said:

tom hall's doom would essentially have had the engine of vanilla doom.

Possibly, but if Hall's version of Doom had ever happened, that's what we had called "vanilla" instead, but the requirements and specs would have been vastly different from what we know today.

esselfortium said:

I'm not sure that the little square light cubes are demonstrating the believable lighting being talked about in the article. ;) Doom's lighting, especially when it comes to sharp lighting like this in high contrast scenes like shots 1 and 2, generally works best when the lighting is based around larger architectural structures rather than having it be very bright in a 64x64 square under some ceiling lights and nowhere else.

Are you saying to make the areas surrounding lights a bit brighter? If so, I will agree with you there. If not, would you be willing to elaborate?

Also, it's a bit strange that the crates in shot 1 have been absolutely painted with blood, yet the blood instantly stopped with a sharp line cutoff when it reached the immediately adjacent carpet.

We are working on this ;)

There are also some resource-related oddities in view: the moon in the sky appears to have some stray bright pixels around its left side, and the wall signs (like the green one in shot 3) pulled from one of the Doom prerelease versions look like they were pulled from an unfinished product (...because they were :P). A lot of the resources were just plain unfinished at the time the alphas were produced, and as such they don't really fit naturally into levels.

We are working on this as well. Remember, as a work in progress quite a few things here are still placeholders.

Thanks a ton for your criticism, if nobody provided input we could never accomplish anything!

Marnetmar said:

Tom Hall's vision of Doom would have been MUCH too large and complex to be able to run on the computers of the day. John Romero has said that.

Frankly, Doom as actually released did not run well on 386s. There's a reason you could shrink the display down until it filled only 1/4 of the screen, and 386s were that reason :)

I'd map for this project. What is the size and scope for levels? And will they require advanced scripting, etc?

Job said:

I'd map for this project. What is the size and scope for levels? And will they require advanced scripting, etc?

Size and scope are variable. We're mainly looking for non-linear levels with lots of optional areas to re-visit.

Generally, maps will require scripting, but hfc2x is more than willing to help out. Just send one of us some examples of your work and we'll look over it. Thanks for volunteering!

Job has officially joined our mappers team. Who wants to be the next victim?

Capellan said:

Frankly, Doom as actually released did not run well on 386s. There's a reason you could shrink the display down until it filled only 1/4 of the screen, and 386s were that reason :)

But it ran great on 486-class machines, and those are really the ones that gamers were buying at the time. Heck, even in the early months of 1993, the dealers were pushing 486's, whereas a 386DX/40 was considered a low-end "budget" machine. You have to actually go back a couple years to 1991 or so to find 386SX/16 being marketed heavily.

I knew a lot of people in those days (lived in military barracks) and of all the ones who bought an actual new PC (not used, pre-owned) in 1993, they were all 486's. And none of us even heard about DOOM until 1994, because there weren't any phone lines, except for a payphone on each floor, so nobody had modems. But within a couple month's time, someone got ahold of the shareware release (probably copied from somone who lived off-base) and then everyone had it...

I remember somebody saying they were gonna post some DTWID gameplay on an actual 486 machine, but it never happened.

Anyway, have another screenshot:



For the record, the stall doors DO swing.

I would love to help. I think I'm pretty good at mapping vanilla-styled levels (example), but I'm not familiar with ZDoom features.

Fernito said:

I think I'm pretty good at mapping vanilla-styled levels (example)

O_O
That was amazing! You're in, of course.

Will everybody please give a warm welcome to our new friends, Fernito and Captain Toenail!

Yay, I'm in!