New project ahoy!

Here is another budding project that I want to start. How long do you think this will last? ;-)

The name is "Elidor" and the story is about when in near future the scientists find interdimensional gateways to the inner world, the one we see in our dreams, the scene they see is quite primative and gothic in style, and no wonder, because we may have developed our knoledge and advanced our life-style in the surface but we are quite primative beings within, and so is our world.

They also encounter lots of demons and hell spawns roaming freely around this world, again no wonder, you can feel it in your soul and heart, or maybe you can see them now in your dreams and nightmares, and also because those dimensions are a lot nearer to heaven and hell.

The only strange thing is that there is some traces of alien invasion and colonies, and ultra modern tech bases are seen here and there, what is happening? A theory is that these aliens have found the gateways sooner than humen and invaded the inner dimentions of their planet a while ago then as the phisycal rules are not so strict in those dimensions, they found easier ways to travel interstellar treks and landed on Elidor a while ago, and from time to time they came out to our phisycal planet to investigate but went back to Elidor after a short while, thats how we saw those UFOs that disappeared suddenly!

The players are sent to Elidor to invesigate the situations and come back with info to let military scientists and forces find ways to make this inner world safe again from demons and aliens. ;-)

A complex setting, no? but it gives me the freedom to make gothic and hightech architectures side by side and make interesting levels with a strong story behind it, the engine is ZDoom ofcourse and I will start working on it as soon as I finish the resource file, I will change and enhance my last resource file SPZDOOM2 to add new gothic and spooky elements to hightech ones and I hope to use new ZDoom 2.0 feature to move all the non-monster objects to the new DECORATE lump and free valuable pageframes for new monster types.

Wish me luck and if you help me with your suggestions and/or levels then the better, we can develope this as a team and finish it sooner.

P.S. I will do all the scripting and if you want I will change the levels (if they come at all:) to incorporate the scripts into them, bacause I want the players to be able to hack computers and fix damaged electronic devices or use "Fly Boxes" to madden the monsters or other scripted tricks and I will happily add those features to any levels that I include in the project and the mood is a combination of spooky-gothic vs hightech vs hellish as you will be forced to kill alien end-boss and hellish archdemons to win the game! :)

As for resource file, it will include lots of new textures and sound events and monsters both in hightech style and gothic ones. the hightech part is ready in SPZDOOM2 so I will add gothic elements and start right on the project.

That sound as an altogether solid Doom experience, if he manages to live up to the hype that is.

AH...How many levels? Or have you not decided?

This'll piss dsm off... heh. But really, instead of saying the aliens are invading you could say the tech in the dreamworld is a result of our dependency on technology.

I forget- is "Dreamscape" taken? Even then, you could still use it right?

I'm sure you can use a Dreamscape type story with no problems. By the way, if I remember right, near the end of that movie, you'll see a monster that looks amazingly like a Chaos Serpent from Heretic and Hexen.

Sounds good. Actually this sounds pretty fucking awesome.

Actually Ichor, I was thinking of the company that made Megarace 2.

Thanx for the comments, and I will try to implememt useful ideas inside the project.

As for alien invasion, if we need to infilterate hightech structures in the gothic world and kill modern enemies and end-boss then we need a reasonable motif to include them in the story and none other than "Alien race invading Elidor" comes to my mind at the moment, so I keep it at that, but I would appreciate any suggestion that may help me in this direction. ;-)

The level count is currently undecided but environments and settings of these levels would be like this:

Earth : Some years from now, A few modern facilities and structures, in a modern city.
Elidor : The dream world, Several spooky and gothic levels, maybe with some hightech parts and structures, and also battle scenes between demons and aliens and human race.
Hellish : A few levels where players advance toward hell to block the way of demon hords.
Alien bases : Some hightech levels in alien era, where you find a way to infiterate the alien mothership to travel to their planet`s inner world.
Alien`s Planet, (in&out) : Some levels with alien environment, hightech and spooky. Their physical planet is probably half scorched and has a radioactive and hostile environment.

These are the types of levels but you may enter one type of a level then go to another type and return to the previous type, I mean these parts are not totally seperate.

As for resources, the normal doom textures will remain unchanged but I will add lots of Hightech and gothic ones to it, Also lots of decoration items in both styles.

I would probably remove Trooper, Shotguy, Hell-knight, Spider-demon, Keen, SS and End-Boss, and combine fogs and do anything to free frame buffers then add these:

Monstertype: Action or
Monstertype: Variations->Act like this.

Land-mine: Boom!
Defence turret: Dual-Shotgun
Frienly officers: Instractor and Overseer.
Strife guard: green->trooper, Black->Shotguy.
Hexen Imp: Green->LostSoul, Black->Flying super-imp
Hexen swamp monster?: Green and Black?
Storm trooper: beefed up Shotguy or maybe Chainguy.
Snow trooper: Railgunner
DF-Phase 1: Instructor or Leader.
DF-Phase 2: Walking and flying, shoots probably a projectile or uses Railgun
DF-Phase 3: Spiderdemon.
DF-Remote: Flying chainguy.
Heretic pods?: Maybe a bit like land-mines.
Soul releasing holes and fire spitting pipes and other hazzards.
Stinging fly squadrons surrounding carcasses.
Shootable lamps and some other damageable decoration objects.
Damage detectors to open walls with explodes and such.
Some Demon Instructors?

Hope I can add all these!

Please send me or guide me to any resources you think that would be appropriate for the mood. Scenery objects do not cost any page frames so they are free to add, also new Pickable and animated objects like bonus items or flames! :)

Currently I have ripped duke apart and also Dark forces (Phase 3) is incomplete!
Have some Heretic and hexen items and monsters, and also strife shareware.
Also graphic section of 3d-Archive is combed for resources, so if you have something other than those and send them to me I will include you in additional credit part! ;-)

But if you help me with the levels, then you will be one of the team! for instance as you may have found out from my previous releases, I am not very much into the small details and scenery eye candy, like fallen bricks or small decoration lamps and so on, so if someone takes the responsibility for those details then he/she is real welcome!

By the way I will probably release a demo level quite soon to show off some new ZDoom features, this levels has a mood a bit like the spooky levels of Elidor, but it is made with normal doom textures with a new sky to show off lightnings. It includes the probable Status-bar and font of Elidor.

P.S. Sorry for the long posts.

OK. folks, this project is not dead yet and I have been working on it, on and off.

There was a time when some ZDoom limitations made me believe that it would not be possible for me to complete this project, but now with so many new Zdoom features I am sure it can be done, if I can work on it as I like.

As for the story, I changed it a lot as I saw some of you did not like the alien invasion part of it, so here is a new story and much better than before, as it fits great with id`s own story. ;-)

The story so far:

"The man has grown. It is several decades now that all the nations are united into one global government and together they have captured and habitated the whole solar system. The whole world is ruled by one central law, but it is fragmented into several states, each ruling a continent on earth and one rules the moon and space colonies.

About a century ago, when a new wave of space explorations started, the moon was fully colonized and several big companies joined the wave and put their resources into it. One of them was named Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC for short), and it was a thriving organization that directed lots of mining colonies on mars and it's two moons and some on the astroid belt. This was at the end of the last century, now it rules almost all the solar system colonies other than moon.

They have also lots colonies around the universe. How come? Well, the story is that they had some research labs working on teleportation and interdimentional gateways. And then one of the researchers named Thomas Elidor accidentally made a gateway which had a destination not to any other gateway on the research lab, but to another plane of existance, a primative and harsh world fixed in time on a dark age with no trace of the original native people.

But there roamed lots of hellspawn beasts and monsters that attacked any living being on sight, it ended up as a total disaster as the monsters destroyed the lab and killed all the crew there, all but one who went into the gateway and attacked the monsters in their homeland and followed them back to earth and fighted them until he destroyed the gateways that let the monsters enter the earth, and that effectively prevented further attacks on earth.

He bacame the hero of the time and was a celebrated person until his death a few decades ago. After that events a new law forbade the remake of any other gateways to this hell of a world now called "Elidor". But apparently the greedy heads at UAC could not ignore a whole new world to explore, and because their actual space travels were dampened by strict physical rules and limits, they decided to reactivate the gateways and entered Elidor again.

This time with a full military force behind them they cleared areas of it from the monsters and colonized there at several places. They had found the paradise of their dreams because in that place the strict rules of time and space were slackened a lot and they could do things they could olny dream about back home. And ironically they were not mistaken because they gradually came to believe that Elidor was in fact the world one sees in his deepest nightmares.

But the discovery did not prevent them from advancing into this new world, and they used the slackened physical rules to their advantage and made spaceships to explore distant stars, and because each planet in physical world had a matching counterpart in Elidor, they could make gateways on distant planets to come out to physical planets to explore, a wise action because of the constant waves of demonic attacks they had to fight on Elidor.

Currently UAC is the most powerful force in the world and with endless resources at hand it attracts lots of companies and people to itself. And now the fact of the reused gateways is uncovered and the central governmenth has become really nervous of the endless power of it. Lots of individual companies and local governments has made their own gateways to Elidor and started their own colonies there in hope of reaching the ultimate power of UAC.

The world has become a tense place with undercurrent wrestling of individual powers and the whole central goverment is about to explode into endless fragments of local rulers racing to gain power over the others and also there is UAC ready to attack them all and become the powerful dictator of the whole world. On the other hand the hellspawn beasts are becoming really a nuisance and each year they are becoming more restless and violent.

In the recent years they fight in more organized ways and from time to time they assault a small colony and totally destroy it to the ground. In this mayhem you start your carrier as a member of special force owned by the shaking central goverment to reestablish the lost principles and rules. Are you sure you are doing the right thing? Well at least the power of UAC has to be controlled so you go on."

OK, now that you have hopefully read the long story of Elidor, you may wonder why I came out with this? Well, because I like several different subjects and game concepts and I wanted to include them all here, for instance:

I like science fiction titles and space or industrial themed levels, I like fantasy and suspense themes and dark and eery levels, I like unnatural and surreal settings and the haunted themes, I like RPG games and how we can develope our persona any way we like, I liked DeusEx a lot and I loved Doom, so I came out with this jumbled theme for a TC, and I called it Elidor, because of an old story I read when I was a little youth. That story was in some ways similar to this one, except that it was pure fantasy, and not a science fiction.

This TC is basically a modern RPG like DeusEx, that starts in future earth but continues to gothic places with a dose of hightech themes thrown in and then it branches to some hellish themes and also space and hightech themes.

You can start by selecting from some predefined character personas, or you can build your own from scratch. Each persona has five different skills that decide how efficient he will be in that specific field.

These skills are listed here:

* Combat
* Computer
* Electronics
* Stealth
* Technic

If someone is better in specific skill then he will gain more experience and/or resources in that field and he will develope faster in that era. You can guess that it will affect the gameplay a lot.

For instance the gameplay when you are a skilled commando is a lot different from when you are a silent computer hacking spy. It is better to try some extreme pesonas to see which type of gameplay one likes more. Any time the players can interact with environment a menu will pop up at the upper left corner of screen, and the players can select the actions by keys defined in "Menu Interface" and activate them by pressing the default action button.

And hopefully the default action will be the one that is used at most situations, so whenever a popup menu appears a single click will do the job. If the player leaves the area without activating an action, the menu will disappear until the player returns to the place, which will mostly cause the menu to reappear, except for when other factors have rendered the menu useless, for instance a door that is exploded open would not cause an unlock/open menu to appear again.

But not all the interactive items would show a pop up menu, for instance the secret places would not give away their secret, and most of the drawers and safes and so on are opened and used just like in the normal doom levels.

More about the skills:

The combat skill determines how much effective the person is in a battle, the more skill you have the better weapons you can use and the more ammo, armour and health you will find and carry.

The computer skill determines the rate of gaining experience in computer hacking skill, the more skilled you get in hacking the more secure systems you can break in and the more options you will have at hand when logged in.

The electronics skill determines the rate of gaining experience in skill of tweaking or repairing electronic devices, the more experienced electronicians can tackle with more "complex devices and change or repair them.

The stealth skill determines how well you can evade the monsters or security cameras in dark corners and how much spying tools you will find around the levels.

The technic skill determines how many different types of technical tools and machinery you can use and how good you are at using them, and also how many gadgets you will find lying around.

Hopefully an early demo will be released in a week or two and it will have a fully functional menu system, and as the menus.acs included with it will be pretty generic any of you scripting folk, can use it as a base for more interacrtive levels. ;)

Wish me luck for the rest of the project: Monster and Item Conversions and the actual level design.

Heh, ages ago i thought up a doom project where a UAC spaceship discoveres an alien planet full of hellspawn, and it turns out the aliens discovered the warp-gate tech the same as they did in doom, but when the demons invaded thier planet they werent so lucky and the demons now rule thier entire world, and you had to help take the planet from the demons again, and see lots of wierd alien technology (Like alien cars and alien computers, which are essentially the same level of technology of earth's in the present time, but made by aliens..), it never got anywhere though XD

Sphagne, before you start asking for help on your new mega-cool-and-whatnot project, make sure you have something to show first (screenshots, map downloads, etc). Keep in mind we've already seen thousands of upcoming projects that actually never got done.

lol! (New tag)
Seriously however, sounds like a good idea. Good luck!

Hey, I want to know who first wrote this tag?

OK. I know the rules, so I am working on a demo level. Maybe it would be a little nice surprise, who knows. ;)

Somebody posted a thread about it in the blog forums which seem to have dissappeared...

Ultimate doomer, and the blog forum is now hidden, check forum 33

What do you mean the Ultimate Doomer is hidden?

Ultimate Doomer was the first person to post that, and

the blog forum is hidden, check forum 33

Sphagne, Lüt and I have decided that you're not allowed to make any more levels. Your maps in the CC megawad were enough. We will not keep your name on file. If you promise not to post any more bad maps, we promise not to vomit while playing them.

DC

*ahem* burrrrrn

Heh, heh, were those that bad? I did not think so. ;-)

What will you say if you know that I made these wads some years ago?

How about 1996,1997?

Ok. just wait for my next wad and then you can decide if you do not like my *current* levels, OK?

P.S. Just remember to clean your keyboard, because I want to release my next wad, quite soon! ;-)

Sphagne said:

Hey, I want to know who first wrote this tag?

I posted a fake newproject tag in this thread, and Torn thought it was so cool he asked an admin to make it real.

(and you can still see my blog post by clicking on....wait for it....my blog)

(and you can still see the blog forum by clicking 'new blog' and then on the path link at the top)

BTW, those CC maps of yours weren't bad at all.

I know that, maybe he was maddened at my style of writing, you know, I know only bookish english and my sentences may seem a bit arogant, so he thought I was an *arrogant bastard* ;-) and got maddened at me, then wrote that about my levels.

And TUD, how come I never noticed anythings about tags? How can we use them?

If you mean all the tags, this will tell you what the various tags are. And the new one is 'newproject' in the same format.

Thanx pal, I had not looked into it before. :p

Heh, yeah me, Lüt and DC were cooping in those maps of yours Sphagne and they were pretty awful for the purpose, though in fairness I cooped the docked ship one later with zarcyb and enjoyed it a lot, except again not ideal for coop.

Sphagne said:

I know that, maybe he was maddened at my style of writing, you know, I know only bookish english and my sentences may seem a bit arogant, so he thought I was an *arrogant bastard* ;-) and got maddened at me, then wrote that about my levels.

No, we just had so much trouble co-opping in your maps that I decided to ban you during the second one, but reconsidered upon discovering that they were quite enjoyable in SP.

At any rate, this new stuff sounds good and if it there is so much time between the CC maps and these you have going now, I'm anxious to see what you can do now.

Hope you like them, I know they sound very hard to achieve and in fact they are, so I hope to make a starting step toward it and get some help from others (Rex? Thomas? any other?) as people see the result, and may become interested in it, then maybe we can finish it sooner, by the way, the map design will be open in some ways to give room for future addons by other people, ;-)