Doom 64 for Doom II - v1.4 released, /idgames link is up

15 hours ago, DeXiaZ said:

Any news? I thought the release will be at 31 of March...

No no, that wasn't an official date.  I said that it would be cool if we could release it on the 31st, but that was it.  Cage is still working on the Motherdemon; its an entirely from-scratch sprite set and those things take a lot of time.

When the time is right, I will announce an official release date.  It'll be in the thread title so no one should miss it.

You did an amazing job with the trailer by the way!  I'll be sure to put it front and center once we release ;)

two things to address:

1) Since the opportunity to release the mode on the 31st of march (Doom 64 birthday) had been missed I think it will be good idea that after

cage will finish to work on the mother demon spirit to set the final release with the release of the next version of the Doom 64 Retribution mode (all coordinated with Nevander).

2) " Cage is still working on the Motherdemon" , only the mother demon spirit - what about the super secret, and the short demons for the carousal? 

It would be best if we just release the project once we're ready instead of trying to coordinate with another project to release at the same time (even though they share similarities).  I don't know how much longer we are going to take, and I don't want to make someone else wait on this (and I don't want to wait on another project to release either).  It could be neat but ultimately I'm just gonna focus on getting this finished when it done and nothing else.

These are the things left to do (just gonna repost this again since we're on a new page):

- Motherdemon sprites

- Finalize the Motherdemon's behavior once I get the finished sprites

- Add in _bruce_'s super secret for MAP24 once he finishes it

- Get demos for the opening carousel (still not ready to do this until the maps are 100% ready to go)

- Fix the sound issues related to the monster spawners in MAP30 (still don't know how to fix this by the way, I could use some help)

- Fix music related issues, possibly by replacing tracks entirely

- Fix the Motherdemon sight sound in the new casting call in (G)ZDoom

- Get MAP14 fixes in (Da Werecat might be working on this?)

- Do the final rounds of testing

Cage recently had a hardware-related issue that kept him from doing work on the Motherdemon.  But thankfully he's got it taken care of, so he should be able to work on it again.

Sorry this is taking so long, I was hoping that we could get it released in February.  But this is just how things go sometimes.  Thank you for your patience :)

*edit*

Oh I almost forgot.  I had plans to release one last private test build to anyone who would be willing to help out.  I think I would like to get @_bruce_'s map update in first (and probably try to finalize the motherdemon behavior as much as possible).  But this is still something I'm planning on doing.  So if you can help out, please let me know!

5 hours ago, Mechadon said:

- Fix the sound issues related to the monster spawners in MAP30 (still don't know how to fix this by the way, I could use some help)

Hm? I'd like to help with it, but I don't "know" which issues has the sound...

5 hours ago, Mechadon said:

Sorry this is taking so long, I was hoping that we could get it released in February.  But this is just how things go sometimes.  Thank you for your patience :)

Don't worry, I'd like to play finished and polished game instead of kinda stable beta version. We're not Eidos Interactive in 2003, if you know what I'm mean...

5 hours ago, Mechadon said:

I had plans to release one last private test build to anyone who would be willing to help out.

5 hours ago, Mechadon said:

- Get demos for the opening carousel

I'd like to help with this.

12 hours ago, Mechadon said:

- Fix the sound issues related to the monster spawners in MAP30 (still don't know how to fix this by the way, I could use some help)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1q5h_dCJY8xjPFNcodJsKktGIoPU0efyY

It's funny that in this day and age I still have to resort to XWE from time to time.

@Mechadon you can send the private build my way. It could probably be run on TBS also if you are happy with that, been a private build and all.

Just finished playing through the whole thing today! I like these maps better than the Doom 64 originals; it's almost like a lost megawad from 1997 or so, both in terms of its difficulty (much harder than Doom 64, but lower than most modern map sets) and its gameplay feel. The Nightmare Imps are indeed absolute nightmares under vanilla (much less so in a GL port), and much more dangerous than their Doom 64 counterparts. Their claw attack does an absolutely absurd amount of damage and they're extremely difficult to see beyond point blank range. The architecture made very clever use of the stock Doom II textures, though I think the hell maps would look even better with GothicDM textures added, especially to replace various techbase textures that appear in some of them.

I didn't really care for the music; it was inconsistent in style, volume, and instruments used and a lot of the midis were just repetition of basic, boring riffs. I ended up throwing the GothicDM soundtrack into a wad and loading that over it, just to complete the classic megawad feel. Good ol' Mark Klem...

While I love the STARTAN3 status bar, the hell bar looks abrupt and awkward in its transition from marble to flesh. I modified it a bit so it's marble all the way across and I think it looks a lot better:

The altered status bar graphic is attached.

15 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

Just finished playing through the whole thing today! I like these maps better than the Doom 64 originals; it's almost like a lost megawad from 1997 or so, both in terms of its difficulty (much harder than Doom 64, but lower than most modern map sets) and its gameplay feel. The Nightmare Imps are indeed absolute nightmares under vanilla (much less so in a GL port), and much more dangerous than their Doom 64 counterparts. Their claw attack does an absolutely absurd amount of damage and they're extremely difficult to see beyond point blank range. The architecture made very clever use of the stock Doom II textures, though I think the hell maps would look even better with GothicDM textures added, especially to replace various techbase textures that appear in some of them.

 

I didn't really care for the music; it was inconsistent in style, volume, and instruments used and a lot of the midis were just repetition of basic, boring riffs. I ended up throwing the GothicDM soundtrack into a wad and loading that over it, just to complete the classic megawad feel. Good ol' Mark Klem...

 

While I love the STARTAN3 status bar, the hell bar looks abrupt and awkward in its transition from marble to flesh. I modified it a bit so it's marble all the way across and I think it looks a lot better:

 

The altered status bar graphic is attached.

The statusbar is amazing. Never seen something like that in my entire DOOM experience to be honest.

Puh, maybe it's time to start thinking about providing external patch wads for all the statusbars we can choose from by now. Normally one can be glad if you get a customized version at all, but for this project, the choices seem to be plentiful. And hard...

5 hours ago, croma said:

The statusbar is amazing. Never seen something like that in my entire DOOM experience to be honest.

*shrug* I made it in 10 minutes kitbashing Mechadon's status bar with another marble one from Kansam's Trial.

On 4/15/2018 at 9:55 PM, Woolie Wool said:

I didn't really care for the music; it was inconsistent in style, volume, and instruments used and a lot of the midis were just repetition of basic, boring riffs. I ended up throwing the GothicDM soundtrack into a wad and loading that over it, just to complete the classic megawad feel. Good ol' Mark Klem...

That happens when you have a lot of people doing the music for the game, you can lose quite a bit of consistency. A lot of Bobby's MIDIs were indeed just the same riff over and over, although they were not boring haha! It took him quite some attempts to get it right too, some of the unreleased Doom MIDIs are dreadful, I remember un36 being particularly bad, so when you say basic, boring riffs, I think of that and I'd like to think that the music in the mod, or mine at least (as I'm speaking for myself here), is beyond that point. Do you have any suggestions regarding specific songs that I wrote? (you can check who wrote what in the OP) I'd like to take a look at my songs and see if I can improve them. I tried to stay true to the original formula because I thought more elaborate MIDIs would distract the player, but maybe I went overboard with the simplicity.

MAP04 might be suffering from this. I picked the track mainly for the breakdown at the end, but the main part sounds a bit shallow.

Hey thanks for giving this a play through @Woolie Wool!  I don't suppose you ran into any major bugs, which is a good thing :)

I would say I'm fairly happy with the music on the whole, though it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I restarted the project.  But I was adamant about having new tracks, and I liked the idea of mixing them in with stock music from the iwads.  Well at this point anyway, it probably isn't likely that new music will get made, and I imagine anyone who might not be fond of the tracks can just replace it with something else.

Your edited statusbar is quite nice!  I'm on the fence when it comes to the fleshy transition; I like the idea but maybe the execution isn't the best.  There were a few people who wanted to see a statusbar with fleshy elements, so that's where it came from.  I might do a quick marble-only edit similar to yours that will be released separately (I would probably make the ammo labels blend in with the other lettering).

Also speaking of music, I was thinking about doing a music swap from MAP11 to MAP32.  The track being used in MAP32 seems to have issues in Chocolate Doom (it won't loop properly from what I remember) and the track being used for MAP11 right now would fit that map nicely.  That would mean I would have to find a new track for MAP11 though.  I'm also looking at replacing MAP14's track since it has issues in Chocolate Doom as well (or so it has been reported, I can't recall the exact issue off-hand).

@DeXiaZ I believe the sound issue has been taken care of by Da Werecat (been too busy to check it out but I'm sure it works).  Basically the problem was related to the IoS spawners.  I needed them to be silent, but my methods didn't work across all ports.  Anywho thanks for volunteering for testing and demo recording!  For the demo reel, you can choose between and Main Engineering or Even Simpler.  I was gonna do the last demo so just lemme know which one you want.

@Da Werecat Thanks for the help with the sound issue!  I wasn't sure it was going to be easy to fix, and I almost resorted to just replacing the sounds with some sort of ambient effect.

@damo2k Thanks man, that would be great!

By the way, for those wondering why I'm keeping this last build private, its because of the Motherdemon.  Cage and I were hoping to keep it a secret until the final release, but we really should do one final test considering how much has changed sine the last build.  There are some placeholder sprites that were rendered from his 3D model, so releasing it to everyone would kinda ruin the surprise.

On 4/19/2018 at 2:56 PM, Mechadon said:

I'm also looking at replacing MAP14's track since it has issues in Chocolate Doom as well (or so it has been reported, I can't recall the exact issue off-hand).

 

Reported for hate speech

(I'm sure I have a suitable replacement if it's needed, but the issue was "apparently" localized to a one-time event as I can't replicate it and the person who reported it doesn't seem able to replicate the issue either)

Yea there were similar music-related issues reported for some of the maps in ZDaemon that I wasn't able to reproduce either.  For your track in MAP14, I haven't double-checked on my end to see if I could reproduce it (but I think the last time I looked into it a while back, it worked fine).  Some of the issues were related to OPL playback too, which I know next to nothing about.  Actually pretty much anything music-related is way over my head when it comes to troubleshooting and fixing issues, so my only go-to is to replace tracks.

When I get a chance I'll experiment with the track in Chocolate Doom again and see if it causes issues on my end.  And if no one else reports problems with it before release, we'll just keep it in.

By the way while your here, there was an issue I was having with your MAP32 track in Chocolate Doom.  That one didn't want to loop properly for some reason.  So I've swapped out the MAP11 track for it in the mean time since it has a similar feel.  I don't know what the problem is, but if your able to look into it and fix it, I'll put it back in.  Or if you have a better track for it that plays back correctly, lemme now and I'll get it in.

On 19.04.2018 at 11:56 PM, Mechadon said:

For the demo reel, you can choose between and Main Engineering or Even Simpler

I'd like to do Even Simpler, because I've already worked with this map, lol. BTW, should I "succ at playing" like people do in the original demos? I mean, in most Doom demos (including Playstation Doom) player just dies somewhere.

On 19.04.2018 at 11:56 PM, Mechadon said:

Basically the problem was related to the IoS spawners.  I needed them to be silent, but my methods didn't work across all ports.

That's....unusual. I thought that making an empty .wav file will fix this problem.

On 4/18/2018 at 1:30 AM, Da Werecat said:

MAP04 might be suffering from this. I picked the track mainly for the breakdown at the end, but the main part sounds a bit shallow.

Oh crap, I considered that one of the best riffs I've written! I really liked how it complemented with the harmonies.

On 4/21/2018 at 10:29 PM, DILDOMASTER666 said:

Reported for hate speech

 

(I'm sure I have a suitable replacement if it's needed, but the issue was "apparently" localized to a one-time event as I can't replicate it and the person who reported it doesn't seem able to replicate the issue either)

(Sorry for the double post)

Apparently the problem is that the song has too much stuff going on at the same time and the OPL chip can't keep up with the amount of notes. Keep in mind the OPL chip is a 9-voice chip, so every note of every channel counts towards this limit. I even think there's a percussion mode that limits that to 5 notes, so I'm not sure, but the thing is, you need to reduce the amount of instruments or notes of each instrument so it sounds ok on Vanilla (this test must be done on actual Vanilla, Chocolate Doom is VERY forgiving with the OPL emulation)

On 4/21/2018 at 11:18 PM, DeXiaZ said:

I'd like to do Even Simpler, because I've already worked with this map, lol. BTW, should I "succ at playing" like people do in the original demos? I mean, in most Doom demos (including Playstation Doom) player just dies somewhere.

Yea that's probably the best way to do it.  I think the general rule of thumb should be to avoid showing off secrets and keep it relatively short and action-packed.  For the demo that I'm going to record, I'm gonna play using keyboard-only for that extra layer of authenticity.

18 hours ago, CoTeCiO said:

Apparently the problem is that the song has too much stuff going on at the same time and the OPL chip can't keep up with the amount of notes.

Hmmm, I don't know much about this, but that sounds like something that might be difficult to do?  I guess it depends on how complex the song in question is though.  @DILDOMASTER666 is that something you could do to the track?  I've already swapped out other tracks because they didn't play back correctly in OPL, so the precedent is already set.  Or if you have another track that is more OPL-friendly, maybe that would be the better option at this point?

16 minutes ago, Mechadon said:

For the demo that I'm going to record, I'm gonna play using keyboard-only for that extra layer of authenticity.

Very good idea. I'll do this too.

Uh, does I need to wait for the special build or I can just do this demo "right now"?

Even Simpler is probably the map least likely to have changes made to it at this point (unless someone can reproduce that ZDaemon bug).  But to be on the safe side, just wait for now.  My plan right now is to get this last private build out and tested for about a week or so, and then take care of anything that pops up.  After that, I'll send you and CoTeCiO the go-ahead for the demos.

2 hours ago, Mechadon said:

Hmmm, I don't know much about this, but that sounds like something that might be difficult to do?  I guess it depends on how complex the song in question is though.  @DILDOMASTER666 is that something you could do to the track?  I've already swapped out other tracks because they didn't play back correctly in OPL, so the precedent is already set.  Or if you have another track that is more OPL-friendly, maybe that would be the better option at this point?

Now that I know exactly what the issue is I can actually do something about this, yes - I would also like to mention that my preference would be to choose a new track for MAP14 to preserve the original author's choice for MAP11, but that is more of a "hint" than a hardline stance so we'll see what I come up with I guess

1 hour ago, DILDOMASTER666 said:

I would also like to mention that my preference would be to choose a new track for MAP14 to preserve the original author's choice for MAP11

Do you mean MAP32's music here?  At any rate, I chose the original track for MAP11 so I didn't have an issue with swapping it out for something else.  I thought the midi-fied version of the D64 track you used in MAP32 was a very nice choice actually, and would prefer it was kept if the looping issue could be fixed.

Anyways thanks for taking the time to get this fixed :)

6 hours ago, Mechadon said:

Do you mean MAP32's music here?  At any rate, I chose the original track for MAP11 so I didn't have an issue with swapping it out for something else.  I thought the midi-fied version of the D64 track you used in MAP32 was a very nice choice actually, and would prefer it was kept if the looping issue could be fixed.

 

Anyways thanks for taking the time to get this fixed :)

I clearly misread, disregard my entire schpiel about map14/map11. Standby, will attempt to hack-fuck map32's midi into working right

Remember the max amount of notes you can get away with is 9 without note cuts if you're using something like DMXOPL - I was working on a strictly 2-op version but it didn't work out well...

13 hours ago, DILDOMASTER666 said:

 

I clearly misread, disregard my entire schpiel about map14/map11. Standby, will attempt to hack-fuck map32's midi into working right

No problem!  Just to clarify, this is the issue - MAP14's track doesn't play back correctly in OPL and MAP32's track doesn't loop properly in Chocolate Doom (not OPL-related as far as I know).  I was going to take MAP11's track and use it for MAP32 since it has a similar tone, but I won't do that if you can get the track fixed.  I'm open to whatever methods you'd like to use in order to fix the issue ;)

Hey, this mod looks very interesting. But I can't ignore that some stuff can't be replicated in Choco DOOM (specially Motherdemon). Are you going to make a zdoom version of this mod?

Hi, thanks for your interest in the project!  Unfortunately a 1:1 recreation of Doom 64 isn't the goal of the project, so there will be no plans for a ZDoom-only version.  ZDoom players will get to see some extra enhancements, but they don't change the gameplay.

That's enough for me. We already have a 1:1 recreation. I only wanted a classic DOOM styled motherdemon with attacks close the original. I like that the maps are inspired but not replicas, and walls shooting darts don't seem to fit in classic DOOM.

From years I tried to make a classic DOOM motherdemon with no success. This is the closest I got lol

Cage's sprites look amazing.

Cage is actually making new from-scratch sprites for the Motherdemon.  The sprites in the current test build are just an edit of the Spider Mastermind.  That's partly why the project hasn't been released yet; I'm waiting on him to finish that up (along with some other updates from other people).  He's aiming for it to look like it would fit in with the rest of the vanilla sprites, so hopefully you'll get your wish :).