Amulets & Armor Support?

Are there any ports that have attempted to support Amulets & Armor in the way Strife is supported? It always seems strange to me how little that Doom engine-based game is played/discussed compared to the others.

Maybe that's because it works completely differently than the rest?

It may use the same level format but that's really the only thing it shares with Doom etc. Even defining any actions within the map is completely incompatible with the original Doom engine.

Bummer.

It could probably still be supported by an intrepid port author. The main challenge in my view is figuring out and supporting all of the data formats and scripting, and of course, rendering the textures, which are in a custom format and include mipmaps (it wouldn't be necessary to use them, of course, though it would be ideal for a port to be capable of it). Recreating the extensive UI would also be a lot of work, but nothing particularly challenging.

At any rate, A&A is not a DOOM-engine game, and that's one of the main reasons that interest in it remains low. The authors of the game only used the DOOM map format because it allowed them to use DeePSea as their development tool, saving a lot of time and money on developing one themselves.(How do I know about this? The level wad files include DeeP's signature in the header.)

Huh, I didn't know this game existed.

Quasar said:

A&A is not a DOOM-engine game

I guess that's why.

It's a similar story with the Sierra game Birthright - another you mightn't have heard of - which uses PWADs for it's "adventure" sub-games, adding variety to what's otherwise a strategy/wargame based on one of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons titles.

Quasar said:

At any rate, A&A is not a DOOM-engine game

Why not? I didn't want to read this. I hoped it IS a Doom-engine game and that one can make Doombuilder configurations for

If I hadn't read that I'd have said "w00t another Doom engine game!!!".

GreyGhost said:

It's a similar story with the Sierra game Birthright - another you mightn't have heard of - which uses PWADs for it's "adventure" sub-games, adding variety to what's otherwise a strategy/wargame based on one of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons titles.

Heh, so it does. I have the game, but never noticed that. I can load the WADs into an editor no bother and even loaded one up into Zdoom for a look around.

Unfortunately, the game resource files are in a non-WAD format. I don't suppose you would know how to get into the texture (etc) RES files would you?

The resources are supposedly .PCX images. I've tried extracting some with a hex editor - so far no luck.

Yeah, I too opened them in a Hex editor and saw the PCX extension coming up a lot in a section of the file which I assume is an entry list or table of some sort. I couldn't find anything to help me identify what sort of archive or container file they were in though.

I just checked and you can open them with XWE. There's a palette in there too.

The .res files in the RESFILES directory? XWE refuses to open any of them for me.

My apologies! I think we're talking about different games. I tried opening Amulets & Armor, and I see now that you're talking about Birthright.

Ah, right. Yes, I was talking about Birthright. I think I've managed to look at A&A's resources before.