Extracting Stuff From Other Games

[A Nobody]

I want to bring the hero of Rebel Moon/Rebel Moon Rising over to the doom engine as a player skin. I do think on wanting to bring the game's weapons over to the Doom engine games as well someday, and also the enemies. How can I be able to do that?

[Zeea]

The short answer is that you can do this, but it'd take too long to explain it all in one post and you'll kinda have to do some learning and experimenting on your own. I can point you to where to start, though.

 

Do you have SLADE 3? If not, you should probably download it. It's the easiest way to mess with graphics and game mechanics in Doom, and it'd help with all of these. Also, I'm assuming you'd be using ZDoom, since most people do and it's really easy to use with mods.

 

If Rebel Moon is a sprite-based game, probably the easiest thing would be to find hero sprites somewhere online, reformat them to the right sizes and other specs for a Doom marine skin (you can probably find that on the Zdoom wiki), and then pretty much plug them into a player skin template. I've never actually messed with player skins so I don't know exactly how it works, but I imagine it can't be much harder than making new enemies or weapons. There's probably an easy guide somewhere online.

For enemies and weapons, you can grab the sprites for them somewhere (a quick search actually turned up a Zdoom forums thread that had some of the weapon sprites, apparently). Then, you can either do it the old school way or the new school way. The old school way is just replacing the weapon graphics and sounds with the new weapons; they'll still work like the Doom weapons but will look different.

 

The new way is to create entirely new weapons and enemies for ZDoom, using the Rebel Moon sprites, and try to make them as close to the originals as possible. It's more work, but there's some tutorials on the Zdoom wiki for doing it. You're mostly going to be looking at articles related to the DECORATE lump, which is basically just a text file you write and then (usually) insert into a WAD file with SLADE 3. It helps to understand some basic programming concepts like object inheritence before you start, but you don't absolutely need to. You can just sorta look at someone else's WAD with new monsters or weapons and see how they did it.

[A Nobody]

1 hour ago, Zeea said:

The short answer is that you can do this, but it'd take too long to explain it all in one post and you'll kinda have to do some learning and experimenting on your own. I can point you to where to start, though.

 

Do you have SLADE 3? If not, you should probably download it. It's the easiest way to mess with graphics and game mechanics in Doom, and it'd help with all of these. Also, I'm assuming you'd be using ZDoom, since most people do and it's really easy to use with mods.

 

If Rebel Moon is a sprite-based game, probably the easiest thing would be to find hero sprites somewhere online, reformat them to the right sizes and other specs for a Doom marine skin (you can probably find that on the Zdoom wiki), and then pretty much plug them into a player skin template. I've never actually messed with player skins so I don't know exactly how it works, but I imagine it can't be much harder than making new enemies or weapons. There's probably an easy guide somewhere online.

For enemies and weapons, you can grab the sprites for them somewhere (a quick search actually turned up a Zdoom forums thread that had some of the weapon sprites, apparently). Then, you can either do it the old school way or the new school way. The old school way is just replacing the weapon graphics and sounds with the new weapons; they'll still work like the Doom weapons but will look different.

 

The new way is to create entirely new weapons and enemies for ZDoom, using the Rebel Moon sprites, and try to make them as close to the originals as possible. It's more work, but there's some tutorials on the Zdoom wiki for doing it. You're mostly going to be looking at articles related to the DECORATE lump, which is basically just a text file you write and then (usually) insert into a WAD file with SLADE 3. It helps to understand some basic programming concepts like object inheritence before you start, but you don't absolutely need to. You can just sorta look at someone else's WAD with new monsters or weapons and see how they did it.

Thank you so much for the information. Sadly I don't have a PC yet. I'm on mobile and am using Delta Touch, which has GZDoom, Chocolate Doom, Doom Retro, and PR Boom. If SLADE3 was on mobile, this would definitely help me out.