Hypothetically speaking, could an addon make CoD Eternity compatible?

[SiFi270]

Caverns of Darkness was originally derived from an early DOS version of Eternity, so it occurred to me that the things that necessitated a whole new engine in 2002 could now be entirely possible with EDF, especially since it's already been converted to Decorate in the past. The thing I'm currently least sure of is whether a fifth kind of ammo for the wad's hidden weapon can be done with EDF, since the wiki (assuming it's up to date) seems to imply that you can only make new pickups that give existing types of ammo.

[Mordeth]

I've not tried this myself, but "AmmoClip" is defined as an "artifact":

 

artifact AmmoClip
{
  artifacttype   Ammo
  maxamount      200
  interhubamount  -1
   
  ammo.backpackamount     10
  ammo.backpackmaxamount 400
}

 

So in theory you could make up your own artifact ammo type and use that as a base. Thing is, it wouldn't show up on your HUD ?

 

[Altazimuth]

It's a tempting proposition. The trouble is I have no idea what would need to be changed. I've wanted to try do this for a while now.  New ammo could easily be defined but Mordeth is correct, there's currently no way to display new ammo types in the HUD. My question is if any new codepointers are defined or what have you, which might make things a bit trickier.

[SiFi270]

Do you mean it won't be on the list on the right hand side of the status bar, or it won't be anywhere at all? If the former, that's how it was in the original, and it would have been a spoiler otherwise.

[Altazimuth]

It wouldn't be on the status bar. Given that that's how it is in the original, that's fine then.

[printz]

By far the easiest is to look at the GZDoom DECORATE scripts and write equivalent EDF. If not available yet, leave it to us Team Eternity to implement it.

 

But it feels a bit embarrassing to use the adopted GZDoom version as a base to enable an originally Eternity-based EXE mod to work now. Can I trust that the GZDoom-DECORATE version is 100% accurate with the original EXE mod?!? 

[Loud Silence]

It isn't possible to get something from original version? Maybe Graf Zahl could share HOW he was able to make a patch?

[Graf Zahl]

Actually, the patch is not a 100% accurate representation.

I deviated in two places:

 

1. The spawning of the Lost Souls out of the dying zombie bodies was originally done the same way they normally drop ammo. But that doesn't work well in ZDoom because item dropping in ZDoom can add some velocity to the spawned item and alter its spawn height, depending on user settings. So I had to use another way to spawn them without any side effects.

 

2. The monster spawning Arch Vile was originally done with quite a bit of coding. To avoid that coding I tried to replicate it with existing functionality. The result is very close but the actual probabilities for the different monsters are slightly off due to how the RNG was used by the original code used - but the deviation here is a lot less than what you get from switching actual RNGs. Since this monster occurs only once in the game and normally doesn't live long enough to spawn more than 2 or 3 monsters this looked like an acceptable trade-off.

 

The rest merely moved some hard coded actions into the actors themselves but doesn't alter the actual semantics.

 

The only engine side support I had to add was a) adding a compatibiliy setting for Boom's scrollers (not an issue for you) and implement the healing sector special. This one had to be made a new engine feature back then.

 

[Murdoch]

Oh hey did someone mention a project I worked on nearly 20 years ago?

 

Here's the original code. Nothing dramatic in the slightest. My abilities as a C coder were and remain decidedly mediocre. Just search for my first name (joel) and you should find everything, pretty sure I commented the lot.

 

I stick my nose in here from time to time out of nostalgia. Based on what I have seen of Eternity's development, I would be amazed if my changes could not be replicated without custom code rather easily with perhaps the exception of the healing sector. Though perhaps a clever script would do the trick there? It would be fun to play this map set again. Chris Lutz was the real mastermind of this project; his levels always blew me away. Emil's and Nokturnus' contributions were great too.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TkkKRvod-a5ep_U6_th2nOL9Ff25k3Ct/view?usp=sharing

Edited May 26, 2019 by Murdoch

[printz]

@Murdoch Thanks a lot for posting the source code! Now we can add back one more of the classics to Eternity.

[Murdoch]

No problem. It was fun to look back at it and see the things I did and the minor contributions I made to the engine at large. Apparently I was the reason MBF got Final Doom support. I totally forgot about that.

[Gez]

@Murdoch: for posterity, the source code should be uploaded to /idgames/source/.

[Murdoch]

On 6/21/2019 at 5:03 AM, Gez said:

@Murdoch: for posterity, the source code should be uploaded to /idgames/source/.

 

Feel free to do so. Or at least tell me how lol.

[Gez]

The procedure hasn't changed since the dawn of time, FTP upload to archives.gamers.org.

 

The only thing outdated in that topic is that /newstuff is pretty much dead now.

[Murdoch]

14 hours ago, Gez said:

The procedure hasn't changed since the dawn of time, 

 

 

That makes me older than the dawn of time then. I do not think I ever actually uploaded anything to the archives back in the day come to think of it. The rest of the people I did work with handled it. I stopped actively following Doom I think a little after cdrom.com went offline. I will bookmark this thread and upload it at some point.

 

[Murdoch]

So I finally did this. It's in incoming now.

[Redneckerz]

11 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

So I finally did this. It's in incoming now.

Thanks once again for doing this after our little PM regarding this very thing. Its great to have this kind of history preserved and analyzed, it deserves it.

[Redneckerz]

On 12/17/2019 at 10:52 PM, Murdoch said:

So I finally did this. It's in incoming now.

I was going to ask if this succeeded, but i did some digging beforehand.

 

Thanks to the Gamers.org REJECTS page, i found out about the fate of your upload:

Sun Dec 22 17:36:15 EST 2019 Rejected cod10src.txt because: need an e-mail address in the text file, it will be removed upon acceptance of the file 
Sun Dec 22 17:36:15 EST 2019 Rejected cod10src.zip because: need an e-mail address in the text file, it will be removed upon acceptance of the file

 

[Redneckerz]

After consulting with @Murdoch ive uploaded the source code to /idgames with text file, and it now has a permanent home. Find the source code here.

 

Thanks fly out to Joel for allowing this and the rest of the Chaos Crew for the COD Engine in general.

[Murdoch]

Figured I should probably sort this out myself :)

 

 

 

[Redneckerz]

7 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Figured I should probably sort this out myself :)

 

 

 

Impressive :) Its good to see someone with such legacy return! Ill post in that thread :)

[hawkwind]

As a side bit of trivia, the source code mentions the zombieman that drops a LS at death, ( Type 5003 ).

For example T542 is one which is in map04, but Type 5003 does not get spawned in the current COD.exe.

It appears that the source code uploaded did not get compiled for COD.exe at the time.

[Murdoch]

On 3/30/2021 at 7:02 PM, hawkwind said:

As a side bit of trivia, the source code mentions the zombieman that drops a LS at death, ( Type 5003 ).

For example T542 is one which is in map04, but Type 5003 does not get spawned in the current COD.exe.

It appears that the source code uploaded did not get compiled for COD.exe at the time.

 

Entirely possible I made a mistake somewhere. Give the Lost Soul dropping variants are visually identical, it would be an easy mistake to overlook in the chaos.