Doom 64 coming to PC and modern consoles?

[Jon]

4 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

This is indeed a bit puzzling. They could have chosen any port out there as a base

I think the Nintendo SDK is incompatible with the GPL which rules out most ports. 

 

4 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

, but doing their own cheap-ass and inept new revision of the engine - in Unity to boot! - is somewhat odd.

 

I think it's a unity wrapper around the doom 64 bfg edition classic engine (which had been adapted to split screen etc). I suspect plugging unity into the Nintendo SDK was an easy path.

[seed]

34 minutes ago, Gez said:

Also that saying is completely stupid. If you have a cake, you can eat it. It's if you don't have a cake that you can't eat it.

 

Damn. Got that wrong and didn't get the point across... It sounded well only in my head.

 

34 minutes ago, Gez said:

I get the feeling people don't actually know what Doom64 EX is.

 

Was PrBoom removed after Carmack made it the official iOS port a while ago?

 

All I'm saying is that it could happen, for a reason or another, not necessarily a legal one.

 

The point here is: How would the commercial release differ from the free version? Why would one choose over the other? And why would one stay up if it's virtually the same, but one is paid for and the other is not?

[scalliano]

Even if C&Ds do occur, likelihood is that we will have a legitimate wad to mod for anyway. I'm honestly not that concerned. Only reason I thought EX would disappear is because it is effectively going commercial. Then again, it's open source. 

[Revenant100]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I hacked my Bethesda Launcher to load the new Doom 64 port and found the new ending.

 

[Gez]

32 minutes ago, seed said:

Damn. Got that wrong and didn't get the point across... It sounded well only in my head.

It's not your fault, it's the English language's.

 

Seriously, the saying used to be "you can't eat your cake and have it too" which was logical -- if you ate your cake, you don't have it anymore, it's eaten. But at some point the propositions got switched around and it stopped making sense.

 

Anyway. Doom64 EX is just a program. It's not Doom 64. It doesn't have the game data bundled with it. It has no more reason to be outlawed than Chocolate Doom, PrBoom+, GZDoom, or Doomsday.

[Dark Pulse]

7 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

As for Doom64, I think it has too much Quake and too little Doom, so it never really caught my interest.

It's kind of funny, because even though I don't think highly of Quake, I do think quite highly of Doom 64 (and wanted it along with an N64 when I saw EGM²'s walkthrough of parts of it).

 

But a lot of that is because I link it strongly with PlayStation Doom. Which it feels very much like an evolution of in terms of ambiance, horror, and atmosphere.

 

PSX Doom found a way to make old Doom more frightening. N64 Doom took that a level beyond with even more advanced tech and an entirely new level set.

 

5 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

This is indeed a bit puzzling. They could have chosen any port out there as a base, but doing their own cheap-ass and inept new revision of the engine - in Unity to boot! - is somewhat odd. It was probably that they thought it was easier this way to target so many platforms at once.

Pretty simple when you think about it: Unity exports to all the major consoles/platforms, basing it off Chocolate Doom or something would require re-porting it to several consoles and different forks of the code per-platform.

 

Basically: Saved them time, and most people won't care except those of us who nitpick.

 

Of course, then the whole Bethesda.net account thing popped up. :)

 

4 hours ago, Buckshot said:

I assume this is just going to be a Doom 64 EX port over to switch, PC and PS4... You know, considering it's night dive studios and Kaiser's handling it. I mean they already have an excellent port on hand so why not simplify things and just move it on over instead of completely starting from scratch. And since they've already used the EX engine for turok and turok 2 ports (which shows up as text info in the bottom right-hand corner if you load up either of those re-releases games on any console or PC), it just makes it all the more likely.

Keep in mind that the KEX used in D64 EX was basically designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: To run Doom 64.

 

KEX has evolved massively since then into a whole framework and is essentially a semi-engine in its own right now, which handles some common stuff like rendering, inputs, etc. The game's data then gets plugged into it, but it's not really running the original engine, so to speak.

 

Simply put, it's not really feasible for them to pick up off the original EX port. They're taking a mulligan and redoing it on the latest KEX. Granted, D64 is quite thoroughly reversed thanks to Kaiser and Erick, so I'm pretty sure that it will run just fine and be pretty much indistinguishable from the original.

 

4 hours ago, Ferk said:

The enemies were more varied and distinctive, you don't see the same enemy with same attacks but different skin/health.

You seem to have forgotten the following:

• Knights and Death Knights are virtually the same, save for the latter adding ~3x the health and a ranged attack
• Enforcers are basically Grunts with, again, ~3x the health
• Somewhat more arguable, but you could say a Fiend is a Rottweiler on steroids

4 hours ago, seed said:

As about D64, it's pretty much EX isn't it? NDS is using it for all the remasters after all (Forsaken, Powerslave, Turok, Fresh Supply, etc). In the trailer it even seemed to have a 3-point bilinear filter implemented, which is something Kaiser teased on Twitter as being WIP at the time for EX. It's extremely unlikely they created something else based on it. It's probably going to just be a multiplatform, commercial re-release of Doom 64 EX.

Fun fact: I asked about this in the EX discord and said that "Maybe this was a hint you were already working on it then." Edward stepped in and said that it actually wasn't the case, but explaining why would be divulging information that they currently could not divulge.

 

I then made a joke about NDAs using the ICP Magnets meme and the next time I looked back in the Discord, both my comments and his had vanished like a fart in the wind.

 

Make of that what you will.

 

4 hours ago, seed said:

Know what I'd love to see now? PSX Doom & Final Doom EX. A man can dream.

Erick from Team GEC did say he completely reverse-engineered PSX Doom; I'd presume that also includes Final Doom as a matter of point.

 

Source code isn't available anywhere yet though IIRC.

 

3 hours ago, Ferk said:

Yes. Quake also used those and you could equally turn them into serious business. I'm sure you can find meaning behind each of the Quake realms and turn the quest for each of the runes into an epic journey in your mind, going through the slipgates much how the Doomguy went through portals. In the end it's all about interpretation.

 

I think that's basically what it boils down to. Preference.

I enjoy much more the hell levels and the demonic gothic style of Doom, I expect you prefer techbases.

To me, Q1 is much closer to the Doom experience than Q2, to you it's probably the other way around.

I actually think you're right on the money. I definitely gravitate towards Techbase.

 

Then again, a large part of it is probably also that I didn't have a PC until the early 2000s, so consoles were all I had. And while Quake was ported to the Saturn and N64, I had neither of those.

 

I had a Playstation instead, so I got PSX Doom (the best of the "while it was relevant" Doom ports), Hexen (...not so hot), and the surprisingly-awesome PSX version of Quake II, but we never got Quake.

 

2 hours ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Well, since Nightdive is handling those rereleases (from the informations we've got so far) and EX is the most recognizable Doom 64 PC port, it's likely that other recreations may get C&D'd. But then again, we can at least expect some decent to good quality porting, right?

 

  Hide contents

I may sound like a retard f**k here, but if Doom 64 is also going to get an official PC release, and by Nightdive themselves, then there's a small chance EX might be taken down. 

  Hide contents

I mean, a Doom 64 ROM is not hard to find online.

 

 

EX isn't going anywhere. It's an engine, no more and no less. Kaiser doesn't include game assets, doesn't supply a ROM, and doesn't provide instructions on where to get one. Not to mention plenty of people have forked/cloned EX.

 

What is more likely to go are GEC Master Edition and Retribution, since those are both including assets, GEC has no public codebase for cloning/forking, and Retribution is pretty literally an asset rip. A very meticulously-crafted one (and I love it), but it pretty much is literally that - assets and DECORATE.

 

2 hours ago, Ferk said:

 

 

The issue with other recreations is the fact that they distribute resources from Doom64, which means they were in danger of getting a C&D from the start. They are no less legit now than they were before.

 

If there's a legal way to get now Doom64 resources, then that means there's a chance for projects like those to become legal. Instead of distributing the assets, have a script or program that extracts them from the official release of the game. Then the modder would not need to distribute them and can deny responsibility, it would be a mod intended to be used with the legally obtained game.

Precisely. This is probably the only way those projects will survive if Bethesda really cracks down on it.

 

1 hour ago, seed said:

Indeed, EX might disappear now after it becomes official, if it is indeed a commercial version of EX.

 

The only mods that I can see as potentially being in danger is GZDoom GEC Master Edition, because those ports include the assets of both games. They could probably only stay up if they somehow get modified. You could say Retribution too, but there should be a way to convert it to use Doom 64's new IWAD and then all worries disappear. It's probably easier said than done though...

This presumes that they actually use the Doom engine though, which they may not necessarily do.

 

If they did use the Doom engine, they'd have to port it and have different forks for different platforms. This is why id did Doom Classic on id Tech 4/5, and why the more recent ports used Unity - you only need one codebase, and it spits out compliant builds for multiple platforms.

 

Frankly, I'd be surprised if this is using Doom's engine for precisely this reason.

 

EX is also less likely to go away if that happens, for both the reason I said earlier (too many people forked it/code is GPL/it doesn't distribute assets), as well as that if this does happen, people who want to mod Doom 64 and create new levels for it are still generally going to need a port like EX. It's like Minecraft Bedrock vs. Java - they'd prefer if you forgot Java existed, but Java is where the mods are, so in some way it will simply never die unless they actively stop supporting it (and even then, the mods will continue).

Edited September 5, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[Linguica]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

They were happy enough to let it continue under the name "DRL".

 

I agree, the corporation was "happy enough" to let people do things once they had absolutely no legal basis to stop it. But Bethesda is well known for its lawyerly nastygrams and valiant defense of trademark terms, and if they are going to start selling Doom 64 for money, then I would expect to see any projects advertised as being based on Doom 64 getting some nastygrams soon.

[Dark Pulse]

Just now, Linguica said:

 

I agree, the corporation was "happy enough" to let people do things once they had absolutely no legal basis to stop it. But Bethesda is well known for its lawyerly nastygrams and if they are going to start selling Doom 64 for money, then I would expect to see project using Doom 64 assets getting some nastygrams soon.

Telling as to how stupid/blind they are will be if they C&D 64Doom.

[seed]

15 minutes ago, Gez said:

It's not your fault, it's the English language's.

 

Seriously, the saying used to be "you can't eat your cake and have it too" which was logical -- if you ate your cake, you don't have it anymore, it's eaten. But at some point the propositions got switched around and it stopped making sense.

 

Anyway. Doom64 EX is just a program. It's not Doom 64. It doesn't have the game data bundled with it. It has no more reason to be outlawed than Chocolate Doom, PrBoom+, GZDoom, or Doomsday.

 

Nah, it is. Should've known the form before quoting one that's incorrect. 

 

Now that you mentioned it, I recognize the original form (the one I've learned way back when I was still in school, but forgot it over time since it's been so many years since I've last heard it).

 

I know what EX is. The reason why I was a bit worried was because it would make the re-release seem redundant - what would be the point of a commercial release if its virtually the same as the free version? I'm probably just overthinking for no good reason at this point though, I should stop doing that.

[SaladBadger]

honestly, I could still see beth trying to go after Doom 64 EX. I mean yeah, it requires a rom to play, and lets not delude ourselves, every last fucking person here knows where that rom is coming from 99.99% of the time. With the examples Ling has cited, it doesn't seem that out of line for bethesda.

 

I'm not super worried, I guess, if only because yeah, whatever we're getting is probably going to be an evolved version of Doom 64 EX, and it could even come with source code released like SVE, but only time will tell on that.

[famicommander]

1 minute ago, seed said:

I know what EX is. The reason why I was a bit worried was because it would make the re-release seem redundant - what would be the point of a commercial release if its virtually the same as the free version? I'm probably just overthinking for no good reason at this point though, I should stop doing that.

1. The free version requires you to download an illegal ROM of the original game, or have very specialized equipment for ripping your own legitimate physical copy

2. The free version is not even available on PS4, Switch, or Xbox one

3. Most people who watched that reveal trailer have probably never even heard of Doom 64 EX or a source port. If the average gamer is playing Classic Doom games at all, they're probably playing them on a console or with the vanilla Steam/GOG versions.

[Immorpher]

I must have missed when someone said it in the topic. But is it confirmed that it may be running a variant of the EX (perhaps now KEX) engine, and not some sort of modification of their unity engine? The give-away may be implementation of gradient lighting, which I dont have a great eye for. I know the lighting is over-all changed (a little boost in D64 brightness is a good thing to me) and I did see columns which seemed to have gradient shading. So is the Switch port indeed the EX or KEX engine?

[Dark Pulse]

1 minute ago, Immorpher said:

I must have missed when someone said it in the topic. But is it confirmed that it may be running a variant of the EX (perhaps now KEX) engine, and not some sort of modification of their unity engine? The give-away may be implementation of gradient lighting, which I dont have a great eye for. I know the lighting is over-all changed (a little boost in D64 brightness is a good thing to me) and I did see columns which seemed to have gradient shading. So is the Switch port indeed the EX or KEX engine?

I've yet to see a Nightdive game that did not use KEX, so KEX is the default assumption.

[Immorpher]

Just now, Dark Pulse said:

I've yet to see a Nightdive game that did not use KEX, so KEX is the default assumption.

Oh Nightdive is involved! So yea that makes sense. I wonder if there is any chance of split screen; it may be a long shot since the original D64 didn't have it.

[Dark Pulse]

10 minutes ago, Immorpher said:

Oh Nightdive is involved! So yea that makes sense. I wonder if there is any chance of split screen; it may be a long shot since the original D64 didn't have it.

The original didn't even have multiplayer, so I'd not hold my breath on that.

 

Adding it would be cool as hell, but it'd definitely require new maps, since the originals would break in all sorts of ways if multiplayer were added.

 

Also, I guess now's the time to step up and ask: @Hyde? Your baby's getting a second shot at life. We need comments. :)

[seed]

1 minute ago, Dark Pulse said:

Also, I guess now's the time to step up and ask: @Hyde? Your baby's getting a second shot at life. We need comments. :)

 

"Last visited: August 15"

 

That could take a while.

[Dark Pulse]

Sure, but I'm sure that if he doesn't know by now, he's gonna get his inbox blown up a bit either way. :P

[Quasar]

23 minutes ago, seed said:

 

The reason why I was a bit worried was because it would make the re-release seem redundant - what would be the point of a commercial release if its virtually the same as the free version?

All I can do is invite you to imagine some ways of rectifying that issue...

[FreakZoneGames]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

Also that saying is completely stupid. If you have a cake, you can eat it. It's if you don't have a cake that you can't eat it.

 

The phrase means that if you eat your cake then it's gone. You can't eat it all and also still have it, cause you ate it and it's gone. So you gotta pick between having it, or consuming it. :P

[Ferk]

57 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

You seem to have forgotten the following:

• Knights and Death Knights are virtually the same, save for the latter adding ~3x the health and a ranged attack
• Enforcers are basically Grunts with, again, ~3x the health
• Somewhat more arguable, but you could say a Fiend is a Rottweiler on steroids

 

I did not forget, all of them have different attacks.

• You mention it yourself for the Death Knight. It has a ranged attack, that definitely spices things up.
• Enforcers are not hitscanners, the missile is fast, but depending on the distance you can definitely dodge it, specially the second laser. They also can provoke infighting much easier.
• Dogs do not have a jump and charge attack.

 

However, in Q2, the "Tank Commander" is, quite literally, a "Tank" just with more health and a different skin.

A lot of enemies in Q2 look similar and have often similar behavior, but I wasn't even counting that. If you want to count that and widen the definition then maybe you could group some Q1 enemies together, but you'll still get more groups and more variety than Q2.

Edited September 5, 2019 by Ferk

[Jon]

Can we take the quake versus quake 2 discussion to another thread or something jeez 

[chungy]

1 hour ago, seed said:

I know what EX is. The reason why I was a bit worried was because it would make the re-release seem redundant - what would be the point of a commercial release if its virtually the same as the free version?

EX isn't a "free version" -- you need the Nintendo 64 ROM image to work. To get that legally, you need to at least own the Nintendo 64 cartridge and a ROM dumping unit (some of which require the Nintendo 64 console to operate).

 

Probably the majority of people using EX got the ROM illegally, but that still doesn't make it "free".

[Gez]

1 hour ago, FreakZoneGames said:

 

The phrase means that if you eat your cake then it's gone. You can't eat it all and also still have it, cause you ate it and it's gone. So you gotta pick between having it, or consuming it. :P

The problem is that "and" has a sequential value.

 

For example, if I say "you can get in your car and drive to your job", it makes sense, the actions come one after the other. If I mix it up and say "you can drive to your job and get in your car" then it gets weird. Perhaps you drove to your job, left your car there, and came here with the company car, and I'm telling you to drive the company car back to your workplace and get in your own car?

 

On the other hand, if I say "you can get Doom64 EX and buy the Doom 64 re-release", then I could order it the other way around because the two things do not depend on each other. You can do one, or the other, or both, in any order.

[Graf Zahl]

7 minutes ago, Gez said:

The problem is that "and" has a sequential value.

 

 

That makes absolutely no sense. Now you are interpreting stuff into that phrase that isn't there.

 

 

[Altazimuth]

Apples and Oranges aren't verbs, Graf.

[Nevander]

I'm worried guys. It looks like my temporary haitus from working on Retribution has a high chance of becoming a permanant one. I have yet to receive any notice but I have a bad feeling.

 

6 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Am I am the only one here who is actually sad to see Doom64 getting a release?

I certainly am, especially now.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

The problem is that "and" has a sequential value.

 

For example, if I say "you can get in your car and drive to your job", it makes sense, the actions come one after the other. If I mix it up and say "you can drive to your job and get in your car" then it gets weird. Perhaps you drove to your job, left your car there, and came here with the company car, and I'm telling you to drive the company car back to your workplace and get in your own car?

 

On the other hand, if I say "you can get Doom64 EX and buy the Doom 64 re-release", then I could order it the other way around because the two things do not depend on each other. You can do one, or the other, or both, in any order.

Can we all just agree that English is the girl at the party who gave everyone a turn and so has all those confusing little rules? And I say that as a native English speaker.

 

The problem isn't "and," it's that "have" is ambiguous. The "have" in this sense is to retain/keep - say "you can't keep your cake and eat it too" and it makes perfect sense, because if you ate the cake, you no longer have it. It's actually clear when you've got the right context, though it is clearer if you reverse it, as it had been decades prior. It does make sense, once you remember alternate meanings of have - but it's confusing for non-native speakers/people unfamiliar with the phrase.

 

With that, this argument should also draw to a close.

 

26 minutes ago, Nevander said:

I'm worried guys. It looks like my temporary haitus from working on Retribution has a high chance of becoming a permanant one. I have yet to receive any notice but I have a bad feeling.

I posed this to Kaiser in the KEX Discord. He said the following:

 

"I am sure everyone is fine."

 

We'll have to wait and see, though if you are worried, Nevander, I'd see if you could maybe program up a way to generate a Retribution WAD from a Doom 64 ROM. This way the mod remains technically legal, operating pretty much as WadGen does for EX, since you're including no assets and it's on the end-user to create.

 

The bitch is I don't know if you're that programmatically inclined. You'd probably have to look at the WadGen source.

[mrthejoshmon]

So this is finally my time to play and actually "appreciate" my least favourite game in the series, I am hoping that the new controls and (hopefully) ability to play on my console will allow me to actually get along with it without me dealing with either mad jank controls or copious amounts of dicking around to get it running.

[Quasar]

26 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

The bitch is I don't know if you're that programmatically inclined. You'd probably have to look at the WadGen source.

I am sure somebody will help. Hell I'll do it if nobody else will. And that's making the very wild assumption it'll be necessary at all, which I don't believe personally. It pays to be calm rather than freaking out in advance.

[Dark Pulse]

1 minute ago, Quasar said:

I am sure somebody will help. Hell I'll do it if nobody else will. And that's making the very wild assumption it'll be necessary at all, which I don't believe personally.

That's cool as hell of you to offer something like that, Quasar.

 

Stay awesome.

 

Hopefully it's not necessary in the first place though!