team insanity

[DooMBoy]

doomworld.com/insanity

Here is one of my favorite places to go for WAD reviews. The only problem is, they're not updated very often. I noticed Lut is member there. Lut, how come you don't have as many reviews as the other guys? And how come you tend to give most WADs you review low scores?
Understand, I'm not cutting you down or anything, I'm just curious.

[fraggle]

uh oh, you missed off his dot things..

[Liam]

I was wondering the same thing about the updates, Lut. But I realized it's probably just because people stopped submitting levels, so I didn't ask.

[Lüt]

No, actually it's just that I am currently the only active "team" member, besides a musician, coder, and texture artist for Millennium, none of whom do reviews. The reason is because I'm busy doing the entire Millennium project (with the exception of the coding and textures as mentioned above, neither of which I could ever do). I only signed up to contribute a few levels and the entire project has fallen into my hands. I didn't expect that. So far I've worked on trying to make 20 other maps that aren't mine fit together into a coherent storyline, arrange their difficulty and playability, come up with intermission texts, do intermission graphics and screenshots, organize the music (half of which doesn't fit any of the maps), play through the game over and over again to track down all the engine bugs and level incompatibilities, come up with lists to fix that nobody pays attention to (or tells me to "shove my lighting tips up my ass"), make custom graphics for people's maps, design and arrange the entire website, story-screenshots-enemies and all, PLUS DO MY OWN MAPS! The last one would have been done if Doom didn't have some silly 32K segs limit, now I have to decide which 1/3 of the level to trash: to me, it's all necessary. The bottom line is that none of anything I'm doing is gonna be appreciated because I'm trying to fix shit that was made as early as 1997, so I just don't care anymore. I'm finishing off all the stuff I had going, ONLY my part of the game, and then it's out. Other people can take the blame if their contributions to the game don't fit, I'm through worrying about their parts anymore. After Millennium is released, I'm gonna work on the Team Insanity page big-time, but until then, I just don't have the time to run so many things. Team Insanity is on hold until Millennium is out. I don't have any other choice.

[Lüt]

OK, that was a little more negative that I first thought. I'm not trying to blame anything on the rest of the people who contributed or start throwing faults around. I guess there's only so much you can ask for. The fault kinda gets split both ways, because when I joined, the project had no direction, it was just a bunch of people doing their own thing. The people submitted their levels that we asked them to submit, then left. Bad planning and bad communication. I guess you can't expect to be able to call everybody back everytime something changes, but you'd expect at least a little extra help. We had discussions, but it was almost always arguments and flames, very little teamwork involved at all. Since I wasn't running the porject at the time, I had just assumed everybody would be staying on the team until the project was released. Seemed the logical thing, but man was I wrong. All I could really do was group the levels together by author and try to pass them off as mini-episodes. Making a story to go with them is gonna be a pain.

There were like 3 other people who were supposed to do levels, Cyb and Pixel Rex being two, but they kinda bummed out also. Pixel just disappeared. Kurt Kesler was supposed to turn out 4 levels, but only ended up doing one, then left the team and left Doom because of zero ideas and zero motivation. Then a few months later, the KZDoom series started getting cranked out. Go figure.

[Lüt]

Well in our case, we programmed per-level intermissions already. It's easier to just write those than take them out of the engine.

[Zaldron]

From someone that's kinda inside the project.

There's a lot of potential in this mod. I, for one, can't stand the idea of not taking advantage of such a solid foundation to make things even better. I'm polishing as much as I can, and that's what Lüt has been doing all these years.

Now, things would be sorta easier if someone actually helped to polish levels, let the man finish his goddamn subway! ;)

[Zaldron]

But the foundations for a storyline are already there. It would be stupid to NOT take advantage of those for enhancing the gameplay.

This thing should be out October 15th no matter what. Of course, I can't really say what will happen in the future, but I'm 100% sure it's out this year.

[Lüt]

Heh, don't worry, story is gonna probably be a totally last-minute thing that will take about an hour at most. It really only needs a few lines inbetween each level, there's not gonna be a giant end-of-episode turn of events or anything.

[Zaldron]

You don't require great cool stories. But some little opinions from the guy you're using about the surroundings and the enemies could be really entertaining.

[Lüt]

Well, not just one sentence, but most likely no more than a paragraph. Just a simple settings and possibly an objective.

[Lüt]

Nah, it's just an MBF-based engine with new monsters, new map structures, per-level intermission pics, the new weapons, a particle system and some other stuff. I've been compiling the engine page for the website, so I wanna get a decent list of the features up by next week. Since it's still in-progress, it won't be final 'till I get the final engine.

[Zaldron]

That's if Joel stays cool and do the stuff. Is it me or there are SO FEW coders out there?

[Lüt]

Heh, I figure I'll be mean and tell you his last letter to me:

"I've ran into a fucking wall. I recently switched HDs, and the Milenium exe I compiled (not the one you sent me) is crashing at startup, as are any new ones I compile. My other projects are still working fine. My boss just picked up a PC at work, so I'll take some code in and see what happens. If it still shits itself, I'll send it to you to see if it's machine or compiler specific."

[Zaldron]

Why, exactly? I mean, what's the hype surrounding Millenium? I ask because I don't really know.

[Zaldron]

Stupid compiler.

The source code stays THE SAME. So no real problem here.

[Lüt]

I mean, what's the hype surrounding Millenium? I ask because I don't really know.

I think we may be the oldest Doom TC in history. I guess we have the Daikatana rap going on now.

[Zaldron]

Oh I see...the question is...will Millenium deliver? I personally thinks so. But I'm no real TC player. The Darkening 1 & 2 were the last things I played, and I can say they were about the second or third TC I ever tried.

[Lüt]

Hm, I thought Chief announced it back in '97. That's when I joined up at least, and I know stuff was going on back then. I think the whole project was born with the release of Boom.

[Zaldron]

How come? Did they started without even MBF or EVEN the source code?

[Lüt]

I'm not totally sure, but when I joined, they were using a modified BOOM first-release engine. Chris ported the code over to MBF sometime around the latter half 1998. I'm not very sure of what was happening before I joined, but when I joined there were at least 13 levels in-progress.

[Zaldron]

Same happens to me. I knew there was cool shit being made for DooM, but I always found better things to do or play. Then, specially when Doom3 was announced, I couldn't get my ass of this place, and eventually played with lots of wads, utilities, source ports and other toys.

[Lüt]

To think, you used to a be a bandwagoner... this place works wonders I tell you.

[Zaldron]

Seems like my English skills drop dead here. "Bandwagoner", wtf?

[Lüt]

Uh... hm, I've never had to actually explain it :|

Somebody else'll do it.

[Lüt]

Jeez, I could used you a minute ago before I typed a whole 2 giant paragraphs explaining it on ICQ, in a less understandable way than that :P

[Katgut]

I mean, what's the hype surrounding Millenium? I ask because I don't really know.

I think we may be the oldest Doom TC in history. I guess we have the Daikatana rap going on now.

Nah, I have you beat there...

Lemme tell you a little story about a project that started out being called The Nether Regions, back when the release of the Doom source was still only a possibility (late '96 or early '97, I think).

Still not out.

Still waiting for the right time to actually get it going again.

Still about 5% done.

And then there's Hellstorm, which is still waiting for its defunct leader to turn it over...

[Zaldron]

I see. Well, I don't really ditched DooM or anything like that. I wanted to edit for Hexen. Period. It never got the popularity it deserved so there were no tools, no community, nothing.

Of course, I should've known I'd find stuff on a DooM-related site, but still, take a look at today's source ports. No decent editing-flexible Hexen engine.

Besides, I spent most of my time out of communities, working for independent, in-house games.

[Lüt]

And then there's Hellstorm, which is still waiting for its defunct leader to turn it over...

But you guys didn't the update the Hellstorm page with a ton of release dates. I think we had at least 6 "official" release dates and plenty more planned ones :)

Part of it was the advertising as well as the actual happenings.

[Zaldron]

Oh people, I started this RPG 5 years ago with another 3 real-life friends. It started as a text-based adventure and ended as a full-3d 3rd person game.

That's 5 years, I think I beat you all here.