Announcement: Doom 0.8

[Quasar]

vv and I are working on a modification of the press release prebeta that will bring "Doom 0.8" to life.

What's already been done:

• Complete mapping of the functions in the exe (http://eternity.mancubus.net/stuff/newdoom.map)
  
• Sound effects enabled (player death, item collection, weapon pickups)
  
• E1M1 imported for testing purposes:
  

What we will definitely do:

• Use Nes's e1m1beta.wad for E1M1 (permission has been granted already! Thanks Nes!)
  
• Convert the complete Doom 0.99 shareware IWAD and "beta-ize" levels with whatever knowledge is known of their layouts to fill out rest of the episode
  
• Hack in access to the rest of the menu system, which is present but disabled
  

What we hope to do:

• Get some music to play
  
• Hack in additional sound effects
  
• Hack in some kind of ending to the episode
  

If you think you are interested in helping, especially with the mapping portion, please let us know.

[wildweasel]

Quasar said:

• Hack in additional sound effects
  

For laughs, use the SNES Wolf 3D sound effects, like in the "A Day at id Software" video that got released a couple months back.

[Csonicgo]

WildWeasel said:

For laughs, use the SNES Wolf 3D sound effects, like in the "A Day at id Software" video that got released a couple months back.

we already have those sounds in a wad file... :3

[Quasar]

WildWeasel said:

For laughs, use the SNES Wolf 3D sound effects, like in the "A Day at id Software" video that got released a couple months back.

Since that version is just a little bit after the prebeta, it is one of our primary reference materials for this project ;)

The stuff we don't have info on (particularly levels E1M6 through E1M9) will need to be "interpolated" between known earlier alpha versions, when such exist, and the 0.99 shareware.

I hope some clever mappers will sign up to use their imaginations and create these "between" versions.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I'll have to check my backups to see if I still have it, but I started a partial edit of E1M4 to match Romero's video shortly after it was posted.

[andrewj]

I don't quite get what you are doing. Is your Doom 0.8 EXE still for DOS, or are you making it for Windows, or cross-platform like Chocolate-Doom?

[Quasar]

andrewj said:

I don't quite get what you are doing. Is your Doom 0.8 EXE still for DOS, or are you making it for Windows, or cross-platform like Chocolate-Doom?

It is a modification of the DOS prebeta executable. It will run in DosBox, or on real DOS machines.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Interesting project.
Maybe John Romero would be able to compile the shareware episode from some point in time before the official shareware release. He might even have a full version of the cut down press release.

Quasar said:

It is a modification of the DOS prebeta executable.

I wonder, how will you be able to add sound to that?

[Dragonsbrethren]

Here's the E1M4 recreation:

http://dkk.slickproductions.org/files/doommaps/betae1m4.zip

This only covers the areas you see in the video. I'll keep working on it and try to make the other areas match the half-finished feeling the first few rooms have. The only other thing I did was extend the ledge near the yellow door all the way to the stairs.

[Gez]

Speaking about menu, you could use the HUFONT lump from the earlier alpha. I've reverse-engineered how it works (it's a very simple format) and you can look at the SLADE3 source for reference.

(Hit the P key while playing Doom Alpha v0.4 to see this font in effect.)

[Quasar]

LogicDeLuxe said:

I wonder, how will you be able to add sound to that?

Sound is already in the EXE, but id had only started adding it, and didn't have any utility to set it up on the end user's machine, so they just left it turned off in the prebeta as it was released.

It was known years ago that DMX was already linked with this EXE, but nobody knew how to turn on the sound, until now. Thanks to vv, we understand this, at least for sound effects. We still have yet to get any MIDI to come out of it. It may just be that the game isn't calling S_StartMusic anywhere. There is also only one apparent music entry in the combined sounds and music lookup, and calls itself M_E1L1. This may be a limiting factor unless we can hack in a larger music array and a call to the function somewhere.

[SaladBadger]

I did small modifications to E1M3 and E1M5 to make them like the video ones.

They seem pretty accruate, but they may not be :P

[myk]

Quasar said:
"Doom 0.8"

One thing, is that the version number in the press release executable?

[Quasar]

Some progress has been done on the menu system:





Some of the items aren't actually implemented, because id was getting ahead of themselves, but as you can see some do indeed work - screen sizes can be set, for example.

myk: The prebeta does not appear to contain any reference to a version number. However given how close it is to the release version as compared to 0.5, I think 0.8 is a good guess. I certainly wouldn't go lower than 0.75, and that's more work to type ;)

[Xenaero]

This looks really sweet, keep up the good work guys!

[SaladBadger]

looking good. Any idea when this thing will be finished?

[Dragonsbrethren]

I "finished" E1M4, making the areas not seen in the video as ugly as those that are. Actually I wonder if I got a little carried away with edits, or didn't edit enough. I guess we'll never know. I based texture choices off what was seen in the earlier parts, what was leftover on the backs of some lines, or just guessing at random. I didn't do too many architectural changes since the layout in the video was almost identical to the final version, more so than the 0.5 alpha. I did copy a bit of thing placement from the alpha though, you get the rocket launcher in the blue key room instead of the chaingun. Anyway, here's the file:

http://dkk.slickproductions.org/files/doommaps/e1m4edit.zip

[xttl]

Here's a small update: The project is still going on, it's just that I've been slacking off playing games [:-)] while most of the work done by Quasar is more "under the hood" and not really material for interesting screenshots.

Anyway, he got fullscreen mode working almost 100% properly (that was quite a while ago already actually) and today I made a patch converter so that the missing E1 patches and sky (if we decide to use it instead of the original press beta sky...note that it was already in place in the "A visit to id Software" video) can be converted to the beta format:



All the missing E1 patches are transparent though (used for the cage textures), and we don't know yet if texture transparency even works at all. Fullscreen is only almost 100% working because if you enable automap while using fullscreen mode, the game will not draw the status bar correctly. We'll try to fix this too later.

EDIT: Transparent middle textures appear to work otherwise, but the engine has serious problems with their drawing order. We have to see if it's possible to fix this. If not, then I guess all the cage textures have to be removed (and replaced with raised/lowered sectors where appropriate).

I started writing a setup utility (not based on the IDSETUP source because it's a mess, but it'll look and feel similar) so you will be able to configure the sound and input settings plus autorun and gamma correction:



The beta supports Sound Blaster or PC Speaker for sound effects* and AdLib or General MIDI via MPU-401 for music*. Music directly imported from release WADs plays too fast, but we'll try to fix the music player code (or make a tool which will slow down the MUS data itself if all else fails!). Input configuration will probably be implemented by the setup tool directly patching the beta executable, as unfortunately there seems to be no code in there to read anything except the sound settings from a file. Likewise, gamma correction will probably be implemented by the setup tool writing a new palette lump to a wad file on the disk as there's no builtin support for that either.

Since interest in submitting maps has been kinda low I'll probably try to do the maps myself but feel free to submit maps in this thread for now.

That's it for now!


*: In the beta, it's possible to set your music device to Sound Blaster (and even PC Speaker too!) but it'll crash when music is supposed to start even though you might think it would be the same as AdLib. You must use the AdLib setting instead, and my setup tool will indeed only allow selecting it, MPU or nothing at all for music. Likewise, the engine allows choosing MPU or Adlib for sound effects (and at least the release versions would even go looking for sound lumps called DA* and DM* instead of DS* or DP*, I wonder what's the format for those!) but the setup tool will not allow it.

[LogicDeLuxe]

xttl said:

gamma correction will probably be implemented by the setup tool writing a new palette lump to a wad file on the disk as there's no builtin support for that either.

So it is superior to v1.1, which has only on and off? Sure, having gamma levels couldn't hurt, but it feels strange somehow.

[Dragonsbrethren]

xttl said:

Since interest in submitting maps has been kinda low I'll probably try to do the maps myself but feel free to submit maps in this thread for now.

I've got an E1M2 video recreation if you guys want that, but I figured you'd just be using the one already in the pre-beta, which is more interesting anyway. (Until I did the recreation I never noticed they made the interior area and courtyard around the red key area bigger for the final version.)

I might do another map, maybe E1M8 or E1M9. I'm guessing you don't want any E2 or E3 stuff for copyright reasons? Have you guys looked into whether tag 666 in E1M8 works?

[xttl]

The 666 tag is not implemented in the beta, but there's always a possibility that either one of us will add it.

Even modified shareware maps are kinda questionable if it's going to be possible to use this hack/mod without owning any of the full Doom games. So, before this goes into distribution I might try to make this work so that when someone wants to play this, they run some kind of an installer tool which will require the shareware 0.99 IWAD, press beta IWAD and original press beta EXE for input and will output a ready-to-use hacked EXE and beta IWAD. This approach could then be used for E2 and E3 too, but let's get E1 and the engine itself done first. :-)

As for maps, I'm interested in doing at least E1M7 myself.

Btw. I might be able to make it read/write configs from disk after all, maybe even add gamma correction support internally (+ a whole lot of other stuff). I figured out a way to disable relocation and still have the executable work ok in DOSBox. This way it's a lot easier to keep modifying and moving code around while developing and when the time comes to release this, I can just update the fixup tables once instead of trying to keep them up to date for every single little change and test. (...don't worry if none of that made sense for you :-)


EDIT: In case anyone is interested, here is a short video recorded in DOSBox which shows gameplay with some additional sound effects hacked in (pistol fire, shotgun fire, death sound for enemies). Yes, I know the panning and volume are incorrect (at least for now)!

[belandino]

xttl said:

The 666 tag is not implemented in the beta, but there's always a possibility that either one of us will add it.

Even modified shareware maps are kinda questionable if it's going to be possible to use this hack/mod without owning any of the full Doom games. So, before this goes into distribution I might try to make this work so that when someone wants to play this, they run some kind of an installer tool which will require the shareware 0.99 IWAD, press beta IWAD and original press beta EXE for input and will output a ready-to-use hacked EXE and beta IWAD. This approach could then be used for E2 and E3 too, but let's get E1 and the engine itself done first. :-)

As for maps, I'm interested in doing at least E1M7 myself.

Btw. I might be able to make it read/write configs from disk after all, maybe even add gamma correction support internally (+ a whole lot of other stuff). I figured out a way to disable relocation and still have the executable work ok in DOSBox. This way it's a lot easier to keep modifying and moving code around while developing and when the time comes to release this, I can just update the fixup tables once instead of trying to keep them up to date for every single little change and test. (...don't worry if none of that made sense for you :-)


EDIT: In case anyone is interested, here is a short video recorded in DOSBox which shows gameplay with some additional sound effects hacked in (pistol fire, shotgun fire, death sound for enemies). Yes, I know the panning and volume are incorrect (at least for now)!

I am really looking forward to this! I've always loved Doom Alpha and Beta stuff! What a pity this video doesn't work :P

[kb1]

One thing I noticed about the beta which may/may not be helpful to you, is in regards to the beta's treatment of the bottom texture on 2s walls. The y-offset seems to be handled differently.

An example is in the 'imp room' of E1M2, with the switch that opens up both sides, leading to the exit room. The y-offset on that switch texture is different in the beta vs. the release version, but they both 'look' the same.

MBF's beta maps get this wrong too.

In my home port, I wanted to be able to extract and play the beta maps, and I came up with this hack: In R_StoreWallRange, I swapped out the "if (worldlow > worldbottom)" clause with this:

if (worldlow > worldbottom)
{
  // bottom texture
  bottomtexture = texturetranslation[sidedef->bottomtexture];

  // [kb] This hack handles the height of the switch near the
  // end of E2M1, in the pre-release beta. No clue why...

  if (beta_mode)
  {
    rw_bottomtexturemid = linedef->flags & ML_DONTPEGBOTTOM ?
      worldlow + frontsector->floorheight - backsector->floorheight : worldlow;
  }
  
  else
  {
    rw_bottomtexturemid = linedef->flags & ML_DONTPEGBOTTOM ?
      worldtop : worldlow;
  }
}

Actually I'm not sure if this really is the *correct* way to display beta maps using release source, but it does fix that switch. So... Maybe the opposite treatment should be given to any maps being "downgraded".

As for the music, maybe some of John Romero's old music lumps would be fitting!

Anyway, awesome idea, and good luck!

[xttl]

Anonymous3000 said:
I am really looking forward to this! I've always loved Doom Alpha and Beta stuff! What a pity this video doesn't work :P

The video works ok in VLC and MPlayer (Win32) for me. I kinda expected some people might have problems though because I just threw something together quickly with the default settings in x264 and faac. (never used either one of them before really :-)

kb1 said:
One thing I noticed about the beta which may/may not be helpful to you, is in regards to the beta's treatment of the bottom texture on 2s walls. The y-offset seems to be handled differently.

It's just that the beta does not support the "upper unpegged" / "lower unpegged" flags at all. You can notice this very easily if you go to the soulsphere/chaingun secret area in E1M2 (either the beta's own E1M2 or one imported from the final game). This switch linedef is flagged as "lower unpegged" (even in the beta wad), so...

kb1 said:
As for the music, maybe some of John Romero's old music lumps would be fitting!

Yeah, I've been thinking about using some of them too.

In other news: Music works almost perfectly now and I've been trying out different line / sector specials in the beta. Maybe I'll post a list and/or a Doom Builder config file later here, in case someone wants to make more beta maps. All specials from the release versions don't necessarily work in the beta, or work but not in the exact same way.

[kb1]

Whoa big bump...

Did you manage to read the states/frames? (I'm kinda curious if Lee Killough got the beta emulation stuff right)

[Enjay]

Video works for me in Win7 and WMP with Shar007's codec pack installed.

Anyway, this project is very interesting. I'm really looking forward to how it turns out. The pre-release versions of Doom have always been very intriguing.

[belandino]

BUMP!

How is it going with this project?

[Dragonsbrethren]

For some reason I got the urge to start working on E1M6 today. Instead of basing it on the final E1M6, I took the map from the 0.5 alpha and started working in the doors, things, and some layout changes from the final version.

I'm actually surprised how little the parts of the map that already existed changed, it's just that almost the entire layout was rearranged. I figure the new areas are simple enough that they could've been added at the last minute to improve the flow of the map.

[Randy87]

This still active?

[Xaser]

Aww, dick. Here I was thinking this was a rather cool project that had just started, and now I'm noticing the dates. :(

On topic though, now that I know about this:
Hmm, think there'd be room for a 'finished' 0.5 Alpha E1M1 as, say, E2M1 (since it never appeared in any of the alphas)? I've always wanted to give that map a proper update-do-over since my previous attempt at doing so wound up being super-crazy.

[EDIT] Awww, I missed that the plan was just to do E1. Shame, there. :(