Alpha Shotgun Mod?

[amalek.92]

spamclark15 said:

I didn't actually ditch those changes. That's how I use the game myself along with a lot of other alpha-centric changes, primarily involving the sounds of the game. I can pack up the changes I'm using (my game directory) into a pk4 for you. I keep what is distributed as the mod to just what we've worked on in order to maximize the user's ability to use other mods along with it.

Actually, the next thing I would like to do is give the Doomguy back his helmet once he dons his armor in the game. He comes off the ship not wearing it and is wearing it for Mars City Underground I believe.

Arl would be the perfect person to help as he is good at working with the game's meshes (if you'd like to help since I'm not sure how to do this stuff on my own.) When the Doomguy is wearing his armor, which would be the wepplayer mesh for cinematics along with the world mesh it's using while you're playing, it would be a matter of adding the helmet and attaching it to the head bone.

It would be very kind of you to make a pk4 containing the changes you're playing with. Bringing back the helmet is another great idea besides the alpha shotgun, I would love to see its implementation too. Unfortunately, I lack the skills to contribute other than wholeheartedly saying "great work, guys, keep it going, I'm rootin' for ya!".

[Arl]

HovoFedayi said:

Arl, I admire your magical work so much you can't possibly believe it. Basically, you (and GodofGaming) made my longtime wish a reality. I'm beyond thankful for that. I know it's just a game and all that, but Doom 3 is my FAVORITE game of all time. And the alpha shotgun is simply BADASS, that's how it stuck in my head since I've played the leaked Doom 3 E3 Alpha.

Thank you, I'm also happy to have an alpha shotgun replacement at last, and if more people are enjoying this then I'm a happy guy.

spamclark15 said:

Here's the readme I've been working on from a template. You can add things:

That's quite good, I would omit 'technical details', and put our nick names in 'authors of course.

Also, in "credits", GodofGaming should be remarked as the one who put the big foundation stone.

I don't mind putting my email in "contact", don't know about you and GodofGaming.

Another thing, I don't know much about the "license" or "copyright" stuff, but I would like that who ever download the mod knows that it can be used as a base for a mod or whatever with permission, you know what I mean.

Also, putting a more formal display of screenshots in the mod page would be nice, sorry for nagging you, thing is that in one of the screenshots it can be seen part of a map I was working on but I lost it stupidly, so seeing that pic makes me sad haha.

spamclark15 said:

Arl would be the perfect person to help as he is good at working with the game's meshes (if you'd like to help since I'm not sure how to do this stuff on my own.) When the Doomguy is wearing his armor, which would be the wepplayer mesh for cinematics along with the world mesh it's using while you're playing, it would be a matter of adding the helmet and attaching it to the head bone.

The model for cinematics is a special one, for the player in the map another model is used.

I can replace the cinematic model with one with a helmet, but for the other thing I think it's better to do it with .def or skins or whatever, because entities are separated by body and heads, so somewhere it is defined that the marine is going to use that body with that head in the first level and another body with the same head in the rest of the game.


If I change the head model with a helmet, you would be wearing that as you arrive to mars city, looking you in the bathroom mirror wearing a helmet and regular marine clothing would look funny.

[romulus_ut3]

Fantastic work, Arl!

Your Alpha Shotgun even works on DOOM 3 BFG's RB DOOM BFG source port!

The .dds format no longer works with DOOM 3 BFG, sadly. So it's loading assets directly from the .tga textures.

Will I be pestering if I ask you to "enhance" the current textures, or will that be greedy of me? :P

http://i.imgur.com/SqnPvD0.png?1

[spamclark15]

Arl said:

Thank you, I'm also happy to have an alpha shotgun replacement at last, and if more people are enjoying this then I'm a happy guy.



That's quite good, I would omit 'technical details', and put our nick names in 'authors of course.

Also, in "credits", GodofGaming should be remarked as the one who put the big foundation stone.

I don't mind putting my email in "contact", don't know about you and GodofGaming.

Another thing, I don't know much about the "license" or "copyright" stuff, but I would like that who ever download the mod knows that it can be used as a base for a mod or whatever with permission, you know what I mean.

Also, putting a more formal display of screenshots in the mod page would be nice, sorry for nagging you, thing is that in one of the screenshots it can be seen part of a map I was working on but I lost it stupidly, so seeing that pic makes me sad haha.



The model for cinematics is a special one, for the player in the map another model is used.

I can replace the cinematic model with one with a helmet, but for the other thing I think it's better to do it with .def or skins or whatever, because entities are separated by body and heads, so somewhere it is defined that the marine is going to use that body with that head in the first level and another body with the same head in the rest of the game.


If I change the head model with a helmet, you would be wearing that as you arrive to mars city, looking you in the bathroom mirror wearing a helmet and regular marine clothing would look funny.

Alright, will make the changes to the readme and screenshots.

Could you do the head replacement for the cinematic player mesh? I'm not sure about where it's defined in the .def files. I understand not replacing the head that's being used for the normal player mesh if it's defined separately. I'm just not sure where this is. Since you guys nailed the shotgun replacement I thought maybe trying to do this from the alpha as well.

romulus_ut3 said:

Fantastic work, Arl!

Your Alpha Shotgun even works on DOOM 3 BFG's RB DOOM BFG source port!

The .dds format no longer works with DOOM 3 BFG, sadly. So it's loading assets directly from the .tga textures.

Will I be pestering if I ask you to "enhance" the current textures, or will that be greedy of me? :P

Everyone is welcome to include this mod within other mods. If you'd like to do new textures for the mesh, you certainly can. The textures used are id's originals and there are no higher detail versions as far as I know so someone with some artistic talent could certainly swoop in and change things up. There is no perceptible difference in quality between the .dds files and the .tga files as far as I can tell (the compressed textures get saved off at DXT5) so lack of support for .dds is not an issue. I would imagine with today's computers no one is using compressed textures in the game anyway (ultra quality setting uses all uncompressed textures and D3BFG uses compressed textures but at a higher quality than the .dds files included with the original game release, which were generally saved at DXT1 unless the texture needed transparency.)

[Arl]

romulus_ut3 said:

Fantastic work, Arl!

Your Alpha Shotgun even works on DOOM 3 BFG's RB DOOM BFG source port!

The .dds format no longer works with DOOM 3 BFG, sadly. So it's loading assets directly from the .tga textures.

Will I be pestering if I ask you to "enhance" the current textures, or will that be greedy of me? :P

http://i.imgur.com/SqnPvD0.png?1

Works in BFG Edition already? that's great, less things to worry about.

The texture is not less detailed than the original shotgun texture, but due to the shape and design the closest part of the shotgun looks quite poor in detail, mostly because of the normal map.


Doubling the sizes and hand tweaking the normal/height/specular textures I managed to aliviate the uglyness a bit, but not much:

spamclark15 said:

Alright, will make the changes to the readme and screenshots.

Could you do the head replacement for the cinematic player mesh? I'm not sure about where it's defined in the .def files. I understand not replacing the head that's being used for the normal player mesh if it's defined separately. I'm just not sure where this is. Since you guys nailed the shotgun replacement I thought maybe trying to do this from the alpha as well.

I think I can, I'll let you know what I achieve.

I guess that this request is related to another "alpha like" project aside from the shotgun right?


Edit: The readme file is okay, but I was expecting to see all the people involved appearing at least in the credits. You should add yourself as a coordinator/beta tester or whatever you like.

[spamclark15]

Arl said:

Works in BFG Edition already? that's great, less things to worry about.

The texture is not less detailed than the original shotgun texture, but due to the shape and design the closest part of the shotgun looks quite poor in detail, mostly because of the normal map.


Doubling the sizes and hand tweaking the normal/height/specular textures I managed to aliviate the uglyness a bit, but not much:


I think I can, I'll let you know what I achieve.

I guess that this request is related to another "alpha like" project aside from the shotgun right?


Edit: The readme file is okay, but I was expecting to see all the people involved appearing at least in the credits. You should add yourself as a coordinator/beta tester or whatever you like.

I'm not sure who else to include. I pushed really hard for the mod because it was something I had hoped for ages ago and it actually finally happened. I knew that unless the version 6 mesh got converted somehow that there was no way to do it. I attempted what GodofGaming did probably a decade ago and was not successful.

Yes, the helmet addition is another alpha-related mod I think would be neat, as originally he wore a helmet and not only does it look cool but those trips outside onto the Martian surface actually seem believable. The design decision to remove his helmet so he can make some facial expressions doesn't seem worth it, especially since the helmet is rather iconic for the doomguy.

[amalek.92]

Arl said:

Doubling the sizes and hand tweaking the normal/height/specular textures I managed to aliviate the uglyness a bit, but not much:

http://i.imgur.com/TNnLnV9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GO8JmO9.jpg

Wow, you do not cease to amaze me!

[Arl]

HovoFedayi said:

Wow, you do not cease to amaze me!

You can have it if you like:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/p123opqgasdk5q1/zAlpha_Shotgun.pk4

Don't know if this should also be included the mod, if spamclark15 feels like it he can add it to the mod and update the download in the moddb page.

[spamclark15]

Arl said:

You can have it if you like:

Don't know if this should also be included the mod, if spamclark15 feels like it he can add it to the mod and update the download in the moddb page.

I can bundle the 2 PK4s together.

[Arl]

spamclark15 said:

I can bundle the 2 PK4s together.

I just play a bit with the unaltered textures... ... I think I'm unable to go back to that.

Maybe it's better to deliver the mod with those last textures, It's just better, seeing the previous textures made me realized the poor definition that part of the shotgun had before.

[spamclark15]

Arl said:

I just play a bit with the unaltered textures... ... I think I'm unable to go back to that.

Maybe it's better to deliver the mod with those last textures, It's just better, seeing the previous textures made me realized the poor definition that part of the shotgun had before.

I think choice can't hurt. ;) I use the original textures myself with the whole project being so nostalgic for me (and probably for some of the other users of the mod.)

[snapshot]

Is this yours ? : http://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-3-alpha-shotgun-mod/downloads/alpha-shotgun-mod

[spamclark15]

DMGUYDZ64 said:

Is this yours ? :

Yes that's where it's being published to.

[amalek.92]

spamclark15, I just figured out how to change sounds myself, now I'm going to use lots of sounds from the Alpha version. But how do I create a separate pk4 file as a mod? Right now I'm replacing the files directly in pak003.pk4, which contains the sounds from Doom 3. But I want to make a mod for the sake of convenience.

[GodOfGaming]

Wow, you managed to fix the problems that I had, good job guys! I will eventually try to create a high-poly model, but for now I'll play with this :)

[spamclark15]

HovoFedayi said:

spamclark15, I just figured out how to change sounds myself, now I'm going to use lots of sounds from the Alpha version. But how do I create a separate pk4 file as a mod? Right now I'm replacing the files directly in pak003.pk4, which contains the sounds from Doom 3. But I want to make a mod for the sake of convenience.

A PK4 file is just a ZIP archive with the extension changed.

[amalek.92]

spamclark15 said:

A PK4 file is just a ZIP archive with the extension changed.

I know. But if I'm creating a separate pk4 file containing necessary changes the game doesn't recognize it. I don't understand what am I doing wrong.

[spamclark15]

HovoFedayi said:

I know. But if I'm creating a separate pk4 file containing necessary changes the game doesn't recognize it. I don't understand what am I doing wrong.

Try naming it starting with z so it will overwrite pk4 files loaded earlier.

GodOfGaming said:

Wow, you managed to fix the problems that I had, good job guys! I will eventually try to create a high-poly model, but for now I'll play with this :)

It wouldn't have been possible without you converting the mesh, something I didn't think was going to happen as I tried to do what you did but I didn't understand what I was working with well enough to succeed with it. I just happened to stumble upon this thread and managed to get ahold of you despite the time between the thread's creation and when I found it. I'm curious if the person who started the thread knows of the progress that was made.

[romulus_ut3]

I noticed a few imperfections in the reloading animation. (Pardon me if it comes across as nitpickish and this isn't an absolutely necessary fix) but while looking at the alpha's shotgun from the alpha itself, I noticed the following:

http://i.imgur.com/cRCQjK8.jpg?1

Notice the shell pushing the cover and entering the shotgun?

http://i.imgur.com/XHV8Nlr.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/WavBZiT.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/WTZMCQC.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/bsjGmJV.jpg?1

Whereas in DOOM 3, the sliding door chamber's missing and is static:



http://i.imgur.com/NG4q03C.jpg?1

Edit: I think Arl already mentioned this earlier.

[Arl]

Yes, this is one of the diferences with the original shotgun in the alpha. As I lack the ability to make new animations I just adapted the Alpha shotgun mesh to the existing shotgun animation, as GodofGaming also did.

That little metal piece and the way it moves is also present in the vanilla shotgun, this is just a model replacement, so everything but the model is the same.


I think is better this way (personal opinion of course), that hanging piece when reloading looks bad to me, I don't know how actual shotguns works but I don't care that much for accuracy regarding firegun's functionality anyway.

[spamclark15]

The loading port on the bottom of the alpha version is broken actually. This port is spring-loaded so you're pushing it open with the insertion of shells. The ejection port doors also don't function properly in the alpha. If you watch the E3 2003 trailer you can see this mesh with fixed animations.

[romulus_ut3]

Lets take a look at the alpha shotgun reloading animation.

And the animation from the ported shotgun, running on RBDOOM3BFG:

[spamclark15]

Yes, they are not the same. The alpha has only 1 animation for cocking the shotgun while the final game has 3 and none of them are the same. My goal for this project was to get the mesh into the final game as best we could, and we have done that and I'm quite satisfied with the result. None of us have the ability to work with the MD5mesh version 6 animations or any animations for that matter and we were extremely lucky to have GodofGaming able to port over the original view mesh and get it working with the game's existing animations. The bones for the ejection port doors were removed from the animations, for example, so there's no way for us to get the doors to open when the shell is ejected. I don't know what else we can do regarding this.

[romulus_ut3]

I think someone else has a working version of the Alpha shotgun with a working reloading thingy.

Edit: Seems like this is one of the earlier versions of Arl's hard work, which had the shell entry port opened or am I seeing things?

DOOM3world had a few importers which were compatible with the alpha as far as I remember, I am gonna do some digging to see if I can find them.

[Arl]

romulus_ut3 said:

I think someone else has a working version of the Alpha shotgun with a working reloading thingy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZHMC_Tb0Dk

Edit: Seems like this is one of the earlier versions of Arl's hard work, which had the shell entry port opened or am I seeing things?

I would assume that this video is from GodofGaming's early progress, before I came here at all.

romulus_ut3 said:

DOOM3world had a few importers which were compatible with the alpha as far as I remember, I am gonna do some digging to see if I can find them.

Oh, that would be incredible, we could get even more things from the alpha like some of the Pinky's animated sequences, or even this guy:

Spoiler

[romulus_ut3]

Seems I have reached a dead end.

Whatever importers existed for the alpha, were replaced by the MD5 version 10 importer once DOOM 3 came out. der_ton is the only guy who could help us at this point, as he was the one who came up with the importer originally.

[spamclark15]

There was a time back when the game was new when I searched and searched for ways to work with MD5mesh version 6 files. The only thing I ever found was a program that allowed previewing of the meshes but you couldn't do anything else with them. I'm not trying to discourage you, but given the game's age and the difficulty in finding people very experienced with modding using id Tech 4, the only way I see any more meshes coming out of the alpha is if you're willing to convert the mesh by hand to a version 10 mesh, the process of which GodofGaming explained on the first page of the thread.

A surprising lot of the alpha made it into the final game in some form. The shotgun was always the glaring thing that I didn't understand id changing so after 12 years we got it into the game and now I'm trying to finish giving the doomguy his helmet like he had in the alpha and we're almost there except for mars_city1 and having the helmet not be used for that map. Arl seems stumped as well. I wish I understood the engine better and I really wish I could reach other people who have written substantial mods to learn from them but they aren't replying.

[Marnetmar]

It's nice to see that the original request has managed to come to fruition :D

[romulus_ut3]

I had a similar request made at idtechforums as well, let me tell you, no one else is happier than I am! :D

[DoomzRules]

This is probably a stupid suggestion... but how would the Alpha Shotgun look with a wooden pump texture and a wooden stock texture? Would it look a bit like the Classic Doom shotgun or no? =P