Some alpha/beta stuff

[Fletcher`]

Da Werecat said:

It's just an unfinished edit of the regular shotgun. Even the pump is retained, and there are some ugly bits.

I'm sure that someone will shove it in their wad regardless.

Where were you a few months ago when I did this?

Also, Map35 seems to have eventually made its way into Heretic as an unfinished DM map for Episode 6 :P

[Quasar]

GreyGhost said:

Not bad for a first attempt, though the final room's a bit longer than it should be.


EDIT - I think I've pretty much nailed the second maps layout.

The columns in the room with four of them look a little bit too close together as compared to the original. This map is based on one that's available in the 0.5 alpha if you need a point of reference, although the editors that can actually load the alpha maps are painfully limited. In fact I'm not sure any editor other than Yadex can actually load them at all, and it only runs on a really old Linux distro...

[Quasar]

rf` said:

Where were you a few months ago when I did this?

Also, Map35 seems to have eventually made its way into Heretic as an unfinished DM map for Episode 6 :P

It's not "unfinished" in Heretic. They just took idmap01 and converted it to Heretic. In the original registered release, it was E4M1. In SoSR, it was moved to E6M3. It was always intended for deathmatch play, although it does have monsters in single player and co-op.

idmap01 can be downloaded off the internet, although I do not know if it is in the archives. If it is, I'd think it would be in the idstuff dir.

[Gez]

Quasar said:

idmap01 can be downloaded off the internet, although I do not know if it is in the archives. If it is, I'd think it would be in the idstuff dir.

It is.
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=idstuff/doom2/idmap01.zip

[40oz]

It just occurred to me that literally everything about the Pain Elemental was a frankensprite. Cacodemon body, Pinky Demon Arms,
Cyberdemon horns, Partial Invisibility eye, and now the blob monster for the inner mouth. Looking even further, it looks more like the inside of the mouth also uses the rocket explosion in the background, as well as the same rocket explosion in the death animation.

Surprising how this monster came to fruition considering literally no part of it was made entirely from scratch at the start of Doom 2.

[Blastfrog]

Dethz0r's alpha resource WADs may not be good for much else, but its map conversions are perfectly usable.

[kb1]

Quasar said:

The columns in the room with four of them look a little bit too close together as compared to the original. This map is based on one that's available in the 0.5 alpha if you need a point of reference, although the editors that can actually load the alpha maps are painfully limited. In fact I'm not sure any editor other than Yadex can actually load them at all, and it only runs on a really old Linux distro...

My old vb6 WadEditor program "converts" the alpha/beta map formats to the standard format before loading them into my crude map editor. If you need them, I'll do a convert/load/save. I think it screws up the texture/flat names, though. It renames them to what was previously a useful name, so if you have a tool that allows a mass rename of texture "ABC" to "123", then "DEF" to "234", etc, you can rename them to something meaningful. In other words, it's a 1-to-1 mapping, from the alpha/beta texture names, to a different set of names - no information is lost.

I might even be able to find the renamed textures themselves, and include them, along with TEXTURES/PATCHES lumps, but no guarantees - that was a long time ago.

Do you need them? (Please only respond if you have a need - it's gonna take me some time, which is limited ATM. Thanks.)

[Dragonsbrethren]

Sodaholic said:

Dethz0r's alpha resource WADs may not be good for much else, but its map conversions are perfectly usable.

Yeah, these are what I've been using for comparisons.

[GreyGhost]

Quasar said:

The columns in the room with four of them look a little bit too close together as compared to the original.

So they are, the top pair should be moved 64 points up the screen, easily fixed. I'll post that map when I've finished the early E1M8.

[Quasar]

kb1 said:

My old vb6 WadEditor program "converts" the alpha/beta map formats to the standard format before loading them into my crude map editor. If you need them, I'll do a convert/load/save. I think it screws up the texture/flat names, though. It renames them to what was previously a useful name, so if you have a tool that allows a mass rename of texture "ABC" to "123", then "DEF" to "234", etc, you can rename them to something meaningful. In other words, it's a 1-to-1 mapping, from the alpha/beta texture names, to a different set of names - no information is lost.

I might even be able to find the renamed textures themselves, and include them, along with TEXTURES/PATCHES lumps, but no guarantees - that was a long time ago.

Do you need them? (Please only respond if you have a need - it's gonna take me some time, which is limited ATM. Thanks.)

Could be useful, yes.

[GreyGhost]

I think I'm done with the Early E1M8 map, and hopefully no glaring errors this time. Working out where some of those vertices belong is a recipe for eye strain.


(1920x1200 - 335k)


And here are the wads

[kb1]

Quasar said:

Could be useful, yes.

Ok I started on this:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/0w3xf5vbbdx0p6d/AlphaBetaMaps.zip
This zip contains the Alpha 02 map, Alpha 04 maps E1M1 thru E1M11, and the Alpha 04 MENUMAP.

As I previously warned, the texture names, flat names, thing ids, and even line specials are custom, without the source images or thing definitions. The map nodes are not built, and the REJECT lump is empty.

But the line positions should be perfectly converted. Given some time, I will eventually re-release these properly, with included resources.

If you guys get some use out of these, I'll do the Alpha 05 and Beta maps as well.

Maybe one day John will release some more Alpha/Beta maps, which would, of course, be awesome. There's something cool about seeing Doom before Doom was Doom, if you know what I mean.

[sheridan]

40oz said:

Surprising how this monster came to fruition considering literally no part of it was made entirely from scratch at the start of Doom 2.

I think it makes more sense to assume that the creation of the monster was likely fueled more by its intended role from the designers than any creative juices flowing out of the art department. Sort of like the Hell Knight. So you can imagine somebody like Sandy Petersen describing what the monster does in detail to everybody else, and Adrian/Kevin throwing together a sprite sheet just to fit the bill.

[Quasar]

As rumored before, there is an *entire* alpha we do not have at all as it was not amongst the set that Frans P. de Vries had for upload. In fact I'm not sure it even ever went out to id's testers at the time. I was HOPING this was going to get released along with the other maps and resources which I put up the pics of. Apparently ancient alphas that only run under DosBox are still valuable "IP" to Bethesda though.

[kb1]

Quasar said:

...Apparently ancient alphas that only run under DosBox are still valuable "IP" to Bethesda though.

Do you know this for a fact? What I mean is:
1. Did you get shot down by Bethesda?
2. Did someone just forget to release it?
3. Or is it something you can't or don't want to reveal?

Basically, I'm trying to find out if we should nicely, collectively ask for it, or not. Cause, another Alpha (or 2 or 10) would, of course, be awesome.

[Jaws In Space]

I have sometimes wondered where a 0.1 or 0.3 alpha are. Also if the Doom released in 1993 is version 0.99 where are alphas .6 through .98 as well.

[Ded10c]

They may not all exist - depending on the extent of the changes they make it's not unusual for developers to miss one. For all we know the thought process behind using 0.99 could have been "Well, we don't want to give 1.0 away for nothing, so let's call this 0.99" or "It's not final, but it's good enough to release... if we need to make any fixes we can lump them into the paid version, let's just get this out of the door fist".

I imagine the news of other existing alphas comes from Mr. Romero. Most of the lost id stuff seems to. If I'd known that when I e-mailed him about Methods of Destruction I might not have been so surprised when he gave me a copy :P

[Marnetmar]

Alpha 0.3 did in fact exist around March of 1993.



Original start area of E1M2, this room is what partially forced John Carmack to use BSP in the doom engine since this area slowed the game to a crawl for some reason.



Original, less interesting version of the card game area in E2M7



Early version of this area:



I also heard a story about Alpha 0.1 being a square room with a hallway branching off of it and using the hud and pistol sprites from wolf3d as a placeholder, but someone probably made that up to get attention.

[I DUNNO LOL0329]

Wall textures download ?

[scifista42]

Here and/or here.