Ancient Aliens - final version on idgames

[skillsaw]

Sure, @Nevander! I've experimented quite a bit but haven't really created anything worth releasing yet. I am hoping to move beyond boom for my next project, though, and I have a lot of things I want to try using the more advanced features offered by the UDMF enabled ports.

[skillsaw]

Thanks, @spiritmaze. The stock enemies aren't changed from the base game, other than some cosmetic changes (only to Arachnotrons and Mancubus, if I remember correctly)

 

Have fun with E2 and E3 :D

[Nevander]

Just wanna come in again and give my usual props and worship. Ancient Aliens is such a great megawad and really is a work of art. Just thinking about it makes me want to play through it again. I've only gone through one time on UV. I will probably run it again soon on something easier for fun. Okay, done fanboying for now. :)

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I know this one is kind of old but are the sound effects from this wad allowed to be used in custom wads for free or do they require permission to be used? I know the textures require permission because of the following statement, "Authors may NOT use the contents of this file as a base for modification or
reuse.  Permissions have been obtained from original authors for any of their resources modified or included in this file. Use aa-tex as a resource instead."

[SleepyVelvet]

28 minutes ago, mArt1And00m3r11339 said:

Use aa-tex as a resource instead."

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/combos/aa-tex

 

^my favorite texture pack.  you have to prep it with your doom2.wad iwad though (instructions included in the zip file) to get the colors to work out with the default doom sprites.

 

I have not personally seen another custom map use this texture set yet, even though it is has been generously offered as free use.  If I ever started mapping again, i'd definitely use these textures.

 

w.r.t sounds: i'm not going to open up files right now, but the texture zip includes, in a separate .wad, monsters from aa too; the sounds might be in there.

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

10 minutes ago, NoisyVelvet said:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/combos/aa-tex

 

^my favorite texture pack.  you have to prep it with your doom2.wad iwad though (instructions included in the zip file) to get the colors to work out with the default doom sprites.

 

I have not personally seen another custom map use this texture set yet, even though it is has been generously offered as free use.  If I ever started mapping again, i'd definitely use these textures.

 

w.r.t sounds: i'm not going to open up files right now, but the texture zip includes, in a separate .wad, monsters from aa too; the sounds might be in there.

I can open the wad file up with Slade to find the sound patches. When I was asking the question, I was talking about the sound patches (for example, DSITEMUP, etc.).

[Endless]

It looks really great, a lot of work put in it I believe.

 

The maps are really cool, quite confunsing sometimes, but really special, this is the only type of wad I have ever played like this (Space, colorful, extraterrestrial theme, X files vibe) Nice soundtrack btw. This truly deserve a lot of recognition. The fact that is almost a total conversion and has a lot of attention to detail makes this megawad just fantastic. And this is not even my taste, I enjoy it a lot. 

[skillsaw]

8 hours ago, mArt1And00m3r11339 said:

I can open the wad file up with Slade to find the sound patches. When I was asking the question, I was talking about the sound patches (for example, DSITEMUP, etc.).

The various sound replacements have been used in a lot of wads - I'm not sure what the original source is for some of them, even. I don't think anyone minds if you use them.

[Mikami41]

Just ended this wad today

 

Man, i'm stunned, there's pretty much amazing visual ideas and animations in this wad (Specially from map 12,14, 22, 24 and 26) love the BGM and appreciate that there is a playable level difficulty which is fresh in my gameplay style.

Congratulations for the amazing work here.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Mikami41

[dugan]

On 8/2/2016 at 6:48 AM, joe-ilya said:

^ HXRTC

Looks like the galaxy is attacking the pain elemental.

[dugan]

For those who mentioned slowdown: the option that makes the biggest difference seems to be DISPLAY OPTIONS -> OPENGL RENDERER -> MULTISAMPLE. For me, setting it to any option past NONE results in progressively worse performance. Map 18 (which has a lot of very large open areas) is as smooth as anything at NONE, and almost unplayable at 32x.

[Nevander]

Bumped because I made a patch WAD to do some GLDEF work on some stuff. Adds lights to the new lamps, gives the Guardians some lights and fixes the pink plasma not having lights and also changes their renderstyle to additive.

 

aagldefs.zip

 

Make sure you are loading lights.pk3 too.

[Caleb13]

Sorry for necro-posting, but is there a version of the WAD without the custom sprites for fatsos, arachnotrons and other stuff? Alternatively, is there some way to cut them out without making the original sprite colors look garbled? In other words, is there some tool that can mass-convert sprites to selected palette (or mass-revert them to the original palette)? Thanks.

[skillsaw]

There is not a separate version of the wad with the custom resources removed.

 

If you want to remove the sprite replacements in your local copy, you can use Slade.

• Open Ancient Aliens and Doom2.wad in Slade
• Delete any offending sprite replacements (keep track of their names I guess)
• Copy sprites with the same name from Doom2.wad to aaliens.wad
• With all sprites sourced from Doom2.wad highlighted (use ctrl or shift + left click), Right click on a sprite -> Convert to... and set as below:

This will convert all the sprites from Doom's palette to Ancient Aliens (ignore the garbled sprite in the picture - I didn't copy the original from the IWAD).

[Caleb13]

Oh wow, I didn't know Slade had that menu, thanks for the tip!

 

I fiddled with it for an hour, but in the end, it was easier to convert all assets back to orignal Doom palette, delete the AA palette and then delete most sprites. Some of the new textures look a bit washed out now, but nothing critical.

[skillsaw]

Well, the visual design is going to look very, very off if you do that... Ancient Aliens was literally designed around it's palette (and more or less only exists as a consequence of it). As you get further into the wad, the washed-out problem will become more pronounced (especially in episode 2) ... But go for it if you prefer, I guess :P

[Caleb13]

I made it to epsiode 2 and it's not that bad - if I cared about graphics, I wouldn't play 25 years old game, anyway. I still have one question if I may - the map markers have different font than normally. How did you do that, I can't figure it out. I deleted all menu and HUD font lumps, but the new markers remain.

[nobleflame]

Sorry to bump this thread, but I’m having some issues with map23. I’m using the latest build of PrBoom+ UMAPINFO.

 

On map23 the secret zombie man fight doesn’t trigger for me when I jump to the invisibility sphere teleporter. The zombie men stay asleep.

 

I know this was an issue in the past, but wanted to check to make sure I’m not doing anything wrong?

[NightFright]

(Just saw now that this was already done in the "UMAPINFO Appreciation Thread", but I guess it's too late now...)

 

Another bump, but this time for a good reason. I have converted the included MAPINFO to UMAPINFO which will enable this beauty to play properly in ports like PrBoom+UM or Woof!.

 

What it fixes in particular:

- Episode selection is available again

- Episodes end when they should

- Custom AA intermission texts are restored

- Doom II intermissions are deactivated

 

How to use:
Load the attached wad together with aaliens.wad when using a port that supports UMAPINFO. That's it.

 

aaliens_um.zip

Edited April 8, 2022 by NightFright

[invictius]

What's the most demanding map in this wad, in terms of performance?  Map 15 seems to be on older hardware, I'm not sure if it's because of the many monsters and transparent floors.

[Dreamskull]

This wad is in my top 3 of all time. I highly recommend everyone play this wad.

[Shepardus]

On 2/6/2023 at 7:40 AM, invictius said:

What's the most demanding map in this wad, in terms of performance?  Map 15 seems to be on older hardware, I'm not sure if it's because of the many monsters and transparent floors.

Probably the outdoors area of map 23, or the beginning of map 29.

[invictius]

7 hours ago, Shepardus said:

Probably the outdoors area of map 23, or the beginning of map 29.

 

And map 29 just happens to have transparent floors - what is it with gzdoom slowing down with these?  Happens on map 15 and one of the spacedm9 levels.

[RHhe82]

Something I noticed yesterday and hastily reported on the DSDA source port thread.

 

Basically, with v1.1 of AA, some ports (at least DSDA-Doom and Eternity Engine) fail to load MAP24, the game just crashes. DSDA-Doom complains something about ZDoom nodes, Eternity gives a technical dialog box on some exception. When I fetched the original release of AA from DSDA-Archives (v1.0 is not available on idGames afaik), both ports loaded MAP24 just fine.

 

I'm not sure if some source port issue can be ruled out for 100% certainty, but it does seem like it has to do with v1.1 release. No other map in AA v1.1 would crash on my setups.

[skillsaw]

Oops, thanks for bringing this to my attention -- it's definitely an issue with compressed nodes on MAP24. Will fix ASAP.

[RHhe82]

Update on the DSDA front: the trouble was with the Win32 build I was using -- but I guess that doesn't change the fact something had changed regarding the nodes in v1.1 release.

[ReaperAA]

Just curious though, but what textures have been updated in AA version 1.1.

[lupinx-Kassman]

I apologize for introducing the issue. I updated most of the MAP24-related textures for V1.1. In the process I aligned some of the textures in the map to fit the updates. I thought I saved the map without rebuilding the nodes since the map played back the three demos submitted to DSDA for MAP24 in prboom-plus and DSDA-Doom with the reported times in 1.1. However I had not thought to test 1.1 with Eternity.

 

Skillsaw informed me of what happened and pointed out a solution to save the map in "ZDBSP - Extended Nodes". This fixed the issue, and it now runs and plays back the demos in Eternity as well as prboom-plus and DSDA-Doom. I submitted V1.2 with the fix to /idgames.

[nobleflame]

8 hours ago, lupinx-Kassman said:

I apologize for introducing the issue. I updated most of the MAP24-related textures for V1.1. In the process I aligned some of the textures in the map to fit the updates. I thought I saved the map without rebuilding the nodes since the map played back the three demos submitted to DSDA for MAP24 in prboom-plus and DSDA-Doom with the reported times in 1.1. However I had not thought to test 1.1 with Eternity.

 

Skillsaw informed me of what happened and pointed out a solution to save the map in "ZDBSP - Extended Nodes". This fixed the issue, and it now runs and plays back the demos in Eternity as well as prboom-plus and DSDA-Doom. I submitted V1.2 with the fix to /idgames.

 

Is this live on idgames yet? The link in the OP still says 1.1. 

 

Thanks for fixing :)

[skillsaw]

It's still in /incoming. I'll watch and update the post.