Your Doom 3 "dream" project that you've abandoned

[Arno]

dobu gabu maru started this interesting thread in the Classic Doom section, where idealistic projects that eventually had to be abandoned are discussed. It inspired me to share some info on an overly ambitious project of my own, which I unfortunately had to abandon. But since it concerns a Doom 3 project, I thought it would be more appropriate to start a new thread in this section. Modding and mapping in Doom 3 has its own distinct set of challenges and hurdles. Maybe other people might be able to share some examples as well of the struggles they faced while attempting to realize their vision into Doom 3.

 

Amsterdam
I've worked on a single Doom 3 map off and on between 2005 and 2010. I intended the map to depict the very moment the demons started to invade Earth, so just prior to the events in Doom 2. But rather than the more abstract locations in Doom 2, I wanted to show an actual city with some landmark buildings being covered in fire, smoke and debris. As if the map was designed by Roland Emmerich.
The map starts with the player arriving by train in Amsterdam. He has to fight his way through a zombie-infested Central Station. When he goes outside, bigger monsters are awaiting him on the streets. The map uses custom textures, scripts and decoration models. There are working escalators. The toilets can be flushed and the toilet seats can be moved up and down.

 

Early on in the project I also had the optimistic intention of adding a second map. In this boss map the player would be confronted with a Cyberdemon on Dam Square. Cars, trams and debris from buildings could be used for cover. But I found out that it was way out of my league to create all the required custom assets for such a scene. So I decided to limit the scope to just a single map, based on the Central Station. However, I still quite underestimated the enormous effort required to finish that single map. Eventually I had the layout in place, but it was lacking the level of detail that the stock Doom 3 maps have. There were many, many loose ends, such as empty corridors, textures without bump maps, a total absence of secret areas, etc. The worst part was that the map was really short: it only contained about ten minutes of gameplay. Since at that time general interest in Doom 3 was diminishing, while I was still looking at months of work to polish the map, I decided to abandon the project. It was unfortunate that I couldn't get the project into a release-worthy end state, but in the process I did learn a few lessons about better planning my work and making sure that I take big challenges carefully step by step.

 

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

Screenshots were taken with an integrated GPU, so please ignore the poor framerate.

 

 

[-Votterbin-]

I wanted to try and create a full campaign out of the scrapped Doom 4 using Doom 3 as a base. I had a few sketches for level designs but I can't seem to find those anymore/

 

I did have a title for it, though. "Doom: Rise of the Resistance". It's a very generic name, yes, but I think it sort of captured the idea of Doom 4's story somewhat well.

 

As far as gameplay, though, I wanted it to play similarly to DOOM2016. I also wanted to have fun with programming it, too (my philosophy is: if it isn't fun to code, it isn't gonna be fun when it's finished)>

[rekko]

Central station looks nice. Killing demons on the shopping street would've been cool.