Steve D

Wow, that is so totally beyond awesome. You made my year!!!!!

And it looks like a screenie from an AGA Amiga. Are you doing a full conversion of Alien Breed 3D2: The Killing Grounds to GZDoom? It would make a wonderful companion to Project Osiris from Arcturus. Color me psyched!

It looks like the E4 idea is gaining traction. @Cammy offered a cool idea of how to do it, so I guess it's pretty much set. I plan to have E4 ready for RC1. @Insaneprophet thank you, and welcome aboard as playtester!

Big update time. The OP has already been revised. Realm of Chaos 2: The Revenge of '96, is finally, for real, with no doubt whatsoever, and I do mean absotively, posilutely quivering on the edge of an RC1. Now, let me be clear; we could have released an RC1 last year, but I chose not to. I wanted to make certain that all the maps likely to be in the final release were in the RC1. There is still some fiddling to do. There is a question about what map will be in the 10 slot. There are 3 contenders, 2 finished and 1 still being worked on. There is also the possibility of map shuffling, even between episodes. Further, there is the question of whether or not to add a bonus 4th episode for the maps that were cut. They weren't cut because we hated them, but instead, because we got into some trouble with too many big maps in a row, and to prevent player fatigue, we swapped them out for smaller ones. As you might guess, E4 would be a bunch of large maps. Anyone reading this can vote on whether we should add a 4th episode, or not. We are still missing some music tracks, but I'm willing to release an RC1 without them. I also need to write up the text screens and do some other bits of clean-up, and that's about it. The map list in the current OP is what I'm willing to go with to release an RC1 within a month. I'll be doing more updates soon. For example, most of the OP screenies are out of date, mainly because of discarded sky textures. I also might be super-egotistical and yap about all of my '90s maps that are in the project. There are currently 4 of them, one of which got me the job on The Macintosh Team, and another of which was intended for the original RoC but was left incomplete. More to come.

Hey, @Obsidian! You did some DeHacked work on Map20, according to what @Cammy tells me, and it was really cool! All those nasty, whispering voices. Now, it's possible you advised Cammy and @antares031 on how to do it rather than doing it yourself, in which case I might need to remove you from the credits. Let's hope not! :)

Congratulations on Tetanus becoming an add-on! That is such awesome news.

Coming in late means I'll make a boring post that covers ground already well-trod, but wtf, why not blather? Yes, I design all my maps for UV and all other difficulty settings are UV-lite. But it's also true that I don't design every map's UV to be at the bleeding edge of how much misery I can suffer. But when I do . . . ;D I design my hardest fights to follow the "chaotic, unscripted combat with high monster density" formula. The "chaotic" part means that even though I know where all the monsters and goodies are, I still get hammered because there's just so many of those nasty buggers around that I can't keep track of where they're all coming from. I can be killed dozens of times in my own maps. 54 deaths is IIRC the most, and on that map, I despair-quit because I knew there wasn't enough health and armor ahead for me to survive the big end battle. But the next day I played it, died like 24 times, and had lots of fun. It's a myth that just because you can't beat your own map in one go on UV means it's a badly balanced map. Truth is, I suck. I'm also a savescummer. I've always played that way. So to me it's completely normal to die multiple times on a hard map and still enjoy it. Sometimes I save at a really unfortunate place, and if I can't make headway after that I'll start the map over. But anyway, what I'm getting at is that many of my skilled testers have successfully FDAed my maps -- including those where I died multiple times -- and found them to be just fine. As I've said many times before, if a map is too much for me on UV -- which doesn't happen often because I'm quite stubborn -- I will replay it on HNTR rather than HMP. The reasoning is that if it's way too hard on UV, I'll probably find it overly tough on HMP. So far, HNTR has always given me everything I needed in those situations. I suppose that what bothers us mappers -- me for certain -- is when someone gives your map a go on UV, gets roasted, then says your map sucks because it's too hard, as if we owe them a map they can beat on UV. Well, IMO we owe them a good time or at least the opportunity for a good time. I want people to have fun in my maps. I want their pelts but I also want to make them happy. ;D I want them to die in ways they find enjoyable. And as we all say, we put in -- and tested! -- those difficulty settings for a reason. But so it goes. There's nothing we can do about it. I reckon I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. :)

About time I bumped an old thread. Michael Krause. Funny thing is that every time I mention Krause as one of my all-time fave mappers, I have to brag that I used to playtest some of his maps back in the '90s. Yeah, I jump up and down, waving my arms and screaming, "I used to playtest for Michael-fucking-Krause!!!!!!" Krause had a big influence on me, even though I never made maps in his style . . . yet! Glen Payne and Marshall Bostwick. I've always been obsessed with Osiris. A TC that wasn't really a full TC but a very extensive mod, dripping with atmosphere, fun level design and great style. Would love to see them go crazy with our modern tools. Sean Birkel. Just because Fava Beans is so great. Viggles. Among modern mappers, almost all of my faves are still active, and for all I know -- and hope! -- Viggles is, too, and a new masterpiece is already underway.

Who knows what might happen? Amiga IP still has a certain cache, which, however unlikely, might tempt some corporation at some point in time in a universe far, far away; and they still make a run of new, modern Amigas every now and then. It's The Survivor, after all. ;)

It all sounds rather like Hollywood; lack of originality, sequelitis, and so on. Not that the sequalization of film is always bad. I very much enjoy the Jurassic Park/World series, even though I realize they are money-making products rather than great films. That said . . . I have never been excited about AAA games. That's because I'm a Doomer, not a gamer per se. Further, I'm a mapper rather than a player, though as I near retirement I plan to do a lot more playing than before. Still, you can't map for AAA games, thus my lack of interest. And to go one step further, I'm an Amiga guy, not a PC guy, so I have a lot of interest in Amiga FPS games from the '90s, and in wonderful TCs like Project Osiris by @Arcturus, a fellow I've seen on AmigaBill twitchstreams a few times. I played Project Osiris over the past week, and it was a magical experience for me. Top-tier work from beginning to end. Would a AAA game give me such a thrill? That said, I plan to buy DoomQuake, The Dark Ages of Conan at The Hexen Bar & Grill, because it showcases what we love about AAA games -- awesome visuals, wonderful gibs, incredible animations -- alla dat. And this time I might buy an Xbox to play it on. I do appreciate the troubles of the game industry and its employees that you write about so eloquently. At some point, there will be a shake-out and a new equilibrium will be found -- one hopes. Until then, I'll keep hoping that someone does a TC of the Amiga FPS Breathless, my personal fave, and I'll mess around with my A500 Mini. :)

You've just described every scene ever. Literally. Every. Fucking. Scene. And like all the other scenesters, I will have my say. Personally, I'm not heavily into any game I can't map for, which basically describes every game since 2004 or so. As for Doom, its story and concept has always been incoherent. The mix of sci-fi elements with Hell and goat-footed demons was an open invitation to absurd story elements such as all the ridiculous lore attached to the game since 2016, especially since Doom Eternal. Quake is the same way. It mixes Ogres, futuristic soldiers and even sword-wielding knights in ways that make little or no sense. Then you have Quake 2 which is more of a sci-fi Doom game and has literally nothing to do with the original Quake, and Quake 4 followed in that direction. And tell me that big turreted 4-barrel gun in the Dark Ages trailer doesn't remind you of Quake 4. IOW, the Doom and Quake franchises are tied together in strange ways, with maybe a Hexen wrapper. So I reckon Dark Ages represents the ultimate melding of Doom with Quake 1, and we should just accept that's the way it is. I plan to buy it myself. Btw, if you look at the Quake mapping community, it's basically 100% Quake 1. There is no love for Quake 2 or 4. They like the original medieval mosh pit with a sprinkling of futuristic soldiers and the occasional robot. No Doom masquerading as Quake over there! ;D Last note: I unironically enjoyed Doom 3. It was IMO an excellent take on the creepier side of Doom as was exemplified in E2 of Doom 1. Oozing atmosphere more than action, turning Doom into survival horror, was just fine in my book.

I can't entirely agree with this. Because modern gaming PCs are exceptionally powerful, they are also quite expensive at the high end. This makes us forget that back in the day, gaming computers tended to be inexpensive models. The early IBM PCs were expensive business machines, and the top gaming computers of that era were things like the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Atari 400 and 800, and the Commodore 64. In 1987, they would all be eclipsed by the Amiga 500, which hit the market at $699 with a set of custom chips that gave it sound and graphic capabilities well beyond those of Macs and PCs of similar and even greater price. The Amiga custom chips gave it hardware sprites that guaranteed a 50fps frame-rate in the side-scrolling shooters and platformers that dominated the scene in those days—all this with a Motorola 68000 running at 7.14Mhz. The Amiga 500 was central to the early success of Electronic Arts, which Trip Hawkins and other former Apple employees founded in 1982. So as we can see, Apple was in various ways important to the gaming industry in the early days. As for Macs themselves, it's not so much that they weren't built to play games, but that their high cost meant relatively few were sold, and with few sold, the market wasn't there to draw game developers. By the late '80s, it was clear that the top game machines of the time -- the Amiga 500 and Atari ST -- would soon be surpassed by a new generation of PCs of similar price and much greater sales volume, so game developers abandoned the Amiga and Atari in favor of PCs, and by 1990 or so the PC was the leading game computer. A big advantage of PCs was the ability to customize their configuration, so you could get a good spec for less money, especially if you could build one yourself. Doom was obviously a demanding game when it first appeared, but my PowerMac Performa 5200 handled it well enough. It was inexpensive for a Mac, and with a PowerPC 603/75Mhz, it outperformed 486 PCs. Even better was my Power Computing PowerWave 604/132, which was a PowerMac 9500 clone costing over $3,700, much too expensive for a gaming machine in the classic sense. IMO, the era of modern gaming PCs began with the first 3DFX Voodoo cards. By the time they appeared, I had already bought a PC with a Pentium 166 in order to play Quake, and I soon added a Voodoo card. Once Voodoo cards became available for the Mac and Amiga, I bought them for those platforms, too. By this time, PCs were outselling Macs by a vast margin, and Commodore, the company that manufactured Amigas, was out of business. Once Nvidia took over as the primary developer of 3D accelerators, the Mac fell even farther behind in the world of modern gaming, because for the longest time, Nvidia wasn't available on Apple products, though the ATI Rage and Radeon series was. Ultimately, it wasn't so much the spec as the price and the limited population of Macs in the wild that doomed the machine as a game platform.

Ah, that evil baby from Fears. Looks great! Big thumping heart for anything Amiga.:))))))

Here's an updated version of Map23 Changes include flagging the secret exit as a secret and adding some detail at the start.

I'm pretty sure I got that right. I copy-pasted from your post, and so far I haven't seen credits from the boss.