MrFlibble

Of course! I'm actually pretty amazed at how well these images convey the game's general "look & feel".

I'm noticing the model is prone to producing some cool Warhammer 40k-esque art: The prompt here was "spacing guild navigator and the emperor" as I was trying to elicit some Dune related imagery from it. This should be pretty recognizable, ran it several times and liked these two more than others:

That's right

I'm very happy to know that there's so much dedication, effort and talent aimed at improving quality of the game's assets, that's simply fantastic. I love you guys!

Very scary and confusing!

Aren't both games using the same binary executable though? I thought I read somewhere that the code development converged at some point, it's just that Doom/The Ultimate Doom does not use the new stuff from Doom II. But the code is there. Am I wrong? As for why the expansion was for the first game and not the second, the whole point of The Ultimate Doom was to bring the original Doom to the retail scene -- it had not been available as such before that. I suppose that the addition of the new episode allowed GT Interactive to boast some new content to what would otherwise be an approximately two-year old game already.

That's one crazy looking mod indeed! And the music is very nice.

I'm not sure about this. I also read somewhere that it is stand-alone, but the free full version available from Zero Gravity still requires Quake to run, as far as I can tell. You can play it solo in DarkPlaces but some sound effects and particles (?), maybe even some effects models will be missing.

Please get well soon, Mr. Jackson!

I don't remember if the project has a credits file -- older versions of the source used to keep all assets arranged into sub-folders with contributor names on them, but this has been dropped rather recently in favour of having all stuff together and ready for compiling IWADs.

This information can be gleaned from closed pull requests, but it is my understanding that @Korp and @HorrorMovieRei are behind most art edits at this moment.

Hmm, then perhaps making a post there and specifically mentioning that you don't want that to happen could address this issue? I guess people at VOGONS will learn of your tool sooner or later anyway.

Amazing stuff, thanks! Might be a nice idea to post this at VOGONS too.

The centaur shape designs kind of remind me of the monsters in Harmony.

To be fair, any kind of hostile-looking alien planet would do for that purpose, it does not have to be another dimension or infernal for that. Some time ago in a similar discussion, someone mentioned they had trouble reconciling mediaeval-looking castle designs with high-tech aliens in powered armour, but I think those elements are not mutually exclusive. After all, no one thinks it strange that there are mediaeval castles with full suits of plate armour and what not as decoration, populated with 20. century soldiers with automated rifles in Wolfenstein games.

Well, if this change is indeed made, it'll take some getting used to it for old-timer Freed∞m players :) But personally, I'm quite fine with the current Serpentipede design. It does not seem too similar to the worm to me, although both move by means of slithering.

I didn't realise that he edited that post and removed the original text. Thankfully it's been preserved via the Wayback Machine here. Well, I was referring to a scenario where maps would reflect the kind of story which I imagined, with an escape attempt and so on. I also toyed with the idea of possible gameplay alterations -- like limiting the amount of ammo and other useful pickups in a level while making every encounter with enemies more challenging. Imagine starting unarmed and having to use stealth/avoid combat to get around, then you find a pistol with limited ammo and can take on the starting enemies, etc. I was a bit inspired by this game. But of course there may be other ways to put more story in the maps. Even the current designs and episode/map names hint at some kind of more or less consistent setting, but it's all rather vaguely defined. I suppose that if someone were to take a more Duke Nukem 3D-esque approach and try to go for a more realistic depiction of locations (e. g. a lab, a military facility, satellite launch station or whatever), this would probably require a hefty overhaul of the existing maps at any rate. Just compare the first few HacX levels with Freed∞m levels -- the former are much closer to Duke3D while the latter are often more similar to vanilla Doom style maps.

The pull request is still open, perhaps you should PM someone from the project admins to get it approved? Hmm, you don't like the current one? I remember you said it was not 100% complete in terms of what you intended, but I think it's a fine design overall. The worm as the imp replacement seems somewhat drastic (but it should work in theory as its attack animation suits both a close-range and a fireball-spewing attack), but what would be the new pinky then?

Maybe @fraggle has them somewhere? I also vaguely remember that something used to be on @Fredrik's site/FTP, but IIRC this is no longer accessible (?).

I believe that historically, mappers were mostly inspired by the original Doom / Doom II maps and their progression, putting various twists here and there, which were often leaning into the sci-fi aliens theme instead of hellish invasion. For example, an old version of E1M9 (which I believe has been replaced since) had a room with rather highly detailed teleporter pads (connected to some sci-fi device-looking prop) that warped in a wave of monsters, which was replicating a similar moment in Doom's E1M9 where demons teleport in over a star-shaped engraving on the floor. As far as I can tell, further development focussed a lot on refining the existing maps, or creating replacements with similar progression gameplay-wise, rather than trying to weave in a consistent story/setting by means of level design. I think that this generally tends to work fine overall, considering the fairly abstract environments of the original Doom. It would be very cool to have a solid narrative grounded in map layouts and design, akin to HacX or Hell 2 Pay though IMO, but I don't think it's been attempted so far. I've outlined this kind of ideas here and here a while ago. But on the other hand, following them would imply scrapping the already existing maps, most of which are pretty good as far as I can tell, in favour of a different design philosophy that could as well warrant a separate fork or even a completely new game altogether.

Ironically, Shaw's Nightmare is a deliberate imitation of Doom/Doom II, down to minutest details. Not only do all monsters and weapons have direct counterparts in Doom/Doom II (and the HUD/status bar is basically a copy of Doom's, something seen only in Quiver out of the original Doom clones from the 90s IIRC), but even the version numbering closely follows the succession of Doom releases, there being v0.99, v1.0, v1.2, v1.4, v1.5, v1.6, v1.66 and finally v1.9 of Shaw's Nightmare. And the "official" FAQ supplied with the game is written to resemble Hank Leukart's Doom FAQ, up to identical section names in some cases. But, with all that, Shaw Nightmare's developer wanted it to be on the Build engine (as originally provided by Ken Silverman, not the 3D Realms modifications), so it is a Build game, while being a Doom clone at heart. The game would be more playable if it were less sluggish I suppose.

I would not completely agree here, or rather I'd say that when it comes to games, the situation differs case by case. Generally, there's nothing wrong with a game being a replica or a clone of another game: unlike other types of software, a game is essentially defined by its rules/gameplay, not by its functionality (e. g., two media players may have differing internal structure and feature sets, but both provide the same functionality of playing back media files; while two strategy games may have entirely different rule sets, effectively being two different games altogether). In fact, historically, games have always copied, replicated or cloned one another fairly often, which is not limited to the free software scene -- there's an almost infinite variety of Tetris, Arkaniod, Boulder Dash, Snake, etc. versions, but even as games got way more complex than these, they still frequently borrow features from one another. I'm inclined to think that more often than not, this kind of cloning also encourages creativity and results in new games that are an improvement or at least an interesting variation on the source material. Of course, I'm not talking about cheap attempts to cash in on the popularity of some hit title as could be often observed in the 90s. Here's an interesting discussion on this topic. I do agree though, that in the case of Duke Nukem 3D, a project similar to Freed∞m seems on the whole rather impossible and superficial at the same time. The sheer amount of detail, gimmicks and the Duke character himself inevitably doom this kind of effort to either become a poor, second-rate imitation, or a more or less completely different game, which could have been the primary objective from the start as others here have already noted. The latter option is not a bad idea though, we could use more free Build engine games I guess. Given available free time and motivation, one could start by slowly replacing the Duke3D assets with free equivalents to create a working prototype, and see where it goes from there. There are some unused angled weapons in the Freed∞m attic, and if such a project were to actually start going somewhere, I suppose it could be attempted to negotiate the use of some character sprites and other assets from the AMC Squad, Demon Throne and/or Alien Armageddon. Of course, this could end up being just an exercise in modding and game design though. There's a free stand-alone Keen-esque game called Planet Cloudius IX, which runs on a replica of the Keen engine (with some enhancements, AFAIK), which I suppose fits that niche.

Well, there certainly can't be no story at all, because there are intermission screens that narrate some of what's supposedly happening in the game world. That there is apparently no consistent background lore explained somewhere is another thing.

I'm unable to check but it might work thru wine

If you don't mind using another tool, Image Analyzer is pretty good for palettising, but it does not do any kind of dithering. It's for Windows. You can also try mtPaint, which is cross-platform and supports optional dithering with several methods. mtPaint can load the palette directly from an indexed image, without the need to extract and load a separate palette file.