MrFlibble

I also like the tune that was playing in E1M2 in versions up to 0.10 or so. Feeling pretty nostalgic about the old versions of Freed∞m generally.

The old, pre-Raymoohawk releases were criticised by many for bad art quality, but actually I think the visuals are pretty consistent, at least in Phase 1.

On 8/4/2020 at 4:24 AM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

e1m1 - Ultrabland Complex

e1m2 - Ubergeneric Tech

Is that supposed to be a meta-joke, or are you expressing criticism of map design this way?

TBH I'm not a big fan of the new E1M1 because of its rather confusing layout, but E1M2 is a longtime classic.

Actually the character reminded me of Caleb from Blood. Not much similarity to Corvus except for the hood IMO.

Any updates on this? I wanted to say how I liked your idea but forgot to make a post :)

1 minute ago, Master O said:

Also, speaking of Dosbox, have you tried running Eradicator in dosbox-staging? https://dosbox-staging.github.io/about/

I haven't tried this fork yet, I mostly stick with SVN Daum and DOSBox ECE.

Eradicator does not have any performance problems in DOSBox per se. I think its issues mostly come from the coding side. IIRC there's some noticeable screen tearing which I was not able to fix with DOSBox's vsync function, but maybe I was just doing it wrong. Also the default mouse sensitivity levels are off and I have to adjust it every time on a clean install to a comfortable level. BTW, the game defaults to the arrow keys but has a control profile called "Cool Guy controls" that is basically WASD + Mouse, except it's not WASD but some other keys. I always change the controls to real WASD and it plays seamlessly like that.

22 hours ago, Master O said:

Is the old FPS called "Eradicator" worth playing?

It's worth trying out for certain.

Here's my story with it. I first discovered the demo via the DOS Museum website, sometime around 2010. It was the old version 1.02 with no option to invert the mouse Y axis, and some minor differences from the final release. Shortly thereafter I found the demo 1.1 and played it. The demo contains the entire first "chapter" of the game -- three regular levels and one secret level -- sans the starting level because this is different for each character. Only Dan Blaze and Kamchak are available are playable characters. I think the demo also allows you to pick some of the weapons that would normally become available later in the game.

I played the demo several times, but not once to the completion. There's a rather complex puzzle at the end of level 3 where you need to blow up three generators and rush to the exit they otherwise block, while they are auto-repaired by indestructible bots. I only completed this in the full game. But otherwise I had immense fun. It's somewhere in between Doom, Duke Nukem 3D (very similar in terms of destructible environment) and Star Wars: Dark Forces with the objective-based level design approach. There are secrets which are fun to look for and discover, interesting powerup items and weapons that feel instantly recognisable yet have little twists to feel original. E.g. you have the Sonic Shock wave (or something) that is, for all intents and purposes, a shotgun. It's powerful enough to blow the basic ground enemy robot into pieces in one hit. The trick is, if you kill it with something less powerful, it will drop a clip for your pistol equivalent slot # 2 weapon, but if you gib it with the "Sonic Shock Wave" there's no powerup for you.

There are explosive barrels you can push around a la Ion Fury (but not pull them), blow too many away and you might lock yourself out of a secret area for good. Actually I think IF drew quite some inspiration from Eradicator too. There's also a poweup that allows you to see enemies through walls for a limited time (it shows a glowing transparent icon so you can't know what the enemies are). When you fire a rocket, a small screen appears showing you its point of view like ins Descent II.

Oh, and you can remote-control robots in certain areas.

Now to the full game. Snatched it on a sale at GOG.com a while ago and played it for a little while, sometime in late last year I think. I did get to the first chapter's secret level but was distracted by something else and did not go back to it (the secret level is fine though). Later I had to reinstall the OS and so far I haven't gotten around to install Eradicator once more. But I can't say I did not like the full game once the novelty wore off (and it certainly did). I wish it was open source and someone made a good port, because, while it works well in DOSBox, it's not as smooth as I'd like. Oh and it definitely woudn't hurt the visuals to be in high-res.

Why, that's a very good idea.

Awesome stuff.

At first I thought the big red thing was the BFG but it's the chainsaw counterpart, right? Cool.

You know what, your HUD weapon design kinda-sorta reminded me of Wrath of Earth a bit.

18 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

So basically, how the Quiver engine technology was pulled off.

From what I remember, the engine was written by one person, which is very impressive. I remember playing Quiver shareware (MobyGames link for the convenience of those who happen to not know about this game) and I was all like meh at first, but then I read the documents and found out the engine was created by one man, which changed my perspective to a more positive impression of the entire effort. I think Quiver could've been much better game if the developers focused more on making interesting levels instead of the rather repetitive slog through glass cannons and other poorly balanced enemies.

Unfortunately it's not likely that we'll ever get the source code for that game.

Here's another type of lost media that I'm personally quite interested in: press kits of 90s PC games. It is beyond doubt that video game companies sent their promo materials like screenshots and art to game magazines in original lossless quality, because some of the mags included these images on coverdisks (but sadly, only a fraction of the actual materials was preserved that way). However the vast majority of the stuff that we have now is in degraded quality thanks to either JPEG compression or conversion to GIF with dithering.

For example, a lot of pre-release StarCraft screenshots from different development phases exist, but only a handful are in any kind of lossless format, and even less come in original quality (e.g. with the original 8-bit palette).

As I mentioned above, thankfully at least some images were preserved via magazine coverdisks. This is also not perfect because some of magazines would also convert the images to some other format (but usually not JPEG), or paste the magazine logo over each screenshot (grr). In some cases, original quality images can be found on official websites preserved by the Wayback Machine, or, even less often, on fansites. The most amazing find of this kind that I know of is an almost complete set of early MechWarrior II VGA screenshots in original quality preserved by one such site -- everywhere else the same images had the palette entirely screwed up. Thankfully, at least MobyGames allows to preserve such media in the Promo Art section.

One thing that I found most exciting about Duke3D back when I was a kid were the urban environments that seemed so realistic. If you ever played LameDuke you know that there were even more ambitious concepts of cityscape levels, which likely had to be scaled down due to performance optimisation.

However, for a very long time I paid little attention to user maps, and only recently discovered the classic Roch maps that give you sprawling urban environments which I can gladly recommend too try out at least once.

The leap in technology is almost creepy

Now that you mention lost source code... definitely having Daggerfall's code would be awesome.

Dukeworld has the classic user maps, TCs and other content for Duke3D from 1996 onwards. I'm pretty certain it was even possible to download maps sorted by year but now I can't find these folders.

On 7/15/2020 at 7:33 PM, jval said:

Is it version 1.0.1.19 or 1.0.1.20?

1.0.1.20 here too. Windows 8.1, Intel/NVIDIA integrated video card.

On 7/15/2020 at 7:33 PM, jval said:

ROTT is too much more complex compared to GREED

I never realised that, how does it come to be? Greed appears to have some rather advanced features like elevators and sloped floors, making it closer to Doom and Co.? Or is this something engine-wise? Like fog and lightning effects?

1 hour ago, InDOOMnesia said:

So I have just tested the port by myself, and the screen just keeps flickering in-game. Is this my device's problem or is it a bug (considering that this is in alpha state)?

I had the same effect going on, I'm assuming this is how it works until higher resolutions are implemented.

On 7/14/2020 at 1:04 PM, Redneckerz said:

The recent Valorant is one such game:

Haven't heard of this before, watched the trailer (or whatever the first video on their YT channel is). Nice visuals no doubt, but it seems rather inspired by Overwatch? (sorry for getting off-topic)

6 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Environments definitely look video gamey but i honestly aren't bothered by it. It is refreshing that a game does not try to mimic 90s gameplay with 2020's visuals or to mimic 90's gameplay with 90's visuals, but rather, a game that tries to mimic the mid-00's and doing so with an engine with a feature set that is applicable relative to that timeframe there.

The engine presentation is indeed interesting, but the demo gameplay seems rather lackluster, at least it failed to interest me.

I believe it is rather inevitable at this point that an FPS game would be inspired by certain predecessors, and/or that the developers would consciously try to imitate those to any extent. To me, the question is whether the end result is appealing, engaging and fun to play. Quite a few 90s FPS titles including Doom meet these criteria and hence, were and still are widely imitated, with varying results. This is completely separate from today's apparent trend of adding some gimmicky features like a faux "retro" look that in the end, more often than not, simply results in deliberately degrading visual quality.

To me, a game is as good as it plays. Back in the 90s and the early-mid 2000s this was inevitably coupled with the tech side, because a good engine like Carmack's would guarantee optimal performance on the widest range of hardware possible, and allow for building a game with interesting situations for the player and a fast pace. But today it seems that this link between good gameplay and specific tech is not as strong, because you can create a fun FPS that will also look good but does not require cutting-edge hardware or intricate code optimisations to work. My two cents though.

I actually like that medieval scene in the first screenshot of the engine showcase. Kinda reminds me of Cube/Cube 2 Sauerbraten. I have to say I like that bright, cheery aesthetic in said games; but it doesn't seem to go super well with the techbase environments they're making for Perilous Warp.

Edit. BTW, just occurred to me that Cube are pretty much the definition of fast-paced, what do you think?

Judging by the video, the enemy and weapon design is clearly inspired -- or rather, pretty straightforwardly copies -- that from Chasm, but gameplay is rather different (too many identical corridors and very slow-paced). Frankly I don't understand why this is labelled retro in the first place. No idea what engine is it but TBH I don't like the clean, shiny look of absolutely every surface, it just feels artificial and completely unlike any actual period visuals (assuming that the target "retro" aesthetic is that of the late 90s).

On 6/17/2020 at 9:11 PM, FractalBeast said:

That reminds me... I wonder if there are still sites hosting old Westworld concept art for C&C1?

The concept art showed that it was originally planned as a far-more scifi-esque game. Actual combat cyborgs for Nod, instead of those weird hacker-cyborgs stationed in the Temple of Nod (that eventually hack into GDI's Ion Cannon in the Nod campaign), jumpjet troops planned for C&C1 instead of TibSun, and aliens have pretty much always been part of C&C's narrative. WW designed the Scrin during C&C1, even though they later on reworked the design (think the CABAL Walker from FS).

I remember that stuff. I wanted to point you to the image gallery at Nyerguds' site but he does not have the concept art you're talking about. But I found those images here just now, I'm not sure if they are in the original quality though. I don't even know where they originally come from, the First Decade bonus content perhaps?

On another note, here's something funny I just discovered. One of the artists who worked on the Remastered graphics, Benjamin Tay, is making a series of comical animated shorts about C&C units:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSt7dofQxC-pIL9hUT6uX0A/videos

On 6/9/2020 at 8:27 AM, Revae said:

I can look into it. Prolly just gotta delete some patch references or something. Or replace them. 

I gotta make a list of stuff to fix/check.

I just thought that perhaps you could build your own DOS binary? I had the idea of trying the WAD out with the FastDoom DOS port, but apparently you need to specify offsets for data in DeHackEd, because the FastDoom binary is different from The Ultimate Doom v1.9 EXE, and I haven't figured out those offsets yet.

However, I just tried loading the PWAD version of REKKR.WAD with FastDoom 0.3 Ultimate Doom binary (using Freed∞m Phase 1 IWAD as DOOM.WAD), and it still returns the same patch errors (but at least I get to the title screen).

3 hours ago, Gifty said:

It's odd that the popular opinion of Quake is that it's a gimmicky tech demo, when Duke3D's main claim to fame is as a tech demo for gimmicky "press F to pee in a toilet and hear a stolen catchphrase from Evil Dead" level interaction that is funny exactly once.

One of the things that I've always loved about Duke3D are the cityscape areas (and generally locations on Earth as opposed to space stations), and it appears that the developers put a good emphasis on them too if you check out LameDuke and the pre-release screenshots. This is where the game shines IMO, and the amount of interactivity and realism was truly impressive back in the day. Compare urban levels in Duke3D and in the slightly older game on the Build engine, TekWar. Duke does them right (most of the time).

TBH I never heard of that project, but then again I'm more into 90s games so I haven't searched for a Doom3 libre project very thoroughly.

As for a libre Wolf3D, on a second thought, such a project could be useful for an online implementation like this. I remember id Software actually put up a three-episode play-in-browser edition of the game for a twentysomething anniversary but it's been taken down since as it seems.

I vaguely remember Greed being re-released as Assassinators with selectable chapters (and possibly the first one being shareware and/or sold separately for a low price), but I have no idea if this was legit or some bootleg release. Does anyone know anything about it?