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MrFlibble

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Posts posted by MrFlibble


  1. On 6/14/2020 at 10:57 AM, Artman2004 said:

    Are there other projects that try to make a free and open source version of an FPS?

    Technically, the Marathon games are free and open source, but the game data is still proprietary (IIRC) albeit free to use.

     

    OpenArena is a free game in the footsteps of Quake III Arena but I'm not sure if you can just use the game data files with the original Q3 engine.

     

    Transfusion is open source (Quake engine) and has the official license to use Blood assets, but again those are proprietary and not free at all outside of this one project.

     

    There were also projects similar to Freed∞m for Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior which were C&D's by 3D Realms before they got anywhere, and I think someone wanted to do something with Descent/Descent II but IIRC this was abandoned because of certain complications with how the game data is handled, or something (?; or maybe a lack of interest). I think it never went beyond making a data file with some placeholder and HUD textures. The project page is still alive though.

     

    My notes suggest there was another project for Descent called Flight Back. It was part of the Open Descent Foundation, some more info can be found here

     


  2. 3 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

    Which was overpowered as hell, but it was Nod's only reliable defence against GDI's infantry+titan rush in multiplayer. It is one of the reasons why only few folks played Firestorm multiplayer and most played standard TS multiplayer because everyone played as GDI in Firestorm (well even in standard TS, the majority played as GDI but there were a few Nod players too).

    Well, it shows then that I never played any multiplayer :) In the original Nod campaign, artillery made everything easy peasy. I think I replayed both TS campaigns at least once if not more times, and would always get the feeling that the features were not used to their full potential. In some aspects, the visuals are more advanced than in StarCraft (my main RTS infatuation for a long time) the dynamic lights alone are miles ahead. But at the same time there are oddities like the infantry "electrocution" animation that is taken straight from Red Alert even though infantry sprites are about twice as tall, and odd missions that aim for depth and complexity but the execution falls short.

     

    The Nod mission where you need to retrieve the Tacitus, one of my least favourite ones, there's the orange Nod AI that is supposed to represent Vega's forces, and actually there is no need for the player to touch them at all, but once I managed to capture some of their buildings but it still got me nowhere because the mission is timed and you lose if GDI remove the Tacitus from the crash site. So the entire action just boils down to walking your units past GDI patrols to the downed alien craft. I even suspected there was a bug in that mission and something did not work as the devs expected but now I think it's just that the design turned out to be more interesting than its execution.


  3. BTW, with TS I always felt that Firestorm ended up being the polished version embodying what was intended from the start. Too bad the campaigns are short and no more mission selection. But they used the scripting potential to the full extent (no more of those in-mission dialogues with like only half the lines having voice-overs), the missions are arguably more interesting, and no more super-accurate Nod artillery that was such a game breaker it felt like a cheat.


  4. On 6/12/2020 at 5:47 PM, seed said:

    Yes, GDX incorporates code from the Blood Alpha as well, but it's not much I don't think since the game changed massively since then.

    I think that the problem was not in the presence of the alpha code per se (I gather it was mostly used as reference for analysing released Blood binaries, rather than incorporated into GDX code directly), rather that using leaked code in such development is incompatible with the notion of clean room reverse engineering. The EDuke32 team has its standards and they do adhere to them.

     

    As for the OP's question, it occurred to me that Duke3D did not fail, it's just that Doom is The Simpsons of 2.5D first-person shooters, and Duke is Family Guy (and Heretic is Futurama of course).


  5. Am I the only one unhappy with the quality of upscaled FMVs? They were made from PSX videos which are in MPEG format, and feature rather noticeable JPEG artifacts.

     

    I wonder what the FMVs could look like if they were upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel. After all, they were aiming at photorealism when making the FMVs.


  6. 16 hours ago, seed said:

    not to mention that some that did had it in legal limbo as well, where a developer released it but it's legality is highly questionable. Funny that it was since merged into GDX as it added support for that game (name is skipping right now... ).

    That would be Capstones games, Witchaven and TekWar, released by developer Les Bird. The code is no official.

     

    Additionally, GDX's implementation of Blood is reportedly partially based on the leaked alpha source code for that game, which is of even more dubious standing.

     

    The Duke4.net team was from the start rather supportive of GDX ports and provided forums space and even (IIRC) file hosting, even in spite of concerns about the grey area components and elements in the project.

    14 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

    Regarding the original question, yes, it is mainly the way the engine presented its features to the mapper. It's rather sub-par. Where Doom made sure that the important things like textures, thing numbers and light levels are done in a mapping friendly way, the Build engine has gone out of its way to present all its data in the form the engine internally needs it, i.e. textures by number, sprites only have a texture number as identifier and the light level is exposed directly in the form the engine internally works with what it calls "light" (it makes even less sense than what Doom did)

    Duke also had the problem that it very, very poorly exposed its engine features, like map actions etc.

     

    Doom was the total opposite, it made modding very easy and more importantly, easy to learn!

    In this respect, I find it interesting that Duke3D introduced the CON scripting language -- which from what I hear is rather simple and user-friendly (I only messed with it like once to fix a thing in the Platoon TC), -- and IIRC the shareware episode documentation even encouraged users to make and distribute their own CON mods. And the user isn't really limited in what can be done, as custom CON scripts are underlying all the new expanded features in mods like Alien Armageddon (making a mod more or less independent of any particular build of the port's binary executable).


  7. 1 minute ago, Gez said:

    Yeah, it was basically a Dune II remake in the C&C engine

    I've always had a bit of trouble of thinking this was, because it's more like a mod that uses some concepts and names from Dune II.

     

    For example, the Siege Tank in Dune II is a heavy tank similar to either C&C Medium Tank or RA1 Heavy Tank; but in Dune 2000 it's essentially Mobile Artillery; the Missile Tank works completely unlike its Dune II counterpart, and so do most of the infantry guys anyway. A later patch even added grenadiers to House Atreides.

     

    I understand that a carbon copy of Dune II units wouldn't have worked because the balance in Dune II is way more primitive compared to the armour types vs. weapon types/warheads system introduced by C&C. But they could have at least have taken a more original approach instead of just repainting the C&C ensemble cast of units into Dune II House colours :)


  8. Have you considered making custom builds of the IWADs? There are some extra textures in the default build which are likely not used in any of the PWADs that you provide anyway (like the AquaTex set), but still take up space.

     

    Also perhaps you'd add the Nukeptyle/Lavamander boss? (it is my understanding that it kind of went in a limbo in the main branch) and maybe some other alternate variations of certain sprites and stuff that are lying around?


  9. 17 hours ago, Revae said:

    Are you loading freedoom first? I've never used boom or mbf doom.

    I can confirm the same results with DOS MBF + freedoom1.wad too. IIRC I've encountered this error before with other PWADS (I've used MBF +DOSBox for quite some time), this generally means that the PWAD is incompatible with the legacy DOS versions, but I do not remember the reasons.

     

    IIRC some of the modern WAD compiling tools skip certain internal components when building a WAD, which is okay with modern source ports but might cause incompatibility issues because older ports expect those lumps to be there.

     

    But a quick Googling of the exact message above it seems to indeed have something to do with patches and textures:

    https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/1496661

    https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2124722

     

    17 hours ago, Revae said:

    dehacked -save current.deh -reload -load rekkr.deh
    doom -file rekkr.wad -config MOUSE.CFG
    dehacked -reload -load current.deh
    del current.deh

    You don't need to use DeHackED like that with MBF, it can do the -deh command like any other port :)


  10. On 6/7/2020 at 1:10 AM, Gez said:

    What would be interesting would be Dune 2000's game code. If it doesn't use the first generation C&C engine, then it's one that's really incredibly similar.

    I've always thought of Dune 2000 as of essentially a glorified RA1 mod. It stills sticks to the 640x400 screen resolution mode, although 16-bit colour is now supported. The differences are mostly cosmetic and amount to debris flying off from explosions. In every other aspects, Dune 2000 is even less original than  the first two C&C titles combined.

     

    Also, from what I remember, Dune 2000 was essentially intended to fill the pipeline as the release of Tiberian Sun was pushed back (and still the game came out half-baked in some aspects). If this is correct, they pretty much had to use the existing C&C/RA1 codebase while TS was being written more or less from scratch.


  11. 1 hour ago, sergeirocks100 said:

    i blurred some of them on purpose to try and get rid of the sharp edges on the shadows

    Mind that the blurring may not look good in-game, just take Freedm's doors for comparison. You might need to manually accentuate the shapes on the doors, plus try adding a little noise. There's a good function called HSV noise in GIMP (IIRC it's in the Effects -> Noise menu), it can produce nice results with default settings.

     

    UPD: BTW, adding noise can be rather effective in dampening JPEG-like artifacts that we discussed earlier.


  12. Slightly off-topic (but still sorta relevant I guess), I mentioned testing Open Quartz data with the demo of X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse, and after you mentioned the -customgamedirname1 parameter in DarkPlaces (which I think is how I ran the OQ+ data back then) I tried this out with the same demo too (without any external data sets). With this I noticed that for some reason, Quakespasm overrides some of the sounds from the X-Men demo PAK file with Open Quartz sounds, such as what seems to be most sound effects of the enemies. Indeed the X-Men game appears to use some default Quake sounds such as door and elevator noises, but I thought that the sound effects of whatever custom game data should take precedence if not missing.

     

    I run the demo with the command

    quakespasm -game xmendemo %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 +map start

    UPD: Nevermind, I was wrong, it simply plays the missing sounds, no overriding of base data here.


  13. 5 hours ago, andrewj said:

    Well the reply on the OA forums was not encouraging though, seems leilei would rather the OQ+ stuff (etc) just fade into history, and I will respect that.

     

    Thanks for asking anyway! I suspected that this was the case, it's a shame to see the project go because I liked it, but leilei will probably never go back to it because of OA development. Others have found their own way, thankfully :)

    2 hours ago, andrewj said:

    P.S. forgot to say that I could run it in Darkplaces without any additional data using the following command:

    
    darkplaces -customgamedirname1 lq1

     

    Thanks!

     

    BTW, I'm unable to access http://www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces, is it just me or what? UPD: Just me, 'cause I can still save live pages via the Wayback Machine.


  14. It seems that Raze does not yet recognise the Wanton Destruction GRP.

     

    Yesterday I tested Blood shareware with the latest version of nBlood. I got to the main menu after renaming SHARE000.ART to TILES000.ART but when I tried to start Episode 1 it crashed and reported "Map file is wrong version" in the log.

     

    Raze doesn't seem to recognize Blood shareware data at all at this point, even if SHARE000.ART is renamed to TILES000.ART.


  15. 4 hours ago, Jon said:

    And there’s already OpenQuartz. 

    OpenQuartz is effectively abandoned, or at least has not been updated for over ten years (more if you don't count OQ2). That was essentially my point for bumping this thread.

     

    OQPlus was going in a good direction, but I think I can quite understand leileilol's decision to freeze the project. Too bad the SVN was taken down, I believe there could be others who'd take up the banner? I mean, isn't that one of the advantages of open source software, so that anyone can continue to work on a project as much as they please?


  16. The ATM machine secret in the first level works, and the remote screen for the toy car area is rendered at high resolution, not pixellated. Also in Raze, coolie corpses stay as they are if they do not spawn a ghost, whereas in VoidSW (and in vanilla SW too) the upper half still disappears.

     

    But these are differences compared to an x64 build from 22 May, while I haven't yet tested the current from 28 May. I guess it's a good idea to switch to the 32-bit version.

     

    UPD: I just confirmed that apart from the ATM machine secret bug which has been fixed in the 28 May build, the other differences remain.


  17. BTW, speaking of Quake, maybe someone can explain something to me.

     

    A while ago I was avidly collecting all information I could find on free/FOSS games and found CodeRED: Battle for Earth and CodeRED: The Martian Chronicles, which are single-player campaigns in the same setting as Alien Arena (IIRC the latter actually being a multiplayer arena spin-off of CodeRED). Anyhoo, I did play both these single-player titles, as well as several early builds of Alien Arena (my machine back then would not handle more recent editions), and even "accidentally" completed the entire Martian Chronicles as I was making screenshots from MobyGames.

     

    I have to say I actually had moderately high expectations for these titles, based on the apparent long-lasting popularity of Alien Arena, but much to my surprise both Battle for Earth and The Martian Chronicles featured rather dull, basic level design that hardly did justice to the engine the games are running on. TMC is literally made almost entirely of straight hallways and corridors with 90-degree turns (complete with an intro ride that was apparently inspired by the opening of Half-Life but trapped in a rectangular cage traversing, you guessed it, straight corridors with 90-degree turns). This is even more puzzling when you consider that even the alpha builds of Alien Arena that I tried out had way more inspired level design with areas that actually resembled places, or hinted at purposeful arrangement of elements and not just walking from one room to the next.

     

    Some time later I discovered Eternal War: Shadows of Light which runs on the modified Quake engine and is actually not bad, but the level design had the same tendencies of straight corridors, rectangular rooms and 90-degree turns sometimes partially obscured by decorations but almost always contributing to dull, uneventful gameplay. This is especially regrettable considering that the monster roster in Eternal War could easily make it into a spiritual successor to Heretic with a premise that is actually rather original.

     

    I understand that both cases probably simply boil down to a lack of level designing skill. But I really wish there were projects like the above with better execution. Did all talent simply go into other directions? (e.g. there's no lack of FOSS arena shooters similar to Quake III Arena) Or is Quake good enough on its own not to be distracted by attempts to make a standalone game? I mean, there's a good selection of Doom stand-alone TCs/games, from Harmony to Rise of the Wool Ball to Nocturne in Yellow, whereas the Quake/2 engine legacy offers rather disappointing examples like the ones above. Or am I simply not familar enough with the Quake modding scene?

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