MrFlibble

I played the Windows demo of Marathon II quite a while ago, and some Aleph One of the very first game. Yes, there are problems with mouse sensitivity but I managed to adjust it so that it did not bother me too much. The game is playable and there's a lot of story and atmosphere going on. I'd say give it a try, it's a very different experience from Doom even in spite of all the similarities.

Terminator: Resistance? Wikipedia says it's on Xbox One

On 4/17/2020 at 11:53 AM, dr_st said:

No one plays the original Duke Nukem anymore

No, I played it some days ago (haven't played arcade platformers in some time though, and noticed that my skill rusted quite a bit).

Gotta check this out, screenies look very nice!

This thread made me want to play Shaw's Nightmare. If only player movement and overall action were more robust, the game would be way more enjoyable.

On a side note though, I believe a Doom engine game with a similar theme but completely dissimilar designs (and altered weapon/monster behaviours which still don't break PWAD compatibility, like what DOOM 4 VANILLA does) would be actually an interesting thing to explore, and perfectly possible, at least in theory. The game balance and map design would be key though, John Romero has already shown that you can still make stuff that feels fresh and new (but still keeping the "original spirit") even with default textures and decorations.

4 minutes ago, sergeirocks100 said:

while a new mapset would add some variety, that would be straying too far from my goal of making an open source alternative to Doom, and i do allow myself and contributors some liberty with the maps, they just have to have roughly the same areas in roughly the same places as the Doom equivalent maps, my map01 is a good example of this philosophy, it has the same spirit and feel as Doom's map01, and it serves the same purpose, but it has enough different to where legal issues aren't a problem

I'm still not entirely getting why the open source alternative should be this close to the original thing, up to maps having "the same areas" (which I'd think is not always an easy task because of the rather abstract nature of Doom maps).

I wonder if you played Wonderful Doom though? It's an Ultimate Doom megawad that I think pretty much does what you describe above. There are also reimagined episodes like Phobos Revisited and Deimos: Slight Return.

But is there really a reason for an entire stand-alone game to be like this? Don't forget that when Freed∞m was first conceived as a project, obtaining a copy of Doom was gradually becoming more difficult, whereas today it just takes a Steam or GOG.com account to buy one.

24 minutes ago, sergeirocks100 said:

i'm trying to make a project with the same feel, spirit, and rough resemblance to Doom

If this is indeed your true objective then you absolutely do not have to make a carbon copy of Doom. I don't know what others might say, but to me the "feel" of Doom comes not from the layout of the levels, or from the exact weapon and monster stats, but from the gameplay dynamic, the balance between exploration and combat, using strategy and solving puzzles, etc. etc.

Come to think of it, there is so much freedom provided by the default engine and gameplay setup, with all its limitations, you could end up with practically anything that would be as much fun as the original Doom, and as much playable, without it being a direct copy of the source material. Again, look at DOOM 4 VANILLA or REKKR.

What license terms are you using? I don't remember if Freed∞m's license bounds the fork to use the same type of licensing?

If not, then you could perhaps borrow stuff not only from the attic but also from Realm667 (there are not only frankensprites there but also fully original work BTW), and also there's some art that was pitched to Freed∞m but not really used. I distinctly remember Mechadon's armour sprites from some project that were offered to Freed∞m but not used for being too similar to their original Doom counterparts.

That said, I'm not really sure why you want to make a mapset that would be very close to the original Doom/Doom II, with the setting and designs that would be only very slightly different from these games. Copyright and plagiarism concerns aside, wouldn't it be more interesting to create something more different, even if using the same premises of a hellish invasion?

I mean, look at DOOM 4 VANILLA. It's neither the original Doom anymore nor Doom 2016, and introduces new monster behaviours and weapons while keeping within the limits of the original engine. Both gameplay and visuals are different enough for it to feel like a completely new game, even with mapsets originally made for Doom II.

My first port was Doom Legacy, in around 2004. Back then I was a Dune II fan of sorts, and there was an engine recreation project called Dune Legacy, and its author (or one of the authors) also happened to have written a bot for Doom Legacy. Before that, I would only play the DOS version of Doom in Windows 98. Doom Legacy blew my mind, because of all the advanced features, high resolution, etc. I completed the shareware episode with the "cheaty" mouselook and jumping, and a good part of Doom II too :)

Later on I also discovered Doomsday and had used it for a while as the main port of choice. I played a lot of Hexen on that engine.

Since then I've become much more conservative about extra features in source ports, and now prefer Choco/Crispy and PrBoom+, but Doom Legacy still makes me feel very nostalgic.

On 3/28/2020 at 12:08 AM, SladeTheAssassin said:

im assuming. i need copy each game and copy it to a new folder?

 

yes all the games include install file.

 

so its install first not deice?

Hey, sorry for not replying sooner, I had to reinstall my OS in the meantime.

DeICE is the installer. It will install the necessary files on your emulated C: drive. No need to copy anything from the CD manually. You need to run the installer for every game separately -- I'm assuming that you do it via INSTALL.BAT in each case; do not run DEICE.EXE on its own.

That just means SETUP.EXE is a Windows programme and you can't run it in DOSBox.

I think that you will need to run each installer separately, e.g.

cd wolf3d

install

From your description I'm assuming that the WOLF3D folder on the CD contains INSTALL.BAT. If it runs the DeICE installer as expected then have it install the game onto your virtual C: drive that you've mounted.

18 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

for the drive it is d, but unforunately i tried mounting the cd, but it gives me this program is running on a different wiindows or something like that.

Can you post a screenshot of what exactly it says?

18 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

there are korean builds for dosbox?

DOSBox SVN Daum. Hasn't been updated since Jan 2015 (and that latest version is unstable AFAIK). It works, but with shader support in DOSBox ECE it's probably not very useful anymore.

18 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

what do the shaders do?

Shaders do fancy stuff to the screen output. In the case I referred to, they attempt to make the games you run in DOSBox look as if they were displayed on an actual CRT screen. These shaders are mostly ported from console emulators (a very detailed list of those can be found here) where the aim is to emulate a TV screen or an arcade CRT screen, but they're still rather nice.

Hey, I just realised that DOSBox ECE has dropped the pixel perfect patch for now, but GLSL shaders are back, and there are some CRT shaders available.

17 minutes ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

SVN Draw? i didnt know about that output rendering. how many commands there for output?

It's Direct Draw. The SVN Daum is a Korean build that was cool for some time, but has not been updated since early 2015. I still use one version and it works fine for me.

18 minutes ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

the files it comes with are: DEICE, WOLF3D exe file, WOLF3D dat file, Wolf3D.1 and install window batch file. its the same for DOom, QUAKE and etc. the first cd has 19 games: WOLF3D, spear of destiny, hovetank, catacombs 3d and etc. cd 2 hs doom ontent and cd3 has quake. idk about the mission packs.  cd4 has wolf3d, doom and quake for mac versions.

Seems like the usual DeICE installers. You can mount your actual CD drive as CD-ROM in DOSBox to access the files on the CD:

mount d D:\ -t cdrom

(assuming that D: is your actual CD-ROM drive letter)

Hmm, I just checked DOSBox ECE, and for some reason it lags with Wolf3D when running with the surfacenp rendering mode -- the one to go for unless your screen has a vertical resolution of 1200 pixels (in which case you should use openglpp).

You could try SVN Daum instead and use ddraw rendering, just don't take the latest version because it's unstable.

3 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

so i create a cd folder in DOS? cause im using the versions from book of id anthology, the original versions of wolf3d, doom and quake.

I do not know what installers that release uses so I can't help here.

3 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

now i see why people use gog for dosbox and etc. makes sense now.

The configuration of the DOSBox versions bundled with GOG releases is often suboptimal, and sometimes does not work outright -- e.g. the 3dfx version of Tomb Raider refused to work for me so I had to make a correct setup on my own.

16 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

HDD1? i didnt know there has to be that folder. what is the -freesize 600 file for?

It doesn't have to, but this is a useful way to organize your emulated DOS environment :)

If you simply drag-and-drop a DOS EXE onto DOSBox, it will mount the actual folder where the EXE is located as the virtual C: drive. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but there are two points to take into account:

a. on a real DOS machine, it was rather unlikely for any programme to be installed to, and then launched from, the root directory of a physical disk drive. Since emulation strives to be as close to the real machine setup as possible, it is generally better to stick with what would be the case on real hardware.

b. this kind of setup is clearly not useful if you are running an installer.

As for the -freesize 600 parameter, it simply sets the free size of the emulated HDD to 600 MiB. Some installers check available free space on a drive, and might not like whatever DOSBox reports as the default in this case (100 MiB? don't remember) so by setting it manually to some large figure you guarantee that the installers won't have such an issue.

17 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

i have created folder Mount C C:\Dos and then add two separate folders? one for wolf3d.conf and for hdd1?

 

ok, i found the autoexe part in dosbox conf file. i deleted part and i make a copy and put it in wolf3d folder? i have dosbox installed in programs filesx86.

I quite recommend not to install DOSBox via the installer routine that comes with the vanilla release, and certainly not in the Program Files folder.

Get DOSBox ECE (Enhanced Community Edition -- it has quite a few useful additions absent from the main branch) and just unzip it anywhere you want. My suggestion is to put it in the same DOS folder, like this:

C:\DOS\ -- this is your main folder for everything DOS related

C:\DOS\DOSBox\ -- this is where you put DOSBox ECE (or any other build you might want to use)

C:\DOS\hdd1\ -- the folder you'll mount as the emulated C: drive

(optional) C:\DOS\cd\ -- the folder you can mount as the virtual CD drive (mount d c:\dos\cd -t cdrom)

For simplicity's sake, keep your conf files in the same folder as DOSBox.exe (which would be C:\DOS\DOSBox\ in the above example).

17 hours ago, SladeTheAssassin said:

i dint know you had to have dosbox conf in the shortcut, lol. well good to know.

By default, DOSBox uses the dosbox.conf file that is either in the same folder as DOSBox.exe, or in the current user's special folder created by the installer. But at any time, you can specify other conf files you wish to use by running DOSBox.exe with the -conf parameter. If the conf file is somewhere outside the DOSBox folder, it makes sense to enclose the path in quotes, e.g.

DOSBox.exe -conf "C:\Program Files\GOG Games\DOOM\doom_single_player.conf"

(completely made that up just now)

For example, most DOS games sold by GOG use a bunch of conf files instead of just one, because it is easier to configure different setups that way (e.g. if a game can run in the software rendering mode or in 3dfx mode).

On 3/23/2020 at 5:15 AM, Redneckerz said:

Hold the executable over dosbox. Make sure Doom2.wad and exe are in the same physical directory as Doomit.

I would really not recommend running DOS programmes through DOSBox via the drag-and-drop method. There are just a few commands that you need to know to navigate around the DOS environment, these being:

dir -- list current directory's contents

cd -- change directory

If you haven't already, make yourself a folder that will be always mounted as your virtual HDD for DOSBox to run programmes from. Can be anywhere you wish on your real HDD. Just add the necessary MOUNT lines in the [autoexec] part of dosbox.conf (at the very end of that file), e.g.

mount c D:\DOS\hdd1\ -freesize 600
C:

Have a TEMP directory on your virtual HDD where you'll drop temporary files like installers.

E.g. let's say you downloaded the shareware installer for Wolf3D. Unzip the contents into the TEMP folder from your host OS, then start DOSBox. If you mounted the virtual C: drive like shown above then it will switch to the C: drive from the default Z: and await further input. Type:

cd temp
install

The installer will then ask the drive you want the game to be installed to (C: in this case), and create a new folder, WOLF3D, on the drive, where it will be installed.

Next time you start DOSBox, to run the game, type:

cd wolf3d
wolf3d

Alternatively, you can put the above lines into the [autoexec] section of the DOSBox config file so that they get executed automatically. A good way to create a desktop shortcut to launch the game straight away, but of course you'll need a separate config file for that.

If you have multiple games installed and want shortcuts for each, you can have different config files with only the [autoexec] section while keeping one main configuration for actual DOSBox settings. In this case, the shortcut must contain the following line:

D:\DOS\DOSBox\dosbox.exe -conf dosbox.conf wolf3d.conf

(assuming that DOSBox is installed into D:\DOS\DOSBox\)

Just delete the [autoexec] part from the main dosbox.conf and put it into a separate file called wolf3d.conf:

mount c D:\DOS\hdd1\ -freesize 600
C:
cd wolf3d
wolf3d

You can have configuration files like this for every game you want.

10 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

@RevaeSorry for this weird question. Is there a name list for the monsters? I'm going to do videos for the WAD, so I want to refer them more easily and precisely. Thanks.

Of course there is, it's right at the official site.

Wait a minute, some of these are not really named. Well then, the list compiled by @TheNoob_Gamer from the DEH file does the job then (since some names match those on the site's page, like husk and grotesque).

AFAIK, back in the 90s the phrase "Doom clone" served as a more or less of a catch-all umbrella term, for the lack of a better definition while the genre was still in its infancy. Here's a neat article to get started on that subject

But since so many games from back then that would attempt to either mimic Doom or make something original inspired by it, actually hardly surpass Wolfenstein 3-D when it comes to engine capabilities (while some have more advanced, fully 3D engines), I tend to call "true Doom clones" those games that are indeed more similar to Doom in engine capabilities, level design and gameplay. All of this is of course also rather subjective because some aspects of gameplay and design do not really need to take advantage of height variation and/or non-orthogonal walls to be similar to Doom. And come to think of it, very few games are literally carbon copies of Doom anyway (with Shaw's Nightmare probably being a notable exception), even if they run on the same engine, like Heretic, Chex Quest or HacX.

Out of the 90s titles that I know, I would list the following as "true Doom clones", based on similarity of engine limitations and core gameplay concepts: that is, 2.5D engine with sprite objects and height variation, and a focus on combat.  I'm excluding medieval fantasy games and non-FPS genres like action RPG, so Amulets & Armor is not on the list. The "big three" Build engine games do not get a mention either as they try to go noticeably farther than to just "clone" Doom.

• Star Wars: Dark Forces -- amply discussed above, notable for a mission-based approach to level design and a great deal of variety in locations compared to Doom
• Powerslave a.k.a. Exhumed -- personally it's the closest thing to a Doom clone for me, gameplay and setting wise. The underlying version of the Build engine used here was a bit more advanced than the devs apparently realised because it supports sloped floors and other neat features we're used to from other Build games but these are notably absent from the official levels, making this generally very close to Doom in look and feel
• Eradicator -- I'd say this one is closer to Duke Nukem 3D and other "big" Build engine games (more interactivity with the environment, sloped floors etc.) but notably different from them because of the setting; progression is also heavily mission based, and the default game view is from the third person
• the Marathon trilogy -- only Durandal first appeared on PC with the other two games originally having been Mac exclusives. The series definitely goes in a different direction, just like Pathways Into Darkness compared to Wolf3D. It's not just terminals, it's the whole pacing, narrative and atmosphere that is notably different. Still, the game is pretty close to Doom and no doubt inspired by it
• ZPC -- running on the Marathon 2 engine, this one is based on works of a prominent British underground artist and has a distinct stylish look, but overall felt a lot like Doom II to me in terms of level design, albeit with a slower pace of combat much like Marathon itself
• MadSpace -- uses portals to create "non-Euclidean spaces" in levels, and has some novelty gimmicks like dual-wielding different weapons
• Radix: Beyond the Void -- very similar to Doom except you're piloting a fighter craft kinda like in Descent. The first release had the craft cruise around all the time without being able to hover in one place except by using a cheat, but the 2.0 release made movement more like Doom with a jetpack
• Rebel Moon -- AFAIK this is somewhat like Dark Forces with mission-based level design; it's rare because IIRC it only had an OEM release bundled with some hardware
• Rebel Moon Rising -- this is the public sequel that I have played (the demo), feels like something between Dark Forces and Marathon 2; very Doom like engine-wise
• Mars 3D -- rather widely known by now I believe, and pretty neat overall as far as I can tell
• Quiver -- a very close imitation of the Doom engine, with some advanced features added for the Pentium version. Some interesting ideas like alien weapons with a Cast From Hitpoints type attack, but monster design and combat is rather different, with most enemies being Glass Cannons that can either one-hit you or steadily draw down health through attrition, but individually get insta-blasted by almost every weapon available. I found it interesting for being a small team project with the engine having been written by one guy if the readme is to be believed. The engine itself is rather robust and works well, at least in DOSBox
• Island Peril -- never played this one but plenty of videos and reviews available. Theoretically the concept is rather interesting but the execution appears to be so-so. Enemies and weapons closely track those of Doom as far as I can tell
• Alien Cabal -- the first level attempts to imitate a city, everything else is an underground alien base IIRC
• CyberMage: Darklight Awakening -- this one mixes in some adventure and RPG elements in a cyberpunk setting; tech-wise rather similar to Doom as far as I can tell

There are also a few games which I'm not sure of their engines are 2.5D or true 3D, including Last Rites and XS. I have also excluded stuff that is apparently capable of height variation but is otherwise notably different, like Pie in the Sky engine games (they are mostly very Wolf3D-ish gameplay wise) or The Hidden Below.

On 3/8/2020 at 1:39 AM, Redneckerz said:

I think you discovered through the same means as i did (Werta Best?) and its really interesting to see this one.

I'm familiar with WERTA from another forum, but I think the first video of Kaos that I found was in this stream:

On 3/8/2020 at 3:01 PM, InDOOMnesia said:

Is it accurate or can it actually be run without setting the CPU cycles manually?

Just put the right cycles in dosbox.conf. You'll need to edit one line:

cycles=max 80% limit 26800

This will cap emulated CPU cycles at 26800, which is supposedly a rough equivalent of a 486, as opposed to forcing a fixed amount of cycles for the entirety of the DOSBox session. I believe limiting cycles like this results in better performance.

Personally I don't usually have individual .conf files for every game I run in DOSBox, by default I use auto 7800 70% limit 26800 which is enough to most games but does not switch to max 26800 cycles if a game runs in real mode. BTW, it's a good idea to use DOSBox ECE, not vanilla DOSBox, but actually I found that an old build of SVN Daum works just fine for me.

Good luck!

Last year I came across a YouTube channel that streamed various obscure DOS-era first-person shooters, and a game called Kaos caught my attention, as it stood out as something more inspired and aesthetically consistent than many other Doom ripoffs that were made back in the day.

Here's a video (from another channel) showing some pre-recorded demos:

The game was developed by a small team from Italy. Apparently they initially intended to sell it via the shareware model but that never materialized, and in 2003 the DOS binaries, level editor all game data and the entire source code were released as freeware under the GPL license, both online and on the coverdisk of an issue of the Italian gaming magazine The Games Machine.

Technically speaking, the game engine is closer to something akin to Rise of the Triad or ShadowCaster than Doom, i.e. there are only orthogonal walls at fixed height. However it allows for both indoor and outdoor areas within the same level, outdoor weather effects like rain, non-passable water and destructible objects (e.g. potted plants and barrels). There are six weapons and five enemy types, the final release comes with several complete levels but there are up to 13 single-player level slots plus some multiplayer levels. Multiplayer is split-screen only AFAIK.

I got a favourable impression of Kaos first and foremost because it seems to capture that spirit and aesthetics of 90s shareware games. It's simple but functional, the palette has nice soft colours and the monster sprites and other art have a certain hand-drawn style to them. The core gameplay elements of an FPS are all present, and I wonder what a competent level designer could do with the level editor. I have no idea how hard it would be to port this game to modern systems though, even with the source available. But it runs seamlessly in DOSBox as it is.

The entire game and source may be downloaded here.

As a bit of trivia, apparently (I had to plough through the supplied documentation and notes with Google translate since my knowledge of Italian is nonexistent), at the initial stages the team intended to create a "hobo simulator" with their engine, but eventually settled for a rather simple Doom like game.

7 hours ago, taufan99 said:

@MrFlibble initial PC release using the Build engine (which is version 5, rendering it unmoddable within the Big 3's Build editors).

The fact that it does not have in-game saves (you can only load at the beginning of the last level you saved your game at) and hi-res mode similar to the Big 3 also contributes to that.

Well, these concerns can be put aside now that there's the PCExhumed port (and before that, CTPAX-Cheater's utilities that allowed to run the game in higher res and added some other QOL things). Also PS turned out to be not that unmoddable, with a short community add-on recently released.

BTW, I just remembered Liquidator, the bootleg Russian Build engine game. Never played it though, but it's a complete overhaul/TC of Duke3D, and even had a legit sequel which AFAIK ran on its own engine (or did it?).

Ah, this sure brings back memories! I grew up during the time when these were sold everywhere, but since I did not have a CD-ROM capable PC for quite a while back then, I scarcely bought any bootleg releases myself. I did have a compilation of StarCraft + Brood War + selected add-ons though, which introduced me to the excellent Antioch Chronicles custom campaign. The cover boasted a complete Russian translation of StarCraft in verse -- no idea why anyone would do that but the CD actually did not contain any poetry whatsoever. But the StarCraft translation (luckily Brood War was in English) did make occasional references to Kin-Dza-Dza which I did not get for not having watched that movie (a classmate explained them to me) :)

I also had one of those "250 games" compilations, which I bought, already in the early 2000s, for the sake of getting Duke Nukem 3D. It also had Shadow Warrior (both with bad quality "guy next door reads lines" type Russian voice over but otherwise in English), Doom shareware v1.2 with a good hilarious Russian dub (you can get it here as a PWAD BTW), Quake shareware, Chasm, an incomplete version of Hitman plus Age of Empires, Dune II (yes, that's how I got into Dune II), some other action-arcade stuff (I definitely remember MageSlayer), a few original Russian games mostly for DOS, and a lot of Windows puzzle and poker shareware titles, some of them cracked. Interestingly, the cover featured art from Tribes 2 which was not on the disk (I only discovered what it was much later).

As far as I remember, most pirate bootlegs from mid-90s were either single releases, which may or may not have been translated into Russian, or compilations that mostly contained ripped versions of games with "non-essential" elements like music and voice-overs cut out to save space. Basically, the idea was to cram as much content onto a single CD as possible, similar to the US "shovelware" releases but with pirated content. AFAIK, most common types were genre compilations (e.g. arcade games, strategy games, action games etc.) and/or games with add-ons. This included both official and unofficial stuff, but save for the unlicensed copy of the main game, the add-ons were pretty much the same fare as the !Zone CDs released by WizardWorks, or numerous other 90s bootleg compilations aimed to profit off the popularity of games that supported custom levels (e.g. recently I found this stuff via the Wayback Machine).

Earlier compilations (from early to mid 90s) could contain scores of full games because the size was much smaller, including registered versions of popular shareware titles by Apogee, id, Epic MegaGames and the like. These were straight downloaded from foreign warez sites (Razor cracks and the like) and usually not translated.

The CD covers are a separate story. They were often completely unrelated to any official art of the games included on the CD and were purely an aesthetic choice of the compilation's authors. Fantasy or sci-fi themed illustrations like those by Boris Vallejo were seemingly quite popular. Here's a nice example: a Russian bootleg release of Daggerfall from 1997 (the translation is hilarious).

Sometimes, the CDs included unofficial add-ons or TCs created by Russian developers but the only thing that comes to my mind ATM is something for Warcraft III -- I don't remember the title but it was sold on CDs, maybe even released by a major pirate publisher of the time. I never played it so I do not know the extent to which the game was modded. This is not the the detriment of legit Russian-made add-on campaigns for Warcraft III, like During the Dark Portal.

Oh and BTW, did you know about Warcraft 2000, the unofficial sequel to Warcraft II by GSC Game World, the then-future creators of Cossacks? Just watch the intro movie.

Pirate translations of games were a mixed bag (that is, mostly quite bad), but some have become classic, like the СПК translation of Warcraft II.

Which content delivery platforms are you targeting BTW? Steam, GOG, itch.io?

On a separate note, talking about Build games not mentioned in the poll, I've always found Powerslave to be closer/more similar to Doom than other titles, except it feels much darker to me for some reason. As a matter of fact, I would name PS among the very few actual "Doom clones" in the narrow sense of the word, that is having similar mechanics, pace and engine capabilities (as opposed to a relatively large number of 2.5D FPSs from the era that barely surpassed Wolf3D engine-wise -- 90 degree walls and stuff).

Granted, the level design philosophy in PS is markedly different from that of Doom, not only because of the Ancient Egyptian theme with aliens mixed in, but also due to the console-type checkpoint progression system. Yet most of the weapons, monsters and items would feel very much at home in Doom levels. For example, the Magmantis monster -- a huge centipede-like creature that pops out of lava pools and hurls fireballs at the player -- would probably make a neat addition to E3.