ENEMY!!!

I remember the glowing reviews that Quake 1 and 2 got in PC Zone magazine here in the UK, and both reviews compared them to Doom. The Quake 1 review said something along the lines of, "'But that sounds like Doom', you might say to your mummy. And it's true, Quake is Doom", and the Quake 2 review finished with, "It's Doom III and it's brilliant". I remember disagreeing with this because although many of the gameplay mechanics, weapons, powerups and to a lesser extent the enemies are pretty similar, I always thought playing Quake 1 was a very different experience from playing the Doom games, and that Quake 2 was a different experience again. I got into Quake 1 multiplayer very quickly after it came out, but until 2021 I never really got into the singleplayer because of the usual criticisms: not enough colour, more generic enemy roster, less satisfying weapons. However, I regard Dimension of the Machine (one of the new episodes in the remaster) as one of the most enjoyable episodes that I've played for any first person shooter, and I've had a much greater appreciation for Quake 1 ever since, especially with the current mod scene producing more varied maps and encounters with the aid of the likes of Arcane Dimensions, Alkaline and Makkon's textures.

I also noticed that at least a few of Amuscaria's recently released Hell-Forged 2 resources appeared in this WAD to good effect. I was impressed with them when I tried them out upon release, it's good to see them already featuring in new releases so soon after they were released.

I'll join the increasingly impressive list of +1s for MyHouse.pk3. It's a while since I've been anywhere near this hooked and immersed by a newly released Doom map (and I've played some good ones recently, so this is saying a lot).

Here as promised is the subway train station. It still needs a bit of work with detailing and adding appropriate sounds when the train moves, but I think it's in a strong enough state to be worth sharing the demonstration of it. It's capable of carrying monsters and the weapons that monsters drop after you kill them. I generated the curves using Ultimate Doom Builder's model export functionality.

I've been progressing on a subway station, which will hopefully eventually be part of a map, but for now I'm mainly testing out the ability to save 3D floors out to OBJ models and import the models using Ultimate Doom Builder, and FishyClockwork's 3D moving platforms. All using Makkon's Quake textures also.

I made Makkon's Quake textures (which were the main basis for the Quake Brutalist Jam) available in a Doom-compatible format at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AZFNL7bzGAQ7wHQ0CM233xaJnfWLiK9z (see d_makkon_concrete.pk3). It works in GZDoom and K8Vavoom, though I'm not sure about its compatibility with other ports as it requires the pk3 structure and long texture names and is not converted to the Doom palette. The thread is at https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/117796-amazing-texture-pack-makkon/

Just done a quick update to the industrial set (same link as before) as Makkon did a quick update which added in the train tracks and some lights and conveyor belts. In the meantime, here's a screenshot of a subway train using these textures, which I generated using the aforementioned method of exporting 3D floors out to OBJ models and importing them back into Ultimate Doom Builder. Some compromises have to be made for collisions. While full-on passenger trains are possible in K8Vavoom using 3D polyobjects, GZDoom's horizontally moving platforms rely on models that, if solid, only allow an equilateral collision radius, which means that creating a full-on passenger train with walls would require me to create a large number of models for the walls to simulate realistic collision. However, trains like this one with semi-realistic collision are feasible, using just a few models for the base that the player/monsters/items stand on. In Quake, it is possible to create more elaborate trains that move only in a straight line, but anything with rotation has the same collision-related limitations as GZDoom trains. However, one area where Doom outperforms Quake is with its scrolling textures. Makkon provided a number of textures for conveyor belts because Quake doesn't have scrolling textures, meaning you have to generate frames individually and cycle through them. But in Doom I found that it's as simple as applying one of those textures to a sloped floor and setting the sector special to "scroll in X direction" and you have a seamless conveyor belt (good for creating, say, subway station escalators). The subway style station still needs a bit of work before I upload a video showing it off, but I've been quite pleased with my progress so far.

I've updated the latest textures into my Google Drive so you can play around with the new industrial set as well as the updated tech, nature, concrete and the roads in the urban set. Attempting trains will have to wait until next weekend now though, I didn't get around to it during the weekend just gone. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AZFNL7bzGAQ7wHQ0CM233xaJnfWLiK9z

Many thanks from me also - this is particularly well timed because I've recently restarted Doom mapping based on an unreleased gameplay mod of mine that draws heavily upon Hell-Forged and Xaser's related Eriguns. I had thought some of these would fit perfectly but assumed that it would be several years before the resources became publicly released. But today, here we are, and sure enough, many of them are a pretty ideal fit. Having played a lot of Quake recently I appreciate the nods to Quake monsters in several cases, such as the the way Wights behave a lot like Quake's zombies, and the Pain Elemental-style monsters that release minions have a lot of potential to be more effective and less annoying than Pain Elementals themselves. Good luck with your artistic endeavours while you take your break from Hell-Forged Episode 2.

Makkon has done another texture update. There's a brand new complete Industrial set and some updates to the tech, nature (snow!) and concrete sets. There's also the beginnings of a new Urban set which currently has roads, road markings and manholes etc. The textures have been released more quickly and in a less finished state than originally planned so that they can be used in the upcoming Quake Explore Jam (which has limited combat and focuses on exploration). Thus, over the next few days I have a bit of updating to do with the Google Drive uploads. Again, it's in my own interest to do this quickly as I have to create these pk3 files to be able to use them myself for my own mapping. As the industrial set contains train chassis textures, I plan to try this weekend to see if I can get a subway style train working in GZDoom using FishyClockwork's 3D moving platforms and the OBJ model method (creating a few models representing the train in Ultimate Doom Builder, exporting them to OBJ and then importing them in as a 3D platform). I recently tried to create a subway style train in Quake and it works fine for trains moving in straight lines but it gets very fiddly very quickly if you try to rotate the train because Quakespasm-derived ports don't support true rotation. FishyClockwork's sample maps suggest that subway style trains could well be more feasible in GZDoom than in Quake. (I already demonstrated a couple of years ago that proper subway trains work quite well in the K8Vavoom port, so it wouldn't be a first for Doom).

Episode 1: E1M3, Toxin Refinery. I really like the secrets in this one, the hidden Supercharge, the yellow key secret and the route to the secret level. For me, E1M2, E1M5 and E1M7 are almost as good. Episode 2: E2M4, Deimos Lab, mainly for its atmosphere which I found genuinely scary when I played it for the first time. E2M2 and E2M6 are close behind (again E2M6 was one of the scarier maps when I first played it, and E2M2 has the iconic crate maze done well). Episode 3: E3M6, Mt Erebus. Not sure exactly why, probably because it was a bit different and worked well, and it can be scary in a good way having tons of Cacodemons being released around the map as you progress and being unsure of when they'll pounce. E3M4 is a close second. Episode 4: E4M6, Against Thee Wickedly, mainly for the atmosphere, architecture and progression. E4M2 and E4M7 are the other standouts.

Thanks for that - you've directed me to the real cause of the problem in my screenshot. It turns out that my problem had nothing to do with transparency or needing the 3D floors to be narrower - for some reason the brightness in several of my 3D floors was set to 0 instead of 128 (the surrounding sectors are all 128 and boosted by some dynamic lights), and so the railings on the other side were appearing completely black. This is how my railings look now that I've sorted the problem.

Yes, one reason why I decided to discontinue the splitting of trimsheets was that it was generating a ridiculous number of textures, and it didn't play along nicely with Ultimate Doom Builder which periodically crashed on me when I opened the texture browser. The current set of pk3s with the full textures and some 90 degree rotations are the same ones that I've been loading into UDB as external resources, and although UDB still struggles a bit, it works much better. Yes, that's definitely an issue. So far I've been working around it by building the railings from 3D floors rather than two-sided linedefs. Here's an example from a spaceship map that I've been experimenting on recently. You have to make the 3D floors very narrow to avoid getting artefacts when transparent and non-transparent areas mix though (the ones on this screenshot are a bit wide, and it shows).

Yes, K8Vavoom has 3D polyobjects which can be used to create 3D horizontally moving platforms. FishyClockwork over at the ZDoom forums has introduced a ZScript-based way to get them in GZDoom as well: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=75352&start=60, which is the basis for the moving 3D platforms in Nash Muhandes's Disdain.

Apologies for the delay, I must have missed this reply over the Christmas period. I have a Google One subscription now so I can retrieve the texture sets that I created with the "broken down into textures trimsheets" and re-upload them if you want without getting short on storage space. They're based on an out of date version of the textures from 2021 but a fair number of them haven't changed since that earlier iteration. I decided to discontinue this for more recent versions because it was time consuming and I realised that, since the textures keep being updated, it would soon add up. I fully intend to keep updating the version that I currently have on Google Drive. The version that I've uploaded is based on the newest release of the Makkon textures on Slipseer, from 19 November 2022. On Twitter and in the Quake mapping discord I've been following progress on Makkon's upcoming industrial/urban set which looks amazing and reminds me a lot of the aesthetic in Valve's Source games. We've already seen from Dooming the Bar that with some portal and 3D model trickery, it's possible to make maps for GZDoom that look like Half-Life 2 maps, so once those are out I'll be keen to quickly add those to the collection that I'm sharing on OneDrive. It might be a while yet though as they're easily the most ambitious set so far.