Gez

Back then I was kinda fascinated by how Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen were separate, stand-alone games, but if you installed both they'd merge into a single greater game. I remember messing around with DEUTEX and trying to merge Doom and Doom II... Like copy-pasting E1M1 into MAP01 and adding tunnels connecting both, this kind of things. Eventually I lost interest in this as I came to find the idea pointless, and only a while after that point was reached did WadSmoosh appear. Anyway basically I think that if I had been involved into Doom and Doom II's development, I'd have pulled a World of Xeen maneuver and made it so if you have Doom and Doom II together, they'd both be loaded. No texture conflicts between them! And a rework of the texture loading mechanism similar to what ZDoom did to allow cumulative loading.

Technically you can provide only your own sprites, but: - to play it in vanilla, people will have to use DEUSF to merge the IWAD stuff in first. - to play it in Chocolate Hexen, people will have to load it with -merge instead of -file. (That replicates virtually the effect of using DEUSF merge, without needing to actually change the files.) - to play it in other Hexen-compatible ports, nothing special is required.

Yeah, that's why it sucks. A workaround involving DEHACKED was found, but that only solves the problem in Doom. Hexen doesn't have DEHACKED.

You can, but due to some oversights it is needlessly complicated. Basically the game will only look for sprites between the S_START and S_END markers, so if you want to change sprites, and have it work in vanilla, you need to include all the sprites.

Nothing. That was a typo for PLAYPAL, which is the game's palette.

Some people cared, of course. But none of them worked at id Software. If there were any obsessive completionist working at id at the time, they'd have fixed the non-maxable levels themselves before release, and the simple fact that these levels were not fixed shows that there were no such people at id back then. No, there were plenty of games released with a ton of bugs back then. Frontier: First Encounters was released in 1995 and it had so many issues that it eventually led to GameTek's bankruptcy. Yeah, a couple of times I had to go back to the store and get a refund because a game just refused to run correctly for longer than five minutes. Patching console games was a more difficult issue since they didn't have hard drives and cartridges or CDs are read-only. But even then, there were some famous stinkers. Action 52, anyone?

Internet was not common spread, but gaming magazines had floppies and then CD-ROMs shrinkwrapped with them. This was the way a lot of people got patches and demos before ADSL made Internet access fast and cheap.

If we add a map in, should we also remove a map out, so it stays a top 100?

I want a car that's also a submarine and a supersonic VTOL aircraft and a space shuttle and also it has to be eco-friendly by using air as its sole source of fuel and it needs to be safe and reliable and cheap, like maybe $100 with no maintenance needed. No, I will not hear your arguments about why this is absurd, I'm just pushing my genius ideas out there.

Hacked is not the right word, as they obtained the source code, made some changes, and recompiled. The Digital Café team were no hex edit wizards. For the IWAD thing, I blame incompetence. They didn't have all that much time to lern how 2 doom good, so they took something that worked (the IWAD), modified what they needed to modify, and forgot to clean out what they didn't need to keep.

The point is the same as why they very very deliberately built in all these neat little Easter eggs: so that we'd have things to talk about 30 years later. Thanks, id! Or maybe they're errors and bugs because they didn't have a giant Q&A department for finding and fixing every single problem. Nah, too boring of an answer!

Eric Alm really should sue Nobuo Uematsu and SquareSoft for having stolen the Scythe II soundtrack. But don't worry, you don't have to take any midi from scythe2.wad. Instead of taking "The Compression of Time" from Scythe2, you can take FF8_Time_Compression.mid from VGMusic, and since it's not sourced from Scythe2.wad, you have not infringed on Eric Alm's unquestionable copyright ownership of this piece of music. If you feel like this version is too similar, then there are plenty of others. Sarcasm aside, people who've used third-party assets presumably without the permission of their creators or right holders (I do not believe Eric Alm contacted Mr. Uematsu or the SquareSoft legal department for a license to use this MIDI), then they have no moral standing to be the arbiter of whether other people can use them as well. Where it becomes relevant is if you want to use a midi that was actually created by the author of the wad. Then it can become a gray area if the person didn't specify you could in the wad's text file, and isn't contactable anymore. Like say if you want to reuse one of Vile Flesh's songs. Text file says nothing about reuse and the author was last seen in 2014. Fortunately the large majority of custom midis are either from third parties like the aforementioned vgmusic.com and therefore free to use, or made by one of our many resident composers who also usually allow free reuse in mods (I'm not aware of any exception to that rule).

The flesh wizard monster came from a defunct WIP mod called Doom-X. It was first uploaded in this thread. I had seen it in some other mods, and since it was freely floating around and used in mods (don't remember which ones, it was a while ago) but wasn't on the Realm667 repository yet, I decided to put it there. I don't really remember why I thought the sprites were from Freedoom. Sorry the story is not all that engrossing.

You said you'd want to see DOSBox integrated into a Doom source port. The implication is that it is to play Doom. After all, why run a Doom source port if not to play Doom? Running DOSBox inside Doom is beyond pointless. DOSBox is perfectly functional as it is, and putting it inside a Doom source port serves no benefit to either DOSBox or the source port.

Since we're talking Skyrim, it'd be $60 every five years. Except not even that, since people who had OG Skyrim and its three DLCs got Skyrim Special Edition for free, and the Anniversary Edition is a $20 upgrade for those who have Skyrim Special Edition. So really it's $60 at release + $20 ten years later. To be fair I would love if every game was like Terraria. If you bought the game for $10 in 2011 (same year as Skyrim), instead of paid DLCs and re-releases, you get free updates with more content basically every year. But that's not a realistic proposition. If a game is to receive active support with content updates etc. for 12+ years, the team working on it has to be paid. Everybody gotta eat and pay their bills, after all. Terraria was lucky in that it can get by with a rather small team (definitely not AAA-sized), without some very expensive budget items like voice acting, and it had a massive success that has only kept on keeping on (selling about 4 million copies per year, they should reach 50 millions soon if they're not there yet). Now Bethesda is not a small indie team, it's a large corporation owned by a larger corporation owned by an even larger corporation. They're gonna be greedy by default, at this scale it's not possible to retain humanity. But even then I can't really fault them for doing shit that id Software did back in the days. All the console ports with their exclusive content, and PSX Doom can sorta count as a remaster. Maximum Doom, Master Levels, Final Doom, all of those were cheap cash grabs. Doom 3 had its BFG Edition remaster, too.

The original release of Skyrim was 32-bit. Pro: it could run on systems with only 4 gB of RAM. Con: it could only make use of about 3 gB of RAM. The 64-bit version is much more stable, and runs better on hardware that is not utterly antiquated. Even my laptop that's as old as original Skyrim gets better perfs from SSE than from "Oldrim". Large scale modding projects like the Beyond Skyrim provinces have had to ditch original Skyrim and become exclusive to 64-bit version because they kept running into technical walls with the 32-bit original. As for the Anniversary Edition, it's just the Special Edition but with more content bundled in. It's kind of like a GOTY version. "Here's the game plus all the DLCs from the last five years". Todd Howard is not CEO. He's creative director. I don't see how wanting updated versions of their favorite games is "cancerous". Why do people use Doom source ports? Keep in mind the aforementioned issues about 32-bit engines and large content mods. If you know Bethesda games, you know how important modding is to them. That's every EA sport game for the last 30 years. Tell me about the graphics, gameplay, narrative, and a.i. innovation from Doom to Doom II to Final Doom... Oh wow, the most popular mod for an old game today is a remaster of "impressively high quality", what a surprise that people would be attracted to playing their old game with updated graphics when it's done well. No, there isn't, and the Anniversary Edition is old hat because it's from 2021 and we're in 2023. Thing is, the Elder Scrolls franchise has been put on the backburner for a long while now. Fallout 4, then Fallout 76, then Starfield. People keep buying Skyrim because it's still the last Elder Scrolls game. Sure there's ESO but it's an MMO, so it has all the MMO baggage that you may not care for.

Because the arch-vile is so much better. As RonnieJamesDiner pointed out, the way the resurrection ability works allows to fine-tune an arch-vile encounter to a great degree, and that makes this monster incredibly versatile. It can even be interesting when unleashed in an area in which the player is not around!

Obviously no. A better question is, "does it fill an interesting niche that is missing from the standard bestiary?"

The Elder Scrolls' Dark Brotherhood is also inspired by the Blood logo, obviously. In fact, the very concept of hands was invented by Monolith, just like the very concept of blood. People did not use to have hands, or blood, in their body before 1996.

Lions and camels and bears, oh my! It's the zombie and imp death sounds that are camel sounds; the pain sounds are human screams and moans. But the speed and pitch are often shifted to make them non-recognizable.

The core of video games is that they're games played on electronic devices that use a screen as the primary method of outputting information to the player. Challenge and fun are very subjective things. Does a game become less of a game as you get more skilled at playing it? Because playing Knee-Deep in the Dead in UV was a challenge back in 1994, but for most players it quickly ceased being one as they grew comfortable with the controls and learned the behaviors of the enemies and the layout of the levels.

The GNU Public License explicitly allows commercial use, and so any source port under the GPL can be used to create commercial games. Freedoom does not contain any original game mechanics, because it is designed to work with vanilla Doom which is utterly incapable of running any sort of third-party code. All the mechanics from Freedoom are therefore just the mechanics from Doom, where they were hardcoded into the engine, meaning they're part of the GPL code that can be freely reused in commercial projects. Basically, as long as all the stuff in the .wad or .pk3 files that you distribute are your own, or at least are resources that you have the right to redistribute commercially, then you can sell it on Steam as your own game, bundled with GZDoom. There's just a few files from the GZDoom distribution that you have to remove because they'll be irrelevant to your game and contain assets derived from the original games, like brightmaps or widescreen versions of certain graphics, those are brightmaps.pk3, game_support.pk3, and game_widescreen_gfx.pk3.

PrBoom and its offshoots were not around back when Doom v1.9 was brand new and people were updating from 1.666.

I'm not sure you can do more than one use action per tic. Try adding "wait" instructions in between each use command.

I wonder if some of the Heretic/Hexen cut content remains somewhere on an archive in Raven Software's network. For example you can see from this screenshot pieces and the assembled silhouette of what used to be the cleric's superweapon before the Wraithverge. Some sort of golden trident with a triangle that was called the Justifier. Also there was an artifact that looked like a bag. It might have been a previous version of the flechette flasks, as their codename is "poisonbag".