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DeimosKnight

Tom Hall's DOOM: Can it Be Made?

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After reading Tom Hall's DOOM BIBLE, I was intrigued by the idea of Tom Hall's vision of DOOM actually being made. From what I've gathered from the design document, what Tom Hall had in mind for DOOM resembled an Origin Systems, Inc. game. In other words, a System Shock 1/Ultima Underworld styled game with demons. It certainly involved puzzles, and a story driven gameplay, and a different assortment of demonic enemies.

So, I was wondering: how could Tom Hall's DOOM be made? As as complex WAD heavy mod, or a standalone game made with the freeware DOOM engine? The other idea I had was for it to be done on System Shock 1's engine, but that is obviously kind of stupid. Besides, SS1's engine is not modifiable, and I think id doesn't allow trademark games to be made with engines outside of theirs. There is however a reverse engineered version of SS1's engine in progress, but it still wouldn't be possible to do it that way. The reason I was considering that option, was because SS1 is true 3D while DOOM is not, I was into that whole retro-3D Origin look. Still, there is the Doomsday engine, which renders Doom three-dimensional enough. Considering what the DOOM community can do with the engine now, maybe the engine can be tweaked to have a SS1 feel and look to it.

Putting my idea for carrying out Hall's DOOM, doesn't anyone here think it's possible for the DOOM described in the DOOM BIBLE can be developed with classic DOOM technology?

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Sodaholic is doing one called Doom EU. It's not as much based on the Doom bible as it is of a "What if the alphas never changed" type of WAD, but it's still pretty neat.

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Projects based on the Doom bible and/or the alpha are countless. So far, all of them have failed; including Id's own since they pretty much scrapped it and went with the Doom we know instead.

I have no excessive confidence in the future of Soda's project -- especially considering it requires him to learn C on the fly and also given he has two other ongoing projects (one involving a pot-headed cat and an army of evil bunnies, the other a gory crossover between, of all things, Sonic and Mechwarrior).

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Sort of wrong. Hall did recycle a lot of ideas in ROTT that didn't make it to Doom; but the bulk of that game is still an attempt at de-Wolfensteinizing Wolfenstein 3D 2. As far as story and ambiance go, it's entirely different; and you don't get the RPG/adventure-like puzzle and dialog elements.

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Is it possible? Sure! The Strife engine is I believe a good example of a lot of scrapped rpg-like features implemented, and that's not long after Doom's original release. Is the release of such a project probable? Well, I won't hold my breath for it. I'd rather wait for Mordeth, personally.

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Gez said:

I have no excessive confidence in the future of Soda's project -- especially considering it requires him to learn C++ on the fly

Neither do I, but at least an alpha project is a hell of a lot simpler to do than a Doom Bible project. It's just a shame that no one has stepped up to help me with the coding. Until then, it's pretty much stuck, gameplay-wise. I'm still working on the maps, and that's coming well, but it will all be useless (except for screenshots) until I can get a coder for the project.

Off topic, but I love ROTT. I think that de-wolfensteining it made the game a lot better than just a Wolfenstein game. I mean, look at all the features they added. Strangely, it had more height variation in it's gameplay than Doom, despite it's map format. The hoverpads (or whatever they were called) made up for the lack of sectors, and enabled them to do true 3d environments (sorta), unlike sectors.

I just wonder what it would've been like with Doom's map format. Now that would've been awesome.

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Gez said:

I have no excessive confidence in the future of Soda's project -- especially considering it requires him to learn C++ on the fly and also given he has two other ongoing projects (one involving a pot-headed cat and an army of evil bunnies, the other a gory crossover between, of all things, Sonic and Mechwarrior).

IIRC, he handed it off to someone else, and it's more or less in active development if the project thread can be trusted.

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Xaser said:

IIRC, he handed it off to someone else, and it's more or less in active development if the project thread can be trusted.

Which one? TSAT, Doom EU, or Koliko's Adventure?

If the former, I'm actually back on the project (PDF has a tendency to over-react, makes it a pain in the ass to work with him sometimes). To be honest, I'm the only one doing any work on the game, PDF himself on Sonic Retro's thread about the project that I've done more on the game in the six months that I've been on than he's done in the last two years (exactly my opinion on the matter as well, before he even said that).

If you meant the second, I did hand it off to him, but I restarted it in my own version (the one you can find here). We've been going our own ways with it, my version is attempting to be very faithful to the alphas, whereas he's developing it with more of a base on the Doom Bible. Both are active (his is probably more active than mine, at the moment)

If you meant the latter, it's still in development, but I haven't done anything on it since I've been losered, since I couldn't communicate with any of my mappers. (by the way, guys, PM me if you have anything important to tell me since then, if you're reading this, you obviously realize I'm back)

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Grain of Salt said:

How's Mordeth going these days? Has there been any news since the 2007 update to mordeth.doomworld.com?


Pretty sure he continues to work on the project as he poked his head into one of Eternity's recent release threads asking about feature documentation.

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Sorry. I just happened to come across this post. But i had some ideas that Hall would have certainly put in his game -- after reading the Doom Bible .pdf doc, I was tossing a thought around in my head: Were they seriously thinking about making this like a FPS RPG-like game?

I mean, most of the stuff in the book sounded like something a common RPG game would have - Multiple characters (party?) , Advanced enemies later on, of same type.

Sorry for putting this out there, but it sorta makes sense.
.

(i was making an RPG with Doom elements, with parts of the Tei Tenga story)

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No need to apologize, TheSpazztikOne. That's pretty much what I meant when I said that Tom Hall's DOOM felt a bit like SYSTEM SHOCK 1 or ULTIMA UNDERWORLD (both of which are FPS RPGs). I doubt that he intended for you to fight with all characters at once, though that sounds like an interesting idea in itself: no matter which character you pick, the other characters work and fight beside you. The idea certainly sounds more ambitious than the system used in RISE OF THE TRIAD, or, similarly, BLOOD 2: THE CHOSEN, where you could only choose one character, and none of the other characters fought with you.

Oh, by the way Marnetmar, I checked out Sodaholic's DOOM EU thread, and I find it AWESOME! Hopefully, he may add some interactive NPCs to make the mod even more interesting (and Demon cages where you can stick the beta bayonet into the demons from a safe distance!). I'll have to check the thread out some more.

Thanks for the responses, everybody.

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I think it's very likely that Doom's characters would've been implemented like ROTT's. All the references to the marines working with each other in the levels was very likely nothing more than talking about co-op mode. The reason the marines appeared in the alphas was just because the game did not exclude spawning extra players in the game at that time, it's likely that they didn't intend AI for the other characters. The Doom Bible actually mentions that corpses would be spawned instead of players for the player spawns of players not playing, and only in the first map.

I'm glad you like my TC, though. :)

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Well, it was a heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) modified Wolf engine. They basically took it, and added height variation. While the levels architecturally were still 2d, the actors were all free to move around vertically. Most levels were very tall, and had hovering metallic platforms which made up for the lack of sectors, and you could also do room over room with them. There were also jump-pads, which launched you into the air.

Really though, best way to understand the engine is to just play it.


Also, off-topic, but I noticed many people around here have their names based on locations. "phobosdeimos1" and "DeimosKnight" both have "Deimos" in their name, "Phobus" sounds like "Phobos", and there's a lot of people with "hell" in their name. But what I want to know is why doesn't anyone have "Earth" in their name? :P

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It would be possible, but you'll have to look at the alphas first and hack the engine to make it like the game Tom Hall invented. You might an advanced engine like ZDoom as well. Judging from Tom Hall's intentions, it's kinda like a crossover of ROTT and Strife.

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poop87 said:

Sorry for the bump, but sodaholic gave permission to hfc2x to finish his project. http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=29466

And a rather pointless bump, because that was already mentioned earlier in the thread. I also already stated that I've begun a new version.

I see you've decided to come here since you've been banned from ZDoom, I wonder how long you'll last here.

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Oh, hey, look! It's poop87. Who did the exact same thing on the ZDoom Forums. And got into some trouble for it.

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I've been thinking: thanks to the suggestion of a fellow doom marine that Strife would be the choice to mod with, what if Tom Hall's DOOM were programmed through a Doomsday engine version of Strife, or a jStrife? Assuming if someone has thought of converting Strife to the a j version, whould it make the gameplay even more flexible?

I've also checked out Brendon Chung's Blendo 1, which is an awesome experiment he did with the freeware Doom engine. He basically used aspects of the Doom bible for inspiration, used some rejected sprites and gameplay aspects from Bungie's Marathon series, added some sounds from Half-Life, a very Cacodemon enemy of his own design, and implemented the ability to freelook and strafe in modern FPSs. Check it out at Blendo games among his free downloads. It's the closest attempt I've seen to program a Doom experience which resonated with Hall's Doom Bible.

While Strife and Chung's Barista 1 could serve as influences, I'm geared towards more of a System Shock 1/Ultima Underworld-like experience. Well, not completely. Unlike those games, I would implement the ability to mouselook. SS1 did have the ability to duck, jump, lean to either side, and also had full 3D environments. So, I'm thinking that Hall's Doom would be programmed in a Doomsday version of Strife, using similar but a more enhanced version of SS1's interface, level design, combat, and experience.

I'll get back on how that might work. Perhaps I could draw it out to demonstrate what it may look like.

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Why bump this old thread?

DeimosKnight said:

I've been thinking: thanks to the suggestion of a fellow doom marine that Strife would be the choice to mod with, what if Tom Hall's DOOM were programmed through a Doomsday engine version of Strife, or a jStrife? Assuming if someone has thought of converting Strife to the a j version, whould it make the gameplay even more flexible?

There is no jStrife at the moment.

DeimosKnight said:

I've also checked out Brendon Chung's Blendo 1, which is an awesome experiment he did with the freeware Doom engine. He basically used aspects of the Doom bible for inspiration, used some rejected sprites and gameplay aspects from Bungie's Marathon series, added some sounds from Half-Life, a very Cacodemon enemy of his own design, and implemented the ability to freelook and strafe in modern FPSs. Check it out at Blendo games among his free downloads. It's the closest attempt I've seen to program a Doom experience which resonated with Hall's Doom Bible.


Barista is a standard ZDoom mod. Freelook and strafe wasn't added by Brendon Chung; strafe was in the original Doom code and freelook was added by Randy Heit.

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Dunno why you're wanting to target Strife in particular. There's really nothing in the Doom Bible that can't be done in some way in ZDoom (and soon EE :D ) thanks to scripting. You're asking the question "What game should I use?" when you should really be asking "What engine?"

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The biggest question here is always going to be "Should it be made?"

Personally, I'd say its not worth the effort. The guys at id scrapped it for a range of reasons and one of which was the level design was going to be a waste of the engine and unexciting to boot.

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Not particularly. I'd say the safest way is to treat the DB as guidelines rather than rules and spice up any parts that feel bland. What's to say a Bible-ish version of the game wouldn't have still had the great map design the original game got?

I get the feeling that a lot of times people associate the Doom Bible with the Doom Alphas too strongly, then point to the Alphas' unfinishedness as 'evidence' that the Doom Bible plans simply weren't any good (not saying that's what Phobus is doing, of course. Unless it is O:).

Or worse, they look at the unfinished alphas and try and emulate the maps' unfinishedness. That's silly. P:

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I've never done anything with the Alphas myself - I'm basing my skepticism purely on what I read and what people seem to do with it in all the various unfinished attempts :P

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http://blendogames.com/older.htm

This is the link contains the download to the closest attempt to a Doom Bible-ish game. It's Barista 1, which I mentioned before. The style of the gameplay is more remniscent of Bungie's Marathon, and its story is told in a similar manner as the Marathon games (through the computer screens). Chung uses sounds from Half-Life and Wolfenstein, some unused enemy sprites from Marathon, and the gas mask from Rise of the Triad. He himself told me that Barista 1 was meant as an engine experiment rather than an installment for an ongoing series, but he does the experiment so well that I wish he did more Doom-engine games like this one...

Anyway, thanks for clarifying some things about Barista 1 for me, Gez. I knew that strafing was a part of Doom. What I meant to say is that becuase it has the WSAD keys, it's easier to strafe for me. I need to give ZDoom a try.

I do hope someone does a jStrife.

I know that I'm bumping an old thread, but I wanted to learn more from the wisdom of my fellow Doomers. You know what you're doing, and you're good at it.

@Xaser: I am all about which engine to use. ZDoom and jDoom might be better options. I was only going on about Strife because kmxexii mentioned it as an example of Doom's engine successfully implementing elements which were scrapped from the Tom Hall's Doom. I think he was referring to the gameplay and experience rather than to Strafe's engine, so I may have become a little too enthusiastic for that version of the DE.

Anyhow, I am more concerned at the moment at visualizing how the game would look and play, rather than jumping into programming immediately. I was working on some concept art on how two of the bosses mentioned in the DBible would look like. One looked like a full bodied version of a Pinky, the other an Ox cyberdemon with a really big gun, and one of the female characters from ROTT and the DB. I need to find the time to do more concepts. I want to use both the art direction of Doom, System Shock, and Ultima Underworld for inspiration.

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Sodaholic said:

They basically took it, and added height variation.


Sort of; just being a tiny bit pedantic here, but each level has the same height all throughout. Each level may have a different height ceiling from the last, but the level itself doesn't vary in height, only by using fake bridges and the little hoverpads do they have "height variation"

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