Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Klaus88 posted:

Also I'm looking for good single player HL 1 mods, not multi player. Sorry about that.

Looks like Wikipedia actually has some good suggestions. I've played the Neil Manke ones (Darkstar and They Hunger); they're both good.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 05:18

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:29

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

KozmoNaut posted:

It's mostly to do with the fact that we've got exponentially more processing power to play with now, so these old engines can be brute forced into doing things they were never originally intended to do.

Quake's original system requirements were a 75MHz Pentium with 8MB RAM. Considering that my decidedly average PC has a 6-core 3.2GHz CPU, 16GB RAM (2000x the original requirement!) and an 11th-generation Geforce card, it's no surprise that we can twist these relatively simple graphics engines to push a much larger amount of polygons and effects on modern hardware.

"Brute forced" is the correct term because these engines don't do a great job of utilizing modern hardware. They rely on the CPU much more than modern games since GPUs back then were too crude to do much on their own. For example, GZDoom performance falls apart on complicated geometry since Doom's data structures and rendering techniques were never intended for anything like modern geometry. The various Quake engines suffer from the same problems to various extents.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 14:43

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Woolie Wool posted:

Doom and the original Quake was made for computers without GPUs and make no use of the GPU whatsoever in their vanilla engines.

Yes? The term "GPU" didn't even come around until the first GeForce 256 card in 1999. The point is that modern game engines are written from the ground-up to feed data into the GPU as fast as possible. Old engines organize data in ways that make this extremely cumbersome. Hence the reason why "brute forced" is an appropriate term since these engines don't exactly take full advantage of modern hardware.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 15:48

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

I played the Half-Life DC version briefly a few months ago and I think the load times would drive me to suicide before the controller. The intro tram ride kind of loses some of its impact when you're staring at a progress bar 50% of the time.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2015 21:16

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

laserghost posted:

Chasm's engine is really weird. It could do 800x600 under DOS without 3dfx with effects like smoke and dithering, everything was in 3D, yet there was barely any height difference on levels. Jumping between platforms is annoying because you nearly immediately hit roof, so you're more sliding than jumping. Also, everything is cramped and rooms feel really small. Yet I really like it, it clones Quake/Doom gameplay with really limited resources, it even uses a variant of Doom map system afaik. The boss fights are more engaging than Quake ones. Also the only FPS to have Egyptian motif, except Exhumed and Serious Sam. Too bad it was released so late and there never was a Windows implementation. Chasm really deserves a GOG treatment.

I agree that the engine is super bizarre. From what I remember the engine is limited to 90 degree walls and I think levels are even stuck with a global floor/ceiling height. It does a decent job of hiding this by using models to simulate raised floors, lowered ceilings, or angled walls. At least this was my guess as to what was going on back when I played it probably 13 years ago. If the engine is actually capable of height variation and non-right-angle walls they did an insanely bad job of exploiting it. We're talking "early Doom Alpha when all the mappers were still thinking Wolf3D" bad.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 02:48

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Mak0rz posted:

Chasm actually had a 2.5D engine in the spirit of Doom or Build. It was just really, really good at looking like true 3D. I also think david_a's explanation is correct. That could explain a lot of the level flatness.

E: Actually it seems the engine was capable of more than just 90-degree walls. Whether that means any-degree walls like Doom and Build I have no idea, but there are screenshots containing corners with different angles. The game looked pretty good imo, but rose colored glasses and all that.

I'm not convinced - the angled walls could be models too. It came with the editor, right? Does it run in Dosbox? Maybe I'll try to find the disc...

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 04:24

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Yeah the Chasm editor works in DosBox (although I can't actually get Chasm itself to run :v:

). Here's a screenshot:

From playing around with it for 5 minutes (and skimming the printed manual, which I would be 100% lost without) a couple of things are notable:
* It does in fact support angled walls. I think this capability was underused by the level designers. The level above is what happens when you create a new level - I just moved that one vertex on the left out a bit.
* There is a global floor/ceiling height.
* Anything that appears to be height variation (or a sloped wall) is actually a model. It's hard to tell from the screenshot, but that little box in the top right of the editor is a preview for the model (RUFF_) I have selected in the list. It appears to be a pair of angled walls with a ceiling (the ceiling is presumably lower than the "world" ceiling). I rotated/moved it over a bit so you can see one of the walls and the ceiling. You would plop down a bunch of these in a hallway to make it look like the walls are actually sloped and there is some height variation going on. There are a ton of other similar "architectural" models; everything from a single subtly sloped wall to a massive arch with lights intended to span a hallway.
* It supports some primitive type of scripting and the lighting system seems interesting, however I'm not going to mess with that now.

I didn't search very long, but I couldn't find a video where the player looks up sharply - I'm curious if you can tell whether or not it uses y-shearing. I wouldn't be shocked if the engine is actually a ray caster. The coordinate system is very suspicious - the numbers you see at the top with the colons are "squares" and world units; IE "13: 144" is square 13, unit 144. Each square is 256 units on a side. This seems like how you would organize things if you supported angled walls in a ray caster.

david_a fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Aug 15, 2015

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 05:19

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

The Precursors is a lot prettier than I was expecting. Hey, is this that Curtain hologram girl from the Holo games you guys were talking about???

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 15:50

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

ytisomauq posted:

But Half-Life really ushered in the mod as commercial product, arguably more than Quake. It's harder to work out those commercial details when the assets aren't from the development team.

This is a good point. Doom is so far from commercially viable that all kinds of heinous resource theft flies under the radar. The community used to be more strict about this. Partly this was because bandwidth/disk space were a lot smaller, so things like official texture packs were A Thing instead of just directly bundling whatever resources you wanted.

I remember in the early days of source ports, there were often heated flame wars about ports "stealing" features from each other. Fraggle accused ZDoom of stealing the Quake-style texture warping from SMMU, prompting Randy to post a giant thing showing how the code wasn't remotely similar. It was even vaguely controversial that ZDoom added Boom support which seems insane in retrospect.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2015 19:56

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Shadow Hog posted:

So Darkplaces mods then

Apparently nobody saw the word "mods" in this sentence. This was not an attack on Dark Places itself!

This video is the absolute worst I've ever seen Quake look. :barf:

I wonder what Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud think when they see people replace their textures with some poo poo scaled version run through 50 PhotoShop filters. Was the Shambler model a hacked version of the Doom3 Hell Knight???

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 14:22

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

drrockso20 posted:

Yeah it's based on an idea I thought up back in High School for a Horror Movie franchise that'd basically be a more serious version of The Toxic Avenger

I daydreamed of a Doom mod I called Dawn (Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, From Dusk till Dawn... yeah, still not a great name). I was envisioning selecting a popular horror protagonist (not limited to those three movies) and playing through various arenas based on iconic horror locations: the ED2 cabin, DotD mall, FDtD bar, Army of Darkness castle, etc. A lot of these movies would be hard to stretch into a full TC but could easily provide a level or two and some monster cameos. It's probably close in spirit to some of these Doom mods that randomly mix stuff from every FPS ever, just with a different theme.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 15:25

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

The Kins posted:

Here's something I haven't seen before that Romero posted on Twitter: A painting Don Ivan Punchatz, the guy who painted Doom's box art, did for an EGM cover at some point:

This is more hardcore than it seems at first glance! The left arm has clearly been severed and is hanging from the gun. Doom Guy is such a badass he hardly seems phased by this fact; possibly because he's flying so high on a near lethal dose of steroids/EPO/HGH/painkillers that he can totally see through the painting, maannnn

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 00:38

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Keiya posted:

WHY do people do the 'it's not open source yet, when I get to Beta' thing? It inevitably ends in the project dying out before getting there.

As a programmer, I think it's because they want to get it "perfect" before letting outsiders see their code. If they release an early hacky version, they probably worry that people might think they are dumb-dumbs because they haven't had time yet to polish every part of it.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 13:42

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

While I really liked both Deus Ex and DX:HR, I never seem to get around to replaying them. Part of it is that I play every open game like this exactly the same way - I become a walking armory. DX1 was the worst example of this. For some of the last levels, I was lugging around drat near every gun in the game. What's that, you say? Your inventory won't hold all of them? You are correct - I would actually progress a bit in a level, dump some gear in a pile, run back to the last pile I abandoned and pick those up, charge forward some more in the level, repeat, etc. Maybe this only happened in one level since you lose the ones on the ground, but I definitely had all the big inventory-hogging guns in the game plus an unhealthy amount of the smaller ones. You never know when you're gonna need that shotgun with max ammo!!!!!

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 22:53

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Segmentation Fault posted:

So how do cacodemons mate? Are there male cacodemons?

Yes, cockodemons:

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 13:37

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Back when I played SS1 I got hopelessly stuck at some point. I think there were only a few decks I hadn't visited but I had no idea how to unlock them. I remember endlessly walking around on a really dark deck filled with some kind of flying stealth manta rays and like zero resources. I had some kind of laser sword with unlimited ammo but they were still chipping away my health in every encounter.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 17:04

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Is the "enhanced version" the same as the portable version that was floating around earlier? How did they change the controls?

# ¿ Sep 26, 2015 18:43

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Internet Friend posted:

I don't know how the portable version handled it but you can set your own controls in a cfg file in this one.

I was more wondering about the mouse. The original had, uh, a unique setup. I've heard people say this one has mouse look which barely makes sense to me given how it used to work.

From reading the GOG reviews it does not seem to be quite the same thing as the portable edition. People are apparently not too happy about the PE being forced offline, so there is apparently an effort to make a legal version of it. I presume this would be some kind of patching utility for the disk version which I don't understand why they didn't do to begin with.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2015 22:49

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

So does Revision modify any gameplay stuff or is it just the maps and Shifter/Biomod do the rest?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 17:07

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Cat Mattress posted:

Here's a totally accurate representation of how Doom actually looked on the real hardware it was meant to be played on. That's real Doom right here.

For the true experience, go to a yard sale and find some 500W MULTIMEDIA SPEAKERS (with a 10w power supply) to go with it. Make sure the speakers are grey or that hideous faded yellowish color of old PC cases.

Also be sure to get a ball mouse and roll it around in grease, hair, and dust for 60 minutes to prime the rollers (if you got it at a yard sale it might be perfect already!). Having smooth mouse movement is for loving pansies. Any keyboard you use should also not support more than two-key rollover.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 14:13

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

laserghost posted:

I was always thinking that if Doom would get an animated series, Doomguy would have a friendly helpful Lost Soul with him.

I'd settle for Tom Hall

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 02:28

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

The Kins posted:

In an attempt to win back everybody's love after "The Incident", Hi-Rez threw the entire Earthsiege/Starsiege series up for free download. Yes, even the PS2 one.

Wow, I had no idea Tribes was in the same universe as Earthsiege.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2015 14:41

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

So I've beaten System Shock Enhanced Edition about a 1000 times and I wanna play through the original version for hilarious tank controls and sweet, sweet Sound Blaster 16 music. The only thing is that the horizontal mouse movement is slow and sluggish, but vertical is fine. Is there any way to fix this?

I remember people complaining about this on the SystemShock.org forums in the context of the mouse look hack. I think there's a configure file you can tweak the values in. I'm playing through my completely vanilla CD version of SS1 in DosBox and the cursor moves fine :shrug:

# ¿ Nov 1, 2015 15:44

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

For anybody else who is currently playing through System Shock or will do so in the future - rotate your loving saves. I just saved about 100 milliseconds before some plastique explodes and kills me (the game gives you zero indication they are timed charges). Of course I haven't flipped the cyborg conversion switch on this level yet.
:ughh:

Fortunately I have one other save slot I've been using but it's at least 4 hours behind. :sigh:

For all the hand-holding and pampering that modern games do, at least they don't let you destroy your progress this easily.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2015 03:33

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Commander Keenan posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7J6kgH5lEU

pro click

# ¿ Nov 6, 2015 15:06

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

The Kins posted:

According to this story about Night Dive Studios, they're working on a full, proper remake (as opposed to the updated version they recently put out) of the original System Shock. What a weird time to be alive.

I refuse to get even remotely excited until it's available for purchase. Way, way too much can go wrong with this.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 21:55

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

The Kins posted:

The XL Engine guy we so regularly curse out for vanishing has returned. Sort of.

quote:

What about source code access? I plan on releasing a few builds before I release the source code � unfortunately I�m too picky about the code for my own good � but I do plan on opening up read-only access to the repository (with the option to submit patches of course, if you are so inclined) within the first quarter of the year.

uh huh
I'll believe any of this when I see it

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 15:08

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Large, open outdoor areas are the worst case for a portal engine so I would be surprised if Daggerfall originally used one.

From what I remember the first thing he started was a Dark Forces engine. Then he started working on Blood and Daggerfall engines at the same time while DF was still in early alpha stages. Only later did he for some reason combine them all into XL.

I remain fairly skeptical about the whole thing because Blood by itself would be an enormous amount of work to reverse engineer. He promised to release the source code a long time ago but keeps coming up with excuses to push it back. I expect him to plug away for a bit (on all three games at once of course, so none of them get close to done) and get everyone excited before announcing that the XL engine will now support CyClones and Cybermage, doing some bare minimum hacking on that, then vanishing again for 18 months.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 01:32

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Shadow Hog posted:

Midlevel saves ~~might~~ will mess with the whole lives system Dark Forces has, though - for better or worse.

If you're a big enough grognard to care about the lives system you won't be using mid-level saves anyway.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2015 01:43

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Parrotine posted:

Tell me your favorite Star Wars: Dark Forces experiences! I want to hear them and imagine what it was like being a fifth grader again and scared shitless of those god-forsaken sewer monsters in the third level

I liked the Jabba level for some reason. There was a spot you could go "fishing" with thermal detonators - these small pits that had the pig guys in them. You could crouch down and roll detonators in there; after a few seconds you'd hear a explosion/squeal and glimpse his horns as he was thrown into the air.

You could also crouch down, look all the way up, and run around punching guys into the ceiling (you may have needed the weapon booster power up for maximum effect).

# ¿ Nov 21, 2015 18:58

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Cat Mattress posted:

I'll take the block level design in the original engine over what looks like the worst of both worlds.

Yeah those screenshots don't fill me with confidence. It looks too much like those garish Quake mods that shoehorn in every graphics gimmick they could think of. Cranking up one aspect of the visuals (textures/surfaces) without doing anything with the level geometry is not a good look.

Hopefully the Citadel project will be completed because it looks a lot more appealing.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2015 05:12

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Huh, I never knew those two Terminator games used the same engine as Daggerfall. I guess we know the next games to be added to XL Engine.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2015 06:08

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Luigi Thirty posted:

Those Zero-G and invisible mutants are still scary in the bowels of level 2 of System Shock

The inviso mutants are straight-up bastards. Creepiest part is AFAIK all the mutants used to be people (which would explain their death screams).

# ¿ Nov 28, 2015 02:25

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Linguica posted:

Yeah I have always used an inverted y-axis in all FPSes and I can't really explain why. I imagine it must be from playing flight simulators??

That's why I do it. I played Aces Over Europe / X-Wing years before I started using mouse look in FPS games. When I first played Wolf 3D / Doom I even used my CH Flightstick as well.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 22:00

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

# ¿ Dec 11, 2015 06:10

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Split the difference between Doom and RoTT and play the Doom mod Return of the Triad. I honestly thought it felt like what RoTT should have been. Ditching the warmed-over Wolf 3D engine makes an enormous difference in atmosphere.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2015 19:37

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Half the fun was figuring out how other people pulled off interesting Dehacked tricks. Twice Risen turned both the pistol and chain gun into laser projectile equivalents and the big, bad gun fired a devastating burst of SSG attacks instead, which was pretty creative. The ultimate was Batman Doom, though. It arrived out of nowhere and pulled off a ton of insane tricks nobody had seen before. I nearly fell out of my chair when Killer Croc lifted a rock off the ground and threw it at me! Impossible! It was only years later that I learned it was using the Arch-Vile resurrection effect to reanimate (lift) rock entities which would instantly fly toward you and die on impact. And I thought I was clever when I made bouncing plasma balls (have the projectile fire another another ball when it dies) and nuclear rockets (use the Arch-Vile jump combined with the BFG spray).

# ¿ Dec 31, 2015 06:12

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

blackmarketlimb posted:

It could if you actually went with weird DOOM demon design. But yeah, this dude wants a really out of place sexy sprite instead of something terrifying.

Worringly, Painkiller announced he was spriting a flying zombie enemy for Brutality... here's hoping he sticks with Brutality's awesome pedigree instead of giving fan service to a weird Russian.

Are you sure it's not some reference / joke to the mildly infamous Sirens?

# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 01:23

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

netcat posted:

It's probably not too hard to make one but it's not the most fun thing to do. I mostly want something that can place vertices and connect them into polygons and then I could postprocess it myself to create sectors/portals/whatever. Maybe I can hack together something from the Doom Builder source...

When I was messing with a ray caster engine a few months ago I would have found a use for a generic 2.5D editor as well. It's easy to add enough features to an engine that defining a level through ASCII-art is a total pain. I never got into actual sectors though, so maybe that tiling map editor can be shoehorned into something useable.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2016 19:42

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:29

david_a: Apr 24, 2010; Megamarm

Narcissus1916 posted:

Outside of Pirates, Batman, Aliens, Army of Darkness, the unfinished Ghostbusters mod, and a scattered amount of Star Wars mods am I missing any other licensed property mods that cross over with Doom?

I'm a sucker for TCs that convert another property into Doom somehow.

There's a ton of stuff involving Terminators/Predators but I'm not sure there's really a go-to mod for it. The sprite work isn't worse than something like Army of Darkness but there was never a proper TC for it, just gameplay mods back in the Dehacked days.

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Someone mentioned Contra Doom. I looked it up. Now I need it, thanks.

Have you played the original Action Doom by Scuba Steve? It's heavily Metal Slug/Contra inspired. It even has branching level progression, although not as much as Action Doom 2.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2016 15:40

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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