Re: Doom 3 Supremacy

[LDAsh]

If you look into XDelta, you'll find it can work from the command-line and you'd be able to batch-process all of your patching, so it's not as overwhelming as it seems, if you know all the tricks.  It's commonly used in the rom-hacking scene and the patches themselves are not considered as illegal roms.  I'm sure you'd have a "dev base" with all the content you've changed and organised into folders, so you'd be able to generate a text list to then make a batch file out of, without eating up too much of your time.

[The Happy Friar]

Arcane Dimensions is different then this.  It used assets from Quake releases for a Quake mod.  The closest thing to this would be the Quake Arena mod for Quake 2 that got shut down because they took non Quake IP and put it in to Quake (Wolf & Doom were the issues).  Q3A was said to be ok because those IP's were all in one (this is back when id was not owned though).
Any way you could release separate mods for the respective games & then let others combine them?  Or, just release the modified assets & let people combine it themselves.  Would (seem to) be no different then my downloading assets from one game & putting them in another for my own enjoyment.

[EoceneMiacid]

I would like to upload it to a GitHub or GitLab repository.
I can make it private, and provide access to anyone asking for it in this thread who has been a member for some time of this forum. It's a rather small community, if you've been hanging out here chances are you have at least one of the source games legitimately, right?

[aphexjh]

Arcane Dimensions is different then this.  It used assets from Quake releases for a Quake mod. ...

Hmm. I don't want to be a stickler, but Arcane Dimensions definitely does this. Observe this screenshot from Arcane Dimensions that showcases the Skull Wizard.

[The Happy Friar]

Hmm, could be nobody cares or knows.  Hexen 2 is pretty darn old at this point.  I only had AD because lots of modern Quake maps want it as a base, never played it on it's own.

I'd say just release the assets for each game respectively & the mod separately saying you should get these.

[EoceneMiacid]

Okay then.

I'll see what I can do.

Stay tuned!

[EoceneMiacid]

Okay.

Ran into some technical snags. I actually forgot it requires a custom game library, since the default one insists on the presence of the PDA and Soulcube, two items I haven't included, if only because their slots can be put to better use.

Speaking of slots, a custom library is inevitable anyway, since I have about 30 weapons in the mod, requiring a different approach to handle them.

I thought of creating three player classes, each with their own set of weapons, but I don't like the idea of not being able to pick up and use a weapon that isn't defined for your class.

So I'd like to implement a new system, where the player is granted three slots: Light (sidearms), Medium (main weapon) and Heavy (rocket launchers, bfg's). This will force the player to swap weapons frequently, depending on the situation and availability.

This'll take some time, and I'd like to release a preview version before that.

As for separating the content in pak's, this is also not so straightforward. The problem is the new guns and monsters require scripts to be loaded (typically from doom_main.script). I can obviously provide the default doom_main with the base pak, and include a newer one in the content paks, but what if the user has multiple paks installed?

This is what's holding me back keeping everything modular, which was the idea at first. Maybe this can be addressed through the use of a custom library as well.

On the plus side, I've done some more polishing and error fixing. Some of the later changes I've done introduced a bunch of issues, which I've been addressing. I'm also including a map that's like a sandbox for the player to go nuts in, featuring all of the assets included.

I'll see what I can do about the library issue (either re-implement the PDA/soulcube for now, or set up a proper git repo with the custom code)

[EoceneMiacid]

Made some splendid progress the past few days. I'll do a full status update pretty soon. I am very excited

I finally sat down and figured out how AI scripts work, so I've been writing my own now for the Quake 4 and Prey monsters.

[EoceneMiacid]

To test the AI (and combat in general), I made an arena with all the Doom 3 monsters on one side and the Strogg on the other set up so they fight each other, with the Strogg primarily targeting the Cyberdemon and the demons the Makron. The Prey guys are in there too, but they just pick targets at random. There's also a fourth faction underway: the humans









Screenshots do not do it justice, though. It is beautiful to witness the Doom 3 engine pull this off. The dynamic lighting cast by all the projectiles, monsters, and explosions looks absolutely surreal, and performs smoothly (even though it manages to trigger the odd crash).

[xyzz]

Looks good. But who threw the Centurion from Prey into the air ?

[EoceneMiacid]

Well noticed

It occurred to me that he was being kicked around all the time, which was caused by a commented out 'mass' var, hence he had no mass.

The Quake 4 and Prey monsters have a lot of animations not being used right now, mostly for situational use.

Right now I'm working on importing textures into the project, one by one, making sure they all work fine etc. The main sources are the Wulfen packs, but they only cover a limited amount of textures, so the remaining ones come from Doom 3. I'll probably add Quake 4 and Prey textures too, down the line. Might as well.

As for maps, I'm experimenting a bit with some ideas. Apart from making my own, I'm thinking of stitching remixed versions of all the Doom 3 and RoE maps together into a single campaign.

[EoceneMiacid]

Maps!



After spending considerable time importing all the required materials, textures and objects, it can now compile and run Doom 3 maps.
Next time I have a lot of free time on my hands, I'll work on doing the same for Quake 4 and Prey maps. How about stepping through portals from one game to another?

[xyzz]

Is that a base Doom 3 map?  Also the shader looks very Quake 4-ish.

About the portals. I remember on Doom3World was a tutorial regarding that. I tried looking for it using archive.org and excavated d3w but could not find anything. Maybe other people on these forums know?

[EoceneMiacid]

Yeah, it's Mars City 1, but without any entities or models. Feels strange walking around in it, as if abandoned. Quite creepy, actually

Meanwhile I've imported all the required materials for other maps, so now I can walk around in mc_underground, mars_city2, admin, and cpu too.

I'll try and get at least one Quake 4 map up and running by tomorrow.

[EoceneMiacid]

I have been working extensively on the project the last couple of days.

I continued working on importing all the materials of Doom 3, so I can compile and run more maps now. Still a bunch to go.

Apart from that, I wrote a whole new bunch of particle effects for blood and gore, and I've implemented a gibbing system (vanilla Doom 3's actually), but put to much better use here still a lot to do, but looks promising.
Blood sprays a lot more generously (and more entertainingly) now. The plasma weapon now leaves nasty scorch marks on flesh, with black billowing smoke. That sort of thing.

Fireballs now explode into spark showers, some with trails. Combat scenarios look like fireworks now

Quake 4 and Prey monsters now start to properly work. I have been fixing all their animations with associated sounds, they fire projectiles, and demonstrate simple 'use melee attack when in range, ranged attack when in line of sight, chase when neither of the previous two is true'-behavior. Having them fire different projectiles is going to require some further script doctoring.

I also implemented a system where monsters carrying firearms can run out of ammo. They're still not smart enough to do anything else but beeline straight towards you, however

Another nice feature I added is I added a custom cloak skin (think Predator) for every monster.