Right!
The time has come to shed some light on this project I've worked on, since it is beginning to approach a state that's fit for public release.
There are some traditions I deem worthy upholding in life - upgrading my rig whenever a new Doom game comes out is one of them. The technology of Doom 3 had my jaw firmly on the floor throughout my first playthrough, and I knew that this would be the engine I'd ultimately settle for. The source code release in 2011 prompted me to actually start doing something with it.
After years of trying to make peace with the way you are supposed to build a Doom 3 mod, I realized I was never going to be entirely happy with the end result. Looking at the gamedata, it is obvious id Software couldn't afford the luxury spending time cleaning everything up, probably because of the publisher's deadline. Roughly half (probably more) of all texture definitions refer to work-in-progress textures that are not present in the final game.
Simply put - the Doom 3 data is a bloated, hard-to-navigate mess.
So I ultimately decided upon building a brand new data set, from scratch, with the aim of providing the best possible base to build new mods on.
Some of my design goals are:
- Target modern source ports on any supported operating system;
- Keep the data as consistent, compact, clean, bloat-free, and easy to read as possible;
- Pre-configure the game for best possible image quality (since even ghetto PC's can run the game effortlessly these days)
- Provide as much professional-quality assets for modders to use as possible;
- Completely rework every aspect of the game, to make it much more fun to play than the vanilla game ever was;
- Modernize controls and add features common in modern FPS games;
- Provide any useful prefab I can think of to simplify map building;
Technically speaking, Supremacy 3 isn't even a Doom 3 mod anymore, but rather a standalone game that happens to run on the same engine, and also featuring it's assets.
Probably the nicest bonus feature is that all the assets from engine stablemates Quake 4 and Prey are also included; massively increasing the amount of available content to play around with. I guess one could call it an idTech4 sandbox game.