[Duke of Hazzard]

Fox, on 20 May 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

It's a gameplay mod, but 99% of the game is still the same.

No disrespect meant, but I can't agree that Doom's gameplay accounts for only 1% of it.

It *could* pass as a "Doom done today" sort of thing if it didn't have cheesy short-lived stuff like the swearing, though.

Another bad decision was to replace Invisibility Spheres with captured marines. In Doom you're supposed to be all by yourself against the demons.

The mod is great, but it's a vast change to Doom and can't be considered "Doom".

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Duke of Hazzard, on 20 May 2015 - 04:06 PM, said:

Another bad decision was to replace Invisibility Spheres with captured marines. In Doom you're supposed to be all by yourself against the demons.

Oh, those are your allies? I always just shot them.

[Carl Winslow]

if you punch them you free them, and they might give you things for doing so.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Comrade Major, on 20 May 2015 - 04:33 PM, said:

Oh, those are your allies? I always just shot them.

Hahaha when I was a kid I used to kill the women in Duke3D too. Now I only kill those who are more or less necessary or when I can't avoid it (like the ones who spawn Battlelords when killed in Tier Drops).

[MusicallyInspired]

I always killed them anyway because they spawn enemies and I'm always after a full kill score.

[Fox]

[OpenMaw]

I wonder what would come out of that barrel in that mod. A focused projected beam or like a plasma-rifle style burst of energy balls?

[Fox]

[Fox]

[MrBlackCat]

I would SO buy a Lego DooM game.

MrBlackCat

[Malgon]

Saw this at the Doomworld forums and just had to post it here.

[OpenMaw]

Malgon, on 28 May 2015 - 12:06 AM, said:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=pKbs-KLmfE4

Saw this at the Doomworld forums and just had to post it here.

That was pretty rad.

[Fox]

Doom 64 EX skybox mode is nice.

[xenoxols]

So I found out that functioning drag and drop inventory in zdoom is indeed possible. I did it in this Army of Darkness mod of mine: http://forum.zdoom.o...hp?f=19&t=48679 That was very tedious to just make one item work, so I can't imagine what it would be like for multiple. I guess it's technically not doom, but close enough.

[PikaCommando]

How many bosses are there in FPS that's inspired or at least function similarly to the Icon of Sin/Doom 2's final boss? You know, those kind of bosses who just stays at one place while firing projectiles or summoning enemies or some tricks and usually requires some sort of gimmick to destroy. They are usually the mastermind of bad guys in the plot.

The only other boss I know of that is like this is SHODAN from System Shock 2.

[HulkNukem]

PikaCommando, on 31 May 2015 - 12:53 PM, said:

How many bosses are there in FPS that's inspired or at least function similarly to the Icon of Sin/Doom 2's final boss? You know, those kind of bosses who just stays at one place while firing projectiles or summoning enemies or some tricks and usually requires some sort of gimmick to destroy. They are usually the mastermind of bad guys in the plot.

The only other boss I know of that is like this is SHODAN from System Shock 2.

Technically, the blind boss from Turok 2. It was a giant eye on the ceiling of this giant cavernous room, and it had the most satisfying/nastiest deaths in that the eye would basically pop and bleed all over you standing under it.
Otherwise, FPS games in general don't do a lot of boss fights anymore. The main bad guys usually end up being just another fodder NPC instead of a bullet sponge health bar puzzle.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Honestly, if I didn't know how to kill the Shub-Niggurath in Quake, I'd probably not figure it out. The whole game is basically "shoot everything that moves", and then the last boss requires a gimmick to kill it. Very ID-style.

I mean, even if you're extremely thick, eventually you'll figure out that plain ammo won't kill it outright, or you'll realize that focusing on the monsters is a neverending staircase (like in Doom 2), but it's a bit counter-intuitive still.

[Never Forgotten]

Doom made it into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Website link: http://www.worldvide...halloffame.org/

[Inspector Lagomorf]

I think it would have been news if it did not.

[Marphy Black]

that crappy hall of fame said:

[Doom] also pioneered key aspects of game design and distribution that have become industry standards. [...] By making the first of three episodes of the game available for free and then asking users to pay for further digital downloads of material, id demonstrated the potential of a business model that today dominates much of the video gaming world.

In other words, this hall of fame is crediting Doom for the F2P model and paid DLCs.

Ignoring the wide spread proliferation of the shareware format before that, including id's own Wolfenstein 3D, I don't think people were downloading The Shores of Hell and Inferno on their dial-up connections back in 1993.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Shareware gave you a complete standalone game that you could pay additional money for if you wanted more.

F2P/P2W gives you an incomplete game that asks you to pay more money just to finish it.

[MrBlackCat]

Marphy Black, on 05 June 2015 - 10:20 AM, said:

In other words, this hall of fame is crediting Doom for the F2P model and paid DLCs. Ignoring the wide spread proliferation of the shareware format before that, including id's own Wolfenstein 3D,<clip>

I mostly agree with what you are saying... the article suggesting that id, with DooM, "pioneered" distribution method is inaccurate, although pre-internet, it might be the single largest example of the use of this distribution. But in the same sentence the article saying id-DooM pioneered game design elements, I think is accurate.

Marphy Black said:

I don't think people were downloading The Shores of Hell and Inferno on their dial-up connections back in 1993.

I was... I had dial-up at home until 2002 at least... just sayin.
Not in 1993, but later, I had three phone lines and a push-pull system with load balancing... still somewhat slow. I started on a 300baud (Vic-modem) modem in 1984, so all of this seemed relatively fast for me at the time. I downloaded Quake for example, by modem, but it wasn't the largest by any stretch. Game downloads with massive (for the time) video content was actually the killer.

MrBlackCat

[Mr. Tibbs]

Brutal Doom V20 is out. http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom

[MrFlibble]

PikaCommando, on 31 May 2015 - 12:53 PM, said:

How many bosses are there in FPS that's inspired or at least function similarly to the Icon of Sin/Doom 2's final boss? You know, those kind of bosses who just stays at one place while firing projectiles or summoning enemies or some tricks and usually requires some sort of gimmick to destroy. They are usually the mastermind of bad guys in the plot.

The only other boss I know of that is like this is SHODAN from System Shock 2.

TVTropes has some possibly helpful articles:
http://tvtropes.org/...BossArenaIdiocy
http://tvtropes.org/...Main/PuzzleBoss

All bosses in Chasm: The Rift are of the puzzle variety, however most of them aren't static but move in certain patterns.

MrBlackCat, on 05 June 2015 - 01:48 PM, said:

I mostly agree with what you are saying... the article suggesting that id, with DooM, "pioneered" distribution method is inaccurate, although pre-internet, it might be the single largest example of the use of this distribution. But in the same sentence the article saying id-DooM pioneered game design elements, I think is accurate.

The article actually says:

Quote

The game’s designers created a game “engine” that separated the game’s basic functions from other aspects such as artwork. This allowed great flexibility in modifying the game, and other game designers began programming their games along the same lines.

This is very vague but surely Doom isn't the first game to separate the engine and the data files, or the first game to allow for player modifications.

It is true that the WAD data format which allowed to store all non-engine assets in a single file was introduced with Doom, but at least some games before that also packed individual data files into single archives, if only to prevent others from using the art or music.

In fact, I'm increasingly concerned with the fact that modern video game media like this seem to (unwillingly) distort facts about old games, because the authors apparently rely on secondary/tertiary etc. sources and fall prey to the "broken telephone" effect.

BTW guys, do you know which game was the first to get its file format specs officially released for the benefit of the modding community?

[Tea Monster]

From "Masters of Doom"

Quote

Though Carmack and Romero were intrigued and inspired by these actions,
they were concerned over the destructive quality of the mods. Players
had to erase the original Wolfenstein code and replace it with their own images;
once a Nazi was changed into Barney, there was no way to bring the
Nazi back quickly. For Doom, Carmack organized the data so players could
replace sound and graphics in a nondestructive manner. He created a subsystem
that separated the media data, called WADs (an acronym, suggested by
Tom Hall, it stood for Where’s All the Data?), from the main program. Every
time someone booted up the game, the program would look tor the WAD file
of sounds and images to load in. This way, someone could simply point the
main program to a different WAD without damaging the original contents.
Carmack would also upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and
utilities program so that the hackers could have the proper tools with which
to create new stuff for the game.
This was a radical idea not only for games but for any media. It was as if a
Nirvana CD came with tools to let listeners dub their own voices for Kurt
Cobain’s or a Rocky video let viewers excise every cranny of Philadelphia for
ancient Rome. Though there had been some level-editing programs released
in the past, no programmer–let alone owner–of a company had released the
guts of what made his proprietary program tick.

I've underlined the bit where they say they separated the engine and the contents for the first time.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for the quote! However, maybe I have misunderstood something, but the underlined bit seems to be about id Software being the first to reveal their data file format specs to the public for the benefit of the players/modders.

However, I've just realised that the author(s) at that Hall of Fame might have meant with

Quote

created a game “engine” that separated the game’s basic functions from other aspects such as artwork

exactly the ability of the Doom engine to load third-party PWADs that would temporarily replace original content. This is indeed something that wasn't tried before - or at least I can't remember any earlier examples.

Quote

Carmack would also upload the source code for the Doom level-editing and
utilities program

Is that actually correct? I've had the impression that the source code for the original editing tools wasn't released (until recently), only the file format specs? In particular, here John Romero says:

Quote

We never told people how the editor was made. We gave them linedefs, sector defs, and the data for the sectors and stuff and like, let people, like, here's our data structure, make an editor. But we never told them how DoomEd worked.

[PikaCommando]

Now that technology has allowed it, who wants to fight a full body Icon of Sin? I know I do.

[Frenkel]

MrFlibble, on 06 June 2015 - 07:41 AM, said:

the ability of the Doom engine to load third-party PWADs that would temporarily replace original content. This is indeed something that wasn't tried before - or at least I can't remember any earlier examples.

You could something similar in Duke Nukem II:

Quote

The CMP format is how most files in the games Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures, Duke Nukem II, and Major Stryker are stored, albeit with varying file extensions (Cosmo prefers VOL and STN, while Major Stryker uses MS1, MS2 and MS3.)

The games will check the current directory first for files, and fall back to the CMP file if none are found. This means files inside the CMP can be easily overridden by simply placing their replacements as normal files in the game directory.

source

This doesn't work in Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure and I'm not sure about Major Stryker.
And I don't think this was known in 1993.

[MrFlibble]

Frenkel, on 06 June 2015 - 08:19 AM, said:

You could something similar in Duke Nukem II

Dune II reads scenario files first from the game directory and then from SCENARIO.PAK. As soon as the PAK format was reverse-engineered by players, it became possible to create custom missions and campaigns for the game. A couple of utilities to pack and unpack PAK archives were eventually created to replace scenarios and other files in the game.

However, Westwood Studios did not (AFAIK) disclose any of the data file formats used in Dune II, and neither does the game include the possibility to load third-party data add-ons. Remarkably though, such functionality is present to some extent in Westwood's next RTS, Command & Conquer, which supports add-on MIX files.

[HulkNukem]

I watched a few Romero interviews recently, and the one below is brand new.
Its interesting the stuff I found out, for instance, Romero never made a dollar from Quake and id also didn't charge retailers for physical copies of Wolfenstein 3D, they let them keep all the money they charged for it. Despite all this they still found so much damn success.