patrick_wd
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patrick_wdParticipant@Wesbat perhaps one thing we can do for the final pack is add a dehacked lump that appends the author to the map name. Vanilla should simply ignore it, but most ports will pick it up.
patrick_wdParticipantThis new version is very good; I especially like the broken door pieces in the red key area.
A few minor issues I noticed:
– red key lights on the “early” version of the red door are misaligned.
– mega-armor and plasma secrets are marked as a secret multiple times.
– A pinky seemed to be trapped in the monster closet in the red key area. Presumably he’s meant to teleport into the hall like the other monsters.
– Southeast tower monster closet should probably be marked invisible so the player can’t see it on the map
– door track texture is missing on the southeast tower door
– switch that opens the locked southeast tower door has a broken texture (make sure the linedef only uses a single switch texture to fix this).
– Part of the ground near that door is marked as a damage sector even though it’s outside the nukage
– The exit area is inescapable. This isn’t technically a “bug” but it’s generally considered good practice to allow the player to backtrack and look for secrets once they’ve “finished” the mapBut minor issues aside, this version is much improved and pretty solid now I think.
patrick_wdParticipantI just tried the combined M9 and it looks like my wing got a little scuffed in the merge. I fixed it up a bit and it should be OK now: M9 south fix.
patrick_wdParticipantAll these ports are well and good, but clearly the best version is Doom ported to Doom.
patrick_wdParticipantOne of my personal favorites in recent years is Simon’s Destiny. A re-imagining of the original Castlevania as a Doom total conversion.
patrick_wdParticipantI’d personally argue that Sigil and Sigil II count as “official” since they were made by Romero, but I agree that Legacy of Rust is phenomenal. The new weapons are interesting and fun to use, and the new enemies, particularly the plasma trooper, are a blast to fight. Definitely recommend everyone try this.
Other sourceports are working on adding the ID24 features used by LoR, so it’s conceivable that it might be playable in DOS eventually.
patrick_wdParticipantOk, I think I’ve finished my M9 wing. I make no apologies: E1M9 South
Also, I’ve revised my other map based on feedback and I think it’s ready for final release barring someone finding a major bug or softlock: E1M6 RC1.
patrick_wdParticipantIdea for E1M9: 3 of the wings have a keycard to obtain, and the final wing requires all 3 keys to reach the exit. In the original map, the south wing contains the blue key, so I’ll add that to mine.
EDIT: Also, since this is the secret level, I’m going to try something weird and experimental. I encourage everyone to do something crazy you’d never do in a “normal” map.
patrick_wdParticipantI got hit with the switch texture problem, too. To fix it, make sure only ONE switch texture is used by the linedef (as in only the lower, middle, or upper texture). If, say, both the upper and lower texture are a switch, then it won’t work.
The linedef actions are indeed a bit of a mess. They were basically iD adding whatever they needed at the time in an ad-hoc manner, which is how we end up with some of the more strange actions like donut. One thing that really helps is to open the vanilla maps in the editor and inspect which actions they use and how they’re set up. I used E1M9 as a reference a few times to figure out how to do certain tricks.
patrick_wdParticipantUnfortunately I didn’t even think to record blind demos of my playthroughs, but I kept a notes document as I was going. Here’s what I have so far:
E1M3:
Really sells the industrial/nuclear waste facility vibe quite well. All the barrel clusters and piston elevators are a nice touch.
Item pacing is a bit tight and sparse. Some more stimpacks and bonuses dotted around here and there would help a lot. Bonuses are also a good way to guide the player like coins in Mario.
Once you reach the primary exit, there doesn’t seem to be a way back to the rest of the map. Once I secure the exit I like to go back for secret hunting, but I had to noclip back out to do so. It’s possible there is a way back and I just missed it.
-EDIT-: Forgot the mention that it feels like the chaingun is a secret, but it isn’t marked as such. Perhaps it’s intented to a “soft secret” instead.E1M5:
That central room with the nukeage pit and 3-point shadow is really striking; great stuff.
The green doors in the green area seem to use the fast open action from one side, but the slow open action from the other. Not a big deal at all really, but it’s something I noticed.
Noticed a bit of oddness in the automap with some parts of certain rooms were invisible while others were not. Perhaps intentional, but worth mentioning.
I actually got a good laugh out of the death teleporter. I knew it would kill me but I couldn’t resist and took it anyway. Nobody to blame but myself. A shame to see it go, but I understand why.
patrick_wdParticipantI actually really enjoyed watching that; very suspenseful finish! It also illuminated a few issues that I’ve since addressed in prep for the final release.
patrick_wdParticipantHere’s mine: E1M6
Difficulty is slightly harder than vanilla. Many secrets are available to help, but the map is still reliably beatable with 0 secrets on HMP or below. UV is significantly harder to provide more of a challenge.
patrick_wdParticipantNice! I like the idea of sharing teasers of our maps, so here’s a quick screenshot from the first area of my map
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patrick_wdParticipantHere’s another idea to add to the pile. It’s possible to make a single player level double as a deathmatch map by adding a region disconnected from the rest of the map. Placing the deathmatch spawnpoints and multiplayer-only items there makes it effectively 2 maps in 1. Romero did this for his Sigil maps and it works quite well.
We could all add simple deathmatch arenas to our maps and use the DGC map pack for a tournament or something. It doesn’t need to be anything more complex than a big square with some walls and pillars in the middle, but feel free to add whatever unique twist you want.
patrick_wdParticipantI agree that it’s a good idea to keep difficulty roughly in line with the original, at least for normal difficulties. The Doom community has been around so long at this point that many community projects tend to be extremely high difficulty with massive arenas and huge waves of monsters that can be quite fatiguing even with save-scumming. Vanilla style monster density should make it accessible to most any player, while we can always reserve UV as a more challenging option.
patrick_wdParticipantAll editors support working in Doom’s native WAD format, so files should be interoperable without issue. Some modern source ports have other formats like “doom in hexen” or “UDMF”, but we don’t need to worry about any of that, just pick standard, vanilla Doom format and it should be fine.
As for adding custom textures, that’s a bit harder if we want to keep compatibility with vanilla. Only the textures from the last loaded WAD are available, which means if we try to add custom textures we lose all of the vanilla ones. This can be fixed by importing all of the vanilla textures into our WAD, which will bloat it significantly, but is doable.
patrick_wdParticipantYeah, modern Doom mapping tools are much more streamlined now. They even have 3D live-previews so you can move around in your map as you edit it and see your changes in realtime. It’s actually quite nice now, nothing like the “2d lines on a canvas until you run the game and hope it looks right” workflow of the 90s.
patrick_wdParticipantFastDoom is a particularly impressive effort to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the original hardware Doom was intended for. As technically impressive as Doom was when it came out, there was plenty of headroom left, and it’s fascinating to see how much faster it can be.
patrick_wdParticipantThe Build engine used by Duke 3D is way more complex and janky than Doom. If you have experience wrangling that, Doom should be no problem at all.
patrick_wdParticipantThis idea has been discussed on IRC a bit as well, and it sounds great to me. I agree that a full megawad is overambitious by far, but a smaller doom 1 style single mini-episode is more viable.
I used to do some mapping a long, long time ago, and the tools and tech have come a long way since then. I’m definitely down to attempt to make a map for this.
My personal favorite style of map are the episode 1 style techbases, so I’ll probably do one of those. If there are more volunteers with different preferred styles we could probably arrange them into a loose arc.
patrick_wdParticipantJust finished this on UV and it was a blast. Fantastic mapset; well done! Difficulty is well tuned and the maps are substantial without being too long or slaughter-y. The secrets were also well paced and interesting to hunt for. I found all but 1 without using cheats. I just wish there was a secret level 🙂
A few minor points of feedback: There are a few things that feel like they should be marked as secrets but aren’t, like the plasma rifle on map 3. Perhaps it’s an intentional “super secret” though, which is fine. I also softlocked by falling into the middle part of map 8 after raising the bridges. I thought they would be lifts to let me out but they weren’t. Maybe I just missed something.
In any case, those are minor quibbles, and this was overall an outstanding classic Doom 1 style episode. I recommend the rest of the club give it a try.
patrick_wdParticipantThis looks really cool so far. I generally prefer Doom 1 wads, especially episode 1 style, so this is just my kind of thing.
Just firing it up for the first time I do get an error message “R_InitTextures: Missing patch 500 in texture BLACKSQ”. I’m using Woof, which ignores this error and is playable anyway, but the Doom remaster on steam halts on the error, preventing it from being playable there.
Not sure how easy that is to fix, but I imagine most casual players will be using the remaster, so it may be worth fixing.
patrick_wdParticipantYeah, I’m a big fan of synth-chip lore, FM chips in particular. UW is one of the few games to be designed for the SBPro v1 before the industry quickly moved on to OPL3, so it’s definitely worth discussing on the episode.
An OPL3 could theoretically reproduce dual-OPL2 soundtracks, but it would require a special driver to translate the register writes. The main limitation would be if both chips independently use their rhythm sections, since the OPL3 only has one. To my knowledge nobody has actually attempted this, but dual-OPL2 games are relatively rare so the demand is likely too low to be worth it.
patrick_wdParticipantModern source ports have an option to cap the number of times you can respawn, so in effect you have a limited number of “lives”, which is what survival mode does. If everyone runs out of lives the level resets and you have to attempt it again.
patrick_wdParticipantYeah, I’ve always felt that co-op is an underappreciated mode in any game. It’d be a blast to get a few people together and attempt pistol-start nightmare survival co-op to see how far we can get.
patrick_wdParticipantI think discussing the mod scene is absolutely on topic as part of the legacy of doom, and there’s plenty of amazing ones.
I played this soon after it came out, and it’s incredible. If anyone is a big fan of doom and hasn’t played this yet, go in as blind as possible, with the exception of reading the companion text that comes along with the mod. Also, it does require the more modern gzdoom port to run properly.
Maybe it’s worth having a general “mod showcase” thread or something, to collect all of these.
patrick_wdParticipantMy dad is very into golf, so I have distinct memories of a couple golf games that we had on our 486 and pentium.
The first one is Links: The Challenge of Golf. This is the precursor to Links 386 and the followup to World Class Leaderboard. The line “Looks like I hit the tree, Jim” is permanently etched into our brains and my brother and I would quote it to eachother for years afterward.
The second game was Jack Nicklaus Golf Signature Edition. This one I mostly remember the distinct adlib tune in the menus and the swing power UI that was a solid bar instead of the horseshoe thing that Links used. We played 2 player in this one quite a bit also, but it didn’t have the memorable voice lines of Links.
It’s been far too long for me to recall which one I enjoyed playing more, or if one of them was distinctly better, but I intend to revisit both during the month. These are some of the few DOS games that I played back in the day but have not revisited at any point since.
patrick_wdParticipantI think we should, personally. “Golf” should include any game that follows the basic formula of hitting a ball into a hole in a minimum number of strokes. This should help keep things more interesting than just pro-sports style games.
One neat looking game I found while searching around for good OPL soundtracks was “Fuzzy’s World of Miniature Space Golf.” I have no idea if it’s actually a good game, but the music was good, so there’s that.
patrick_wdParticipantThere’s also the odamex multiplayer port, which I’ve heard has good latency tolerance which should help for the large distances between club members.
In any case, I’m down for all of it. There’s plenty of different modes to try, like the co-op mode where you have to survive as a team against waves of monsters.
patrick_wdParticipantI played this when it dropped and it’s fun; I encourage everyone to give it a look.
patrick_wdParticipantI’d heard of Ultima Underworld and vaguely knew what it was, but had never played it before now. I thought I knew what to expect from this game, and dungeon crawlers aren’t usually my thing, but my actual experience turned out quite different.
At first it felt like a survival game, just gathering food and light sources, but once I discovered the goblin settlements I started to suspect this game was more than it seemed. There are FAR more NPCs than I was expecting, with a reputation system and detailed dialog trees. Luckily, around this point I was tipped off that this game is easily soft-lockable. I went looking for a guide to make sure I wouldn’t make any fatal mistakes, but what I saw was a very long and detailed document filled with elaborate quests and puzzles that I was not expecting to see.
I avoided reading too much (at first), but seeing that was the point where my idea of what this game is started to shift. I was expecting “fight your way to the bottom floor and kill the bad guy.” Turns out this game is also a complex linear puzzle adventure game. More specifically, it has subtle “riddle” puzzles that involve gathering clues and making an intuitive leap about some obscure action you can take to make progress. I actually LOVE this kind of puzzle and am a huge fan of games like La-Mulana with similar puzzle design, but I struggled a bit with it in this game because I realized too late what kind of game this actually is and hadn’t kept detailed enough track of the things I had done or seen.
I’m actually fine with aimless wandering in a puzzle game like this while I search for clues, but the controls in this game (while actually quite modern relative to the time) were still a bit clunky and added just enough friction to exploration that retracing my steps constantly became increasingly frustrating over time. Even still, I found many of the puzzles quite enjoyable. Most notably the quest for the knight order where you find the golden plate. It offered just enough clues to keep me on track, and all the pieces fit together neatly. After some doing I managed to find the plate without using a guide at all, which was very satisfying!
The infamous “Cup of Wonder” puzzle was a bit of a different story. Honestly I actually really like the concept of the puzzle and how it’s constructed, but it felt almost like it was in the wrong game. It would fit right in as a mid game La-Mulana puzzle, but here I kept underestimating its complexity because I just wasn’t expecting that kind of thing here.
I managed to find about half of the talismans myself and the other half with the help of the guide, and eventually made my way to the evil wizard and took him out, made my way down to level 8 and got to the final door of the game. Unfortunately, I was stopped dead by a new key that I needed and had no idea what it was or where to look. The dramatic pacing had really pumped me up for a final confrontation, and the sudden screeching halt spiked my already substantial frustration and I just went to follow a guide for the remainder of the game. Turns out the game had the last laugh when I got hit with the object list corruption bug, so I just youtubed the ending. You win this round, UUW.
Even though I didn’t manage to actually finish it myself, and things like inventory management and general movement could be quite annoying at times, there is definitely something special to this game that kept me going for as long as it did. I can easily see how growing up with this game would smooth over the rougher parts and leave a mostly positive memory. Coming into it late with 30 years of hindsight makes it difficult to overlook some of the considerable flaws, but the spirit of the game still shines through I think. This is definitely my second favorite “never played it before” DGC pick after Gateway. Just be prepared to refer to a guide to keep you on track if you’re going in blind; you’ll need it.
patrick_wdParticipantVL-Bus was introduced in ’92, along with clock doubled 486 DX2 chips, so it would have been very new at the time and require a 486 or one of those rare 386 boards with VL support.
Hitting the 70fps frame cap would have been a big ask for anything but a top of the line DX2 machine of the time. Many games have logic based on framerate and start to exhibit strange behaviors when rendering too fast, so I generally recommend to keep dosbox cycles roughly in line with a high-end machine of whatever period a game is from.
patrick_wdParticipantMichael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book is considered a landmark text of the era. A fascinating read even if you don’t use or need all the techniques described.
patrick_wdParticipantThanks! I still have some tweaks I’d like to make for a final version, but yeah, once it’s all done and dusted that would be great.
patrick_wdParticipantHere’s version 1.1. I’ve made some of the early levels a bit less punishing, but the back half of the pack is still very hard.
patrick_wdParticipantSure, I’m making some adjustments based on feedback and will upload a new version soon.
patrick_wdParticipantAnother useful control tip: If you hold down the right mouse button while picking a lemming, only walkers will be chosen. This allows you to assign a skill in a tight space without cancelling the work another lemming is already doing. This can be extremely useful on later levels.
patrick_wdParticipantAfter a couple weeks of effort, I’ve managed to put together a pack of levels to celebrate the month. Just rename the file to LEVELPAK.DAT and place it in your Customized Lemmings folder, replacing the original LEVELPAK.DAT.
patrick_wdParticipantYeah, honestly that statue is on my bucket list of things to visit one day. Lemmings had such an impact on my life that it would probably be a rather surreal experience.
patrick_wdParticipant“This town didn’t have ANY vicious speed gangs. So we spent a lot of money and got one.”
patrick_wdParticipantFor me I guess it depends how exactly we define DOS game. If we mean games where DOS was the initial or primary release platform, then I think only DOOM would make my cut of best games ever. If we include anything that merely had a DOS version, then Lemmings would be in there too.
I think the reason so few games make the cut for me is also the reason the platform is so interesting. It was a highly experimental wild-west where new and strange things were constantly being tried, many of which either didn’t work, or needed further refinements to really shine. Console games tended more to focus on established formulas and iteratively refining them, which is why the “best of the best” exemplars tend to be found there.
EDIT: And just to clarify, I interpreted this more in an objective “what games achieve the highest quality” sense, rather than just a list of my favorite games. Many of my favorite games are deeply flawed in some way, and several more DOS games would be included in that case, such as Descent, Hexen, many Sierra adventures, etc.
patrick_wdParticipantEven better, there’s actually 4 Christmas editions. ’91 and ’92 are 4 level shareware demos promoting the ONML main game, but ’93 and ’94 were full commercial standalone titles. Thankfully, the ’94 version includes all the levels from ’93, so you only need the ’91, ’92, and ’94 versions to get all the content.
That should be plenty of official content to keep us busy, but I’m also going to dive into the mod scene since there’s lots there to talk about also.
patrick_wdParticipantWhile I don’t have a deck specifically, I do all my gaming (including DOS stuff) on Linux, and it works great.
For best results, you’ll want a version of DOSBox that uses SDL2. I recommend dosbox-staging or dosbox-x, both of them are quite good. The main challenge will just be using the dosbox keymapper to set up usable control profiles for different games so you can play without using a keyboard.
There’s also 86Box if you want a maximally authentic experience, including setting up the BIOS and installing DOS itself. I’m not sure if it supports controller mappings though, so it might not be as suitable for deck use.
patrick_wdParticipantI agree that Hexen would be a better pick for an episode, since Heretic really is essentially a doom total conversion, with the most notable innovation being the ability to store items in an inventory for later use.
Hexen has a fundamentally different game design, with the non-linear hub-based map structure and emphasis on thorough exploration. Also, Hexen brought several interesting technical advancements to the Doom engine. Firstly the custom ACS scripting language which adds much more dynamism to the maps with elaborate scripted sequences and puzzle triggers. Second, there were “polyobjects” which were specially marked sectors that could move and rotate in ways previously impossible for Doom, allowing things like the swinging doors on the first level, or the sliding crusher walls seen later.
My friend and I couldn’t get enough of Hexen and played through it with all the classes on progressively higher difficulties just to get more out of the game, and would do co-op runs over modem, much to the frustration of our parents for tying up the lines 🙂
patrick_wdParticipantThanks. Unfortunately I’m definitely more programmer than musician. I got myself lost in the weeds of designing an efficient song format with support for digitized drum samples because it was a fun challenge and something I hadn’t done before, but now that it’s mostly usable I’m going to need to learn how to actually compose music at all :/
In the meantime I just use converted VGM dumps of classic DOS tunes to make sure it’s working properly, and I’m working more on the renderer, since that’s the most crucial part. I’ll definitely share once it’s far enough along to be interesting!
patrick_wdParticipantIndeed, the OPL3 especially never really saw its true potential. Most games used it merely as a stereo version of the OPL2, and even then only to play MIDI conversions using off-the-shelf General Midi patches. When the chip is programmed directly and its full capabilities are used, it can do some amazing stuff.
