Fans of DOOM (the original)

[Firepath]

Hey guys

I'm a fan of early 90s games, and want to at some point make something like DOOM (and maybe like Wolf3D first, and a game like Command Keen...).

I wanted to start a discussion on those old games and their mechanics so we can help each other demystify things to enable us to implement them ourselves. Or something like that. I just came back from getting drilled at the dentist so a bit wobbly in the brain atm.

I came across this vid talking about what made DOOM (always caps; respect!) so much fun. It talks about a couple of the main few aspects (in my mind) that made it an awesome game.

1 - The monsters being so unique in how much damage they take, how, and how much damage they deal, and how they look.

2 - The weapons being so different. The shotgun is great for mass mulching of easier enemies. The rocket launch is too, with splash damage, but can also miss completely and also damages the player if used too closely.

3 - The way each monster reacts is slightly different (granted not really much other than how they attach).

4 - Their (monsters) behaviours can be learned and your play style is constantly adapting to deal with it. I like ghost recon but it gets old kind of quick. A fun, quicker, more dynamic situation with less investment in it lasts much longer for me.

I like the way the monsters were very dumb and pretty-much zombie / "dumb monster" - like. The latest iteration of DOOM has some monsters that have pretty good interception prediction and are also very fast. I liked how you just felt unstoppable charging in constantly and mowing down hordes. The new version has less monsters at the same time and they are all jumping all over the place, not lumbering around towards you letting you mow them down.


I also think there is something to the older games where the less detailed graphics left more up to your imagination, improving your mental involvement in the scenario. Similarly I'm not a fan of the realistically-detailed gruesome flesh-machine hybrid and sinewy slimy flesh monsters that are in DOOM 3 and DOOM 2016 and other fairly recent games.

I like the more stereotypical, stylised demons and monsters. The brown humanoid with spikes that was the imp, not the pseudo-spider (DOOM 3) or jumpy posing flayed rat-man (DOOM 2016) of the later games. I like the big pink, clean-skinned, muscly pinky with golden eyes, not the fat blind pig grafted onto a wheelchair (DOOM 3) or even the stubby lizard they made it into in DOOM 2017 (this one I think I like / respect better though).


Anyway, thoughts?

[Pindrought]

I liked doom 64. #1 horror game

[albinopapa]

Ok, so what's the plan to start making a fan version? You have your ideas on what to do, now where do you/we go from here?

If you are looking to start a group project, be sure to layout your intentions outright. You being the first to speak up, make sure you are the one in charge of the project and don't be to passive. Of course, realize that this would be a volunteer thing so don't be to strict either. You can take advice, but don't have to cater to anyone. Those that don't agree can leave with NO hard feelings.

I've tried in the past to work on group projects and have found that it's more trouble than it's worth. Mostly because there is no structure and no one is on the same page.

IMHO, if you find people that are interested, each should have their own portion of the project to work on. No more, no less. GitHub has a section that allows for creating tasks and each person can either be assigned tasks, or they can move tasks to their own column, letting others know that's what they are doing. Once they are done, they can either quit or start another task. I wish my team projects would have used something like this, but it either wasn't available or wasn't considered at those times.

I think it would be a great idea to get something going as a team project, one that is a come and go as you please, look through the tasks and see if there is anything interesting to you. If there is; pull it, complete it, turn it in and decide if you are done or want to continue.

Anyway, that's been my experience over the past 4 yrs or so.

[Firepath]

I'm not trying to start a group project but have thought about that. Maybe at some point I'll put something that is going somewhere on github and let people know they can have a go at contributing (pull requests, right?).

I'm just trying to help anyone out who wants to make those same sort of games, and get ideas and info from others.

I'm especially bad at having my own ideas and thinking about problems laterally, at least in what seems like a normal person's time frame.

So basically I want to make a DOOM game, but without just remaking DOOM I have little ideas. Keeping the same mechanics with a few more and changing the textures and sprites would be good, but then it would just be like Hexen.

I've not really got any problem with just trying to remake a game though, in itself it would be a good challenge, and perhaps a good starting point, that will give me ideas as I go.

I'm not really in a rush either as I have found that being impatient is the biggest contributor to just giving up on it. That plus I have a lot of other stuff to do. As an example, being Sunday and mother's day I've got to finish some ECU troubleshooting on my motorcycle, get some exercise at least once this week (cycling), and go to work to try and catch up on stuff that needs to be done. Yay.

Also I'd like to go through the direct X stuff (from Chili's tutorials when they come out) and build from the ground up. I've already done that a couple of times, using directxtutorial website as my main learning resource, but it explains so little, and learning the actual language is a HUGE help too, which that site doesn't go into. It also seems to do things sub-optimally now that I've experienced Chili's way of doing things and learnt more about the language.

I think Wolf3D would be a good one to start with, as I have the textures, everything is right angles and square textures, no floor or ceiling textures, etc. No lighting (maybe distance-based darkening).

[albinopapa]

Funny you mention directxtutorials.com. I for one was having troubles understanding the DirectX API and found that site to be more clear than any others. Granted the DX11.0 stuff is in C style with outdated usage of the D3DX library, but somehow I was able to grasp the concepts easier. The site that confused me the most was Rastertek.com. Setup as C++ style with classes, but with the old C style mentality ( declaring all variables at the top of a function, manual memory management, refusing to use constructors and destructors for their intended purpose, in/out parameters for functions instead of returning them, etc. ).

Another thing that got me confused was how everything revolved around the graphics class, including the "logic" like updating position and orientation of objects and lighting. I suppose I had issues looking past all these things and caused too much of a distraction from the material.

One thing I like about the directxtutorials.com tutorials was being able to see all the code that made it work in one source file and putting it in classes or functions that made sense to you.

That being said, I feel as though the admin charging $50 for his later content would have been fine, especially if he would have continued expanding the material. This was not the case and he never responded to my emails, so I hope he burns in hell for taking the money and running off with it and not delivering on his promise of expanding the site.

[Firepath]

That being said, I feel as though the admin charging $50 for his later content would have been fine, especially if he would have continued expanding the material. This was not the case and he never responded to my emails, so I hope he burns in hell for taking the money and running off with it and not delivering on his promise of expanding the site.

I also paid, and while I did get some out of it (probably my money's worth as far as education costs go I guess) I was left still kind of stuck. I think the main thing I wanted to know what how to work with animated models. The X file stuff he did was OK, but never went into trying to get it to do anything but constantly walk. That was a while ago, I could probably figure it out myself now. I also wanted to know more about loading models. Where to find out the contents of the files. I did eventually work most of this out myself and made a scene where I loaded barrels (textured in the end) that I made myself. I tried loading some models I downloaded but their textures were all upside-down and didn't go further with that for the time-being.