Very, very long ago when Doom started a new era of gaming on PCs, some brave coders decided that first person shooters weren't for Intel machines and consoles only, but that also good old Amigas - maybe with some acceleration here and there - could afford a decent FPS. Those people where the coder of Alien Breed 3D, which become a little classic for the platform. Tempus fugit, anyway, and nowadays we can get great 3D graphic engines even in the open source planet, which can be modified and "dressed" as we like. So, why not adding to a popular "anternative" DooM engine some new graphics inspired from Alien Breed 3D, to create an amazing remake of the old Amiga classic? User XDelusion from AROS-EXEC.org had exactly this idea and showed a little video of his progress here. Here at AROS PlayGround we all agreed it was great, and we decided to talk a little with him about his project. Here's the interview.
- when did you get involved in AROS,
and what were your former projects?
I have had my eye on AROS since the
idea was first proposed on the Internet back in the mid 90's, but I
did not start using it regularly until the past three years. Thus far
this is my only AROS project, unless begging BSzili to port Odamex
counts as one. :)
- I guess you were a fond player of
Alien Breed 3D, when did you play it, and what were your dreams at
the time?
If I recall correctly, I was able to
play a little Alien Breed 3D sometime shortly after its release. I
think it was at a friends or at an Amiga show, I forget. From that
point on all I could dream about was having an Amiga powerful enough
to run a DOOM clone and of some day making my own FPS game, though by
nature I was a huge RPG fan at the time.
- Would you have imagined, at the time,
that many years after you'd start "backporting" the classic
on a newer engine?
Back in the day when Alien Breed 3D was
still relatively new, all I wanted to do was learn how to make maps
for DOOM, but I didn't think I was smart enough at the time to teach
my self. I ended up finding an Amiga program called 3D Construction
Kit and would sit around all day tinkering with it, creating rooms,
populating, them, gliding around them slowly, and dreaming about
virtual reality head sets. Needless to say, I never imagine that I'd
be merging Alien Breed with a DOOM engine, as I said I didn't think I
had the capacity to self teach as I did, but some time later I found
myself doing just that, but I never imagined I'd be creating a new
Alien Breed chapter within the engine, that was actually and idea of
Fishy Fiz's to be honest.
- why did you chose Odamex? Are there
any particular feature that drove you to this decision? Were there
any other option available?
Originally the project was intended to
be a clone of the original Alien Breed 3D and was being designed for
Nova's port of BOOM for the 68k Amiga. Fish mentioned it one time in
passing, and I ended up staying up all night thinking about it. The
next morning the projekt was born but it was some time later that I
realized that BOOM did not have all the features necessary to pull
off my vision.
Around this time, BSzili was kind
enough to port as much of Odamex over to AROS as he could. Having
this particular engine is a giant step over having BOOM. In short is
allows for the majority of ZDOOM 1.22 and 1.23's features to function
just fine, this includes nearly every mapping feature available to
Hexen, an advanced scripting language, sloped floors, swimmable
water, controllable gravity, new Railgun weapon, on-line or networked
co-op or death match, the list goes on.
Without using GzDOOM which is Windows
only, I probably won't be able to create a perfect or near perfect
clone of Alien Breed 3D, so instead I am going to take advantage of
those features unique to Odamex and am in the process of creating and
entirely new chapter for the Alien Breed saga, though instead of
drawing influence just from the 3D titles, I am using all the games
of the series as inspiration.
- What are the main problems and
difficulties you're encountering during the process?
Three of the hardest aspects of the
project is staying inspired, staying in a good mood, and making the
time. I of course had to take a crash course in the ZDOOM engine that
Odamex is based upon. Then I had to take time to figure out which of
those features Odamex supported and which ones were not, or were
broken.
I had a lot of experience with the DOOM
Legacy and PrBOOM engines, so that came in handy, but learning how to
edit in Hexen mode took a little while to adapt to as well. Other
than that the only other struggle has been the fact that so far I've
been working alone.
- Are you planning to release your
total conversion in a particular time frame?
I'm going to have to go with the AROS
motto here, but idealy I would like to have a polished up 1 to 3
level teaser released before summer.
- If anybody would help... how can he
get in contact with you?
I am very open to help from the
outside, especially from those interested in pushing pixels as I
could use some custom weapon sprites for the game, as well as some
extended work on the enemy sprites I am currently using. The AB3D
resources on Aminet were kind of lackluster to say the least. Some of
the enemies only have frames facing the player, but none facing
backwards, to the side, or at angles. The more frames the better so
if anyone has the skill the project could certainly use help in that
department!
If there are any seasoned mappers who
are familiar with ZDOOM in HEXEN mode, then please by all means, get
in touch! We also urge programmers. And last but not least, a port of
the server and a nice GUI for the program would also be a boon
because as I said, I want to emphasize multi-player with this project
and little features like that would make it easier for AROS users to
contact each other, set up their own servers for Odamex., and just
launch custom pWADs without command line.
Also I would like to call upon any
Alien Breed veterans who have features they would like to see in this
project, or who have seen the project and see something about it that
they don't like. I consider the Amiga to be holy territory and I want
to stay as true to the spirit of the originals as I can, but without
keeping the atmosphere and level detail back in the 90's, so if
anyone has any ideas they would like to shoot at me, I'd be open to
listening to them at the very least.
I can be contacted here or at
AdvertAndEntice AT gmail DOT com
- How can we follow your progresses?
To follow the project, you can just
watch for my posts on AROS-EXEC.org and on Amiga.org, GBATemp and EmuExtras, as I
have put additional focus on making sure this runs well on the
classic XBOX and hopefully some day the Wii too.
It will probably work if you copy the patches to the games' drawer.
Speaking of drawer, you can simply dump the game files there, or create a
data drawer and put them there."
