Project Osiris - Alien Breed 3D for GZDoom

[ArcturusDeluxe]

Hi all, I hope this thread doesn't come across as a bit tacky, since I'm a new user barging in plugging something I made, but I think it's relevant to people's interests in here and I'm looking for feedback and discussion about it so hopefully it's ok with you all!

I suppose I should introduce myself, hi, I'm ArcturusDeluxe, I'm in my 30s and from the UK and I had an Amiga 1200 back in the day. It was cool and I have a lot of fond memories of it. Not sure where my particular machine ended up, so I emulate it these days. Good times. Anyway, I made a thing!

Long story short, I've remade (and very slightly reimagined) AB3D using the current GZDoom engine. It's (pretty much) finished too, you can go and download it and play through all 16 levels. Obviously there will be inherent differences since it's using a different engine, so don't expect an exact 1:1 remake just with higher resolution. It's its own game really, but I've tried hard to keep it pretty faithful to the original.



I did specifically add and change things though, to hopefully enhance the experience a bit, here's a few of note:

I drew a lot of new graphics - many of the aliens now have diagonal view angles and some have been completely overhauled. The art style on the regular troopers is less cartoony and fits in a bit better, for example, and the trooper variants that wield plasma guns and shotguns are now way more distinguishable. The spawny tentacle chaps have also been redrawn at a bigger scale as they appeared too small in the Doom engine. Some monsters now have death animations where they didn't before.

Enemy behaviour is different and more Doom-like, they will generally chase you down more aggressively. Honestly this is partly due to my lack of ZScript knowledge, but it is arguably better in a lot of cases. The boss fights have been purposely overhauled though - the robot boss is slower but now has a couple of different attacks, and the alien queen at the end now has multiple phases and the fight escalates as it goes along.

The weapons have new view sprites, and a knife weapon that didn't make it into the final game has been added for when you run out of ammo.

The maps also have a few changes, some shortcuts have been added to reduce backtracking, and now have visual enhancements like better texture alignment and coloured lighting effects.

I added some additional sound effects and I remixed some of Bjorn Lynne's music tracks made for the original game as well. No regular in-game music yet, but there is boss fight music!

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So basically I'm looking for any feedback, particularly on the difficulty balance right now. Is it too hard or too easy? There are no difficulty levels implemented currently, since the original didn't have any, but it's something I want to add, and I'd like to make sure I get 'normal' difficulty right first. Any other feedback would be greatly appreciated of course, especially if you find any bugs or major issues. Either way I hope you enjoy it!

You DON'T need a copy of doom2.wad to play. The download link below includes a current Windows 64-bit version of GZDoom - just run gzdoom.exe and you're away! Or if you already have GZDoom set up, you can copy the osiris.ipk3 file to wherever you keep your IWADS (such as doom2.wad etc). If you have Mac or Linux you'll have to download your own version of GZDoom, but just drop the ipk3 in the same folder and it should find it.

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It seems I can't directly link to the file here due to where its currently hosted, so please take a look at the thread on ZDoom.org for the download link:

Main project thread on ZDoom.org - check here for download, information and updates!

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A few more screenshots:

[CFou!]

great, i will test it next week

[Valken]

Just awesome including the other Alien / Aliens GZDoom project. Now we just need GZDoom to be ported to AmigaOS or even AROS and it would be even more amazing to run.

[cry]

Wow this looks amazing, gonna play it real soon!

[trixster]

This is brilliant! Very well done indeed. Looking forward to trying it

[Nobby_UK]

Just played the first level = Very Nice


Although the Knife/Arm looked a bit weedy

[trixster]

It would be cool to see a video of it in action

[Bren McGuire]

I love this! It'll make me finally play this game

[Cherno]

I already praised this TC in the zDoom thread, so after finishing it I'll just add that the game never got unfair; there was a noticeable spike in difficulty around level 14-15, and I ran out of regular ammo in level 15 and had to shoot grenades at beholders at close range (because of the short range of the launcher). I did a couple of times there to shotgun soldiers, but otherwise I'd say it's fine. The end fight was frantic with the enemy waves, I liked that. I think one addition that could be made is the includion of a small health pack, like the stimpack from Doom, which gives 10 health, so wasting those precious medpacks becomes less of an issue.

[Havie]

Had a play through the first level and a bit of the second. Plays really well and feels like the original! I think the sound effects are spot on and really help the atmosphere. Excellent - feel the urge to play this all the way through.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by ArcturusDeluxe

----><8

Long story short, I've remade (and very slightly reimagined) AB3D using the current GZDoom engine. It's (pretty much) finished too, you can go and download it and play through all 16 levels. Obviously there will be inherent differences since it's using a different engine, so don't expect an exact 1:1 remake just with higher resolution. It's its own game really, but I've tried hard to keep it pretty faithful to the original.
----><8
]

Howdy, first of all, great work, I'll definitely check this out. Its obvious from jsut the screenshots that A LOT of work went into this. Well done.

Now a question - how did you recreate the maps.Did you write some sort of utility to read the original format.. and if so would it be possible to convert the TKG maps to something usable.
I've done some Quake mapping in the past and was tempted to do TKG but got nowhere with the map design without some sort of tool to get the old maps into something readable..

[Dunny]

Bloody marvellous, loving every minute of this. About half way through after a handful of hours, the difficulty is spot-on.

Managing ammo is more of a thing in this than the original, but that adds to the fun.

The alien AI for the troopers can be gamed - they didn't have as much "activation range" in the Amiga version, I think? I can easily farm them by just popping into a room and then letting them bottleneck into a narrow corridor. On the Amiga I would generally have to get into their room as only the closest would chase me.

The graphics are very nice indeed, though the rocket launcher needs to fill up the right-hand third of the screen.

Different water colours are interesting, but I think I prefer the light blue of the original. And somehow getting the water refraction animation in there would be just sublime.

All in all, a very competent job and great fun to play - captures the original's atmosphere and gameplay very well indeed.

Your next project should be Breathless, btw

[ArcturusDeluxe]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Now a question - how did you recreate the maps.Did you write some sort of utility to read the original format.. and if so would it be possible to convert the TKG maps to something usable.

There was an old Quake mod called QBreed by a guy called John Girvin, he was trying to remake AB3D in Q1. He had written tools to rip the maps and the levels were present in the mod in non-working form. So to make the maps I literally went into QBreed in a Quake port in windowed mode, noclipped above the maps, and copied them by hand into Doom Builder. I used the repeating nature of the textures to reference distances and such.

Then at some point I met someone else who tried to do an AB3D mod for Zandronum who somehow got hold of the original uncompiled files for the QBreed maps (I guess he got Girvin's tools working via an emulator, which I never figured out), so he sent them over and I could load the maps into GTKRadiant and reference them a lot easier. It was still very time consuming!

I also had AB3D open in an emulator with a trainer so I could cheat and just look around the levels without getting killed, so I could reference things like floor and ceiling heights, item placements and light levels.

So yeah, nothing particularly clever I'm afraid, just a lot of work. There was no Quake to Doom converter really that could have done the job properly. The only one I did find had a broken link - and it looks like it converted them into a mess of GZDoom 3D floors floating in a void, so not ideal. I'm also not sure that Girvin's tools work on TKG maps, although someone (not me I'm afraid, I'm not a huge fan of TKG myself) can probably use the TKG level editor to look at the maps and recreate them in a similar way.

[Twiggy]

Looking forward to giving this a go. Never really got very far on the original.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by ArcturusDeluxe

There was an old Quake mod called QBreed by a guy called John Girvin, he was trying to remake AB3D in Q1. He had written tools to rip the maps and the levels were present in the mod in non-working form. So to make the maps I literally went into QBreed in a Quake port in windowed mode, noclipped above the maps, and copied them by hand into Doom Builder. I used the repeating nature of the textures to reference distances and such.

Then at some point I met someone else who tried to do an AB3D mod for Zandronum who somehow got hold of the original uncompiled files for the QBreed maps (I guess he got Girvin's tools working via an emulator, which I never figured out), so he sent them over and I could load the maps into GTKRadiant and reference them a lot easier. It was still very time consuming!

I also had AB3D open in an emulator with a trainer so I could cheat and just look around the levels without getting killed, so I could reference things like floor and ceiling heights, item placements and light levels.

So yeah, nothing particularly clever I'm afraid, just a lot of work. There was no Quake to Doom converter really that could have done the job properly. The only one I did find had a broken link - and it looks like it converted them into a mess of GZDoom 3D floors floating in a void, so not ideal. I'm also not sure that Girvin's tools work on TKG maps, although someone (not me I'm afraid, I'm not a huge fan of TKG myself) can probably use the TKG level editor to look at the maps and recreate them in a similar way.

First of all, played through the first levels, really nice.. It sure brings back memories. Seems very faithful to the original.

About the map-making.. I though John Girvins name might show up. :-)
I have his sources for lev2map (by permission) but I not a coder so I didn't do much with them other passing them on to the occasional enthusiast who would find them useful for some AB3D related project like yours.

Anyhow I also suspected there would be no magic button. If one looks at all the nooks and crannies on a typical AB3d map it almost looks "impossible". It certainly isn't a design that would exist anywhere in the real-world if someone would buuild it for a purpose, making it very time consuming to rebuild (I'm guessing, as a I said I do Quake mapping in real 3d, not so much 2.5D). Maps probably aren't directly translatable so some manual work was always going to be necessary, but again, well done and kudos for the effort.

[girv]

So glad to see something finally come from QBreed Nice work!

For reference, the QBreed tools spit out Quake-standard textual .map files that can be compiled into Quake 1 levels.

The Q1 engines around at the time I was woking on this were limited to 0-8192 for map geometry coordinates (for some reason I don't entirely recall), but some of the AB3D levels were too big to fit into these restrictions. IIRC it needed more like 0-11500.

Map files, textures and a little bit of scripting was as far as I got before I hit the coordinate limit and dropped the project. Obviously, technology has become sufficiently advanced in the intervening decades

[Dunny]

Just a thought, but would it be possible to port the AB3D demo disk map too? Possibly as a playable secret level? That really would be the icing on the cake for me (and proper water too).

[Cherno]

Originally Posted by Dunny

The graphics are very nice indeed, though the rocket launcher needs to fill up the right-hand third of the screen.

You can set the weapon sprites to their old version if you fancy

Originally Posted by Dunny

Just a thought, but would it be possible to port the AB3D demo disk map too? Possibly as a playable secret level? That really would be the icing on the cake for me (and proper water too).

Well, I know for a fact that the green aliens from the demo are in the code

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Cherno

You can set the weapon sprites to their old version if you fancy

Yep, found the option and switched straight to it - that's much better

Well, I know for a fact that the green aliens from the demo are in the code

Yeah, I opened the ipk3 and found the green alien. Actually, I might replace the plasma-gun trooper with the green alien which would improve things quite a lot as the current plasma trooper looks very much out of place in this.

[Cherno]

Interestint! I liked the green plasma trooper. The alien has only one angle so that might bother some people