Hiya my friend,
After you finished doing a TC for DOOM you could try your hand a doing one for Quake 2, the Quake 2 engine should be more than up the job.
When we last talked, I had discovered some limitations within BOOM that prevented me from pulling off my "grand vision". In order to accomplish half of what I had intended, that being a nearly full DOOM based re-creation of the AB3D, I would need PrBOOM at the very least to be running well on the Amiga.
Since then I have been very busy with moving, dealing with unemployment and this and that. Well now that I am done moving (yet again) and have a little spare time on my hands I have been busy trying to organize my old work and have another go at this...
...but now I have some new thoughts.
First of them being that the Quake TC for AB3D has been revived, and as much as I would love to see AB3D recreated using an enhanced DOOM engine, I would have to say that Quake is more up to that task than standard BOOM.
Secondly, without PrBOOM, I would be forced to remove more features that were in the original AB3D. Added to the list of features that I already would not be able to pull off, would in the end only result in a buzz kill.
Third, Odamex is coming along nicely and aside of being the king of the on-line DOOM experience, it keep receiving new features found in PrBOOM as well as ZDOOM, making it more and more of a better candidate to carry my work over to.
As far as Amiga based OS' are concerned, Odamex currently only runs on AROS, though I'm sure with a little convincing, it could also find it's way over to MorphOS, and OS 4. Heck it may even be doable for classic WB on a PPC or with an FPGA board.
So I am thinking, would it not be more fun instead to take my current AB3D resources and use them instead to create an entirely new and fresh AB3D game for Odamex, rather than try to re-create the already advanced AB3D with a limited DOOM engine, especially considering all of BOOM's short comings without the PrBOOM features?
That is of course not to say that BOOM is crap. BOOM is freaking awesome man, and allows for Amiga users to play so very many pWADs that have been created over the years (Community Chest 1-4, Eternal DOOM, Batman DOOM, etc.). All I am saying is that I don't quite think standard BOOM is quite as up to the task of recreating AB3D as I first thought it was.
Onc thing I am trying to do though, now that I am just creating new levels from scratch is attempting to also bring in some new textures, and design a couple more enemies that closer match the look and atmosphere of the original Alien Breed games before they went to 3D,the end result will hopefully come across as the perfect marriage between classic AB and AB3D.
Likewise I am really keen to the idea of adding Co-Operative support which is another feature of the classic Amiga Breed games that I really feel should be included in this new incarnation. Odamex once again would be perfect for this, and it would allow Amiga users to connect with each other and share something else Amiga related in common.
Beyond that there is also the fact that Odamex is also on Windows, Linux, OS X, XBOX, coming to the Wii, and God knows what else. So the community to play with, and the hardware for that matter is not just limited to the Amiga community, so hopefully this will broaden the amount of people who are willing to play my piece of crap when it is finished, thus increases the amounting of people for you all to potentially co-op with. And besides, it's just cool to be able to create something that runs on my classic XBOX and on a tell-lie-vision set no less.
Love it or hate it, I do believe this is the direction I am going to take for now, the upside is though that should PrBOOM become a reality on classic Amiga, PPC Amiga or FPGA Amiga, it would not require too much additional work on my end to adapt what ever levels I am creating to work on that engine, I would just have to cut a few features such as sloped floors and what not.
That being said, please feel free to express your thoughts on my new change of plans be they supportive or against.
