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New Release: Doom

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 8:33 am
by Kweepa
In-game screenshot:

Image

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 9:41 am
by orion70
Naaah, you're kidding.

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 10:10 am
by Kweepa
No joke!
The first person view is 32x64 pixels.
Frame rate is about 3FPS right now... hopefully I'll be able to bump that up a bit, although I doubt I'll be able to get more than 5.
I'm aiming for 20 or so maps, loaded from disk. I'll release the map editor at the same time as the game.
Code is a mixture of C and assembly - just like the original game!

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:47 pm
by Ghislain
Kweepa wrote:No joke!
The first person view is 32x64 pixels.
Frame rate is about 3FPS right now... hopefully I'll be able to bump that up a bit, although I doubt I'll be able to get more than 5.
I'm aiming for 20 or so maps, loaded from disk. I'll release the map editor at the same time as the game.
Code is a mixture of C and assembly - just like the original game!
Awesome!

I've always wondered how a 3D rendered VIC-20 game would be like.

We should find a time machine and go back to 1981 and dump a lot of our homebrewed dev projects onto the market just to freak everybody out :)

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 1:19 pm
by Jeff-20
You're on fire! Amazing stuff. Check out "Capture the Flag" for 3D effects.

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 2:46 pm
by Kweepa
Yes, capture the flag is awesome.
It was partial inspiration for this.

Speaking of CTF:
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=capture+flag+vic-20
Two!

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 2:50 pm
by darkatx
It was just a matter of time...LOL...awesome! :D

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 3:51 pm
by cobracon
Very cool project. Never thought I'd see this.

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:40 pm
by rhurst
This is a cool concept, as a working demo, but I am left wondering why such a leap to (10-year future) DOOM! would be attempted when a derivative such as Dungeon Master would be more suitable (and playable), rather than attempting to port and optimize the Doom 3D engine on a primitive VIC?

Not a criticism, mind you, but at the end of the day, busting your butt in 2010 for flashing chunky graphics in this manner (because you can) is ephemeral in the extreme... your time and a game's legacy of this era's machine can leave a better footprint with us aging geeks on its history with something that matches the friendliness and playability we love in VIC 20 gaming.

Our beloved Jeff has captured that essence in a most eloquent manner. most of us will never achieve. As an example, I pursue the late 1970s and early 1980s arcade action that were missing from the VIC 20 library -- with those titles making it to our "richer" cousin in C64 born only a year later. Like that "younger" brother or sister, C64 got some titles VIC 20 missed out on, and I aim to make up for those missed years of pure personal arcade enjoyment (although I did personally with my C128, but three years later into the C64 hey-day)!!

But other than my (now) martini-influenced ramblin' here after a long Monday at work, I do appreciate the result of your work! :shock: :lol:

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:55 pm
by Kweepa
You scratch your itch, and I'll scratch mine! :D
Who says this game won't be friendly (look at that big guy's smile!) and playable?

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 12:26 am
by orion70
Yep, everyone should feel free to pursue the games genre he prefers. As everyone knows here, I really like adventures (with graphics or not), turn-based and real-time strategy, and RPGs. Even if none of those genres was well represented back in the VIC's heyday, I just love the new releases from Denial's crew.

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 1:39 am
by Kananga
Awesome! And the fluffy orange ball looks cute! :)

Do you plan an alpha/beta release?

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 1:45 am
by Kweepa
Beta, definitely.

Alpha... possibly - to attempt to attract some better graphics (saehn, are you listening?) and some music tracks (perhaps for Vic Tracker if I can get that integrated and it doesn't kill the frame rate).

Fixed the wall collisions today. Tomorrow I'll optimize them :)

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 5:46 am
by Ghislain
rhurst wrote:This is a cool concept, as a working demo, but I am left wondering why such a leap to (10-year future) DOOM! would be attempted when a derivative such as Dungeon Master would be more suitable (and playable), rather than attempting to port and optimize the Doom 3D engine on a primitive VIC?

Not a criticism, mind you, but at the end of the day, busting your butt in 2010 for flashing chunky graphics in this manner (because you can) is ephemeral in the extreme... your time and a game's legacy of this era's machine can leave a better footprint with us aging geeks on its history with something that matches the friendliness and playability we love in VIC 20 gaming.

Our beloved Jeff has captured that essence in a most eloquent manner. most of us will never achieve. As an example, I pursue the late 1970s and early 1980s arcade action that were missing from the VIC 20 library -- with those titles making it to our "richer" cousin in C64 born only a year later. Like that "younger" brother or sister, C64 got some titles VIC 20 missed out on, and I aim to make up for those missed years of pure personal arcade enjoyment (although I did personally with my C128, but three years later into the C64 hey-day)!!

But other than my (now) martini-influenced ramblin' here after a long Monday at work, I do appreciate the result of your work! :shock: :lol:
I was subscribed to the "2600 Connection" newsletter back in the 1990s. Once a year, they'd have an "April Fool's Issue" where it would contain mock screenshots of games and products that would be technically too advanced to achieve on the Atari 2600: Windows 2600, Doom 2600, Duke Nuk'em 2600, etc. The Atari 2600 was quite limited in it's capabilities: only 128 bytes of RAM (though ROM cartridges had no real limit because you could "page swap" 8K blocks at a time), 40x200 playfield graphics, 2 sprites, 3 "missiles/balls". And you had to set the graphic registers in "real time" as the raster beam drew the graphics on the TV screen. Basically, Atari 2600 graphics programming had to be done at the raster level.

As far as "retro" goes, the Atari 2600 is probably the most popular console because it is a pop culture icon (just like the Commodore 64 is the most popular retro machine on the home computer front) and people are making games for the machine to this day, along with new cartridge releases. Somebody made Lady Bug for the 2600. The 2600 homebrew community gets annoyed with requests to adapt arcade certain classics, but those making the requests have no clue as to the graphical limitations of the 2600.

After the introduction of the Commodore 64, the VIC-20 was largely abandoned by the commercial games publishers. So the Video Interface Chip was never really pushed to the limit until recently.

Is a modern VIC-20 game that requires full memory expansion + disk drive really a VIC-20 game? The "pure" VIC-20 back in the day was just a stock machine with no memory expansion and a Datassette. The "elite" users had maybe 3K or 8K of memory expansion. It was technically possible to expand fully to 38.5K (3.5K built-in RAM, plus a 3K cart and 2 16K carts) with a giant motherboard protruding out the back of the machine, but at this point, the super elite VIC-20 user spent more on that setup than an actual C64.

Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:28 am
by Kananga
@Ghislain: So what's your point?