T.U.C.Q. Conversion to GZDOOM Thread

[Boingo the Clown]

Now that DeiMWolf has had a fully functioning version for GZDOOM released a couple of days ago, I can now turn my attention to converting T.U.C.Q. over, as I have been meaning to do for years.

Converting T.U.C.Q. over to GZDOOM is going to be much more difficult converting DeiMWolf was.  DooM Legacy does not have the DECORATE lump and so I made heavy use of my special trick of hacking into Legaacy's hidden Herectic thing and frame tables when I was working on T.U.C.Q.. It will take me a while to recreate all these items, especially the new versions of the flemoids.

It is also going to be difficult to work on T.U.C.Q. for the simple reason that I have not worked on it in a long time, and there is going to be a bit of a learning curve before I remember everything I was doing before.  I will have to spend a lot of time playing T.U.C.Q. in Legacy to see what I was doing back a few years ago.  The fact that Legacy does not work properly in Win 7 means that I am going to spend a lot of time switching back and forth between my new computer and the old in order to do this.  A number of the old editors I will need to figure things out also work only on the old computer.  It may take a while.





To answer a common question:

No.  I do not plan on incorporating Chex Quest 3 into T.U.C.Q.. 

This is *not* meant as any kind of slight against Chukker.  Chuck was very kind to me, giving me credit in CQ3 and using some of the changes I made in T.U.C.Q.  in CQ3 (the booths and and windows in the diner in E2M1 for example).  This has given me a good motive for working on T.U.C.Q. again, and I feel a great deal of appreciation toward him for this.

The primary reason I am not including CQ3 in T.U.C.Q. is that I already have a story planned for T.U.C.Q. that pre-dates the one used in CQ3 and is quite different from it.  The two stories do not match up, and so I have decided to go with my original story rather than adding CQ3.

I also feel that adding CQ3 to T.U.C.Q. would be stealing Chuck's work, and I don't like that idea at all.





What I have planned:

It is unlikely that the first GZDOOM version of T.U.C.Q. will contain anything new.  I am just going to convert it over as best I can.  After that I will start to work on fixing it up.

It is most likely that I will change the flemoids on the lower skill levels to be more like the versions in the original Chex Quest.  When I started T.U.C.Q. I was unaware that the commonus and bipedicus only had melee attacks.  This was due to the fact that I played CQ almost entirely in Legacy, because it was easier than running CQ through DOSbox, and I incorrectly assumed they behaved the same way as the DooM trooper and sergeant they replaced with their ranged attacks.  Now that I am aware this is not the case, I would like to correct the mistake.

I am not sure if I had already impemented it in Phase II Beta 3, but I was planning on implementing difficulty levels in a way that is different from the way DooM engine games usually do.  The usual method is to have an increasing number of enemies on higher skill levels.  The method I was trying to implement was (and still is) to swap the flemoids with tougher versions on higher levels.  For example, if there is a bipedicus in a certain spot on skills 1 and 2, on skill 3 there will be a bipedicus that is faster with more hit points in its place, and on skills 4 and 5 there will be yet another version of the bipedicus that is even faster and tougher.  In addition, I was also planning on increasing the difficulty by reducing the amount of health and ammo on the higher skill levels.  I intend to continue with this plan.

I will no longer be using the Phase X Beta Y naming in future releases.  I do not think it is appropriate anymore.  Instead I will either put in a version number, starting with 0.5.0, or the release date (i.e. June 12, 2013).

I have other things I want to do, such as adding cutscenes, and finishing my version of the flemoidus gyro and flem balloon and adding other new flemoids of my own, but I will probably deal with those later when the initial conversion is done.

As per usual let me know what you think.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: October 17, 2012.

Things got off to a good start yesterday.

First I managed to get the large flats, which would not work in GZDOOM, converted over as textures, notably the steel plate textures used extensively in E1M3 and the gigantic floor textures for the final round room on E2M5.  I will be redoing them as straight PNG grphics in the flats section however, because textures used as flats appear as a "?" graphic in DooM Builder 2, which can be very confusing when I edit.

I did my first GLDEFS lump yesterday (Yay!).  Because the wall lights I added to the museum level (E2M3) were done by hack editing the Heretic tables in Legacy, they did not show up in GZDOOM.  I found the walls looked bald without them, so I made up a DECORATE definition for the wall light.  They didn't look right, because they didn't cast any light, so I did my first GLDEFS.  The results were good.



I found I missed the teleport glitter (another Heretic thing) rather badly, so I copied the DECORATE definitions directly from the ZDOOM wiki.  The glitter generator worked, but the glitter did  not work. The function for making the glitter accelerate upward gave me an error and I was forced to remove it.  Without acceleration I ended up with massive amounts of glitter slowly floating upward.  It was very pretty.



I decided that such a massive numbers of glitter objects on the screen would slow older machines down to a crawl, and found that levels with teleporters close to the player start would allow the player to run over to the teleporter and see the glitter not yet reaching to the top of the teleporter, so I increased the initial speed of the glitter by four.  This resulted in less glitter on the screen at once.  It is not as pretty, but is much more reasonable.



I also added the MAPINFO lump.  Now I don't have to worry about adding scripts to skip the unused levels.

All in all it was a pretty good day.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report:  October 22, 2012.

Work continues to roll along.

I had to work on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and did very little on those days, but I managed to get some stuff done this past weekend.

I have converted all of the original flemoids over to DECORATE, as well as the medium and hard version of the Flemoidus Commonus.  The medium and hard versions of the Flemoidus Bipedicus have not been converted over yet.  As per the poll taken last year I have decided to make the easy versions of the Flemoidus Commonus and Flemoidus Bipedicus melee fighters only as they are in the original Chex Quest, but to give the medium and hard versions additional ranged attacks.  I have decided not to use the existing hitscan attacks, but will have them shoot projectiles.  I will be giving the bipedicus a triple spread shot when I figure out how to do it properly.  The Commonus is currently shooting a small flem ball using Bipedicus with Armour sprites scaled down and using that attack's sounds, but I intend to come up with new sprites if I can and to create or find a "pfoo!" sound to make it seem more like the Commonus is spitting the projectiles as its sprites suggest.  At present the projectiles are a little too difficult to see and are too accurate, making them frustrating to deal with, but I intend to fix that in the near future.

I also recreated the extra ammo types I created back in phase II beta 2 using Heretic pickups.  Because I have control over these items through DECORATE, I will probably change the extra ammo types to make them more useful, such as changing the large phasing zorcher recharge from +25 cells to +50 cells so that I don't have to place  two of them together all the time as I was doing before.

I have added A flash effect in place of the bullet puff For the hitscan weapons.  I know this is not needed for the conversion, but it is something I have wanted to add for a long time.  In fact I tried to accomplish it in Legacy by swapping the code pointers between the DooM pistol and the Heretic wand, but Legacy would not let me do it.  It is too bad, because the final effect, especially with dynamic lighting added to flash, looks pretty good.  If Legacy had been more coorperative, T.U.C.Q. would have had this effect a long time ago.



I also added dynamic lighting to some of the other weapons.

I am still inexperienced at ZDooM/GZDooM editing, so don't scoff if I am making a big deal out of this, but I did my first DECALDEF lump today for the various flemoids' flem balls.  I used an existing wall patch of a flem splatter, with scaled versions for the different sized flem balls.  It is so much better to see the flem balls actually going "splat" against the walls, rather than just disappearing.



At some point in the near future I will have to create a number of other flem splats to add a lot more variety.

*** WARNING: Obnoxious Bragging Ahead!  ***

I looked through the chex3 wad today and noticed that Chuck had adopted nearly all of the sprite name changes I had made to the flemoids in T.U.C.Q. (i.e. FLEM for the Flemoidus Commonus instead of POSS from the original Chex Quest and STTU for all the statues in the museum level).  Whenever I see something from T.U.C.Q. in Chex Quest 3 I always break out with a bad case of the grins.   

That reminds me that I still need to create a Cinema level.  Chuck may have based his theatre interior on the one I made, but he then went on to create the rest of the level.  All I have at the moment is my theatre interior.   :facepalm

*** Obnoxious Bragging Complete ***

I changed the blood splatter so that it leaves little blobs of flem on the floor for a short time, just as the blood splatter did in Legacy.

I also have the MAPINFO lump working.  The episodes only follow the extant levels right now and end after E1M5 and E2M5 respectively.  Episodes 3 and 4 simply end immediately with instructions to visit doomlegends.com to look for updates.

I found the test level in which I made a very simple cut scene with fraggle script and a Legacy camera.  If they do not bloat the wad too much, I may be able to add animated cut scenes to future versions of T.U.C.Q..  This can be important, because my version of the story does vary a bit from the original, like the planned extra levels in episodes 1 and 2 (originally because I needed to fill in the standard length DooM episodes), and the storylines for episodes 3 and 4 also need to be introduced.

I also found an old copy of DeiM!  DeiM is an old project of mine (My Wolfenstein clone is called "DeiMWolf" because it originally started as a planned easter egg in DeiM.) that has been on indefinite hiatus for years.  It seems I did a lot more effects tests than actual levels when I was making DeiM, and one test level had a experiment that will probably end up in T.U.C.Q..  I have not successfully made any models for any of the DooM ports, but I have managed to fake it in the past by other means (i.e. several objects in DeiMWolf are constructed from 3D sectors).  This simple object is constructed entirely of textures, but appears to be a solid model:



Please note that this screen shot is from over ten years ago, and that the effect here is actually for vanilla DooM.

I abandoned this "model" and the effect because Legacy's opengl mode had a bug that wrecked it.  GZDooM does not appear to have the same bug, so a modified version of this "model" will almost definitely appear in T.U.C.Q. in the future.  If it works, I may use this trick for other  "3D models" as well.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: October 26, 2012.

You're going to hate me for this.

After playing T.U.C.Q. with CQ3 as the IWAD I have been forced to redo the Chex Quest decorations in in DECORATE, because CQ3 mixes a lot of them up (i.e. some statues are replaced with minecarts or hostages, one statue was actually hanigng from the ceiling, and some hanging plants are replaced by giant bowls of cereal!).  As I have been redefining them in DECORATE, I have also been renaming the sprites to better match what the items are.  Instead of the hanging items all having names like GOR1 (because the original DooM things were hanging corpses, hence the designation "gore") I have names like "PLNT" for hanging plants and "BAT1" for bats.  I already did this way back as far as Phase 1 for the flemoids.

This may foul up some mods made for T.U.C.Q..

I have been making up a DooM Builder 2 config file for T.U.C.Q. with the new changes accounted for though.

Eventually I may renumber the thing ID numbers at some point (not yet though).  This is because a lot of the current ID numbers are a little screwy.  Legacy did not have DECORATE, and I was forced to use whatever things were available, such as dead monsters, to get some of the items and flemoids working, and even a number of Heretic things as well.  As a result, I have the easy commonus with an ID of 3004, the medium commonus with an ID of 6068, and the hard commonus with an ID OF 20.  If I renumber the IDs I can have something a little more orderly, like all the flemoids in the range of 1000 - 1100 or all of the decorations in the range of 2000 - 2999.  That might make more sense.

Of course I haven't decided if I am going to do that yet.

Meanwhile, I have decided on the name format for the next and any future releases.

Instead of the Phase X beta Y format I have decided to call the next release simply "Release 5", because there have been four releases before it.  Any future releases will be numbered the same way.  That way you will know if you have the latest version simply from the release number.

[MajorSlime]

Hey Boingo, are you using GzDoomBuilder? I highly recommend taking a look at it if your not.


http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=32392


Also, nice progress so far

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: October 30, 2012.

The conversion has been going a lot faster than I expected.  I dare say it is almost releasable now.

I find this amazing, because I expected to be struggling with it right up until Christmas, and yet I have only been working on it for a couple of weeks.

E1M1 is quite difficult on the higher difficulty levels.  It is much more difficult than I intended.  This is due almost entirely to the tougher flemoids and the omission of the rapid zorcher at this difficulty.  The mini zorcher (really just an ammo pickup) gives the player more ammo than picking up the rapid zorcher, but it still leaves the player with not enough ammo against the tougher flemoids.  It may be difficult to rebalance the level.

The biggest issue right now is the cinema level.  As you know I only created a single theatre interior.  The rest of the level is non-existant.  If I do a release now, I will have to temporarily change the MAPINFO lump to skip the cinema level until the new cinema level is complete.

[Atariangamer]

Well, maybe give the cinema level a good effort, and depending on its rate of progress, release or wait for completion?

[chexquestisawful]

My opinion is, go ahead and release it, placing the cinema level at the very end, so that people can get a "sneak-peek" at what it should look like.

[Boingo the Clown]

I am very sorry there has not been any progress in this past week.

Some of it is laziness, but a lot of it has been the fact I have had a very busy week, including extra work I had to do (due to a major foul up at the printer's warehouse), a physical I had to take, three medical tests I had to take care of, a job fair I went to attend (It was a waste of my time  ) and meeting with the Salvation army to get some extra seasonal work as a bell ringer.

I will see what I can do today, since I am pretty much ready to release, and just have to take care of a few small details.

I will keep you informed.

[noob1234]

Wow, good job so far! And I'm just wondering what's wrong exactly with Legacy on Win7? (I know I asked this in the other topic...) Seems to work fine for me...

[xbolt]

Wow, good job so far! And I'm just wondering what's wrong exactly with Legacy on Win7? (I know I asked this in the other topic...) Seems to work fine for me...

It's not actually Win7, it's Nvidia. The newer cards/drivers don't work right out of the box with Legacy. But they can be made to work by changing some settings.

[Atariangamer]

Wow, good job so far! And I'm just wondering what's wrong exactly with Legacy on Win7? (I know I asked this in the other topic...) Seems to work fine for me...

It's not actually Win7, it's Nvidia. The newer cards/drivers don't work right out of the box with Legacy. But they can be made to work by changing some settings.

The latest builds don't need the tweaks...but they also have a large issue with MUS handling. Considering its the format that most Doom games have their music, that's a problem.

[Boingo the Clown]

The problem is any new versions for Legacy would require Legacy 1.42 in order to keep the Heretic hacks working.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: November 16, 2012.

Not much to report, except for a few minor tweeks.

I added a new title screen, so no one will mistake the new version for Phase II beta 3, and I finally got the harder versions of the Bipedicus working.  The medium difficulty version fires a single small flem ball, just like the Commonus, and the hard version now fire a three flem ball spread.  With the "new" wall splats the three flem ball spread makes for some really messy looking walls fast.

The next thing I need to do is figure out how to use the custom melee properly so I can switch the Commonus and Bipedicus attacks over.  Right now they use the DooM zombie and sergeant attacks up close, as the original CQ versions did, and if you pull away from them fast enough and make them miss you, they will make zorch flashes on the walls, which is not good.