Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190730184747

Welcome back indeed, been quite a while. Sorry to hear that you had quite the nightmare with toothaches, my life is going about the same as usual, which means none of that nonsense thankfully. Sounds like overall you have had quite the crazy period, hopefully it starts calming down and the pain goes away.

Precisely my craziness. I am very much about preservation; this is sort of why I get bothered by most modern games. The lack of shovelware also means a lack of any real preservation like was done in the past, so we can only hope people are as crazy as us. In any event, it is comforting to know someone else is preserving and cares about history.

Sounds quite insane, but I guess it makes sense from a designing standpoint. Sometimes you try to design something that is a leap forward, only to break other things in turn. And yes, only we would be insane enough to care sadly enough.

Pretty sure it existed? Oh yes, it existed in the thousands, id Software themselves once had a lot of links to clan sites. Me personally, multiplayer serves very little purpose, so it is pretty useless to me as well. As stated, it is significant, just not something I personally will bother covering. As are a lot of what I mentioned.

GameMania is indeed one of those I would love to get, just for completionism. Same with Aftershock Deathmatch 300, if that even exists. I have a small collection of available commercial files, but sadly just not much in the grand scheme. My main sources are Quaddicted's commercial section and Archive.org, though I use MobyGames and 3dShooterLegends as references along with any links I find in the shovelware that can be found on Archive to in turn give me more files. By all means, the more sources I have for this stuff, the better to be more thorough, you know I am crazy enough to document it out and keep it archived. So if you see me skipping over anything or just missing out on some resource, don't feel bad about mentioning it, just know right now I am oriented to 1996 and still know of some more I have yet to cover. I need to go through my list and make sure I didn't accidentally skip over one of the levels I recently covered for just normal shovelware, think I got like 70 Deathmatch levels or so that are just shovelware. I think I said it that long time ago, but this one I am tackling now just is the largest little collection I have done yet (Quake 'em is what it is called, though it also covers a lot of non-Quake stuff).

Coverdisks are also another direction to hunt through, depending on what ones can be reliable to find Quake levels. I know "PC Review" was doing this monthly from around Issue 60, but the problem is that issues 61 and 62 haven't been found, and 63 is highly corrupt. I have done SUPERDEAD, but that is pretty easy since it was made in June, so this was one of the big areas I got QTEST stuff from.

Know the same goes for you, I can easily supply any of the stuff covered, as I keep it all stored. I even have a rather corrupt iso file I am trying to find the files for or somehow get uncorrupt. My stuff isn't really that hidden, it just mostly is a case of being persistent enough to tackle it all. It gets sort of daunting when you realize there are 200+ levels and 300+ mods in a giant list of folders.

I sometimes have used Russian sites (they are great for obscure metal music), but they generally are not even shown in Google search results, and I haven't really found one that suits my needs well. And I am grateful for your ability to translate, Google Translate can work, but then there are sites which it cannot lurk for whatever reason. Rare, but they do exist. Do you have any familiarity with SoftPortal and know a way to get around the phone number requirement? Main Russian site that seems to be good is katushka5. Of course, I am not even sure how I would look for shovelware on them or what they might have, the language barrier would be rough. Funny though, I always thought Russian sites were the last resort for hunting for the very obscure and often treated it as such, needed it today to hunt for a higher than 128kbps version of Die Liebe Gottes (a black metal opera mixed with Rammstein style music mixed with gothic ambience).

We are definitely looking at thousands at least, just based on what I am aware of. It would be a massively dedicated area without even getting into Machinima. If you find something interesting in them, I definitely can start supporting them once I cover a few more modifications that are important to that (specifically bots, so far we just have BG Bot and Botskins, I am aware of at least a few others that I will be covering either through the list I am working through or through other files).

Conversions
Oh, that is something I spent my time doing yesterday. Doom to Quake conversions are pretty interesting, it is easily the type of thing that would be amazing if we can get it working right. I should mention I did most with no real parameter modifications. -nowall, -nofloor, and -noceiling sort of sound worthless due to that causing leaks in the level. there are some like "-nosky" which won't convert the Doom sky, which might lead to them being less broken. I think I tried for one or two without any difference in success.

I should note they don't have level exits or anything, so they aren't exactly creme of the crop, nor are they as fleshed out as they would be in their original Doom versions. Locked doors don't work as such, so you pretty much can go in any order without worrying about locked doors at all. The converter I have has the ability to choose what I want the entities to be swapped out as. Right now they are the defaults, perhaps with the most questionable change being Barons to Zombies, but I assume this is due to the wider Doom II roster.

Elevators are also VERY weird here, they tend to rely upon something not being at the top of them, so they might just fail because a Rottweiler was at the top. This can lead to some impossible to escape pits. Another thing to mention, hazards are just flat textures, so don't expect slime or lava to actually hurt here. No difficulty differences, also expect things to be their deathmatch equivalents, at least if E1M1 having a Rocket Launcher sounds about right. I of course am not a Doom expert, so I cannot say too much on what was converted to what. Secrets don't work either, they tend to just be walls you can walk into here, and are treated as normal parts of the level.

As I described, most levels aren't playable at all. I tried every level in the original game. In fact, I would say a good chunk (say at least 50% of what I tried, including the first 21 levels I did for Punching Barons), won't even compile properly. I believe E1M3 fell in that category, as did levels such as E1M5, E1M7, and E1M8. We also had E2M2 fail this way. E2M4 and E2M5 as well, plus E2M7. Episode 3 was probably the best for terms of not crapping out immediately. MOST PWADs immediately crap themselves. A lot has to do with entities that move in Doom, the more static the level the better the chance of conversion. I got E1M5 able to convert if I killed movement entities such as elevators... which of course leads to you being unable to return the way you went, plus it had a lot of packet errors.

If they do, usually that will result in visibility leaks like what I described in E1M1, the map can work in sections but have other sections that won't work at all. For example, the zig-zag room in E1M1 looks great, and the outside courtyard and exit area work fine. The mid-area computer room is entirely broken however, heading that way will result in falling through the map, and there is a bit of a leak in the pillars room that means half of it works fine while the other half leads to invisible enemies and self. E2M1ED is another example of this, of course a bit more extreme, you fall through the map upon launching it.

E1M2 I remember as working much better, but it is pretty much stuck once you get past the red door. The corridors are just too narrow, specifically the chainsaw and staircase leading forward routes. But you could mess around in the first half of the map without issues. It could be alright if you are fine without 100% completion, but sucks if you want that. E2M6 is pretty memorable here, it was working pretty well until the Barons refused to trigger due to the broken nature of elevators. E1M9 is mostly functional outside of the teleporter area, but then again there is an Aftershock Toolbox level that offers a much more stable experience (if a lot less brutal, a proper conversion results in swarms of Grunts and Enforcers while you not really having any Ammo). E3M1 has the first room after the start being too small. E3M3 has the upper floor corridors, which are just too tight for the Quake player. STONES has a case of a broken elevator locking you out of the second half of the level.

Heh, and yes, large scale chain reactions are a big problem in Quake as well. E1M4 doesn't end up too bad until you blow up that radioactive chain in the far left room from the start, then it freaks out for obvious reasons (of course, dropping into the slime path and heading to the secret areas lead to problems as well since the height is too small). This means this sort of thing is just not that playable if you want something 100% stable for servers, since it would literally boot us out of the server. E2M3 starts out pretty fine, but get to that radioactive chain and... yeah, you get the drill (of course, the area near the exit is also too small). CAVLAB11 is like this due to the starting area. Obviously these are one of the easier types that could potentially be fixed, but I don't know what to replace out the Radioactive Containers with.

E1M6 is just...big. So big and unsupported that it leads to almost nonstop errors and audio issues while playing it. If you ever gib too many enemies at once, you might remember seeing a couple Packet Overload errors and getting the audio to cut out. Imagine that, but now imagine it so grand scale that it never stops. It seems to work if you can get past the audio not being there however, it might even calm down at some point if the game doesn't just crap out, at least as long as you avoid the radioactive containers... I remember E2M1's start working fine before it would just crap out, either due to scale or something. E3M5 actually worked pretty well at the start, but that room with the spectres after the teleporter maze caused it to crash. I want to say E3M2 crapped out on me? I remember it working right at the start, and getting through the hand maze, but I think the lost soul army near the exit was just too much. E3M4 was a case of too many enemies, I remember that at least.

Then there are levels that could work, but are just so... dark. You would need to keep shooting in them just to see where you are going, or play them on fullbright. E3M7 is a good representative for this, that maze is a nightmare in the dark. Also, 23Castle is quite funny with real knights, but you won't see the front door or where you are generally going. As said, they can be easily fixed, much easier than most other levels... but the problem is that it would be entirely lit up without shadows, often with entities projecting shadows on themselves so they look very dark.

So pick your poison. Or, if you want functional Doom levels, you got E2M9. I also found DETHWALK to actually work somewhat decently, it was easy to forget it was Doom shovelware and not some cheap Quake shovelware. But maps past two rooms have just been an impossibility without some sort of major issue. So thus I find it impractical to really hunt for, not unless we can find a better converter that can handle at least a couple more levels, or we cut out some stuff like radioactive containers. Origwad works as well if you are curious. I imagine the OK series would work, but most don't even have enemies, making them worthless (same as MINE1, which I can report does work). Another great level to convert? E3M8, four enemies and simple design leads to a map that looks relatively great. Obviously it doesn't play as good, especially as the best Quake can really offer in the Spider Mastermind's stead is a Shambler.