Parallax: The Pinnacle of the Paranoid Paranoiac

[Rex Claussen]

Try saying that three times fast, eh?

The development of Parallax has seen a rebirth. A few weeks ago I switched back to development on this project, which is a side story + non-canon maps that build on the Paranoid and Paranoiac "universe". [Yeeesh! That word pops up hither and yon, does it not?] Development had stalled when I was struggling with creation of a massive space station (sound familiar?) Essentially, 80% of the space station is built using the 3D feature in GZDooM. You can imagine how tedious the creation of geometry can become. Long-story-short: I have been focusing on the non-3D parts of the map and have made a decent amount of progress.

The major bonus of Parallax (and, the entire set of mods) is that all enemies and weapons have been re-created as models, thanks to the painstaking and tireless efforts of Ed the Bat. As someone had pointed out when Paranoid was released in 2010: ".... it recreates Half Life so accurately in the Doom engine, you sometimes forget what game you're playing." With the enemy & weapons models, the distinction promises to get blurred even further.

What remains, you ask? Well, aside from the mapping, nothing has been done yet for the voice-acting, nor for the music. I expect that those will take a few weeks, at the very least. After that we're looking at additional weeks for play-testing. So, in other words, look for the release sometime in 2030 A sure-fire candidate for DooM World's Mordeth Award. Heh.

[Enjay]

I'm not even sure that I can say it once... slowly.

Great news though.

3D mapping in Doom can be a real head-scratcher. Ultimate DoomBuilder does make it easier.

[Rex Claussen]

3D mapping in Doom can be a real head-scratcher.

I'm generally comfortable with 3D mapping, as I have a reasonable capacity for visualizing "real" 3D space. It's just that I've never created an entire map that's almost entirely structured in 3D space.

[Enjay]

I'm OK with visualising 3D space too. But, even on a true 3D game, a lot of the editing is done using plan and elevations in the respective editor rather than actual 3D representation (and even then, it's actually on a flat screen, of course).

With Doom, however, the head-scratching comes in (for me anyway) because the game isn't a true 3D one. So 3D structures are made by using control sectors off to one side in some void space, or with special fields and formulae. 3D slopes are (or were) particularly problematic. Until editors had good support for it, it was almost like you were supplying the game with an Ikea kit that the game engine assembled for you. You provided lots of separate bits and instructions, but the game assembled it. At least UDB now has excellent 3D floor support and you can create things in the editor as you make it, looking much as they appear in the game.

Hmmm... I really need to get myself back into editing. Real life has taken me away from it (and other hobbies) for quite a while now. I'm hoping to be able to address that before too long.

[Rex Claussen]

You can imagine how tedious the creation of geometry can become.

One way I intend to "fill" up the empty spaces and reduce the creation of 3D constructs upon 3D constructs is to use models. To that end, I had made a request in the ZDooM forums but it appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle. If someone on these forums [hint, hint, @Enjay} has, or can point me to, some such models it will make my life a whole lot easier.

Cheers!

[Enjay]

Sorry, I didn't notice that post. I'll have a look to see what I have. It won't be immediate though.

(On a very quick dive, most of the things I have that might fit that requirement are models that I have already given you in the past. I don't have too much in the way of generic pipes and random machinery. I will look some more though.)

[Rachael]

That forum is one of the ones I don't check or I would have tried to help you, myself. You're right it gets lost in the shuffle - I have stopped looking there entirely because nothing seemed to hold my interest.

That being said, I can certainly help you with some of these requests. I'll try and go through your list tomorrow and see what I can do. Unfortunately I can only really do .obj's, but hopefully they'll be sufficient for your needs. If not, I am sure Nash or Enjay or someone else can convert those to .md3's for you. (Though in the past couple years GZDoom did gain .obj support, I don't know if the GZDoom you can still use is new enough for that)

When it comes to static, non-character stuff, I got you covered.

[Enjay]

If not, I am sure Nash or Enjay or someone else can convert those to .md3's for you. (Though in the past couple years GZDoom did gain .obj support, I don't know if the GZDoom you can still use is new enough for that)

Unless there is anything particularly weird about the OBJ files (which I don't expect there to be) then converting to MD3 should be easy enough.

From what I've seen, native OBJ support seems to be good, so it does really depend on what version Rex is using and his personal preferences I guess. I'm happy to do conversions if needed.

[Rachael]

Here is a pipe segment model

[Rachael]

One single turbine

[Rex Claussen]

Thank you, Rachael.

My computer situation is weird: My personally-owned computer only supports the hacked version of GZDoom that I've been using for editing and testing purposes. My company-owned computer supports all versions of GZDoom, but I don't use this for editing - just for playing around on a limited basis. Therefore, I'm hesitant to use this computer to edit GZDoom to insert an .obj file, even into a test file.

@Nigel: Would you be able to convert these into .md3 files, and include the basic DECORATE definitions? I'll take it from there.

[Rex Claussen]

On a related note, I have reached the point where I believe I (and the project) could really benefit from collaboration. I'm not referring to the voice acting and music; I'm speaking of the maps themselves. More specifically, I'm burnt out with this monster space station map and could really use ideas to make the game-space more interesting. To that end, I'd like to upload the WIP for availability to the Persecution Complex team. But https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?p=1238876 and I'm not sure how else to upload somewhat large files without creating an additional account with a free hosting site.

[Rachael]

Do you have a SFTP client available? I think mostly all that needs to be done is to set you up with a new SSH keypair if you lost the old one.

[Enjay]

@Nigel: Would you be able to convert these into .md3 files, and include the basic DECORATE definitions? I'll take it from there.

Hmmm... OBJ files (as I understand it) don't need to have a texture based skin (though they can use them), but can get their surface information from internal definitions (in the mtl file?). These models do not have texture based skins, so conversion to MD3 is not as easy. I'd have to create a skin that matched the materials in the model (an MD3 without one would be invisible). In itself, it's not difficult to make a basic block of colour skin, but the result would be underwhelming: the model would look very flat/unshaded.

I'm not sure how to proceed here.

Anyway, for for info, here are a couple of quick screen grabs of what the models look like in Noesis. Note: Noesis renders with shading. The result would not look this good in GZDoom with an MD3 (not sure how the OBJ would look in GZDoom).

The pipe has been setup with a dark grey coloured material, the turbine has a white material (which gives an idea of just how much shading Noesis is applying).






Without shading, the turbine looks like this.

Obviously a skin that is not as white would look better (perhaps even something based of of a hi-res version of SHAWN2 or something) but I'm not sure how nicely it would work out.

[Enjay]

OK, I tried using a texture on the turbine.

By happy coincidence, the baked-in shading on the texture just happened to line up with elements of the model reasonably well.
This is just a hi-res version of SHAWN2 from a texture pack blindly mapped to the model with no re-working at all. There is a bit of Z-fighting in the middle, but that would probably be a quick fix.



Without shading.



Unfortunately, it didn't work out well for the pipe. The baked-in shading on the texture repeats around the circumference of the pipe. Significant remapping of the texture would be required. More problematically, I think that the model has too many polys to convert to an MD3. You can see how bits of the model are missing and some lines are in the wrong place.



I'm not sure what the best way forward here is.