Al_B on 18/12/2010 at 12:49
This would probably be better in (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=151) the Underworld forum. The engine is quite a bit more complicated than doom's:
* Item management
* More complicated AI
* Conversations and scripting
* More sophisticated physics
to name a few. Getting a basic graphics engine to render the levels up and running is pretty easy and I think that's where most remakes start from. However, when it comes to adding the meat of the actual "game" it takes more work than expected and that's where things start to fall off.
I have faith, however, that a remake will come out one day.
Albert on 20/12/2010 at 23:57
Lol, Albert getting a reply from Al_B... Sorry, just noticed the humor in that. :cheeky:
I see what you mean. Well, hopefully it'll come soon. However, I wonder what happened to the source code for the Underworld Engine.
icemann on 21/12/2010 at 12:32
Alot of those things listed the modified source ports for Doom do nowadays. Zdoom for example can handle Strife which in itself featured inventories, scripting etc.
ZylonBane on 21/12/2010 at 18:41
Quote Posted by Albert
Lol, Albert getting a reply from Al_B... Sorry, just noticed the humor in that. :cheeky:
Holy mother of god you're easily amused.
Keep this guy away from laser pointer dots.
Kolya on 21/12/2010 at 21:10
Can we keep him? Pleeeeease, uncle Bane! :D
Al_B on 21/12/2010 at 21:22
Quote Posted by icemann
Zdoom for example can handle Strife which in itself featured inventories, scripting etc.
I'm afraid I didn't play Strife much at the time - I seem to remember the demo was fairly buggy but showed promise in terms of NPC interactions. I would still argue that the Underworld games are more sophisticated in terms of its game (not necessarily graphic) engine although I didn't think it supported it the full range of physics.
Part of the problem as I see it is the ease of extracting information. The unofficial (
http://www.gamers.org/dhs/helpdocs/dmsp1666.html) doom specifications were pretty much documented 16 years ago and most of the important information was known within six months of doom's release. In contrast, the (
http://abysmal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/abysmal/abysmal/trunk/doc/uw-formats.txt) Underworld specifications are only recently nearly complete. Part of that is definitely down to the number (or lack of) people involved but even with that taken into account the simple fact is that doom style games have a simpler set of game elements.
The other obvious difference is that the Doom source code was released - whereas the Underworld source is lost or locked up somewhere in EA. It would obviously help a lot if it were available but in the meantime it still requires quite a bit of reverse engineering work to recreate. I'm not losing hope, however - if you look at projects like (
http://exult.sourceforge.net/) Exult you can see what can be accomplished with enough determination.
JPL on 17/6/2015 at 21:40
Resurrecting this thread because I've been thinking about it again lately, and the Abysmal project is pretty clearly dead at this point.
The main reason I think TSSHP, UA, Abysmal etc have died is because without source code access, you're stuck reimplementing the gameplay from scratch, which in the case of UW / Shock 1 is a
way larger amount of work than recreating those games' rendering engines. Physics, collision, inventory management, all the UI those games had... it's a ridiculous amount of code, most of it not nearly as easy / as much fun to write as rendering stuff, and LGS's solutions for those were probably more strange than most because they were tackling big problems so comparitively early in CRPG history.
Even Strife, the Doom engine game with some RPG-like gameplay whose (
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Strife_source_code) source code was lost was eventually able to be reconstructed because it was building atop an engine whose source code was open. Without a similar base for the Underworld engine, the only option is to decompile and otherwise reverse-engineer the game's code, which is an even larger amount of work. The data formats have been reverse-engineered, which is awesome, but it's only one piece of the puzzle, akin to finding some scraps of an alien language's dictionary but having no notion of its grammar.
Remaking the game in a modern engine is even more work - you have to "reimplement" all the art as well as all the code - and at the end of the day you'd just have something that could easily fall prey to "HD remake" disease, bland and failing to capture the personality and spark of the original.
Underworld Ascendant developers Otherside have (
https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=140.0) said that they have access to the UW1/2 source, and as unlikely as it is that EA would agree to release the source (given Eidos's disappointing disinterest in releasing the Dark Engine source) that's still our best bet for giving Underworld and Shock 1 the Doom-like sort of immortality they deserve.
voodoo47 on 17/6/2015 at 21:48
well.. agreed, I guess?
icemann on 19/6/2015 at 02:16
Strife works quite well under the doom sourceports (eg zdoom). From memory, they offer full support for that game.
In regards to TSSHP. I think of any of the SS1 remake/re-engineering attempts, that was the best and closest to success effort out of all of them by far. If it hadn't been for the main developer on it falling off the face of this Earth, I honestly think they'd have finished that one off a very very long time ago due to just how far along the project had got prior to his disappearance.
They had the map system done, level geometry done, sounds done, music done, inventory and GUI system done, item and enemy placements + animation of sprites done. Even player movement was done. I can't recall if switch and door use were setup or not, but either way it was VERY far along. If I remember right he had started on enemy AI implementation when he vanished.
To give a comparison, other projects both around that time and since generally get to the level geometry stage, sometimes to the GUI stage and stop around there.
