Project Osiris - Alien Breed 3D for GZDoom (1.0.3)

[ArcturusDeluxe]

Thanks for make so great work!!! I loved that game and finish it on A1200 20 years ago. Thanks for make possible playing again on new systems.

It's possible play it with brutal doom mod? I tryed it with gzdoom and Zandronum but give error. (A variable already exist)

Thanks in advance!

Sorry, there isn't any Brutal Doom compatibility, since it's a completely separate game from Doom, and I wanted to keep it faithful to the original AB3D.

[jocelynsachs]

Have you been able to play Osiris by now? And looking back, what would you have changed about the level design with the experience from now?

Yeah, it's REALLY strange seeing those levels again! Feels very familiar too - I actually got to play the original on an A1200 last year and this version feels very authentic.

What would I have changed? Well, for a start I would have rethought how the level system worked. It was a huge struggle to fit everything in memory, and one of the big problems was sorting what got drawn. For the pathfinding and precalculation of draw order to work I was limited to just 256 convex 'regions' of map, with the order in which the other regions should be drawn precalculated and stored for each one. Each stair on a staircase, for example, would be a region, and it would have a list of the other regions that were visible, in back-to-front rendering order so that things would look right. It was a MASSIVE pain and meant that half the time when I was designing levels I was fighting bugs in the sorting.

If I had thought about it more carefully, I could have split each map up into zones, each with its own 256 regions, so long as I put in a kinked corridor or something between them to limit visibility. That would have really expanded the possibilities for much bigger and more interesting maps. If you imagine every stair on a staircase being a region, PLUS having to split up adjacent flat regions to get the sorting okay, you can see how quickly they run out when you only have 256 to start with!

Also, having some kind of a plan and an art schedule would have been good. The textures for the walls were more or less random; there was no overall idea behind any of them and I just picked the ones that looked nicest on the low-res screen. Overall it was a bit of a wasted opportunity, I think.

[4shot]

Made some new pickup sprites for the enhanced versions for fun.

[Dynamo]

Also, having some kind of a plan and an art schedule would have been good. The textures for the walls were more or less random; there was no overall idea behind any of them and I just picked the ones that looked nicest on the low-res screen. Overall it was a bit of a wasted opportunity, I think.

Having played this TC on my laptop a few weeks ago (and having never played Alien Breeds 3D originally but always wanting to), the level design honestly felt very similar to what some of the early doom mappers were going, in that a lot of the maps felt quite random in their layout, almost as if areas were constructed with absolutely no concern for flow, whereas other maps actually felt like they had something going for them in terms of design, with interesting interconnection and layouts. Did you end up being a level designer for any other FPS game, or was this your only foray into the genre? I've heard the sequel to this game had significantly worse level design, but I've yet to see it.

[Cherno]

@jocelynsachs I hope you don't mind me asking you this question here: Have you ever heard of a plastic toy version of the Alien Breed 3D Pule Rifle? I faintly remember one of those thick mailorder catalogues that were ubiquitous in the 90s, where you could order all kinds of cheap toys and overpriced junk (in Germany, it was the "Pearl" catalogue), and one of those pages had the toy weapon, along with a nice picture of it. Maybe I dreamed it but somehow it seemed to have been real. Maybe you have ever heard of such a thing?

[TDG]

@jocelynsachs

If the Alien Breed 3D franchise had taken of like Doom did (perhaps even getting a PC release) and you would still have been on the project years later, would you have stuck to the Doom design of FPS games or would you perhaps have eventually gone for a more narrative driven game with more realistic environments like Half Life and Unreal?

[jocelynsachs]

@jocelynsachs

If the Alien Breed 3D franchise had taken of like Doom did (perhaps even getting a PC release) and you would still have been on the project years later, would you have stuck to the Doom design of FPS games or would you perhaps have eventually gone for a more narrative driven game with more realistic environments like Half Life and Unreal?

Alien Breed did continue in other forms, but I didn't work on it again. I did put forward some ideas, one of which was basically a cross between Alien: Isolation and Darkest Dungeon: trying to escape a facility while managing your team's fear levels (Do you give the swivel-eyed one a gun to make him feel better, or leave him unarmed so he can't panic and shoot the other team members?). It's hard to say what might have happened: AB3D was made at a time when it was a monumental challenge to get ANYTHING running: hardly any RAM, very poor tools, no internet to learn from or exchange art/builds (what little art I got through from T17 was literally posted on a floppy). It was technically too ambitious for its own good.

[jocelynsachs]

@jocelynsachs I hope you don't mind me asking you this question here: Have you ever heard of a plastic toy version of the Alien Breed 3D Pule Rifle? I faintly remember one of those thick mailorder catalogues that were ubiquitous in the 90s, where you could order all kinds of cheap toys and overpriced junk (in Germany, it was the "Pearl" catalogue), and one of those pages had the toy weapon, along with a nice picture of it. Maybe I dreamed it but somehow it seemed to have been real. Maybe you have ever heard of such a thing?

Sorry, no T17 did do a lot of merch for Worms, but I never heard of anything for AB3D.

[jocelynsachs]

I've heard the sequel to this game had significantly worse level design, but I've yet to see it.

Oh, yeah, it was awful. What I should have done is fixed the limited level design system, added some actual game features, and made something worth playing. Instead I just tried to push the graphical envelope even harder: I came up with an early kind of bump-mapping so that the alien sprites could be lit directionally, put in a chunky-to-bitplane converter that wasn't very good, and then threw together a bunch of terrible levels at the last minute when T17 wanted me to be done with it and move on.

[kanda]

@jocelynsachs Thank you so much for creating such a great game, back in the days. The atmosphere was great and technically fantastic!

@ArcturusDeluxe Thank you so much for giving us a chance to play again this masterpiece on modern computers! Nice work!

[Cherno]

^I think that directional light masking system for sprites was a pretty cool idea at the time! For some reason, it was never attempted again until normal-mapped sprites become a possibiltiy about 15 years later

[TDG]

Alien Breed did continue in other forms, but I didn't work on it again. I did put forward some ideas, one of which was basically a cross between Alien: Isolation and Darkest Dungeon: trying to escape a facility while managing your team's fear levels (Do you give the swivel-eyed one a gun to make him feel better, or leave him unarmed so he can't panic and shoot the other team members?). It's hard to say what might have happened: AB3D was made at a time when it was a monumental challenge to get ANYTHING running: hardly any RAM, very poor tools, no internet to learn from or exchange art/builds (what little art I got through from T17 was literally posted on a floppy). It was technically too ambitious for its own good.

That is interesting, have you ever heard of the Thing video game? It also had a similar mechanic in which the player had to earn trust of characters to give them weapons. I don't recall if it was necessary if the weapons had ammo or fuel.
If you had done this back in the 90s it would probably have been quite innovative.

Heh, so basically getting anything resembling Doom running on the Amiga was the main goal. If it was any good or fun came secondary.

Well it is usually ambition that drives the world forwards but I get what you mean in this circumstance because of the hardware limitations. This was basically a project to try to make the Amiga keep up with the PC.

and then threw together a bunch of terrible levels at the last minute when T17 wanted me to be done with it and move on.

Did you read that one roast an Amiga magazine that was nearing the end of its run did on AB3D2? Giving it a 100 percent in the review?
If you read the review it became clear that the people reviewing it thought it was awful but as the magazine would soon stop publishing and they never had given a game a complete 100 before they wanted to have a final laugh before closing doors.
I think Team 17 actually took it seriously.

[jocelynsachs]

I think Team 17 actually took it seriously.

Nah. Not in the least. I know T17 had a proper feud with one of the Amiga magazines at the time but nobody was under any illusions about what a mess AB3D2 was. To be fair, it was never going to be a commercial product. The market (especially when you took piracy into account) was far too small. I was basically allowed to finish it as a kind of goodbye to the Amiga.

[ArcturusDeluxe]

@jocelynsachs Hi, I'd like to thank you for being in my thread and answering questions, it's been really interesting getting an insight into the development process of the original game. Can I ask if you have any more feedback on my version? How do you feel about the small changes I made to the level designs, and how is the difficulty? Do you have any opinions on the additional assets I made, such as the weapon sprites or diagonal alien graphics? Did I go too far or not far enough in changing things? Just curious about your thoughts! Thanks again.

Made some new pickup sprites for the enhanced versions for fun.

These are cool! I've already made some replacement pickup sprites for the weapons (will be optional) for a future update, but I like how these reflect both the original designs and my new ones.

[Kinsie]

Seconding the massive thanks to jocelynsachs for stopping by and providing some thorough and frank commentary on the original games. Amiga FPS games weren't necessarily what one would realistically call good, but they're endlessly fascinating in how they and their developers fought to make something work on a hardware architecture that really wasn't suited for it.