[WIP] GloomDoom TC (Gloom Deluxe, Amiga 1995)

[Cherno]

This is a supposed to be a TC of the 1995 Amiga game "Gloom" by Black Magic Software.

Consider this a proof-of-concept right now, as it has a number of bugs and hasn't been updated in a long time.

Gloom.pk3

Gloom and the enhanced version Gloom Deluxe were part of the Doom clone avalanche that hit personal computers in the mid-90s. The Amiga was already on it's way out but there were still a large number of machines in households, especially across Europe. The hardware wasn't suited for fast 3D action games but nevertheless several titles of varying quality were released over the years, with the most well-known probably being Alien Breed 3D I and II as well as Gloom. I played this (very hard) game a lot back in the day and thanks to @Kinsie who kindly uploaded most of the original assets of the game I was able to convert a lot of it to GZDoom.

How does it play? Well, it's a lot simpler than Doom in many ways, both gameplay and visuals-wise. You don't get any different height levels, textures are drab and very limited, sprites have very few animations, and the gun only shoots projectiles of different strength and color (it has unlimited ammo, too). However, there are some things that vanilla Doom wasn't capable of, such as rotating and sliding sectors as well as a nice easter egg where you get to play a Defender-style game at an arcade cabinet, inside the game!

I am quite happy that I was able to put almost everything from the original game into GZDoom, the only thing I couldn't do was the nice teleporter effect but these are not very common so no biggie

So anyway, if you fancy some braindead and very gory action, give it a try. I have converted the first four levels of the first episode so far.

Screenshots




Thanks to
Black Magic Software and Kinsie

[Kinsie]

Looks pretty faithful so far! I'd recommend adding a "silent" music track for the maps, to avoid just having the titlescreen/intermission music flow through into them. I believe I just use a silent, one second long wav file.

Also, the gun really needs to be made larger - it's invisible with the HUD enabled!

[ramon.dexter]

Good job! I always wanted to play gloom, but the gameplay on any amiga emyulator was not user-friendly. Now, I can play gloom. Good!

But looking and the resources - only three enemies...Is this finished, or a beta? Because many enemies are missing (dinosaur guy, spectre, two header dragon...).

Didn't you considered making a custom status bar for it?

Also, the gun seems too small.

[Cherno]

Thanks for the comments.

Yes, the gun is very small, I noticed that too. It's just the way it is, I guess... I might substitute it with some custom weapon sprite if I can find a proper one.

There are only three enemies so far, since all the levels I have converted so far are from the first "Spacehulk" episode. Gloom has three episodes (Spacehulk, Dungeon/Tomb, and Hell) each featuring three enemy types. It's probably related to memory restrictions on the Amiga.

I would really like to make a custom status bar but I have zero experience with it and my earlier efforts making a status bar for a Dungeon Keeper TC were met with failure so I'll have to do a lot more learning first!

[Kinsie]

Yes, the gun is very small, I noticed that too. It's just the way it is, I guess... I might substitute it with some custom weapon sprite if I can find a proper one.

The gun in Gloom Deluxe is considerably higher res:



Unfortunately, I don't know how to get the raw art for it out of the game. You may have to perform the crime of screenshot ripping.

[Ozymandias81]

@ramon.dexter
You should buy Cloanto Amiga Forever and try with AmiKit OS... Then retrieve the WHDLoad edition of Gloom / Gloom Deluxe and run it: you won'regret!

@Cherno
Love this TC, I used to play Gloom on WinUAE several times, since I didn't had any luck nor play it when I had (my brother) an Amiga600.
You should do the same with Breathless though, by far the most detailed Amiga fps.
Will try it this weekend, thanks.

@Kinsie
Uhm I am not on pc, but I am sure seeing some Gloom Deluxe graphics somewhere...

[Cherno]

Yes, the gun is very small, I noticed that too. It's just the way it is, I guess... I might substitute it with some custom weapon sprite if I can find a proper one.

The gun in Gloom Deluxe is considerably higher res:



Unfortunately, I don't know how to get the raw art for it out of the game. You may have to perform the crime of screenshot ripping.

You are right, there are bigger gun sprites... I am not sure if they can be ripped from screenshots though because Gllom Dx seems to do something weird with the gun sprite scaling when changing the pixel resolution in the menu.

About Breathless: Never played back then, only ever tried it once on WinUAE and didn't like it at all, so someone else has to take on that project

[Tormentor667]

Wow, good work

[Kinsie]

@ramon.dexter
You should buy Cloanto Amiga Forever and try with AmiKit OS... Then retrieve the WHDLoad edition of Gloom / Gloom Deluxe and run it: you won'regret!

You don't need Amikit, since IIRC Gloom unloads the OS like a lot of old Amiga games do. I personally use FS-UAE to emulate, since it can auto-import the legal Kickstart ROMs from Amiga Forever, auto-downloads proper emulation settings from an online database and has WHDLoad built-in. I think I had to tweak its modified config to make it run better, though...

@Kinsie
Uhm I am not on pc, but I am sure seeing some Gloom Deluxe graphics somewhere...

Yeah, I ripped MOST of them (either from the original disc files or from the source release) but I was unable to find a tool to view a compiled version of the gun sprite, and I couldn't find the graphic in the source release (which seems to come from in-between the original game and the Deluxe version). You can find what I got in the Resources subforum.

[sherberttcat]

Gloom Deluxe is my favorite Amiga game. I look forward to seeing this project's progress.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

"Gloom"? Wow... Whoever came up with that name really had to think long and hard.

Joking aside, not bad at all! Of course, the gameplay has not aged well and so far there is absolutely no challenge to be found, but I suppose there is nothing you can do about it.

Out of curiosity, though, what is supposed to be going on in the game? Like, who are you and who are the enemies you are fighting?

[Kinsie]

"Gloom"? Wow... Whoever came up with that name really had to think long and hard.

Joking aside, not bad at all! Of course, the gameplay has not aged well and so far there is absolutely no challenge to be found, but I suppose there is nothing you can do about it.

Out of curiosity, though, what is supposed to be going on in the game? Like, who are you and who are the enemies you are fighting?

Here's the award winning literature from the jewel case manual. Please excuse any typos, I OCRed this out of an image because I'm lazy and had to retype bits of it.

I glanced up at the flag waving forlornly in the acid sharp breeze. "The United States of Earth" was what it represented, but the enormous number of stars it had accumulated over the centuries made it look more like a dirty rag. I turned my attention back to the N.W.O. building ahead. It was, as it was meant to be, an imposing building, both in size and in design. Its sharp spires, oddly-coloured windows and antique building materials were the ultimate tribute to the ugliness of an age long passed. I had only been here twice before, and the results of each visit are still etched in my mind - as are anyone's worst horrors...

Seated before the council of 7, I struggled to maintain a dignified calm. The room was cemetery quiet - the old men holding me firmly in their collective gaze. At length, one of them rose to speak...

"The New World Order greet you Agent Black. Thank you for arriving so promptly". I grinned inwardly at the rhetorical compliment. He continued...

"We of the council have reason to believe that the Cultists are operating again." My stomach froze. I had really known this all along, although I had not wanted to believe it. My other missions for the N.W.O. had involved the Cultists, and both had involved more violence than any man could be expected to endure. But I had survived, sanity more-or-less intact, and had made the mistake of thinking the N.W.O. were set fit to retire me from further Cultist missions.

"Evidence suggests that Cultist infiltrators are smuggling equipment and resources off Earth, on an Earth Starcruiser, and are time jumping to cover their activities. We believe we know which Starcruiser is involved but due to the time jumping have no strong evidence to implicate it." My mind reeled · Time jumping? Had they really gone that far? The dangers of time jumping had long ago been established, ever since spacecraft were capable of reaching the phenominal speeds necessary - it's tendency to unravel the very fabric of the universe - the mind shattering effect it had on it's practitioners.

"We have arranged with the owner of the concerned shipping company to have you teleported aboard the suspected StarCruiser. She has personally guarranteed us of your safe cover and passage. Your mission is simply to determine the Cultist's destination, and return such information to us, Again, we thank you for your co-operation." He sat. I left.

I had a bad feeling about this mission. It nagged at me all through a mostly sleepless night, right up until I reported to the Teleport Centre the next day. As I lay on the teleport couch, watching one reality fade while another took it's place, I hoped that things would go as smoothly as the council has promised...

EDIT: It's worth noting that this has next to no relevance to the game itself.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

Shame. It sounds decent enough - for a video game, mind you.

Anyway, thanks for the quote!

[Cherno]

I never even knew about the story. Anyways , gameplay is really uninspired from today's perspective. There is indeed little challenge but that might be because i eyeyballed the weapon and enemy health values. I think apart from giving nostalgic players a
quick fix of Gloom the main raison d'etre are the assets ready for mod use in other projects.

[Cherno]

I finished the Spacehulk levels and started working on the Gothic Tomb maps. The first two are already done. I also added the bouncing bullets powerup, and all damage and health values are based on the original game.

One thing I was not able to get to work was intermission screens, for some reason they just won't work no matter what I do. I posted about this in the "How do I..." thread, but I'll just copy it here in cased someone knows the answer:

I would like to know how to make custom intermission screens work. I have set everything up as the documentation requires but I always get an "Intermission XY not found" error.

MAPINFO:

Code: Select all

Intermission INT_SH01
{
	Image
	{
		Background = "hulk"
	}
}

map MAP01 "Spacehulk 1"
{
	levelnum = 1
	EnterPic = "$INT_SH01"
}

^From looking at zdoom.pk3 it seems like the intermissions (showing the Mars moon landscapes etc.) are all as txt files in a mapinfo folder, but ther eis no actual MAPINFO file and I have no idea how to set everything up so the map data in MAPINFO can find the intermission data.

Another thing: There are X-Ray goggles in the game which show enemies through walls, from the research I did I have to conclude that only the Playstation version of Doom supports such a feature so no luck implementing this, eh?

Last but not leat: I seek to replace the blaster gun sprite with a proper one, I think something like the vanilla plasma rifle or BFG would look similar enough. If anyone knows of any custom centered weapon sprite that would fit, please say so.