[WIP] Might & Magic VII in DOOM

[AlpacaNox]

Latest video:

OVERVIEW

Might & Magic games (VI-VII-VIII) got a lot of resources that are pretty compatible with DOOM in general, it just takes a little bit of work to make them usable. I always loved both DOOM and M&M series and that is my attempt to give another breath to the art that is otherwise collecting dust.

Why VII? 3 games are relatively similar, although 6 doesn't have side attack frames for monsters, meaning that infighting will look not very nice. While 7 and 8 got the frames needed. And so to not disrupt the art style I decided to go completely with just 7, at least for now. In future anything can be done, I just feel like 7 will provide a good start.

The state of the project is "proof of concept",

The archive contains: [outdated]

• 18 Monsters scripted with DECORATE in attempt to resemble the vanilla Doom monsters in behavior
• A set of high resolution (128x256) wall textures (around 1k in total). All of them are scaled down using TEXTURES lump
• Terrain tiles (Dirt (+Road), Grass, Snow, Desert, Badlands, Shore, Swamp)
• A lot of misc actors such as trees, flowers, bushes, rocks, torches and etc with entries in GLDEFS and DECORATE
• Ambient sounds

preview of wall textures included in the archive (zoomable)
mini version here

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This stage is quite easy to to the existence of MMArchive tool made by Sergey "GrayFace" Rozhenko.
The extracted resources will be in .BMP format for the most part. For batch editing I'd recommend using ImageMagick to convert, flop, resize many files at the same time.
Using this tool you can also check the palette ids the textures are using.

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OVERVIEW

• The most common dimensions are: 128x256 for walls and 128x128 for floors or general use.
• Single-patch textures
• Indexed palette
• The original textures do not use transparency at all.

Since by default the textures have indexed palette they weigh much less than if they were to be true-color. The original palette files are in .ACT format.

I did not divide the files on textures and flats since the original engine did not need that. Instead everything is a texture (GZDoom handles it quite alright).

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The original engine was not capable of constructing the textures out of elements. It was not capable of flipping or rotating as well, that is why the art team tried to make every texture as unique as possible to justify the space that otherwise could've been considered as wasted for flipped/rotated versions of the same texture. I decided to leave the textures as is to preserve the level of detail.



As was stated above the original textures are non-modular whatsoever and during the development it was a big question whether to leave everything as is or to try and make everything segmented. Turns out that's quite a lot of work with some pretty serious trade-offs and that is why the idea was scraped. It is however possible to make it look good, it would just take insane amount of time to process everything.

The other question is what to extract and what to leave as a part of the base texture. Imagine a brick wall, technically you can extract every brick and make hundreds of unique brick wall textures but is it really worth it? Until the idea got scraped one of the principles was to extract the elements only if they repeat of the other single-patch textures (original sets). That keeps the number of elements at a sane level providing a fair amount of modularity at the same time.


[gifs, click to play]

The main trade-off is loss of shadows/shading. The effect however can be recreated but that would take even more time. So the other principle might be to segment things only if the original look is almost unaltered.

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Example of the complete "Grass" tileset
Each segment is 128x128 in size.
The terrain textures require to be treated a bit different than everything else. There is no need to scale them down as the other textures.
This is a thing because the original game uses 2 engines for rendering and they have different scaling parameters apparently.

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There are 2 variants of water in the original: one for the hardware mode and one for the software. The hardware one uses a set of frames to make it animated while the one for software relies on texture warping and 1 frame. The replication of the hardware water is relatively easy and is achieved by combination of 2 patches: one for ground and one, beneath it, for water. There is an issue with the software water, it is not possible to warp patches in GZDoom (at least for now) so we can’t combine it seamlessly with the ground textures yet, however without ground textures it is perfectly functional (if not used for terrain and such).

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It seems like Horizon Engine (outdoors areas) had a maximum of 10 symbols in the filenames. So I tried to alter the naming scheme a bit to contain no more than 8. Most of the textures though have no more than 8 symbols by default. (Labyrinth Engine (indoors) might have had a maximum of 8).

The original naming scheme works in such a way that there are almost no conflicts with the resources from the other 2 games which makes it quite possible to combine them all in one archive without any issues.

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OVERVIEW

• Monster sprites from VII are almost perfectly compatible with GZDoom by default.
• Dimensions are 256x256 for the most part.
• Sprites were shot counterclockwise (require to be either mirrored or the naming scheme should be inverted to be usable)
• Indexed palette (the palette files can be extracted from the game in .ACT format)

Monster sprites from M&M VI do not have side or back attack frames which will make them look weird if infighting happens. It is not only the case for VI since in VII and VIII there is a black dragon monster which doesn't have these frames either, every other monster (?) however does.
All sprites are required to be renamed as usual.
Most of the monster sprites have areas mapped with certain colors (usually pink) which are supposed to be translated in engine, the recolored parts are used in game to define weaker/stronger versions of the same monster.

In VI attack frames are frontal only, there are no side frames which makes it not really usable in Doom since monster infighting will look weird.

VIII however provides more than enough, by giving side frames for death and taunt states.

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Requires GZDoom and DOOM2.wad
UI is tied to 16:9. The native resolution is 720p (1024) if you want a crispy picture. The fonts rely on that quite a lot.
Anything bigger then that will require "Use Linear Scaling" enabled in Video Mode options, texture filtering should be enabled as well.

Everything Doom related including the test map was made using solely SLADE.

SpriteShadow by Nash is included in the archive.

LINKS

Download the latest version: MM7_71.PK3 [166MB]

A completely scripted Unicorn from M&M 8
Is not yet included so keeping the link here just in case.
Got it from BFG. Thanks a lot!

Screenshot gallery with images from the original title

YouTube There are some small videos regarding the project.

Special thanks to Sergey "GrayFace" Rozhenko for making and keeping most of the software I used to extract the resources.
Thanks to StormCat for making MM7View which allowed to access the string tables of the original game.
Make sure to also visit Ettingrinder, who made a lot of things regarding Witchaven, especially JOETOOLS which made possible to extract the sounds and music from the games.

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Sprites, Textures, Sounds, Fonts: MMArchive
Sprites were shot counterclockwise which means that you'd have to either mirror them or invert the naming scheme for DECORATE.
The archives contain .ACT palettes for sprites. They can be used to ease color translation. (SLADE can import them easily out of box).
For fonts you'd need FNT Editor. This will help to convert fonts to a set of images, 1 for each character. Then you'd just need to name them correctly and add an entry into FONTDEFS.
To extract the dialogues and other string based things you can use MM7View

Usage of anything in this post requires no permission (at least from me).

[Amuscaria]

Screenshots look fantastic. :O

[Nash]

Those levels look amazing! The Doom items spoil it for me though.

[ramon.dexter]

Looks really sweet, but the stock doom weapons just break the atmosphere...

Fantasy MMVII themed shooter would be nice tho

[Dynamo]

Looks lovely! Looking forward to more!

[Cherno]

Good work. It begs for inclusion into some Heretic/Hexen mod.

I guess the glittering cloud enemies summoned by the wizards need the +NOBLOOD flag

[MaxRideWizardLord]

That looks like something a lot of effort put in to... Would be so lovely to play these maps as some extremely overpowered Wizard and eternally respawning monsters.

[Benito]

Sweet jesus christ on a bicycle, this is the single greatest thing I've seen in my entire life. Good work my dude.

[Tormentor667]

Fantastic Screenshots! But it needs medieval weapons

[Hipnotic Rogue]

This would make for a fantastic Heretic texture replacement pack.

[Zan]

Incredible, you're doing God's work, mate
Shadowman, I hope you're seeing this :^)

[felipesaldes]

Can't play, gives me this error message:
Unknown texture SFPNLONA
tested on Debian Stretch and GZDoom 3.5.0 (legacy version)

[AlpacaNox]

Thank you! Somehow forgot to playtest the latest build. Everything should be working now.
MM7_49_1.PK3

Amuscaria, Nash, ramon.dexter, Dynamo, Cherno, MaxRideWizardLord, Benito, Tormentor667, Hipnotic Rogue, Zan, felipesaldes

Thank you so much for your feedback, really appreciate it. Makes me want to continue working on it asap but can't really commit myself completely to that right now.

[Horrorfreak106]

Keep up the good work! This looks really neat

[sinaptica]

Great work. This looks fantastic!