Alien Trilogy Resurrection

[Thor110]

I played it on the Playstation originally too and don't remember it being too bad to control, I enjoyed the game, but on PC it feels super sluggish, hence why I thought I might aim for a level editor and or doom port.

Currently creating a system that can seamlessly select which palette value should be transparent, or Magenta for the time being, just 25 textures left for me to figure out.

[Thor110]

I have put up a new release, which has a manually built table of transparency values. : https://github.com/Thor110/AlienTrilogy ... ansparency

There are notes on the remaining issues which I haven't yet figured out.

Primarily there are 4 textures which I cannot determine if are correct or not. ( + 1 which is identical to one of those 4 ) - 3 of which are included with the post and all are detailed in the notes of the release page.

And 2 textues for which I haven't been able to work out the proper palette.

If anyone figures out what is what, feel free to let me know, but for now I think that is about as good as it can get.

I also introduced a range of features for the palette editor, such that the values used for transparency, have a white cross through them and cannot be selected, while trimmed colours for the level backgrounds have a black cross through them and also cannot be selected, unused colours have a slash through them, that is intended to be different colours which should contrast against the palette colour, however this doesn't seem to work properly for very bright whites yet.

Edit / Update : I have just released a new version which adds support for exporting palettes alongside images as well as true transparency options for saving 32bpp PNG images, note that if you want to replace textures in the game they must be 8bpp images.

[Thor110]

Successfully fixed my UV issues and got the models extracted from the game, the tool now does this as well.

I have also begun parsing the map data, next I just need to get the level geometry extracted along with coordinate data for all of the level objects, pickups, enemies and switches.

As well as that I have set up a PK3 file with the games assets and begun to prepare the files for Doom, hopefully I will be able to get it all compiled in the next few months or less.

[Enjay]

That's cool. Well done.

Because the game runs so lo-res, I wasn’t even sure that the models were even models in the traditional sense, or some kind of voxel type of deal or whatever.

[Thor110]

Thanks! I also just finished getting the level geometry exported.

It is now possible to export all palettes, textures, models and level geometry with the click of just a few buttons.

I just need to finalise parsing the level entity data, then I should be able to look at actually getting everything imported and reconstructed in GZDoom.

[Bob Beaky]

This is a super exciting project. I had a lot of fun with the game when it first released on Playstation and have always wanted to see a decent PC port. I have tried the official PC version a good few times over the years but it is, indeed, sluggish and DOSBox doesn't seem to like it too much either - at least for me.

It's not the exactly the most ground-breaking game but it is charming and pretty big, too, if I remember correctly.

Good luck with your continued endeavours.

[MartinHowe]

Oh, and I know the OP is talking about editors and so on, but what's the betting it would also be used for improved A L I E N themed Doom mods

I just need to finalise parsing the level entity data, then I should be able to look at actually getting everything imported and reconstructed in GZDoom.

Oh, so that was the intent all along? Cool For a few years now, I've despaired at all the remasters (modern engines) and resurrections (old CDs via DOSBox) and just wish an old game would be ported to ZDoom so we can play and mod in a familiar environment. At last, somebody is doing it

[Thor110]

Oh, and I know the OP is talking about editors and so on, but what's the betting it would also be used for improved A L I E N themed Doom mods

There are already a number of Alien Trilogy themed mods using sprites ripped from the PS1 version of the game, so I don't know how much this would actually help in that regard, but it might!

Oh, so that was the intent all along? Cool For a few years now, I've despaired at all the remasters (modern engines) and resurrections (old CDs via DOSBox) and just wish an old game would be ported to ZDoom so we can play and mod in a familiar environment. At last, somebody is doing it

I initially planned on making a level editor for the original game with the primary goal of fixing an inaccessible secret in one of the levels that is missing a trigger, but I also planned on doing this at the same time, realistically I was just having fun reverse engineering the formats, documenting things and programming the toolkit, I discovered a number of odd things, such as approximately 80mbs of files not being needed that are installed with the PC version of the game, though I think that might for the most part be the fault of the repack and not the original game, as I believe one set of files are lower quality, using less colours than the other, but the repack just copies everything out of the iso and then mounts it at the same time.

However I haven't checked it against an original installation yet to verify, but either way I setup a script that removes the unnecessary files automatically.

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing when it comes to GZDoom, but for now I have setup a PK3 template project, replaced simple things like the menu background, prepared the games sprites in such a way that eliminates duplicates by trimming them all down to 32x32 sprites while culling any that are solid colours or identical to others, I automated this, though I might need to redo it to 16x16 or have a good look through it manually.

I don't know how much I am going to be able to automate actually getting it into GZDoom, but I am aiming to automate as much as possible of the entire process, I suspect or rather hope that I will be able to automate the level geometry and am likely to end up having to repaint and populate the levels from scratch.

But overall I am aiming to do a 1:1 port, as you mentioned though, it might also lead to some improved ALIEN themed Doom mods, though from what I have seen a few of them are actually pretty good.

The main thing I am unsure about is how I am going to handle all the 3D assets, I would really like to make it an absolutely 1:1 port, including things like the way the options menu looks with 3D models in the background and adding things like 3D destructibles, but I don't know much about the GZDoom side of things yet, when I set up the PK3 template the other day I couldn't even seem to get an intro movie working, but I didn't try all that hard at the time, I just wanted the basic folder structure setup to work from when I am ready.