Sometime beforehand I had played the map Ruma by Espi and this served as an inspiration (a mental "starting handle" as I described it in the original text file). I did not set out to copy Ruma, but merely to make something that gave a nod to it. In fact, I deliberately didn't look at Ruma while I was making the map. However, in retrospect, the end result owed far more to Espi's work than I realised at the time (it's embarrassingly close in overall layout). My fault really; I used to have a near eidetic memory for things like map layouts (and other things - something that the illness eventually dulled) and perhaps I should have taken that into account. So, full credit to Espi for the inspiration.
Marine Assault was a "mini TC" with quite a few DeHacked enemies and other changes that went with the map.
Anyway, the project turned out to be quite popular. Over the years, and to this day, I've had quite a few messages from people about it - probably more than I have for any of my other mods. For some time now, several of those messages have asked for an updated version that doesn't rely on DeHacked etc.
So, this is it. It's not a full remaster or anything. I don't want to do that. I'd suggest it's more like a face-lift.
If you fancy running around a map being sniped from a distance by too many over-powered hitscan enemies then this could be the map for you.
Overall, I went with a "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" philosophy.
You are a marine.
You are (mainly) up against marines.
You have access to the Doom weapon set.
They have access to the Doom weapon set.
You can often one-shot kill them.
They might be able to do the same to you.
There are a couple hundred enemies (depending on difficulty setting) and there is one of you. Oh, wait...
If you don't like this version and think I have ruined your childhood by updating the project, that's cool. Just stick with the old version; it hasn't gone anywhere. This is essentially a request project and it does not aim to replace the original; though you can choose to think of it that way if you want, or not, I'm not your boss.
Download: https://aspectsweb.co.uk/enjay/doom/Mar ... MAFL01.pk3
Requires UZDoom 5.0*
Intended to run with doom2.wad - may run with other IWADS of similar structure.
*Can run with UZDoom 4.13.4 but the rumble mappings at the end of SNDINFO need to be commented out otherwise those sounds will be silenced. See the next post.
I generally play with texture filtering on, so most of the development work was done with that. It should work equally well without it, but there may be some anomalies without it that I didn't spot simply because I didn't run it often enough in that mode.
Screenshots
Spoiler:The rest of this post is far too lengthy. You don't really need to read it, but it's there is you want it.
Thumbnails open a link to postimg.
What this includes:
Spoiler:Details:
I have updated the enemies so that nothing relies on DeHacked. All actors are done in ZScript to varying degrees of neatness. (I delved back into a few old files. So, some of it is definitely not how I would do things now.)
Similarly, the ACS for the map is shockingly convoluted and inefficient in places. There's no way I would do it like that now. However, it is functional and, more importantly, "fixing" it would involve stripping the map right back, reallocating line, sector and thing tags from scratch and be a major task just to end up with a map that behaves in exactly the same way as far as the end player is concerned. The ACS is untidy, but not actually broken; so, as they say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
All the enemies are different compared to the original mod. I hope that they still capture the basic feel that I was going for in 2003, but rather than try to recreate the 2003 DeHacked effects exactly, I decided to go for something that felt right to me in 2026.
A few enemy types have been added over and above the ones that are carried forward in modified form from the original.
The original had a DeHacked weapon - a railgun that replaced the BFG. This version has a very similar railgun but it is now an additional weapon (on button 6). It uses alt-fire to zoom in.
The main reasons that I'm using alt-fire rather than the actual Zoom state label are mostly historic.
The plasma rifle has priority in slot 6 both for auto-switching and when pressing the key bound to slot 6.
The original used an altered palette to mostly make the blues lighter but now many of the textures and sprites have been updated or replaced with ones in their own palette and there is no longer a need for a custom palette as every graphic in the mod is in PNG format.
Most of the marine sprites have been replaced with ones from the Allied Marines Pack from Realm667. I still quite like my modified sprites from the original but the ones from Realm667 are visibly carrying the correct weapon and I liked that more. I have also tweaked most of them, created some variation and also given them all a standing-position appearance. I think they are a little less "clean" than they could be (quite important because I used translations to achieve the different colours of the marines) but I still think them having the correct weapon visible is important and the advantage that would be gained from me making new edits and trying to clean them (if I even manged to do it) would be minimal versus the amount of work involved.
Some other sprites are unchanged from the original (particularly my grotty flying robot sprites and altered Crusader robot sprites).
There are a few models included but I mostly restricted those to things that I felt made sense as "solid scenery". I have, for example, got models that would work for all of the robot enemies, but I decided to stick with sprites for all the enemies (including the robots).
I think probably every graphic included (or pretty close to it) has been tweaked in some way by me (for better or worse YMMV).
All appropriate graphics have brightmaps.
All appropriate actors have dynamic lights (and dynamic lights are used in the map too).
The map itself has been "massaged" a bit to improve it (I hope), but it's basically the same as it was in 2003.
Music - I decided to stick with the midi tracks that I used in 2003 because I think they still sound quite good and I couldn't find any modern mp3/ogg tracks that conveyed the same feeling.
I used a track from Strife for the ending cast call which I thought felt appropriate, and a couple of incidental tracks from Doom (rather than Doom2) because I prefer them.
I replaced the "bunny scroller" at the end of the original with a custom cast call instead.
I tried to make the mod reasonably stand alone and as "interference light" as possible. i.e. it doesn't change much from the base game - even using duplicate resources in places so that someone could change the defaults without changing the mod (e.g. the pk3 contains renamed duplicates of the Doom plasma projectile sprites).
The player actor has not been changed at all.
So, the mod should work with most weapon mods and similar. However, the intention is definitely that it be played with the default weapon set + the included railgun.
The Story
Spoiler:Enemies:
The "story" such as it is, has been expanded slightly. The in-game briefing has been extended to explain this, but it's also skippable.
You are up against an organisation called ATGC Innovations.
They have done some bad things and recruited marine mercenaries to protect themselves.
To beat ATGC, you need to destroy 4 power couplings in 4 separate towers around their base to allow some refugees to be rescued and allow a greater UAC force to land.
ATGC is an obvious nod to adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine and I know that they are usually listed in a slightly different order. However, this is a company name so they have deliberately changed it up to make it their brand, and having C at the end sort of implies that it might stand for something like "company", "corporation" or whatever, rather than "cytosine".
Spoiler:Weapons:
Weaker organic enemies:
ATGC Scientists - weak, will run away, some won't even attack, but they are the bad guys behind whatever is going on. Wipe them out. All of them.
ATGC Workers - also weak. Most, except the foremen, will run away. However, they are armed with pistols and a pistol can still do some damage to a marine even if it is fired by an untrained shooter.
Dogs - German shepherds and Dobermans. They bark, they run, they bite.
Machines:
Tip: Try to keep clear of the mechanical enemies when they die. Most of them do some damage (albeit not too much) as they explode.
They do this either by scattering a bit of shrapnel or directly from an explosion (or both). Keep your distance and you'll be fine.
Ceiling Turrets - very much like the ones in Strife
Stalkers - again, much like the ones in Strife but there is the Strife-like ceiling variant and a floor-based one with a ranged attack.
Security remotes - they look like the Strife sentinels, but behave differently.
Security droids - two types of flying enemy. One fires double plasma bolts, the other fires rockets which may, or may not, home in on their target.
Crusaders - (based on the Strife sprites) - one that behaves a bit like a mancubus but with greater variety in its attacks, and the other that fires a powerful rocket (or can hit you with its arm at close range).
Marines:
Obviously.
Basically, as mentioned, I went with a "sauce for the goose" policy. With some exceptions, I decided to make there be a marine wielding any weapon that is available to the player, except fists because there are already dogs, a stalker and a chainsaw marine to cover the "walks up to you and does damage" role.
Pistol marine - similar to the Doom Zombieman but a little more disciplined and effective than his undead counterpart. He can do a rapid three round burst though (unlike his undead pal) but may just fire a single shot.
Rifle marine - essentially a variant of the pistol marine
Shotgun marine - similar logic to the pistol marine, like his undead counterpart, just a slightly better/less zombified
Super shotgun marine - keep your distance and you will be OK. His weapon does a lot of damage, but it has a wide spread making it fairly ineffective at range.
Chaingun marine - less like the default ChainGunGuy and a bit more like the player when they have a chaingun.
Rocket launcher marine - does what it says on the tin. He will fire a rocket at you. Avoid!
Plasma rifle marines - there are two variants: one will fire 1-3 plasma bolts at you, the other will fire a rapid, non-stop stream of plasma (faster than the arachnotron, more like the player). They look deliberately similar (but not the same) because the important message here is the same: avoid their attacks, and take them down as quickly as possible.
Railgun marine - You've got one, why shouldn't they? This one is nasty. If you don't spot him quickly, he can hit you from a distance and it can be a single shot kill. Like I said, sauce for the goose...
BFG Marine - Dealing with this guy is the same as dealing with anyone with a BFG: kill them quickly and if you hear them firing get out of the line of sight.
Chainsaw marine - mostly included because if you have access to one, they should have too.
Spoiler:Inventory:
All the standard Doom weapons are available.
One additional weapon - a railgun - is available mostly because a very similar weapon was available in the original to allow the player to do lots of accurate damage from a distance (i.e. it was intended as a sniping weapon to kill bad guys across the map).
The railgun uses 5 cells per shot but does a LOT of damage.
You can also use alt-fire to zoom in on targets (and do slightly more damage when you do so). It will zoom in more the longer you hold alt-fire.
When empty, the weapon can still be changed to and you can use alt-fire as a telescope if you really want to.
It has a relatively slow refire (not excessively so) so it makes an audible "beep" when it's ready to refire - useful if you are using it zoomed in where the HUD weapon is not visible and your view is a little restricted anyway.
The weapon is in slot 6. The plasma rifle has priority in the slot both for auto-switching and when pressing the key bound to slot 6. Pressing 6 multiple times toggles between the plasma rifle and the railgun in a similar manner to the default shotgun/supershotgun.
Spoiler:Play information:
Appearance changes (all minor):
The standard Doom item list is present with some slight changes.
The medikit looks slightly smaller (still functions the same). It also has a green cross instead of a red one. This is really mostly to tie in with the portable health item, but also complies with the Red Cross copyright issue.
The stim pack has been changed to have a matching green cross.
The berserk pack uses a tweaked version of the BFG edition "pill" sprite because it amuses me.
The blue key is a lighter blue, just to echo the lighter blue palette of the original. I was going to do a full, independent new blue key that did not interfere with the default key, but getting it to appear on the status bar would involve modifying that. So, I just went with a sprite replacement.
Actual new inventory items:
A portable medikit - 25 health to be used at a time of your choosing. Pick it up, it stays in your inventory until you use it. Green with a white cross (opposite but complimentary to the medikit sprite). Select them in the inventory and activate to use one.
(or bind a hotkey to use NJArtiHealth)
Flares - part of the map is quite dark, these flares might help. Select them in the inventory and activate to throw one.
(or bind a key to use NJRedFlarePickup)
Grenades - select them in the inventory and activate it throw one
(or bind a hotkey to use NJArtiFragGrenade)
Explosive charges - these are in your inventory, but are really just story items. Every time you destroy one of the quest targets, a charge is taken from your inventory.
Powerup:
There is only one true additional powerup - a mini soul sphere. It gives health by the same rules as the standard soul sphere but only 50 points instead of the 100 of its bigger brother/sister.
"But Enjay" I hear you cry, "that's basically just the standard blur sphere." Correct. It is nearly identical to the default one. I made a clone simply to give it a more subtle dynamic light without affecting the original dynamic light definition. The original definition spilled colours too far and gave away its placement, but I didn't want to mess up anyone's settings. So, I just cloned the item. While I was at it, I thought I might as well give it a a new sprite - a blueish/teal sphere with some armour fading in and out inside - and called it a "shadow armor sphere".
Spoiler:Engine required:
Single player only. The original had co-op and DM starts but they were essentially useless. The map was never set up for those modes of play and the starts were only there to silence DeePsea's error checker.
Difficulty settings are implemented.
Infighting has been switched off. So enemies will not retaliate if they hurt each other and they are immune to each other's standard projectiles.Spoiler:Falling damage is enabled. The maps has a quasi-realistic feel (within reason) so this makes sense.
The marine rocket, plasma and BFG are all slightly less damaging than the player versions, but are all still quite nasty.
I considered making the other enemies immune to the rockets and BFG, and I also toyed with giving at least the marines a line of sight check so that they wouldn't fire if someone on their side was between them and the player. However, having the marines splatter their comrades with their BFGs, rockets and railguns was amusing, so I kept it. The only real concession is that the rocket marine and heavy crusaders do not take splash damage from any rockets they themselves fire (but others can).
Health and ammo have been balanced but are generally not "tight". The threat comes from enemies that can chew through your health pretty quickly even if you go into an encounter in quite a good condition.
Secrets - there are too many of them. However, a few are relatively low-value or so obvious that calling them a secret is pushing it a bit. So, there are fewer "real secrets".
Jumping/crouching are both allowed, even encouraged. Neither is essential to finish the map, however either may be required to find a secret or two. The map is (as far as I know) jump and crouch proof. i.e. I don't think there is anywhere that using those abilities will break the game or soft-lock you. Several windows can be jump-crouched through and jumping or crouching can mean a short-cut in a few places. These are quite acceptable and allowed for in the map design, but not at all essential to get to complete the map (except for a couple of secrets as already mentioned).
While run-and-gun is certainly possible in the game, a bit of caution and use of cover should make the game more playable for most players. I have completed the game several times on all settings (I have an advantage, of course) and my playtester has done so at least once on all settings - but died more.
There are a couple of unspoken quests/tasks in the map which don't generate any rewards, other than an on-screen message to say that you have completed them.
I guess kids these days might liken them to so-called achievements.
Spoiler:Known bugs
The main engine used when developing and testing this version of Marine Assault was UZDoom 5.0 (dev builds) and it has been released to coincide with the release of UZDoom 5.0 Official.
So, the intended engine is UZDoom 5.0.
To a lesser extent UZDoom 4.14.3 and GZDoom 4.14.2 were also used during development.
The ZScript is versioned to 4.14 but I don't think there is much, if anything, in there that wouldn't run on much earlier versions of ZScript. It's all relatively straight-forward stuff.
It should run well with UZDoom 4.14.3 - with the caveat about the rumble mappings already mentioned (see next post on how to address).
It has been played to completion with GZDoom 4.14.2 without issue several times as well. So, that should be good too.
As mentioned, the mod contains models and makes use of dynamic lights and brightmaps. So, settings to enable those are required.
I personally prefer texture filtering and most of my testing was done with that enabled (and switching it off doesn't look as good to me) but if you prefer filtering switched off, that's your business. It shouldn't affect the functionality of the mod.
Spoiler:
There are a couple of places near some extreme corners of the map where if you stand and look in the right (wrong?) direction, you can see that the sky sectors around the towers have been lowered to make the cliff face look taller than the towers. Reconfiguring things to fix this would involve quite a bit of restructuring of the map and would either change the position of the towers or involve a lot of additional 3D floors etc depending on how I did it. It's barely noticeable (I'd played the map dozens of times before spotting it). i.e. I decided that it wasn't worth it. I've seen worse in commercial games.
There are several sectors, lines and things that have tags that are redundant. This is a consequence of map's history. Originally it was in ZDoomHexen format and lots of items in the map had to be set by giving lines/sectors/actors tags and then referencing them in an open script to change their properties. With UDMF, this became unnecessary in many cases. So I set all the relevant items in the map directly using UDMF properties and did away with the relevant scripts, but didn't reset any tags simply because some do get used later on, and others don't. While I was doing the Hexen-to-UDMF conversion, I had a lot going on, so tracking down the ones that needed to keep their tags and only resetting the ones that don't get referenced later would have taken a lot of time and brainwork that I didn't have available. So, I just left the tags in place. They are completely "neutral" in as much as they don't affect gameplay at all. So, the effort versus reward wasn't balanced. I guess they're not really a bug as such; just left over harmless cruft from an earlier version of the map that I decided to leave in place for my sanity. Similarly, there are other harmless ZDoomHexenisms in the map that would not be there if the map was made in UDMF from scratch, things like some sidedefs having both overall offsets and separate UDMF upper/middle/lower offsets. They're all perfectly "legal" (sometimes even desirable) but mostly just a bit of "untidiness behind the scenes."
I'm sure there will be something else, but I haven't come across them (yet).
AI Content:
Spoiler:Credits:
This is important to many people and it's worth being clear about it: the mod contains three images where AI was used to assist the editing process. AI has only been used to augment what I did myself, and in a very small percentage of the images. Of the nearly 3000 png files in the mod, 3 have had AI tweaks. No code or any other resource has any AI involvement.
The lumps involved are TITLEPIC (and an identical copy under the name CREDIT) and two textures MARBAD01 and MARBAD02.
This has been done in accordance with the ZDoom dot org guidelines.
The most obvious (and it is pretty obvious) is the TITLEPIC. I composed my own image using screenshots and available Doom art from iD, overpainted it to make it more detailed and to repair things damaged by my stretching and rotating of the images. It looked bad; far too flat and like something only a mother would want to attach to the fridge. So, I asked Dall-E to upscale it, so that I could edit it further, and make the style look consistent because doing so was beyond me and I couldn't find anyone willing to help. (One artist who I know personally even told me "if the AI image looks good enough, why don't you just use that" which surprised me somewhat.) Frankly, the AI made too many changes and I didn't really like the result, but it looked better than my shonky Frankenspriting and overpainting efforts alone did. After Dall-E had done its thing, I then spent many hours over a few days further tweaking, fixing and replacing elements of what the AI had spewed out (in fact, I replaced significant chunks of it because the AI had really messed up some parts). At least it helped me get better acquainted with my Wacom tablet. After that, I completely recomposed the image, re-took the screenshot and editied it, created the title using a (non-AI) upscaled version of the a font that comes with DPaint for DOS.
In a similar manner, for a couple of incidental graphics seen during the briefing (that probably most people will skip anyway), I composed my own image using Frankenspriting of storyboard images from Strife (SS5F2 and SS5F3) to get the scene that I wanted. I then rendered some images of Doom marines in Cinema4D using models by Willem Sitters edited to be in the poses that I wanted and pasted them into the scene. Once the scene was composed, I got Dall-E to upscale to make it ieasier to work on, it and make my rendered models fit into the style of the scene more closely (something I really suck at). Then I spent a few days working on the images to fix them and un-mess up what the AI had done, paint over many of the AI bits, modify them to be closer to how I wanted, and then I eventually scaled them back down to their original resolution for inclusion as graphics during the briefing.
So, I'm content that the above process keeps the images I included well within the community guidelines for the use of AI imagery. Basically, I did more than the AI did (by a long way). I composed the original images, rendered parts of them, and spent hours on them before and after Dall-E was used. The AI was merely something that assisted during a single one-shot step of editing compositions that I worked on. It helped adjust my work, it was not used as a new image source in itself. However, I feel that it is right to highlight the use of AI.
All that being said, even though I am content that I have done things in accordance with the guidelines, I'm not entirely comfortable with the situation. So, in the unlikely event that someone wants to provide real-art alternatives that do the job better, I'll happily swap them out to replace the AI-touched images. I have already asked on some art forums, asked artists that I know online and in real life and made in a post on these forums. No one was in a position to do the work, which is fair enough, but that's why I included the images that I have.
Other than that, all images are either as they came from their original sources or have been hand created and/or edited by me and/or others without (as far as I know) any AI input.
Spoiler:
Esa Repo (Espi) for his inspiration via Ruma
iD software for many original sprites and the whole Doom thing, plus Quake4
DBJ87 for the Allied Marines Pack and all the contributors that he credits in his credits lump.
Laz Rojas for Astrostein (I'm pretty sure the sprites that form the basis of the ATGC workers came from there).
Willem Sitters for his Doom marine model
Various for The Hexen HRP (a few models that form the basis of edits by me)
Freesound_Community for a few sound effects
Designated as Manardo via GameBanana (DoomGuy with helmet mugshots I used when frankenspriting some graphics).
Rogue Entertainment for Strife (sprites, textures, sounds, music and incidental graphics)
JAM productions for Blake Stone (basis of the Scientist sprites)
iD software for Wolfenstein 3D for a few sprites.
3D Realms for Duke Nukem Shadow Warrior (sprites, textures)
THQ for Red Faction (sounds)
Apogee for Rise of the Triad (sprite source for the railgun)
Epic Games for Unreal Tournament '99 (Textures)
Raven for Heretic 2 (some textures)
Xatrix for Kingpin Life of Crime (a few textures)
Valve for Half Life (sounds, maybe some textures)
Midway for Doom64 (some sounds)
Engine Technology for Mars 3D (sprites)
Blue Tongue for Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy (a few textures)
Textures from various other sources that I have no easy way of identifying.
Midi music - I really have no idea where the original tracks came from. It was over two decades ago. Obviously one is a midi of the Terminator 2 theme.
The majority of either original textures or edits to existing textures (and many of the sprites and models) were done by me* but there almost certainly will be something included that has been posted publicly by someone on a forum somewhere where I have lost track of who the author is. If you recognise anything in here that you made and I have not given you due credit, please let me know.
*In fact, amusingly, while trawling through possible resources, I found some of my work in quite a few mods that have since formed the basis of someone else's edit and there's no mention of me. Such is the nature of resources going through many iterations and generations of modding. So be it. No harm, no foul. I put the resources out there for general use. They're being used. That's cool.
Engines Credit:
Marisa Heit for the original ZDoom and the mods that it made possible - including the original Marine Assault.
Graf Zahl and the GZDoom team for GZDoom and the advances it contains that make this update possible.
The entire UZDoom team for carrying things forward and producing UZDoom.
Tools used:
Ultimate Doom Builder
Paint Shop Pro 7.04 and 2023 Ultimate Edition,
Slade
GrabPNG
TextPad,
Goldwave,
Cinema 4D,
DeePsea (for the original map and a few lump manipulation tasks even in 2026),
XBR,
rotsprite
Dall-E (see note on AI in a spoiler above).
Play tester:
Chevrolet103