Early and unused DOOM 64 Level Designs

[ImpieEyez95]

Included here are 5 Doom 2 that I was able to acquire from the people who created them (these maps that were made by the MIDWAY Level Design Team (Thank you Tim!) on PC, and some (in the case of Newcat3) became what later was Unholy Temple for D64  (while in the other cases here, going unused) when initially developing Doom 64. 

Based on sources, some of these stem from 1995, to 1997. Within MK3/Trilogies source, we know there's reference to Doom 2 (an .LMP demo file is located there - dated March 21st, 1996 -  which runs after some editing), along with a doomn64rom (this does not boot at all.) 
 

Within that source, it seems MIDWAY were also in the process of porting Doom II to the Nintendo 64, at least in 1996, when the programmers were getting a feel for how the WAD files and LUMPS worked - to create Doom 64 for the Nintendo 64, which would eventually see release March 31st, 1997.
 

Romero stated as such on twitter: 

Quote

"Did you help out with Development?" 

Romero: Just a little. Aaron Seeler, the coder, was here for months to pick John C’s brain.

 

Also there was the id Software & Mortal Kombat enactment in 1995 (which, Doom 64 was supposed to be a launch title for the Nintendo 64 but was delayed)

upon playing some of these, these do seem to be very early (as evidenced by no secrets being tagged, where there probably should be, in reference to "Mee2.wad", and other things) @Linguica should this stay here or be moved to Doom 2? thoughts?

Anyway without further ado below is what Tim had to say regarding these:
 

Quote

 

Inside should be 5 Doom2 wads. These are all I was able to find.
 

So - Tuff.wad was another designers level. A quick one just as a challenge. Basically, lots of monsters in a donut.
 

Newcat3 is the most interesting as it later became, um, Unholy Temple in D64. This was my first iteration.
 

Mee2.wad is another one I made to try theme ideas.

canyon.wad was the same. Wanted to try organics/cliffs I think.
 

hack2.wad was an ocean fortress idea, but some ideas were reborn in D64 in my level In The Void I believe

 

 

 

wads.zip

Edited January 15, 2019 by ImpieEyez95
added stuff about sectors..

[Immorpher]

Interesting bit of history!

[iori]

Woah, awesome! Newcat3 became Altar of Pain not Unholy Temple, but easy to see how it was confused as both have a similar layout.

Edited January 15, 2019 by iori

[Gerardo194]

More Doom64 History, great!!! is this a sign??;)

thanks for sharing this interesting maps! I knew No Escape level from Doom64 came after Tower Of Babel! :O

[seed]

Fascinating bit of info. So Doom 2 might have been considered to get ported to the N64 at some point, would have never guessed that.

 

Nice to see some ideas did end up in the final product one way or another.

[Mk7_Centipede]

I feel like we know quite a bit about Doom 1 and 2, but this still doesnt tell us much about 64.

are we talking about willits?

[ImpieEyez95]

26 minutes ago, Mk7_Centipede said:

are we talking about willits?

 

No, as he wasn't a level designer on Doom 64. Talking about MIDWAY here.

[Gez]

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Midway_Games

Must be Tim Heydelaar. The other level designers were Randy Estrella and Danny Lewis. Perhaps they have kept some of their old stuff too?

Edited January 15, 2019 by Gez

[ImpieEyez95]

That it was.

[Gerardo194]

Now I wonder if they still have the scrapped maps from early stages of Doom64

[seed]

10 minutes ago, Gerardo194 said:

Now I wonder if they still have the scrapped maps from early stages of Doom64

 

It would be pretty sick if they do since the game originally had a much more ambitious goal. If not, well, at least the final game inherited many textures from them.

[Gerardo194]

That's right. Those levels from magazine's screenshots are quite interesting but I remember reading in a website that Id software didn't like those levels at all.

[seed]

1 minute ago, Gerardo194 said:

That's right. Those levels from magazine's screenshots are quite interesting but I remember reading in a website that Id software didn't like those levels at all.

 

Hm, another interesting bit of info, I always thought they simply decided to stick to the established formula of the previous games as the tech might not have been there for what they had planned at the time.

[DefilerPhil47]

These are awesome, Canyons was actually a really cool level and I instantly recognized the square fortress themed levels from doom 64 in the .wad newcat3.  Thanks for sharing these, some awesome pieces of doom history.

Edited January 16, 2019 by StainlessSteel

[Job]

I haven't had a chance to check any of these out more closely yet. Anyone willing to share some screenshots?

[DefilerPhil47]

I took this screen when I was playing Newcat3.  Not sure if they just never finished the level (which I assume) or me playing the level through GZdoom made the level not load correctly.

 

[ImpieEyez95]

Tim did confirm to me that the level works and is legitly completable. He was using Doomsday to complete it. 

Edited January 17, 2019 by ImpieEyez95

[Hyde]

Hey all - Tim H. here. Glad these unseen levels got out there (good or bad!) - thank ImpieEyez95 for finding me and inquiring! Thought I'd hop in and maybe answer some random questions and wax nostalgic. Doom (as a player/LD) and Doom64/Doom PSX (as Dev) hold very special places in gamedev memory for me (and the LD crew even still - Dan Lewis is my best friend to this day). 

 

Here's some info I can recall that I don't know if we've shared (beyond the fact there was a sequel).

--There was a Doom64 sequel, called Absolution, in the works. We had a fair number of levels done but the top priority was multiplayer, which was already in and fully playable. It was great, despite the whole 'can see you on the same TV' thing. The levels we had done, if memory serves, took place on the moon (or some planet) surface. We were getting better with abusing our custom scripting system and had some cool stuff in the works. The reason it wasn't completed is a bit of politics, but mostly, we (Midway) had been tapped to do Quake64 and resources went there. Doom64 did do pretty well, but the thought was Quake64 was going to do much better than another sequel. We (the D64 LD team) were already editing Quake levels in our spare time by then, but were not part of the Q64 team (politics mostly).

 

--The scripting system made Doom64 so unique. Every idea we had, from copying a sectors floor/wall/ceiling texture tags, lighting info, to timed delays (spinning lights, etc) that could all be bound to one function, made D64 what it is. As fast as we could come up with ideas, Aaron (the coder) got them in. It was much like Basic - linear list of functions based on line numbering. 

 

--The reason we could 'fake' 3d was because of a happy accident during the initial Doom64 pitch (those mayan/etc looking levels first shown). We had an outdoor sector who's height was lower than a neighboring sector, but had sky. In Doom, this would look bad, but in Doom64, the sky was drawn behind everything, and we realized we could fake lower ceilings (by having a sector behind it go up past it to be the 'wall') to give that impression of 3d. Also, the original pitch (the mayan stuff) was scrapped because I think the theme was too foreign to Dooms lore and ID wanted it to be more based in the current lore.

 

--Fun fact. The reason Doom64 is so dark, is because we (the Level Designers) were developing it in our offices, which had no windows and we kept the lights off. To us, it looked great! Then, when it went to QA, in their florescent bathed room light, they couldn't see anything. At. All. Hence, the gamma slider was added which literally saved us. That mistake was on us 3 LD's. And I've never developed anything in the dark again. Strong lesson learned.

 

More soon - if you're curious about anything, fire away!

 

 

[Gerardo194]

Hello @Hyde it's always good to hear more about Doom64 development, but I've always been curious about this: 

we know the Doom64 takes place in Phobos (info based on some game magazines) and it ends in level 8 (Final Outpost)... does level 9 take place in a more corrupted Deimos (according to the Doom story about Deimos being absorbed by Hell), in another arcane dimension, or Hell itself?

Great to see you here in Doomworld!

[KVELLER]

This is some terrywad material right here.

 

Spoiler

 

;)

 

This is all pretty interesting stuff. I'm glad it was released.

[esselfortium]

1 hour ago, Hyde said:

Fun fact. The reason Doom64 is so dark, is because we (the Level Designers) were developing it in our offices, which had no windows and we kept the lights off. To us, it looked great! Then, when it went to QA, in their florescent bathed room light, they couldn't see anything. At. All. Hence, the gamma slider was added which literally saved us. That mistake was on us 3 LD's. And I've never developed anything in the dark again. Strong lesson learned.

This is amazing.

 

Thank you for stopping by and sharing some dev stories! It's a shame that internal politics killed the D64 sequel.

[Grain of Salt]

I read "early version of Unholy Temple" and thought of Dark Citadel for some reason, so I experienced multiple layers of wrong-map-ness.

 

Although NEWCAT3 is clearly map12 Altar of Pain, I do think it could also be the "first iteration" of Unholy Temple, since they have similar enough layouts. I think taking a second shot at a layout idea and ending up with something distinct enough to be considered a new map is a common enough occurrence.

 

I always liked the map12/map23 square tiers maps in d64. It's a cool layout archetype, and you don't see it much. Kinda has a bit of a "classic" feel while being flexible enough that you could give it modern gameplay/detailing/whatever if you wanted.

 

Edit: the rock detailing in newcat, mee2 and canyon is very nice. Kind of ahead of its time, feels more like 2000s maps than 1995.

Edited January 18, 2019 by Grain of Salt

[Kaiser]

Greetings Tim! Awesome to see you around the community. In case you're wondering, I am the one responsible for that Doom64 'Total Conversion' back in the day (and was also the one that provided a bunch of technical questions for that 2003 interview).

 

I am kinda curious to know, if you remember at all, what was the story behind this unused weapon seen in this issue of Gamepro?

 

I am assuming it was suppose to be some sort of lightning gun (like Quake)?

[Hyde]

1 hour ago, Gerardo194 said:

Hello @Hyde it's always good to hear more about Doom64 development, but I've always been curious about this: 

we know the Doom64 takes place in Phobos (info based on some game magazines) and it ends in level 8 (Final Outpost)... does level 9 take place in a more corrupted Deimos (according to the Doom story about Deimos being absorbed by Hell), in another arcane dimension, or Hell itself?

Great to see you here in Doomworld!

 

Oh gosh - honestly, the story wasn't much of an influence on what we created. It was kind of a 3 part setup. Space base/random locations/demonic/hell-ish locales. We decided the theme of most and tried to be diverse in look and feel, but it was pretty loose as far as sticking to lore was concerned. If we did follow an outlined story progression, I definitely don't recall. We really just let our imaginations run wild and challenged each other to come up with new ways to surprise the player visually and gameplay wise.

[Xaser]

2 hours ago, Hyde said:

--There was a Doom64 sequel, called Absolution, in the works. We had a fair number of levels done but the top priority was multiplayer, which was already in and fully playable. It was great, despite the whole 'can see you on the same TV' thing. The levels we had done, if memory serves, took place on the moon (or some planet) surface. We were getting better with abusing our custom scripting system and had some cool stuff in the works. The reason it wasn't completed is a bit of politics, but mostly, we (Midway) had been tapped to do Quake64 and resources went there. Doom64 did do pretty well, but the thought was Quake64 was going to do much better than another sequel. We (the D64 LD team) were already editing Quake levels in our spare time by then, but were not part of the Q64 team (politics mostly).

 

This is a bit of a long shot, but what's the feasibility of releasing the unfinished sequel stuff as-is somewhere? I'm probably pipe-dreaming here, but given that there's now an unofficial (and quite faithful) PC port of Doom64 (done by Kaiser above; he's a wizard), I imagine it'd be possible to get the community involved, polish & finish it up, and release it as a mod. Even if it's a few levels, that's more than zero levels, and D64 could always use some love!

[Hyde]

35 minutes ago, Kaiser said:

Greetings Tim! Awesome to see you around the community. In case you're wondering, I am the one responsible for that Doom64 'Total Conversion' back in the day (and was also the one that provided a bunch of technical questions for that 2003 interview).

 

I am kinda curious to know, if you remember at all, what was the story behind this unused weapon seen in this issue of Gamepro?

 

I am assuming it was suppose to be some sort of lightning gun (like Quake)?

 

Hey Kaiser! Definitely a familiar name! I've got the TC somewhere still.

Oh - that's a good one. I _want_ to say it was the first iteration, visually, of the rocket launcher. I don't think it was a new weapon type. If it was, my guess would be on a flamethrower type weapon (given the canister on the side and the vented front) but I have this very iffy memory of the rocket launcher not looking like a rocket launcher and it was redone (might have been ID feedback, or internal). That may be it.

 

Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think it was the first pass Rocket Launcher. I think part of the reason it was redesigned is it went into the playfield too far, visually. It felt weird, obstructed too much. That seems pretty familiar to me.

Edited January 18, 2019 by Hyde

[Hyde]

10 minutes ago, Xaser said:

 

This is a bit of a long shot, but what's the feasibility of releasing the unfinished sequel stuff as-is somewhere? I'm probably pipe-dreaming here, but given that there's now an unofficial (and quite faithful) PC port of Doom64 (done by Kaiser above; he's a wizard), I imagine it'd be possible to get the community involved, polish & finish it up, and release it as a mod. Even if it's a few levels, that's more than zero levels, and D64 could always use some love!

 

I don't have any of the assets - we developed on SGI Indy's so it wasn't really transferable or useful then outside of that environment. And given the many transitions Midway has since gone through, my bet is those assets are long gone.

 

[Edit - if there's a mod who can increase my per-day post cap, I'd appreciate it! Already hit it!]

Edited January 18, 2019 by Hyde
post cap

[Xaser]

Ah well, figured it was worth an ask. Somebody was inevitably going to, at any rate. :P

 

Thanks for stopping by, BTW! Doom64 is friggin' awesome, and it's always refreshing to see the creators stop by and shed some light on the old times. There's definitely a brightness pun there... somewhere.

[Dark Pulse]

@Hyde Thank you and all the other Midway guys for making two of the truly most unique Doom experiences the world got to see. I didn't own an N64, but PlayStation Doom was my second Doom (after the SNES port of Doom), and I always loved the difference in atmosphere compared to that. I sure did want to play Doom 64 though!

 

My questions are more Playstation Doom related - I'm kind of curious as to why some of the maps that got cut, well, got cut. I'm not sure if you're aware, but there's a very large project going on for Playstation Doom where we're hacking all sorts of lost/missing levels back into the game and giving them a makeover in the style of the work you guys did on Playstation Doom. Obviously we have to do quite a bit of work for some of these levels, but for others, it seems like there's really not any reason I can think of other than time constraints for not having them in there (some of the maps I've done, like E3M8: Dis and TNT's MAP05: Hanger/MAP06: Open Season come to mind), where relatively few cuts were needed to get them running (and running well) in the Playstation version of the engine. Any chance some light can be shed on this? It'd be kind of a bummer if it was mere time constraints, since there was plenty more room on that CD.

 

Me doing some of these maps has made me truly appreciate the sacrifices you guys went through to get a damn good port of the game on the Playstation, by the way - some of the limitations like stretched textures on walls over 256 units high, the 16 flat limit, the tight RAM requirements limiting monster variety, and geometry fun make me wish we had better debugging for that, but it also makes me appreciate all the work you guys did all that much more. That said, the desire to want to do things on the Doom 64 Engine is also what led to us trying to reach out to you - but @Erick194 is having progress figuring out the extra type of compression used by Doom 64 maps/textures/demos, so hopefully soon we'll have versions of those maps running on the N64 Doom Engine as well - and make use of all the little features and tricks that you guys got added to it. :)

Also, is there any reason why the flags for monsters (mostly used for the Nightmare Spectres) weren't used on more enemies? We know there was some Nightmare Imps in a beta version of PSX Doom (there's screenshots from an issue of Gamepro, I believe), but in the final game only Demons generally got that treatment, save for a few weird (and seemingly random) enemies:

• One Cacodemon on MAP45: Tenements has 50% Transparency set to it, using the third bit of the bitfield. It is the only monster with this set in the game.
• One Demon on MAP34: The Focus (in the exit room) has 100% Additive Transparency set to it, using the second and third bits of the bitfield. It too is the only monster set with this in the game.
• Setting all three bits creates normal, non-nightmare Spectres, but for some reason these were seemingly never used.

Kind of surprised that these flags weren't really used for much more than the Nightmare Spectres, and for some reason, only for those - some Nightmare Cacos or Nightmare Mancubi would have made for some interesting mid-boss tier fights, and broken up the monotony from a Hell Knight being trudged out for your token "beefy bad guy." Any light shed there would be really interesting to me - it's one of the bigger mysteries of PSX Doom to me.

 

Oh, lastly: If someone doesn't raise your post limit, that's only because you're new, and to try to ensure you're not a spammer. It goes away after the first day or two. Maybe @Quasar or @fraggle can bend the rules and get you set up a little early?

Edited January 18, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[Bushpig2dope]

Loving the D64 love in this thread. The true Doom 3 ;)
 Oh and @Hyde I thought of a question, were there any scrapped demons in Doom 64? If so what was their design like and what place did they have in the game?

Edited January 19, 2019 by Bushpig2dope