What's the history behind Eternity TC?

[Dusty_Rhodes]

inb4 "read the wiki"

 

I've read the Doomwiki page, it mostly just explains a few awesome details about there being three episodes, the first in a UAC base, the second in a Hexen - style fantasy world called Halcyon, and the third in Hell.

 

It also said there were to be spellcasting, friendly things based off of MBF's helper dog functionality; these were to be a marine and a dwarf wizard, which, let's face it, sounds awesome. Some custom enemies were made too, seems very cool.

 

Anyway, what's the story behind all this? I know it spawned an awesome engine, which I enjoy a lot (I really need to make a mapset for it). Why did the project stop? Did interest in development die down? It just seems like an interesting bit of Doom history that I don't have much info on.

 

It's a shame, Eternity TC seemed to be a very fun project. It has a snowball's chance in Hell at being finished, but it would be awesome to see.

[Quasar]

In 1997 one of my high school friends and I wanted to start our own Doom mod. It was going to originally be a nine-level episode mod for Ultimate Doom. The time travel theme was explicitly inspired by the Star Trek: TNG episode, "We'll Always Have Paris", in which an experimental physicist fractured the time continuum using a weird device that reminded us both of Doom's HOM effect. This was announced some time that year (very prematurely, with absolutely no real work done yet) on Usenet's rec.games.computer.doom.announce.

 

As time went on my friend lost interest, and the Doom source code was released that year, so my plans for it just kept getting bigger. Through 1998 I got involved with beta testing MBF for Lee Killough and had learned how to do a lot of things with DeHackEd, so these inspired me to start trying to learn C programming so I could edit the source code myself. I started college later that year and took a comsci major which accelerated my learning; I decided at that point that I really wanted to try to break into the game industry. That was when I came up with the entire Halcyon stuff, inspired very heavily by Heretic and Hexen, which was meant to be a springboard into a game series of my own making that wouldn't have anything to do with Doom.

 

Meanwhile I kept trying to recruit level designers and particularly artists. However there were basically no artists back then that did full sprites for enemies, and resources that are taken for granted now like bestiaries and ZDoom modpacks with thousands of monsters in them didn't exist yet. The level of interest from the community was never very high and definitely not enough to match the overly ambitious plans I had made up. The coding I could do however, and after fraggle gave up on his SMMU port, I decided to re-purpose Eternity as its successor, meant to become the "banner carrier" for the line of development that started with Boom (arguably PrBoom, which had started up in the meantime and beat us to porting to Windows, was more successful at achieving that aim in the short-term).

 

After the TC had languished for enough time I eventually matured enough to realize that it was not a realistic goal and shut it down officially.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Quasar

[Dusty_Rhodes]

@Quasar wow thanks for the info. That's really awesome that interest in modding Doom got you into the game dev job. I always liked the TNG episode too, very cool. 

 

And thanks for the engine, I love Eternity and I'm glad the mod can live on through this port. Thanks for all the info!