I think there should be a Dune mod for Doom

[domthedoom]

I think there should be a Dune mod for Doom. I'd like to see it.

[mrthejoshmon]

If you lament the lack of something yet refuse to be involved in its creation then you are only failing yourself.

 

What I'm saying is: Get it started.

Edited March 15 by mrthejoshmon

[Captain red pants]

Where would doom's run and gun gameplay fit into dune as a franchise? I mean, I know one can do a lot with gzdoom these days but it's kind of established trope of the setting that you don't do a lot of shooting.

Edited March 15 by Captain red pants

[senpaigru]

8 hours ago, domthedoom said:

I think there should be a Dune mod for Doom. I'd like to see it.

 

This is a great place to get involved with various community projects while learning the ropes and gaining some experience along the way. Maybe in time you'll learn enough to be able to make the mod/wad a reality. 

[dasho]

6 hours ago, Captain red pants said:

Where would doom's run and gun gameplay fit into dune as a franchise? I mean, I know one can do a lot with gzdoom these days but it's kind of established trope of the setting that you don't do a lot of shooting.

 

There are several circumstances in-universe where shields are not viable (the open desert on Arrakis, etc). Could also be an interesting mechanic to make enabling/disabling your personal shield important (i.e., near-instakill by worm if you turn it on in the open, get nuked along with your target if they have a lasgun, etc).

[Gez]

There should be a Dune mod for Doom but only if it's called either Doon or Dume.

[Gmg]

Doone.

Edited March 15 by Gmg

[Aaron Blain]

Is there a tool for bringing outdoor topographical meshes into GZDoom? My first thought is that the literal dunes would pose some difficulty.

[dasho]

4 minutes ago, Aaron Blain said:

Is there a tool for bringing outdoor topographical meshes into GZDoom? My first thought is that the literal dunes would pose some difficulty.

 

 

[VoanHead]

I think there should be a doom mod for dune

[LadyMistDragon]

The spice must flow!

 

Although, to be honest, it probably wouldn't be a first-person shooter because Dune is not that straightforward of a story. But I'm open to anything.

[thelamp]

This sprite exists on realm667, called "Dune Warrior" hope this helps

[Devalaous]

On 3/15/2024 at 11:29 PM, Captain red pants said:

Where would doom's run and gun gameplay fit into dune as a franchise? I mean, I know one can do a lot with gzdoom these days but it's kind of established trope of the setting that you don't do a lot of shooting.

 

I can immediately think of something. Dune's better videogames were largely RTS games by Westwood, full of guns and warring factions. What did Westwood also do? An FPS based on their RTS games. It could easily happen with Dune as well

[Murdoch]

On 3/16/2024 at 12:33 PM, LadyMistDragon said:

The spice must flow!

 

Although, to be honest, it probably wouldn't be a first-person shooter because Dune is not that straightforward of a story. But I'm open to anything.

 

Yes, I am not that familiar with Dune, but I get the rough gist of it. FPS does not really seem an ideal medium for it. Have not the previous games been RTS?

[mrthejoshmon]

With the RTS being brought up and having played them myself, perhaps it would lend itself very well to an FPS.

 

More towards a large scale war like fps where you'd take the role of a grunt/fremen on the front lines defending or attacking spice extraction outposts or fortresses.

 

It's a lot like 40K in the regards that it makes more sense as an RTS series yet would be a great FPS game if given to right people, it could happen but probably wouldn't.

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, mrthejoshmon said:

With the RTS being brought up and having played them myself, perhaps it would lend itself very well to an FPS.

 

More towards a large scale war like fps where you'd take the role of a grunt/fremen on the front lines defending or attacking spice extraction outposts or fortresses.

 

It's a lot like 40K in the regards that it makes more sense as an RTS series yet would be a great FPS game if given to right people, it could happen but probably wouldn't.

 

Thinking more, the two concepts are by no means mutually exclusive as Battlezone 1998 ably demonstrated.

[Captain red pants]

8 hours ago, Devalaous said:

 

I can immediately think of something. Dune's better videogames were largely RTS games by Westwood, full of guns and warring factions. What did Westwood also do? An FPS based on their RTS games. It could easily happen with Dune as well

A combined arms style game set in the Dune universe would be pretty cool actually, but again, I'm not sure the Doom engine would be my first choice for a project of that kind. It's not impossible to do I suppose, but seeing what the MechWarrior Living Legends guys did with the Crysis engine, I'd be looking to that as a good model to follow.

In fact, you just reminded me did you know that C&C Commando has a stand alone mod set in the Red Alert universe called A Path Beyond? Bring things full circle and make a Dune mod for it!

All that said, if it was a Doom mod you might have an advantage of it probably not getting much legal attention assuming you're sticking with mostly sprite based assets.

[Kinsie]

On 3/15/2024 at 9:29 PM, Captain red pants said:

Where would doom's run and gun gameplay fit into dune as a franchise? I mean, I know one can do a lot with gzdoom these days but it's kind of established trope of the setting that you don't do a lot of shooting.

I'm not exactly familiar with the Dune setting because I'm a cultureless grub, but Westwood's "Dune 2" RTS sets up a version of the setting conducive to open combat. Taking cues from that with clever reference to old mechanics from that game (ie. a path of stone ground with buildings and their ruins acting as level structure, with worms gobbling your guts if you venture too far into the sands) and you could have something that at least evokes the setting to a reasonable, if somewhat gimmicky degree.

[Stupid Bunny]

I was going to have a boss in one of my projects where you fought Baron Harkonnen and he floated around shooting you with a crotch mounted cannon and shouting “SQUEEEEEEEZE!!!” but am too untalented to draw the sprites (I did do the arena and dehacked for it though). Do love me some Dune, though I only got up to halfway through Heretics before it started to lose me

[Devalaous]

C&C Renegade had a thing for man-sizing lots of the iconic vehicle and base defence weapons, even man-sized the bloody Ion Cannon, so that could also help with setting up an arsenal of weapons and foes, since in the Doom engine, you'd have to forgo Renegade's vehicles. Dune 2000 in particular only had riflemen, rocket troopers and grenadiers as the base forces, you could have the Fremen and Sardaukar as elite enemies depending on which house you would play as for said theoretical mod (Common sense says it'd be a classic Atreides vs Harkonnen good vs evil story), and the three faction's specialty weapons could be mn-sized (Sonic wave weaponry for Atreides, explosive plasma for Harkonnen, mind control gas for Ordos) and you could adapt the Harkonnen cluster missile as a mansized BFG equivalent (Im picturing it as something like the Bouncer from Ratchet and Clank 2 or the Zarr from Warframe, explosions EVERYWHERE around the point of impact)

 

@Kinsie's point above about the sandworms totally works too; Hexen had monsters that were stuck to one type of flat and ambushed you when you walked into their area, could do the same with sandworms. Can also use the RTS' Thumper device to purposefully attract them to attack enemies, likely more as a setpiece than an inventory item

 

And again if we go by Dune 2/Dune 2000, the campaign would end with an assault on the Emperor's palace, where he'd probably have some over the top doomsday mech or something just to give a final boss of sorts. There was a third RTS, 'Emperor: Battle for Dune', that I never got to play, so that likely has even more material for adaption into a possible Doom thing.

[domthedoom]

On 3/15/2024 at 2:29 PM, Captain red pants said:

Where would doom's run and gun gameplay fit into dune as a franchise? I mean, I know one can do a lot with gzdoom these days but it's kind of established trope of the setting that you don't do a lot of shooting.

I imagine a story where the player fights for Paul and infiltrates Harkonnen facilities on Arrakis and Giedi Prime.

[domthedoom]

On 3/15/2024 at 1:56 PM, mrthejoshmon said:

If you lament the lack of something yet refuse to be involved in its creation then you are only failing yourself.

 

What I'm saying is: Get it started.

I wanted to do it myself but some personal stuff came up so I started the topic to sort of plant the idea for anyone who wants to do it, I had the whole story figured out.

I wanted the mod to be made in GZDOOM. The first part of the mod would be about the player helping Paul by travelling to Giedi Prime and attacking the Harkonnens (as I said earlier). The second part would be set a little earlier in the Dune story, the player would play as a Harkonnen and would attack the Fremen in their sietches. The third and final part would take place in God Emperor Of Dune, the player would explore the dunes and then hitch a ride on a sandworm that's larger than Shai-Hulud, it would stop at a Fort Mali where God Emperor Leto II resides (This is very different from the book), the player would have an epic boss battle with him and would defeat him, end of story. I have made a more comprehensive document about this a long time ago (2019) but it's lost now, only now I've revisited the idea. 

[Gez]

On dimanche 17 mars 2024 at 11:11 PM, Murdoch said:

 

Yes, I am not that familiar with Dune, but I get the rough gist of it. FPS does not really seem an ideal medium for it. Have not the previous games been RTS?

Cryo's Dune game is more of an real-time adventure with a sprinkling of 4X on it than an RTS.

 

Westwood's Dune II is an RTS but, for as good and entertaining as it was, took considerable liberties with the setting and the stories. Just for a start, they swapped the color schemes of the two main factions, the Atreides have a red emblem and the Harkonnen a blue one, but they swapped that around because in the West we're used since the Cold War to have blue good guys and red bad guys. They've added a third house that doesn't really exist in the canon (House Ordos is literally just a single line in The Dune Encyclopedia, which describe their emblem as being ivy-covered crossbones; not a book and a serpent as that one is actually taken from another irrelevant House found only in the aforementioned Encyclopedia). They've made the combat units basically WW2-style (tanks, artillery, etc.) whereas in the canon, battles are mostly melee since Holtzman shields make kinetic weapons mostly useless, and energy weapons fatal to the shooter. So combat in Dune is about getting to enter the enemy's shield, which can only be done slowly since anything too fast is blocked, and given how close that shield range is, this basically means you fight with knives and swords. Or with hunter-killers, the FPV drones of the series, if you really want a ranged option. Now to be fair, since the Fremen don't have Holtzman technology, in the books the Harkonnen get to use artillery against them. But it's not something that they had really trained for, it's more of a rediscovery than a tradition, due to how much Holtzman shields had impacted traditional House warfare in the Dune universe.

 

Another big factor in Dune universe warfare is that space travel is very, very, very expensive. So large armies requiring large amount of transport is right out of the question. While the Houses rule over entire planets, they fight with only a few thousand men at most. This small scale of warfare is what allows some renowned swordsmen like Gurney or Duncan to acquire such an important status: if someone can fight against 50 enemies and win, this person alone can win an entire battle. Remember, small armies have to fight over an entire planet. There's very little in the way of force concentration. That's a key part of what allows Paul Atreides to win in the novel, because he rallies to him the Dune natives and that gives him an immense numerical advantage over the Harkonnen and Sardaukar troops, advantage which more than compensates for the technological disadvantage (the Fremen don't have shields, remember?). This again isn't something that is factored in any significant way in the Dune 2/Dune 2000/Emperor games, even when you play as the Atreides the Fremen units are just a small, largely inconsequential bonus.

 

So what is the point of all the nerdery above? Simply that Westwood made Dune games by simply retconning everything they felt they needed to retcon so as to get the kind of gameplay they were looking for. A lore-accurate Dune II would have been very, very different.

 

And if Westwood could get away with it to make a good RTS game, then another studio can also get away with it to get a good FPS game.

[MrFlibble]

Back in the early 2000s I discovered Dune II and also started playing Doom and some mods/PWADs more or less regularly. In a bit of possibly interesting info, one of the devs of Doom Legacy was also involved with Dune Legacy*, which is one of the earliest attempts to make a Dune II engine recreation. Which is how I discovered the Dune Legacy project in the first place (IIRC; or was it vice versa?).

 

*To make it clearer, I believe that the person who was then working on Dune Legacy had coded a bot for Doom Legacy, and had a link to it on the Dune Legacy webpage. Whether that person was a regular Doom Legacy dev or contributor, I don't really know as my memory is a bit fuzzy on the details. The two projects sure were related in my head back then.

 

Anyway, back then I was in my late teens and I was very impressed by Doom Legacy's advanced capabilities. And, also being a Westwood Studios fan and having discovered Renegade not long before, sure thing I did fantasize about a Dune II themed FPS. You'd play as the good guys of course, with the action taking place on the ground, inside buildings and in some sore of underground facilities, although I did not think specifically about sietches. Dune II has light infantry armed with automatic rifles and heavy troopers with chainguns and rocket launchers, all quite fitting with the standard Doom arsenal. There are also Fremen and Sardaukar that have different guns on the art (but are still the same heavy troopers in-game). I think I imagined the player as a Master Chief style commando with more armour than the light infantry (Atreides don't use troopers because they're too brutal or something), but not quite the same as the bulky trooper.

4 hours ago, domthedoom said:

the player would play as a Harkonnen and would attack the Fremen in their sietches

If you stick to the book's lore, that Harkonnen would have to be very resourceful, as the Fremen made short work of these goons.

6 minutes ago, Gez said:

the Fremen don't have Holtzman technology, in the books the Harkonnen get to use artillery against them

Not exactly, they used the artillery against the retreating Atreides to block them in the caverns to die. It was a surprise weapon, but not because the opposing party did not have shields, but because they could bury the Atreides in the rocks by shelling them. That artillery was never used again (although Rabban wanted to keep it), and the Baron never really considered the Fremen a threat until it was too late.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

23 hours ago, domthedoom said:

I wanted to do it myself but some personal stuff came up so I started the topic to sort of plant the idea for anyone who wants to do it, I had the whole story figured out.

I wanted the mod to be made in GZDOOM. The first part of the mod would be about the player helping Paul by travelling to Giedi Prime and attacking the Harkonnens (as I said earlier). The second part would be set a little earlier in the Dune story, the player would play as a Harkonnen and would attack the Fremen in their sietches. The third and final part would take place in God Emperor Of Dune, the player would explore the dunes and then hitch a ride on a sandworm that's larger than Shai-Hulud, it would stop at a Fort Mali where God Emperor Leto II resides (This is very different from the book), the player would have an epic boss battle with him and would defeat him, end of story. I have made a more comprehensive document about this a long time ago (2019) but it's lost now, only now I've revisited the idea. 

The problem is that even though you kept the story/concept as simple as possible, which is appropriate for a DOOM mod, the percentage of modders capable of succesfully executing the most important things you are describing (riding a giant sandworm, an epic boss battle) is the same percentage of people here who aren't virgins. There's a few of them around, but they're busy making things like Kama Sutra (which does feature an epic final boss battle and takes place in a world where people ride worms). It would require new custom enemies, weapons, and textures, also music most likely, and advanced knowledge of GzDoom features and scripting. Otherwise you end up with a map where you (Doomguy who spouts audio clips from Timothy Charmander) walks on top of an immobile SKINFACEworm before fighting the Freedoom Pinky Demon.