Cammy

Hey again, folks! Wanted to give you guys a quick update. A November release is looking somewhat unlikely at the moment thanks to some solidifying family plans for Thanksgiving, but I'll be damned if I'm not still going to try and hit it! While I'm posting, here are some new screenshots for you, this time in the form of some good, old-fashioned before and after comparisons. Original RoC on the left, RoC25 on the right. Lighting is fun! I'm glad to see the positive reception this thread has gotten. I hope the adjustments and music live up to all your expectations!

I'm fully on board with this idea and I have one hope in particular, especially since @Soundblock is the one who's putting the idea on the table: finally creating a full and proper megawad which realizes the story of the Cabal. The story, if you're unaware (taken from the text files of Sverre's ML maps): Even if it doesn't change anything about the gameplay, imagining your quest into Hell as more of a conquest/reclamation than a crusade of punishment - taking back your throne, rather than destroying it - just gives off this really cool vibe. In fact, I was really close to making my own custom compilation frankenwad of the Master Levels which used that idea as a springboard for its text screens - in fact, I may actually have those proof-of-concept text screens still laying around somewhere! @Soundblock would know better than I would, of course, but my understanding was that he intended to make a full megawad out of this idea, and each of his ML maps were meant to be levels within that megawad - but as a result of that big exodus of maps, the wad became fractured and ended up never coming out. This could be an opportunity to correct that. Suffice it to say if this idea does take off I'll be pumped to write some music for it assuming my schedule will have the room for it. Keep us in the loop, this is exciting stuff!

I'll be sure to ask him these questions when I can get back in touch with him - unfortunately, Leo hasn't logged onto LinkedIn in a couple months. I've actually had this post ready to go for months now, but I was hoping to also get in touch with Jonathan El-Bizri and ask him to canonize his tracks' names so we could get all of TNT's soundtrack squared away at once. El-Bizri is really hard to contact though, so that hasn't happened yet. Figured I'd just post what I have.

So, if you’re not aware, Leo Sieben (also credited as L.A. Sieben) is a musician who worked with TeamTNT and Wraith Corp. He provided a handful of music tracks for the shared soundtrack of Wraith Corporation’s megawads Hell To Pay and Perdition’s Gate, and more famously, for TNT: Evilution. A lot of TNT’s most iconic tracks were actually written by him - we have Leo to thank for fan favorites like Death’s Bells, Into the Beast’s Belly, and Legion of the Lost! The only problem is none of those songs are actually called that. The only TNT composer who named his tracks straight-up is Tom Mustaine, who named everything he ever wrote on one page of his website. TNT’s other tracks by Leo Sieben and Jonathan El-Bizri have never been named - but in 2010, a few anonymous IPs decided to give those tracks their own names on DoomWiki. I believe that these unofficial names - and their unwritten, yet widespread acceptance among the community - both came from our intrinsic desire to catalogue music as its own work. Leaving songs untitled is a disservice, in my eyes, and undersells its value as an individual creation by reducing it to deference to the circumstances in which it is played. In the Doom community nowadays, it’s simply not possible to separate these songs from their unofficial titles in standard conversation - or to imagine them with other names. Good news, though! I managed to get in contact with Leo Sieben on LinkedIn and described the situation to him. He did those of us who love to catalogue music a huge favor. He has accepted the community names that we have adopted for his tracks - Sadistic, Smells Like Burning Corpse, Death’s Bells, Agony Rhapsody, Into the Beast’s Belly, and Legion of the Lost - as official! Gone are the days of needing to clunkily refer to these as things like “TNT Evilution MAP04/MAP13/MAP29 theme” on the wiki and in other documentative contexts. I might be one of the only people to whom this is actually a big deal, but I LOVE it when stuff like this happens. To clear up confusion, by the way, Legion of the Lost is often attributed to Jonathan El-Bizri, but was actually written by Leo! I hadn’t really thought too hard about it before but it does make a lot of sense - LotL does not sound at all like El-Bizri's work. El-Bizri’s TNT submissions (Soldier of Chaos, Let’s Kill at Will, Cold Subtleness, and Blood Jungle) are characterized by bouncy, chromatic riffs and quirky instrumentation. Compare that to Leo’s music, which favors steady intensity and more standard chords - particularly as heard in Death’s Bells - and you can hear the resemblance in Legion of the Lost right away. It's unmistakably Sieben. Leo was also kind enough to share with me some tidbits about his thought process behind some of these tracks, which you can read below: I also asked him if he'd be able to provide names for the tracks he wrote for Perdition's Gate / Hell To Pay, and am currently awaiting a reply. For those interested, by the way, he currently works for Insomniac as a gameplay programmer. He scored the gig this January after having worked for Hi-Rez Studios and Rockstar within the past few years, so the wiki's musing that he "seems to have retired from game development" is inaccurate.

Also worth noting that, despite clearly being explosives, Revenant missiles do not deal splash damage like rockets, so you can't get them to kill themselves that way either. The only enemies that can kill themselves (without the assistance of barrels) are Archviles, since their attack inflicts splash damage, but to say making them do that is impractical is an understatement.

I had considered that - I'm fixing whatever texture misalignments I find, but I ultimately decided not to mess around with geometry too much. For a wad of RoC's age, it's difficult to define a point at which a map really needs that visual care, and even harder to define a point at which a visually-updated map loses its identity. Besides, I think each map having its own music track - a field in which I have much more experience than mapping - will do quite a bit of work all on its own to make these maps feel fresher. Thanks for your interest, I hope you end up enjoying it when it's out! Edit 2024: This aged very poorly, lmao

Congrats on the announcement! I'm really excited for RoC2 to see the light of day.

As far as classic '90s megawads are concerned, there are a few key monoliths which we still think back on today - Icarus, Requiem, and the Memento Moris chief among them. But dig a little deeper, and you may just discover some hidden gems... On Halloween night of 1996, Realm of Chaos hit the scene, a megawad developed by TMT. And no, that's not a typo - they're The Macintosh Team! A mere seven Mac users, given a mere six months, managed to assemble an entire 32-map megawad. It flew under the radar for most, not being as Triple-A as the above-mentioned megawads and not pulling off many complicated puzzles or mapping magic. But in its place, Realm of Chaos distinguishes itself with a prevailing focus on straight-up combat, often in quick and concentrated levels. There's plenty of creative maps and fun action to be had in this hidden classic, and I think it deserves its time in the limelight. Fortunately, I've been given the privilege to give it that time. With guidance from TMT keystones Robert "DocBob" Berkowitz and @Steve D, Realm of Chaos: 25th Anniversary Edition is here! This revised and recharged version of the classic wad features new graphics and sprites, an included DeHacked patch with original story sequences and automap names, and a major facelift to every single map with permission from the original creators. The fights are badder, the progression is clearer, the lighting is sharper - but the original soul is wholly intact, and it remains 100% vanilla compatible! Perhaps the biggest addition of all, this edition of Realm of Chaos features a full custom soundtrack of 35 never-before-heard MIDIs courtesy of yours truly! Sticking true to the original project's restrictions, the soundtrack and all above changes were made on my MacBook Air right up until it kicked the bucket. = = > DOWNLOAD THE MEGAWAD ON IDGAMES! < = = Here are some screenshots for you: If you've read this far, make sure to check out the development thread for Realm of Chaos 2! @Steve D and I have got a hand in that one, as well, and you're not going to want to miss it.

I believe a more accurate way of abbreviating the Japanese name would likely be ビファガ9000, or "BiFaGa9000". Each individual character in Japanese does not represent a letter, but instead one or more syllables - for instance, the name Raijin is composed of four syllables in Japanese (ra - i - ji - n), and translating the name Smith into Japanese results in it being broken up into three syllables (su - mi - su). Because of this, Japanese doesn't really employ letter-based abbreviations like we do. Instead, they will often chop off the first couple syllables of every word in the thing's name, then use those to make a shorter name. For instance, Monster Hunter will become MonHun, Mario Kart will become MariKa, etc. Taking the first syllable of every word in the katakana approximation of Big Fucking Gun will give you Bi as in Biggu, Fa as in Fakkingu, and Ga as in Gan. Hence, BiFaGa9000. Take that with a grain of salt, though. My Japanese knowledge is extrapolated from wiki-editing and machine-translated interviews/articles. Works well for trivia like this, but the moment you ask me to construct an actual sentence, I'm completely in the dark.

I miss this school of web design so, so much. Next person to host a megawad on a site like Dino's gets a free Cacoward on me. I'm not even a member of the team but I'll make it work. Damn, I could go for some pizza piez.

Sure thing, I'll take it! Thanks!

Good luck on the project, everyone! Sad to see the map slots got taken up so fast - Dusty, if you decide to expand this to full megawad status, I'll gladly take a map in the 21-29 range!

Welcome back, Dario! 25 years later and Plutonia is still the tightest, most fun, best-looking IWAD if you ask me. You and Milo put in some excellent, iconic work! I hope you guys are aware of (and approve of) the Plutonia MIDI Pack! :)

Congrats on winning this year's Mordeth award! In all seriousness I'm going to have to give this a try, always liked the classic stuff and those are some pretty good-looking screenshots. Congrats on the release!

Surely it'd have to be a city, if the road and street lamps towards the lower-left are anything to go by. Just with some intensive liberties taken in the perspective department.

It's fairly common to see the overall hardest map hovering around 27-29 but distinctly not 30, because a lot of players find it satisfying to have the final map(s) be a sort of "victory lap" after you've beaten the hardest level the wad has. If the very last map in a set is exceptionally long and/or exceptionally difficult, it can become a source of frustration for some players who feel that the megawad is ending on a cheap or tedious note (see how much some people complain about Scythe's Fire and Ice, for instance); because of that, it's often a good move to situate your hardest challenge before the ending so that the final map or two can be dedicated to pure spectacle and fun factor to leave you feeling great by the wad's end.

Congrats on the release, @letshugbro! Finally got around to updating the OP for an easy download link, sorry to keep everyone waiting on it these past couple days. Can't wait to try it out for myself!

Mortal Kombat's shadow ninja character Noob Saibot is named after series co-creators John Tobias and Ed Boon, but backwards. In Banjo-Kazooie, Mumbo's "eekum bokum" talk is just random syllables lifted from composer Grant Kirkhope saying the phrase "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough". Fire Emblem Awakening was going to be the last Fire Emblem game but it accidentally sold like 50 trillion copies because it was a banger. It then proceeded to not be the last Fire Emblem game. A benevolent dragon in Skyrim known as Paarthurnax is voiced by Charles Martinet. He also voices Mario. And for the most obscure and wild and unknown undiscovered trivia of them all...... guys......... did you know that if you type IDCLIP while you're playing Doom, you can walk through walls???????? MAN!!!

@letshugbro Good to see you here, thanks for clearing the air on some of the details! Welcome to Doomworld. I've updated the OP a little to reflect what you've confirmed for us. It's impressive to see how far this project has reached across the web, and I think that's largely the result of your own skill in advertising your work, not just its theme. It makes me wonder where Doom wads in general could be if more of us broadcasted our work with as much poise, and in as many places, as you have.

DOWNLOAD THATCHER'S TECHBASE HERE Full disclosure in that I have nothing to do with this project - I just saw buzz of it online, noticed there isn't a DW thread for it, and decided I might as well pop in and post about it on the forum. The actual dev is @letshugbro, all credit to him and his team! LINK TO THE OFFICIAL GITHUB SITE Thatcher's Techbase is a Boom-compatible wad in development by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital under the direction of Jim Purvis. Former British Prime Sinister Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has escaped from the underworld, and it's your job to explore the Tenth Circle of Hell (better known as the United Kingdom), locate the resurrected CyberThatcher MK.1, and send her back to hell. Features include: - All difficulty levels implemented - Co-op and deathmatch support - Four maps, about 1-2 hours of total playtime - Several custom textures, monsters, and weapons - A soundtrack by Barry "Epoch" Topping - arranged in both MIDI and non-MIDI format - Voice acting - The best premise for a wad of all time

Hey there, everyone! Last night I finally got the chance to get the full recorded soundtrack uploaded to a new YouTube channel of mine. Each MIDI has its own video so you can add individual favorites to your own personal playlists, and they're recorded with Microsoft Wavetable - the standard MIDI device many modern systems use, and the one for which many of these tracks were written and optimized. Enjoy! I might upload other Doom wad OSTs to this channel in the future if people like this formula. Let me know what you think!

I challenge the person above me to beat Plutonia 2 MAP31 on UV, but with their left strafe and right strafe movement binds mirrored.

Mechanical Midwest Hellscape slaps. Could even get a sequel called Natural New England Nihility.

Honored to be a part of this club, thank you for the ping! Those screenshots, hhhhhhhhhh My current schedule is booked tight, but the instant I'm free, I'll be knocking at your door, @Cheesewheel.

That's what the chainsaw is for, baby.