Bitbotherer

Looking at the size of the wad it would be a real problem, it's a struggle getting the assets for doom 2 to fit at the moment. I won't say never but we are limited to a 6meg rom. One possible option would be to create a GD only version, paging in assets to allow for a much larger memory space. That then starts impacting speed. In summary: unlikely at the moment but who can say.

Not yet, didn't really want to spam this site as we only do irregular updates. Well that and it's more the doom engine and support utilities I've been involved with which are more technical in nature. Currently Busy on Doom, Doom 2, Chex and Heretic (didn't realise that had not appeared on console except for a DC port). The networking is "fun" - I'm aiming at a start of Upto 4 players but the protocol I've put together allows for a lot more - but serial data is a begger to get synchronised after a tx failure (I'm looking at a token ring kind of implementation with Comms between each two players and then a pass of the token to the next two units etc. It's treating the serial interface as a managed bus - a la 1553 style with units being either a controller, receiver or monitor) I'll be detailing all the tech details at some point too (so other people could create/convert their own tunes and graphics etc)

And the doom 2 video is now here - it's different from the one linked in the first post as we're doing it based on the current codebase. It's an amusing little level. That's on hardware btw.

Quick look at some of the huds we are implementing, along with the graphic changes we've done. These are all captured on a pc under Big P emulator.

Info for those that are interested. The zero page homebrew twitch stream will be doing a live preview of the current state of play on the 20th of October 11pm Gmt. Missing music is the thing I'm concentrating on at the moment, the jaguar player is limited to 9 instruments while pc version has 16. The mus format is also not the standard mus as used by later versions so requires conversion. The jaguar instrument sample numbers also do not match the "standards". I've written software to convert from mus to Jag format but, yet again, jaguar has some "features" :)

No trouble. There's a lot of testing and rejigging going on at the moment to try and achieve the optimum game in the maximum space. Taking over the PC assets reveals all sorts of issues during testing though. Eg. characters were not updating at the correct rate. This came down to the implementation of tics in the pc Vs console versions. The values in the various multigen.txt files differ between them, console being approx half the PC. Unless they match the characters move at the wrong rate.

Just a quick bit of info for those interested, the DSP code is now going through its optimisation phase and there are some MAJOR improvements identified/tested. It's originally written as 68k code after a C translation instead of "pure" DSP. The clock cycle difference is left at an exercise for the reader but you are looking at a factor of 20 in some cases.

I know it works fine on bigp (even smoother due to not blocking the bitter), the original doom rom had issues with VJ - but oddly worked with Project Tempest. The big thing is ensuring it works on hardware and that's where the game drive has been a godsend

No problem, we still keep encountering "features" as we test - such as the health potions varying between pc and console versions (1 Vs 2). Do you adjust the value or alter map to have less etc. It's looking good though to hopefully pop it's head above the parapet soonish.

No problem, glad to clarify. There is unfortunately a bit of "history" between various jaguar homebrew developers and some like starting trouble - usually in YouTube comments. (Basically comes down to those that left/were banned from the Atariage forum Vs those that are still on there). And this all slayer development started because people finally decided to look at the networking issue :) Jaguar doom is notorious for having flakey network play and it's explained in the manual as being noisy in hell causing comms problems. The actual reason being rather more mundane - maths rounding errors because of differing frame rates, leading to a drift in position, between the two players.

As one of the people involved in the slayer/chex/heretic project I can confirm that jh5124 has no clue about what's going on. One of the people in the team was responsible for releasing the modified Doom II jaguar files many years ago after he converted the levels and patched the original jaguar Doom image. People keep selling his work so perhaps that's where the rumour of sales started I believe. We are currently about to start internal beta testing of the rom to ensure we do not have memory related issues due to map sizes. If you have any tech questions then please just ask. A few bits that might interest people: 1. We've written a utility to fully convert PC textures/sprites/sound files etc. to jaguar (music is still a pain due to the jaguars non standard MUS format - with a non standard instrument set and limited in number of simultaneous notes too. It still needs some tweaking). The utility also creates the support files needed to implement additional creatures etc back into the source code. 2. We took a hiatus due to external issues affecting one of the team members. 3. We are working to have an open release as soon as we can - when it's ready though is always the date. 4. The change list is enormous and includes memory leak fixes, etc. 5. Current wad (today's build) breaks Slade in a few places due to some successful experiments we did on texture reuse. 6. Yes you have to pad the wad entries to a 4 bytes boundary, dot files are the post data for the previously defined graphic, some files must be compressed even if it's a bad option, names of lumps have high bit set in first character if lzw compressed. 7. Calico doom implementation was very useful to study during development. 8. There are lots of new screen shots and videos of the animated textures on the atariage discussion.