Burgertime 7/12/2015: DOOM 3DO

hello everybody welcome to another fun-filled episode of Burger Time today I'm going to be talking a little bit about that thing I dealt with about ten years ago one that 1996 I think it was I worked on a game called doom you may have heard of this doom was of course you know the game about my ed software and released on many many platforms but the story was is that well to be quite honest is that I was doing a bunch of games for 3do because at that point particular point in time I had I remember everything so long ago after leaving at her play I got a business partner and the tool was formed a company called logic where and with some other X interplay employees and some other people that got together we all form this big company and we started doing first music park software and doing this thing called your day at the park for Busch Gardens but then later on which was all based on laser discs of all things and then later on we then started doing back to video games where I was doing a bunch of ports for mac play well eventually up I did the port for Wolfenstein 3d for the 3do and that got me a lot of attention well everyone at 3do was hoping to get doom on that platform and unbeknownst to me at this particular point in time another company called art dinner interactive gave heed software a boatload of money I was under the impression was somewhere between 250 to 500 thousand dollars but remember 1996 that's a lot of money it's like saying licensing doom for $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 today just for just to use the name not unheard of but for a game console a 3do which really wasn't that popular even though it was hyped up to no one's business Oh see up looking at the chat line here it says here 13 Friday girl is at work but hi Wow someone's hosting me for viewer cool but back to I was saying um I was working on wolf3d and our data interactive went ahead and got the rights to doom and the CEO of our data interactive was a newbie from what I understood is that he raised money from a fellow's at his church of all places and he convinced them to give him several hundred thousand dollars to form a video game company and they were going to call it art data interactive and since the biggest thing of all that particular time was the 3do arm which you know I already had done the 3do buffet I had already worked on Wolfenstein 3d I was doing I did out of this world for a remake of Aldous World on the 3do so uh 3do already knew my company logic where was really really adept at making 3do ports that they came to us and say hey can you help this company out this company was telling us that they already have a version of doom working with new levels new monsters new weapons and everything but they just need a little technical help in order to get it out to market now that's my specialty is taking games that are nearly finished and finishing them you know figuring out what the optimizations are where the stuff to do well talk to the CEO of our data he told me backed up everything 3do said new games already in the works etc but just needs some technical help and I said so when do you need it done he says I need it done by Christmas well this talk was like in August and to ship something in Christmas you have to have it finished no later than October you preferably September but October is like the drop dead time because you then have to get it go through QA then you have to go through submissions with in this case 3do then you have to press the disks then you have to mail them to all the stores in order to get the store this these games on the store shelves by that dreaded Thanksgiving weekend you know Black Friday so here it is beginning of August they need this game out by Christmas so that's not very many one months I mean that's August this August September October November I mean it's really three months but you know if it's just a fix of code so for three months is very doable easily fixed I usually do a job like that two-three weeks so I didn't said great signed a contract said let's get going and sure enough I'm sitting there going like well when am I going to get the source code and I get contacted by the CEO of all of our data's oh just start working on the game right now and I'm like how could I start working on the game if I don't have anything he sends me a copy of doom on the PC on a floppy disk and says start with this and my jaw hit the ground when I got this disc because I got the disc and I put it in the disc drive thinking I was getting the source codes that I find the executables and I'm like wait a minute that's what I already have in my hard drive I mean I've been playing doom for like a couple of years already it pretty much everybody has a copy of doom at that time means a shareware game it's not like yet to buy it you just downloaded from anywhere and I didn't call up you know our date ago like um this isn't what I need I need source code and this went back and forth for like about a week and then a friend of mine a who works at art data his name was Tristan Anderson contacted me and let me know that um we don't have a source and that's what I'm going like if you don't have the source so I call up and panic my friends at 3do and I talked to my producer he was a really producer of this game directly he was our Account Representative over at 3do and he was in telling me that well there's nothing we could do about it other than you need to get this version of the game from 3do the one that they've been sending up screenshots of and hyping it on all these magazines because there was a whole stack of magazine PC Gamer IGM I mean the games that were like magazines around the time latronnik is man mag monthly I think eg monthly I'm try remember all the names because I mean it has been like C was 1996 so it's it's been about 20 years since this happened so my memory is a little fuzzy but the the thing was I actually have at the time magazines that had held the CEO of our day a holding a CD and saying I've got the yell the beta version of doom for the 3do that's got these new weapons new stuff so I see these ads so it's like well everybody's telling me this but I can't start the game from just a copy of doom that you bought in the store now trust me I have done ports like that where I got a copy of the game from the store and was told I need to put this on the collection but that's not what I'm being contracted to do here so what happens next was that I then call up my friends I did and talk to John Carmack and he didn't said well I have no idea what's going on all I knew is that they just bought a license from us and we sent him a copy the source and that was the end of it he says well can you send me a copy the source is sure thing so day later I got this FedEx package and it had on it this little CD which I still have I actually should pull up the CD but it's a CD of the source code that was 2 CDs one CD was the source code to the pc version of doom which is right now you could download anywhere from the internet because it's pretty much what he uploaded to SourceForge and of course put up not source from first on the id's site is just a zip file then later on ends up on github etc but that was the first cut disc the second disc has the complete archive of the Jaguar version of doom high vs. 3do planet yes do do do so I take the CD with the copy of Jaguar doom and I then spend the next two days just getting myself to echoed get the Jaguar development software running everything and I'm able to say okay great I've got a copy of doom that works on a console the Jaguar but this is still doom the original doom and I have all these magazines against saying here's a new version with all the new stuff so it's like where's all this stuff so then I end up having to drive down to our data interactive and they were up in like West like was Rancho Chatsworth somewhere on there um there was west of la north west of La I remember that part but it was a long drive because my at the off my office for a logical was based in Covina California yeah it was like two zero six to eight east arrow highway if I can remember correctly but I had to go all the way across town to go ahead and see him and then I confronted him and he then says he should showed me the art they had and it was all JPEGs of Photoshop and it was like Photoshop one back then I think was a they would use no you would use excessively called studio 32 that's what it was it was a art tool basically Photoshop and he had somebody draw shots of what he thought would look like cool for a new version of doom and of course they did that and that's the pictures they were passing around everybody I says so you don't have a copy of this game so again you do here's the pictures that's when it dawns on me this guy did not know at all how games made he had literally no clue he really thought all I had to do was copy the code from a store bought version of doom and just copy it onto a 3d on work and that you could take JPEG of new art and just copy it in there and the art would that weapons are he really thought game creation was that easy and I informed him that no it's not how it works um but this point I then take what JPEGs he had what little there was of it drive back to the office and I get right on the phone to three do it says well this projects over it's dead and because I can't do this I there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to make this deadline I can do a port I could bright make a brand new game but of course that the earliest I can get it for you is Christmas 1997 not Christmas 1996 ain't going to happen well my friend at 3do bless his heart begged and pleaded with me to figure out a way of getting doom on the 3do in time for Christmas and I'm saying and of course he I asked him why and the whole thing was they hit our 3do itself was already getting all this positive press that doom was coming out on their platform there's nothing they could do about the fact that was our day was involved but at least they knew that a competent developer was going to be involved so that game had chance of at least shipping so I said all right but all I could promise you is the Jaguar version of the game I'm just going to take the data from the Jaguar version because it's already been reduced for memory it's already been reduced in size it's already been you know converted to begin with to fit in a memory map because it was renting on a Jaguar Jaguar Lee had a megabyte of memory where the 3do had to so it fits I didn't have to deal with redoing all the art or the asset because if I had to do that there was no way in hell I would ever get to sport done it was just physically impossible what I did was I took the data prepared a project got all the Jaguar code done converted over to using burro live that took a few days and after that I had that version of the game running on the Mac so I was able to play the game you render play everything's going software rendering but at least I said okay I've got a game running but then that's when I realized oh they had a custom sound driver for the Jaguar version and the Mac version I had the prototype I did had no sound there was no sound I'm not even just bang bang nothing because I was just trying to get the code the visuals working except for like that so um that's when I told our data okay I'm going to deliver you do and that's all I promised of course they were expecting new levels because even as I told them don't tell people you have no levels don't know and I then showed him some mock screenshots and stuff of the game but of course he thought the Jaguar version was all new levels so he said yeah the game's gonna have custom levels made specifically for the 3do and I said no that's the Jaguar version but you know not my problem not my problem so the middle of August was when I finally had a version the code that was running on a Mac base little Jaguar version and that's when I at that point I said alright how am I going to get this thing done in time for Christmas it's going to be the quickest dirtiest cheesiest hack port I've ever done well then again not really I have done others I will probably use that as a topic of another show but I then said well going to roll my sleeves up thankfully I got three vo to guarantee that we're going to get paid because that was one of the other contingencies is I would realize that when I saw our data that am I even going to get paid for this because I their office is really small um they you know with the guy who didn't even know anything about this game business and so forth it's like is he going to be such a Begg he's going to you know promise me all this money and I know we got our initial payment you know the it upfront advance just a small advance of the entire contracts so at least I had some money so even if he decided weasel out but at the same time I was really trying to get in really good graces with 3do so I said okay fine let's do this so I started working on the game and because I found it up at the sound driver I then called up our data and says look there's no way in hell I'm going to get music in here however you if what if you do this what if we take all the tracks of doom the music and you have a band play them so I took the music and I could place it on a cassette tape I kid you not I just took doom for the PC played just started the game and just let the music play then went to another level let the music play and so forth they made a tape but like it was about an hour long and then I had it sent over to our data and our data thankfully as CEO was actually a guitarist and he had a bunch of friends and they had a little band so they went into their garage for the next three weeks while I was working on doom up cutting tracks laying them down and well every few days I would get a new track FTP to me or in some cases sent to me on one or two C or one or two floppies or if sometimes it was a CD in a mail in fact I still have some of the CDs that were sent as like a doom le 1 M 0 AF because you know we use uncompressed AIFF files for whoop sitting here yeah it was um a iff files is how they divorce that's why if you look at the doom archive that I put up on github all the files are AIFF uncompressed because that is the original files that were put in and I decided I'll put up the uncompressed once because the fact that you know even though what shipped in the game was a IFC files because they were compressed to fit on the 3do the raw files are all forty-four kilohertz stereo um I worked my butt off I took all the art of the game converted to lower pallets convert them in the set of 3do cells because originally my first pass of the game was used software rendering I went ahead and got the whole game running you know using the old doom software rendering engine on the three day but it was only running at 3 frames per second and after I optimize the crap out of it on some of the assembly functions an arm assembly I got it up to around 10 frames a second give or take but the whole thing is that ok the games run a time frames per second I'm about two weeks away now because it's been about actually ticket back at this point it's been about a month worth of work so I am now like five weeks left before so ship but at this point I got a version of the game that's fully functional you know you start the game just go straight into doom there's no intermediate screens or some no load sides or nothing like that which then I was able to set it off to 3do and when I sent the 3do they were excited as all get-out they didn't think anybody would even get the game that far because you know they saw the game was stable and relatively bug free I had to make a extensive modifications to the dimension in fact I got to the point where several sections were on remade in which this became the technology that inspired me to do the engine that I wrote for killing time a project I did after doing theater 3do doom and there's many things in killing time that you could see we're really inspired by what came from doom but there was a lot of things I took a different directions because I had to fit things in memory and that was one of the biggest problems I had with the original doom engine was at doom you know Carmack just simply was a little lazy in which he just allocated static buffers and if data went to the static buffer if you over float it just crashed so if you had you know over 3,000 polygons crash if it had over 4,000 wall a rendering sink crash that that's the answer to everything in my case I rewrote or - I actually wrote from scratch a section of the code which as its rendering things I just have a giant buffer and I just fill it as I need it and so therefore if you have a scene with a lot of Polly's but only if you posts it'll still fit because it's like this and as the memory allocates like this you know you have the static one buffer of memory but you could put the you know I could have a lot of this a little bit more than that a lot of this little more that either way but as long as you don't fill up the memory because if you feel more memory I can't do anything beyond that but that's what I did with the the technology that the because what I did with Doom was just a few things about that but when I would killing time and I rewrote everything or cerise ruin in many cases start from scratch but it was like I was inspired by it that's why if you ever look at the source code of killing time which I'll probably eventually release one day you'll see there's a lot of homage 'iz to doom from for killing times engine but the but there is there's some glaring differences between the two they are not the same engine but back to do is after I set this off then I had to spend some time with some artists and so forth at logic we're creating new interface screens and so forth a lot of them we use to bake started from the Jaguar version we took the Jaguar Jaguar stuff converted it to 3do work 3d art and then put that up there but once we got the screens up it took me another three weeks to write new user interface to use the 3do control pad one things I'm really proud of was that I did this piece of code which when you turn the camera it doesn't out log rhythmically so therefore if you're standing still and you press the pad to start turning right it slowly turns right but then start speeding up so longer you hold it the faster it goes that way when you get into a room and you just want some fine control just do little taps left right left right and the game will do some minor motion but if you're let's say running like hell you're moving fast you hold the button as long as you hold it it starts to turn and it turns really fast and it turned out to be a way of yeah this is 1996 I came up with this thing which it really made the controls of the 3do version of doom actually quite fluid and quite nice uh which was one of my biggest saving graces in fact I had a lot of people compliment me on yeah the graphic game for the framerate kind of bites but sure as hell easy to play um and heck there was even a time when it software wanted to you know when I sent him a copy of the game they're going like my god the framerate bites we may have to cancel this and I'm saying look the guy's a 3d really want this and besides art data not many people gonna see it and they go yeah whatever we don't care what the check cleared so it's office of fine whatever I did do a compromise for it because originally the game was full screen so I made it run in a smaller screen and because the guys at 3do kept saying no no we were going to come out with a new 3d later on then there's the m2 and so forth so it'll run faster so you should make itself a detects it runs faster make a full screen so I left it as a cheat code that if you wanted to you could set do a little cheat code and what it did is that it allowed you to set the sizes bigger all the way to the full screen and that was intended to be for people who hey if you got the new 3do mark 2 or whatever model coming out if you want to play Doom the way it was meant to be just enter his cheat code of course as we all know in history there was never another model of 3do so the cheat code kind of went by the wayside but the as I was nearing completion I got all the audio tracks and in fact it was supposed to be some more made but I just got what I had and I put him in the game um I ran out of time so I couldn't put the little bunny at the end of the game instead I ended up having to recycle a hybrid ending of Doom 2 which was where the as soon as the game ends you see a little bad guy and you press a button he dies and it goes the next bad I press a button he dies just something really cute but it was better than absolutely nothing for an ending ah cuz you know what just doom you get to the big bad guy and after you in this case it was a pentagram level with a bunch of Barons of Hell and when you kill them all then the game ends um yes caffeinated so we are nearing the end of the development then I get this panicked phone call from the CEO of our data and he's in saying where are the new weapons and I go umm what new weapons that ones I've been promising the ones you promised like I didn't promise anything says what yes you did you took the art from me and you took those pieces that you promised me you're going to put him in the game I said he and I kind of find later he was recording my conversation hoping to get me to say something so he can then try to sue me or blame me for the shitstorm that might happen later on thankfully there wasn't really a storm but he did you know his company did end but finished up the game got it going I had this long list of things like you know what it would have been nice it had more time but I can't finish this examples are the sprites and the vertical walls in Doom were actually rendered using the hardware I had it was really tricky but I got the hardware to render it but the flats the floor and ceiling tiles arm the 3do is hardware to render a polygon doesn't do perspective correction so I ended up having to use software to render those lines horizontally if you look inside the source code of 3do Doom in fact let me see if I can find that here see that would be under floors um see everybody by home audience you want to see some source code yeah come on I know you wanna let's see that's the actual so where's the draw functions D main blossom yes there it is okay here we go I'm going to show a little bit of source code because I rolled that way yep I'm getting some source or source ok then here is some source ready have the mines get destroyed here we go now we're going to go into magical source code land in fact let me change over to using code from micro switch because I can then zoom in let's see here again I kind of learned see control plus so control plus okay here we go this is the actual span routines that I wrote for 3do doom as you can see here's the the game 3do doom in fact we fill up the screen here and again zoom it a little bit more so the home audience could read this what's going on is this in Doom the the numbers for the X&Y coordinates into a texture are known as fixed point now most times people think of floating point numbers like 1.5 or 2.6 or whatever it is and you type that in and of course it turns into a floating point number and you can work with it well the problem is the 3do does not have floating-point at all in fact that was kind of like one of the things that drove me insane but then again I've always been driven to insanity instead what the 3do uses as well as most pcs at the time was what we call fixed point fixed point is where you take a 32-bit hex number and normally that would be one you know the hex number one so you'll be selling int you know foo equals one now b1 the trouble is what if we built into a fraction foo is 32-bit so we can represent zero that's the 32-bit number or the maximum so now this is actually this number here is 4 million and of course that's 0 but what if we did something really interesting here what if we took this number and split it in half we treated this as 0 and this is a fraction in which this is 0 and then we add in the fraction 0 / 6 5 5 3 6 now why is this 6 5 5 3 6 because four digits in hex is the numbers 0 through 6 5 5 3 5 because that equals 0 - Oh X FFF so we've got a fraction here we got 0 / 0 well as you see here this 1.5 int foo 1.5 would be 0 X 1 0 0 1 because that's 1.0 and then X 8 because that turns into 1 with 3 2 7 6 8 / 6 5 5 3 6 or 0.5 okay so as I was going with this example int you know 1.5 equals o X 1 0 0 0 1 X ok now this little math example of why fixed point numbers work is very crucial because the way you do things when you're scanning from a piece of art is when you draw a piece of art 1 to 1 you want to step one pixel at a time so you'd have let's say a piece of art that's a bunch of X's but if I want to draw it as is I only want to step 1.0 x 1.0 means that every time i want to draw on to the screen you know this is a screen i want to take these as X X X X X X X in fact let me do it a better example here I'm going to do pretend these are pixels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 so that's going to be some image we're pretending here we're really using our imaginations everyone here and we want to draw it one to one so we want to draw 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 but what if I want to take this image and get closer to it so I want to scale it up I want to draw one 1 two 2 three 3 four 4 what I've just done here is that visibly you know I would keep drawing like this so I've now taken that same texture this and I have doubled it in size well the way you do this is that you use instead of 1.0 you draw stepping 0.5 so what I would do is I would say from the original code I would do something like you know read pixel and it would be step shifted down by 16 bits and then step plus equals Delta and then read pixel step 16 and keep doing that over and over again the Delta here is either 1.0 or 1.5 and 1 make it smaller or 0.5 want to make it bigger but one of the tricks I had to deal with when I'm doing code for the textures in Doom is that what if the texture is only 64 by 64 that means if this step gets bigger than 64 which is 0-2 30f it will wrap around or go to the next pick or some goofy thing like that well I came up with this interesting little trick what I did is that zero to three F is only six bits so what if I made a fixed point number that instead of being sixteen by sixteen fixed point I made it 6.22 which is 16 plus 10 I'm she's 26 16:26 sorry there was a number it's still 32 bits 6 plus 26 is 32 bits but my fractions 26 the upper bits are 6 so whenever I do the add if it wraps around in any direction doesn't matter it's always going to be on the texture well that's where this draw span comes in how many pixels I want to draw the X and y coordinate into the texture where I'm going to start the step of both the X and y as I draw it on the scan and of course finally the texture itself so here is the wonderful arm code and here's where I say 280 because that's the maximum number of lines so therefore I don't have to know what I'm doing here is I'm actually it's a macro which repeats over and over again and I actually jump in the middle of this code in order to do what I want to do but what I do here is I say see the 26 see a 20 what I'm doing is is that I take the let's see here this was try to remember the registers was this one I try to see where these set a start let's store a said a jump says Y leftist and okay here's the shift because v2 is the original original registration yeah that's that's the texture right there yeah what I'm doing is I'm creating four different offsets into the texture so I take the C it would be the Y shift it down I take the Y shaped it down by the mask shifted up by 20 bits here's the x coordinate right all I do is I just take the x coordinate or it with the original pixel shifted down by twenty six merge the two values together do this again there's again does again here's where I actually read the four bytes of the textures because of the way the 3do works I have to read them by bytes this is actually supposed to be 16 bits 16 bits and then I mix them all together write it to memory it's actually this store beans I'm writing a 32-bit value plus four and then here's where I do the loop but here's the main entry for the span code this actually will probably melt your brain if I go ahead and speak about it but this is where I use the filler macro I guess the filler was the macro for run fills and that's the return address but the whole thing I was doing was that I wanted to negate the need for doing something where would take X shifted down by 26 then I would take Y shifted down by 20 and that would get me the you know it texture equals something like that because I was doing the X shifted down that means I never have to and the top part this one unfortunately is that when I did shift it down I had to mask off the upper bits because it was a spot that occupied this the XCore you know was the other way around remember at the really look at the code again but if you see what the trying to do here now one of the things because I was hard coding it to 26 it meant that all textures in 3do doom don't say let me get out of here get back to be on live TV here whoops there we go I went ahead and made all textures for the floor and ceilings in 3do doom 64 by 64 you know so some of the textures in the original game were bigger somewhere smaller I've changed them all to 64 by 64 and hard-coded that way so that the game didn't need to worry about multiple texture sizes but again it was one of the compromises I had to do just to get this game done someone quite asks how to completely turn off floor and ceiling rendering a 3do doom well that's very simple this function here don't call it just don't call it at all then you don't draw it and if you don't draw it then you don't see anything just you know that function direct drew directly into the original frame buffer 3do one of the weird things about the 3do was that unlike other frame buffers that I worked with where the memory is all linear the 3do was actually the first 16 bits was the first pixel the upper left corner pixel but then the next 16 bits was actually pixel directly below it and then it was like so it was drawing to scan lines at a time when it was rendering a frame which is one of the reasons why the rendering buffer the rendering code you saw there was actually rendering two pixels at a time was a little for me to only try to write to video memory as little as possible because I was doing two spans at the same time someone asked why was it needed to remove width and height parameters from sell textures before packing them into res fell that's because every was everything was already 32 bits or 64 64 since I already knew 64 by 64 for everything I just hard-coded that in when I was generating the cells so internally in the 3do as part of the question which was why was the game data that shipped on the 3do game didn't have any width and height information for the textures it was because since every texture was 64 64 that would be redundant if I added that data in there um my biggest problem I had with the 3do was I needed to get as much stuff I could into memory memory was a premium um I remember when they were first designed to 3do and they told me about the device and they said oh yeah it's going to ship with like one megabyte of memory but then they talked about this operating system they're going to put into the it so they ended up shipping it with two then eventually three megabytes of memory although you really only could use two somebody was asking here on the questions because I'm now going to open up the questions here someone says arm to me EA was the at its best when it was stewarded by trip Hawkins post Hawkins EA lost his charm have you any experience with Hawkins while developing 3do doom etc actually no I had my experiences with trow Hawkins when he was at EA while I was doing things like bars tail and stuff like that but after he left to go form 3do I honestly was just one of the people in the trenches and he was more interested in hobnobbing with CEOs of major corporations than to talk to a CTO of a very small dev studio in Covina California and of course during my tenure at interplay I was more content being essentially the equivalent of the back writing code and not really that interested in doing any forward facing or business facing things up during those years of my career Becki fates they said hi someone for 13 Friday girl writes Morrigan here just here to say that you rock oh thank you okay versus radio planet says but all main menu graphics also don't have width and height okay that's a misnomer the the graphics in 3do doom that shipped was all cells and because they were cells they had the prefix of the cell date I think it was like a 36 byte header which is rendered by hardware well the width and height is in their arm so because I was giving it the actual cell description arm there was no need to add any extra data so is the cell data then it was an offset pointer to the pixel data itself and I just simply passed that as a pointer to cell engine and just drew that I had a tool called slicer that I wrote which I still maintain today and it still has the 3do code in it which says yeah if you tell to a slice for cell it will take this the art data reduce it down convert it to 3d Oh cell data and then generate the appropriate header with all everything offset and relative so all you have to do is put it there someone writes the file format wad files inside res file differs from the pc wad is there any converter available no it's a different tool and I actually have I have ëifí actually just recently found the source that tool it's something that's on my long list of things I got to put up on open source projects in fact if anything I would put that new folder called tools for 3do doom one of my things I'm doing now is that now that I've got this build process of taking older code and putting it in places like I've got the original battle chess EGA done this format I've got space ace done this way in which I'm going to put put up there um what's a cold yeah everything on 3do doom I'm going to update with all the tools and stuff like that one of the things you may have noticed mic readers or my viewers is that several my Python tools I already uploaded onto pi the Python shared things so if you just do easy easy install of space burger and easy install face make projects under a Python shell it'll automatically install the stuff for you and if you watch you can just go onto github and you can actually see the original source and it literally is a mirror of what I've got on my hard drive someone asked gamma dev there's a long-standing rumor that the version of doom that was published was not your final build but of beta any truth I don't believe that's true I believe it was the final version arm but just a reminder the game sucked I'm not I'm not for all of it and I will flat out tell you that game sucked um the the problem is that with the process to get something manufactured with three do is that once I make a golden master I have to use this tool called um gosh II was like uh there's a folder called take me I have to create I try to remember all the stuff I did on the 3do but I remember I had to make a folder called take me and then there's a special tool which creates an image file that image file I then sent the 3do who then they run with their testers and only when their testers say this game is good for manufacturing they then take it to this little black room somewhere in the 3do labs which actually does the encryption and they kept it only like I understand only had like five or six people actually had access to that room and the intent was that the encryption keys were like if they ever leaked then anybody can make 3do disks so once they made the encrypted disks they gave us an ISO back which was what is we can manufacture we could take this a special ISO when we look at its gibberish its total garbage however though that is the file we burn to see these and then we can put them onto a 3d a multiplayer and it would run and that's all because the 3do multiplayer on startup only will read encrypted disks so the in order for anyone to take a beta version they would still need to send it to 3do for encryption who in turn can release it to manufacture so anybody out there releasing a beta version that would have to get past three vos TRC um so yeah and what they did ship I look at the game and I it had by cheat codes in it and everything but I am NOT going to sit here and say ever that the version of 3do doom was one of my better ports it's actually one of my worst ports in my entire career let's see here let me someone writes a vs 3do planet writes how long was doom compilation process on Apple - I never released doom on the Apple - so and quite frankly is doom on the Apple - unless you've got an accelerated 2 GS running at at least 20 megahertz it's going to be even worse port than the 3do version um unless you want doom running a legal team you know I mean that's possible like a little like you know 40 by 20 window but at that point was fun that um let's see here um someone writes epics 9-1-1 writes sorry about not directly source code question more about a historical game dev question based on your interplay EA time I absolutely love Danny buttons games I still feel among the influential of all time any interaction with Danny anywhere anyone you'd ruin our spiration from at your level you could banter dev chat with oh well I um I met Danny button several times in my career most of the time I have knew Danny before she was Danny but however Danny was I always news when I met her him at the time uh was very sad and just I knew something was off but of course it's kind of like what I was little nicknames we collect trans door a trans person can tell another trans person's around and but of course at the time I wasn't telling anybody who I was I was not gonna I was keep my little secret but then later on I met Danny only once and that was in passing at a GDC and sad story was I was invited to an apple to party at ion storm in 1998 and so me and a couple of friends of mine we flew down to Dallas and we were going to go ahead and party with all these apple two luminaries um thank you John Romero for hosting that party but one of the highlights of the show was Danny button was supposed to be there but only a few weeks before the party was just you know was to both happen we got the news Danny button died so I actually felt really bad during that time because I really wanted to just have some quiet time with her and just talk to her about her experiences and so forth mostly because I you know may I may have come out to her for all I know but neither here nor there never happened um next Oh as far as banter and deaf chat most of times I would be talking to John Carmack John and I would talk about code we talk for hours especially during the early nights when his work working both its soft discs because I was doing a lot of ports for soft discs back then and then afterwards when they found it odd and we're working in Wisconsin I talked with him about that and but we really kind of parted ways some around the mid 90s when he really got you know but think it was around the time when he had Romero parted ways um that's when karmic was just more focused on cars and stuff like that and I was busy doing stuff with contraband entertainment but other people of that nature of that time period it was Jim Sproul at interplay who he and I had many many hours Charles Dean and he and I would talk for many hours about audio programming um say it was Tim came spoke with him for many hours but there was there was quite a few very smart people um now faster kitty asks what do you think is your best port out of this world for the Super Nintendo and out of this world for the 3do those I think are my best ports I've ever done a close second would be like my old port of Ultima one my ports actual original games of Bart's hail the bar steel trilogy in fact two of my better ports I really wanted to see the light of day but never did was wasteland and barge tail 3 for the Apple 2 GS I was working extensively on both of those versions when we got the word from EA that thou shalt not release another wasteland or bar stale product ever vs. 3do planet asks how the debugger 3do looks like do you have it okay I once owned a 3do dev kit all I had since sold it to a collector in France about a decade ago I have not seen another dev kit since but the biggest problem with the dev kit is it order for you to use it you have to have a Mac a 68k Mac with or a PowerPC upgraded Mac but has to have a new bus slot and those are really old Macintosh's we're talking here mid 90s the new bus slot was needed because they had to specialize card that plugs into your Mac which was a fiber optic serial court connector that serial connector plugs into what looks like a giant PC because it was a standard PC case and that was the dev kit the debugger was running on the Mac it uses the fiber optic lines to communicate with the 3do and then it stepped debugged it was using their own proprietary debugger it wasn't even Gd because I don't even think gdb was even around at that time but it allowed me to using their custom debugging software 2-step trace source code debug everything all the stuff I was doing on 3d out today in order for you to do any of that even if you somehow got the software arm which I do believe I might have a couple of CDs lying around with that software on it but it's useless without the hardware the the software for three doe debugging there was no software emulator it was all done in hardware it was all done using a new bus equipped Mac with a fiber optic line to a 3do dev kit um I would love it if somebody could get find me a 3d of dev kit so I can get back to working on at least to play with it but really I think that you're better off to seeing if a 3do emulator developer would just add in gdb support or something like that so you can actually have a true PC based debugger that would probably run about 20 to 50 times faster because don't forget the 3d owes CPU is only a 12 mega Hertz arm 6 which today is might as well be the equivalent of saying it's a high-speed Apple 2 GS epics nine-one-one asks Bard's Tale 3 for the Apple 2 GS would have been amazing how far along were you with the development of Bart's tail 300 GS simple the game was running game was running fine I just didn't have the artwork I was using some of the monster art from Bart Steele one and two but all the custom things like the refugee camp some of the other the the creatures from those two Lydia and Tom idiot the one which is the world of war in fact I'm trying to remember it they were using art that I would probably recycle stuff from wasteland for crying out loud but unfortunately for me is that I only had the Apple 2 and c64 art and of course all the Apple 2 GS and PC art that we had done over it and interplay so I was originally starting with the Apple 2 GS art I had the game bar still 3 using the Apple 2 GS bar still to art but when it came time for me to ask for art resources to start getting the art done that's when we had the word come down we're not going to work on Bart's tail anymore and I was already using up all my art resources doing art for dragon wars so I either had to assign my artists to do the art for Bard's Tale and pray and hope that we'd be able to convince EA to let us ship this game or I would have to continue with the you know dragon wars now of course grant at the time that was called Barksdale 4 so you know we're doing bars tail for had all my art resources on it and then this all came down and there was a huge reorganization but in the meantime I had to archive my code for a wasteland at our code my code for bar sale and then that was the last I ever saw of that now granted I saw the archives which is one reason why I'm able to do this new port that I'm doing for in exile for the bars tale for which by the way just let you know I'm not involved were still four I'm only just doing this report of the original three games so who knows maybe I might get involved with it later but at this precise moment in time I'm not let's see here epics nine-one-one writes I had a 3do dev kit when I left EA in the late 90s sadly no more yep sadly no more here - I know they exist unfortunate lecktor's are not willing to part with them but and sadly unless I get a new bus card the fiber optic cable the dev kit and a Mac an ancient Mac that has a new bus card slot all those components that with if any one whose components is missing you've got paper weights next one is a vs. radio planet are you going to release your own 3do - or other 3do titles it'll be very interesting to learn how different video games work wolf3d the 3do I will definitely be releasing that is a given the other games that I got to actually do some clearances first because shadow in and Kingdom the far reaches I probably could get those out arm but I need to ask for permissions for those first like doom and Wolf I already had permission from years ago for that but for Casper is one where I have to verify whether or not I'm in copyright infringement land if I release a game with assets from Casper the Friendly Ghost battle chest more likely I'll release battle chess and someone writes by the way I'm running out of time so I'm going to be having to end the questions very soon so vs3 do Planet rights can you remember the funniest event during the development for 3do hmm funny well there was a story on development 3do but I wouldn't call funny because it was more painful than funny I did Wolfenstein 3d I went ahead and made the master disk prepared it all off set it off to enter play because this is logic we're doing this it was I wasn't working in her play at the time enter play then sent it to QA QA then signed off on the game now part of QA is you're supposed to start the game and play the game from start to finish and verify everything's cool well they then went ahead and sent it off the 3do 3do verified the game actually ran didn't crash etc they too signed off on it they manufactured some around 10,000 discs 10 20,000 some around there and then immediately after the game started selling people saying hey by the time I got the level of 30 or 35 the game would crash I would open this door game crashes well it turns out that it went ahead and you know once I got a report of the bug I went ahead look today and I found out that somehow when I manufacture the disc I had made an error in the data the game you could not it literalist you open the door it would as it tries to render the BSP tree it would go over to a bad node and died there was absolutely no way in the world you could have played the game past level 30 which meant wait a minute how did this pass QA and that's when people interplay then realize that oh the QA people were kind of busy so just signed off on it after playing like 10 levels no one actually played the game from the beginning for the end I understood someone probably got fired for this because interplanted of having to recall those CDs and reissue new ones with the fix um so that was kind of sad I mean I was like or like yeah somehow the data it somewhere the transfer that's what happens I mastered this but somewhere along a line bad day to get in it because all they desire just remaster the disk and it popped out with no errors so that was really funny um let's see here now someone epics nine one one is asking last question for me dragons of the RIP I have million missed it but what is the rough launched window for the Kickstarter really looking forward to this we're currently shooting for now we pushed it back a couple weeks because we wanted to make things a little bit nicer on it but we're looking at the beginning of the month beginning of August we so we're going to do the things now you please like our Facebook page please like or follow on Twitter old school Oh L des k uu l in fact I'm going to type it in here let's see follow old school follow Berger Becky and you course follow me here on twitch TV but we will be making announcements and we will also have a twitch TV launch event to basically say hey everybody you know we're launching our game and we really hope you would contribute to it because you know we really would like to make a new brand new RPG okay let's see here and someone else someone who's green color a wall cop woke up all I could say is that for some reason twitch TV showing your name in a very bright green color that could barely read but anyways I have now hit my limit on time but the one thing I wanted to mention about the 3do which I should mention about the art data after finishing doom for 3do and having it pressed and ready for release I then come to find out that the start data interactive press something the neighborhood of 50,000 copies of doom despite the fact that 3d of themselves said don't make more than 5,000 copies initially and if it sells out make another run but he was so desperate to make money and he was so convinced that oh yeah just put a game in a box it just sells he made 50,000 copies which gives you an idea at the time the top-selling game on the 3d it was about 50,000 copies so needless to say he ended up with a lot of copies of doom that probably ended up in the landfill probably sitting next to Atari 2600 ET or Raiders Lost Ark keeping him company who knows but anyways everybody out there at which TV Land I just wanted to say thank you very much for wasting your time with me for the last hour arm and that the next installment will not be happening at on Sunday the 19th only because on that day I am moving from one apartment to another so I will be doing the next installment two weeks from today in which it will be on Sunday that Sunday the 26th so won't be on Sunday the 19th early Sunday the 26th at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time and right now as it is my plan topic would be probably Bard's Tale but however though if anybody has a suggestions please say in the box or on my youtube channel at Burger Becky and might change my mind also please give me a ideas on what sort of topics we'll talk about in the future both on gaming history as well as code because I know some of you like that and subscribe to my youtube channel okay you know press that subscribe button so hopefully hear from you all soon and thank you very much and until next time

Channel: Rebecca Heineman

Views: 74,214

Keywords: Video Game (Industry), Video Game Development (Industry), 3DO Interactive Multiplayer (Video Game Platform), Doom (Video Game), Apple IIGS (Computer), Video Game Console (Invention)

Id: rBbIil2HPSU

Length: 63min 14sec (3794 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Kamran_Santiago]

I especially like the part where they say "they handed me a Doom floppy and told me to port it!"

Goddamit. Happened to me a few times. The first time was back then I made Adobe After Effects plugins, and two, count 'em, two people handed me .aex files to convert to Mac versions... And another time, I was making a frontend for a model I had made, and my client asked me to "just use their old frontend". WhenI asked or their frontend, he asked his clients, and they gave him transpiled Babel JS files. I think this is the modern version of handing people exe files!

[u/skulgnome]

Didn't Doom already use 16.16 fixed-point internally? What's the issue here?

[u/ehaliewicz]

Great story :) Doom does not use raycasting though.

[u/smuccione]

This was a very interesting listen. Thanks for that.

[u/enleeten]

...and the same guy later worked on the N64 port of doom.

[u/spytez]

Good afternoon, and welcome to my room of chairs!