I’ve been working on remaking an old game from 1996 called Strife: The Quest for the Sigil. It was the last commercial game to use the doom engine. It had kind of an open world environment which was unusual in those days. It is on Steam under The original Strife: Veteran edition. The game is not related in any way to the modern MOBA. It was overlooked because it was released against Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. In many ways the original half life borrowed a lot of ideas from Strife.
Unfortunately I’m more of a programmer so artistic work isn’t one of my strong points. If anyone is a fan and would like to contribute I would love to get help. Right now I’m trying to get as many free models as possible as well as buying many on the marketplace. I have a few videos up on youtube and a facebook page with tons of screenshots. I have made a couple of models, but they were all created in BSP and then cleaned up in blender.
I was beginning to wonder when or if someone was going to do a strife remake! Very good job so far. I love the maps they look very close to the original.
Ill have to show my friend this thread, hell probably be insanely interested =P
They should look like the originals. I’m using doom builder to get the specifications of the various maps. I multiple all the values by 6.25. It makes things a little big, but its an easier scale to work with. So I made the player bigger and faster to compensate.
I did have to make a few modifications though. Some of the buildings are bigger on the inside than the outside. So far I haven’t had to make any major changes. I know from my last attempt with UE3 (which had all the maps but no functionality) that the sewer level is not going to line up properly.
I’m doing it all in BSP right now. In some cases I’ll make meshes instead. Once I get it all setup, I may look into changing some of it into terrain. A little terrain work could add a lot. Also from what I’ve heard there are benefits of using meshes instead of BSP, so I may convert the whole thing to meshes at some point. It is a bit of a pain as the levels get larger. I find that once you hit 700 brushes the editor takes to long. I’ve actually split some of the maps up in half just to make them easier to manage.
I don’t know that game but i love the idea you are making a remake of an old game
And yeah, avoid BSP Brushes as much as you can, moving stuff and rebuilding the level so you can see the changes may take forever in big maps and it is getting really annoying.
Strife is actually the last commercial game released with doom technology. Unfortunately that’s also probably why it failed. However half life also was released with outdated tech and it succeeded so I don’t get it. Strife was essentially open world. All maps have overlapping transition zones. You can go to almost any map that has been unlocked until the very end of the game. It remembers the position and status of every monster and power up of every map. It has questing with voice acted dialog. If you use your weapons in a public area, you will be swarmed and probably killed. You aren’t supposed to kill peasants.
Basically it took the doom engine as far as it could go.
There has been a question of legality that I couldn’t reply to since the user’s inbox was full. (Serious 50? that’s crazy) Neither of the companies that made or published this game exist anymore. The IP is dead. It was published on Steam by a company that I believe is nothing more than a group of the people that made the original. I have no idea what their legal rights are to this game nor do I know what mine are. Its my intention to finish this one way or another. If I can find a way to get it released I will get it released. I’ve even considered submitting it as a mod on the steam page. I’ve never submitted a mod before so I have no idea what that would take. The game barely had any involvement with ID software during its development so I think that both ID and Bethesda effectively have no say in this project at all. I’m only concerned with the company that found a way to get the original published to steam.
My biggest concern with release is the recycling of any original assets. I wasn’t concerned about this until it was released on steam. Now I am. I’m reusing the original voice acting and music. I have no plans for doing new voice acting as I don’t know enough people to make that happen. There is a slim possibility for remixed music, but I’m not holding my breath on that right now. I currently am using some of the original textures, but its my intention to have new textures for everything in the end.
Remember that Strife was released around the same time as Quake, where the true 3D environments made the “2.5” style look very dated and unimpressive. Half-Life may have used the old Quake 1 engine, but they modified it to make it look competitive against the graphical benchmarks of the time Quake 2 and Unreal 1 by adding hardware acceleration, coloured lighting etc.
Do you intend to eventually overhaul the maps to add detail and architectural complexity, or retain the blocky design of the originals? I find that having the original look of the levels makes it look more like an engine mod of the original than a proper remake. It often ends up looking ugly as a result as the high res textures and lighting don’t mix well with empty, square corridors and rooms.
There are a couple of areas in the game that were obviously restricted to 2.5D. I’m fixing that for sure. I would love to go ahead and make more major changes make the caves look more realistic instead of blocky. That is WAY in the future though. Right now the objective is to get the game blocked out and more or less playable in its original form. If I see opportunities to improve it in any way I will and I already have. Mostly right now its better textures. I haven’t replaced as many as I would like, but I do plan on replacing more. I am certainly open to people assisting me. Modeling is not one of my strong suits. Making new textures from scratch is hit or miss, but in a lot of cases I’ve found textures that work. I would love it if someone talented in one of those areas could help me out.
I think you are giving the original half life more credit than it deserves though. All of the technology already existed in quake, but the video cards required to play with 3d acceleration didn’t exist at the time of release. I did go back and play glquake. However I’m fairly certain colored lighting wasn’t a part of it. In many ways I personally thought sprites looked better than horribly blocky characters, but that’s just me. It wasn’t until quake 2 that I started to let go of the 2.5D era. I’m not alone either. Duke 3D did really well and it too was 2.5D. Sure it had slanted floors, but the walls were still upright.
In fact I would really love to completely expand the game. One thing about it that one of the choices cuts out about 1/3 of the game. If I was rebooting it, I would make it branch instead of skipping. I always thought the town could be bigger (there is no place for the peasants to live) However massive changes like that are way beyond the scope of someone working alone doing everything.
That would be awesome, and it’s always a good idea to block out the levels anyway to get the scale and layout accurate to the original.
I also take your points about the goldsrc (half-life) engine too, I think Valve had access to the Quake 2 source as well, though development started with Quake 1. It was still impressive looking at the time though.
I think Duke 3D had the benefit of releasing 6 months before Quake, while Strife was right at the same time which was unfortunate. By then everyone was jumping on the 3D bandwagon, even though DOS Quake running in software mode at 320x200 (default resolution) was a nasty, jagged brown mess compared to the crisper, more colourful pallette used by “2.5d” games. At the time I even thought Duke 3D had the better graphics, until glQuake came out and I picked up my Voodoo 1 (Millenium Matrox 3D I think?).
I don’t remember what I had, but it didn’t support colored lighting. I believe it ran Quake 2, but not GL quake with an acceptable framerate. I want to say it was a pergola 2 or something p related. Anyway I bought an nVidia Riva TNT. I tried to run GL Quake and it ran like butter for about 2 seconds before BSOD. Unfortunately my motherboard did a poor implementation of the AGP spec. I returned it and got a voodoo banshee instead (voodoo 2 + a 2d graphics card + AGP) and since it was based on PCI tech instead of AGP it actually worked. That also ran glQuake like butter, but it didn’t crash.
There were many things I didn’t like about the original Quake. The dull colors was certainly one of them. The horribly low poly models was another. I thought Sprites looked better at that point. Descent was an exception since robots don’t need to be high poly. I also missed the automap. Fortunately most of what I didn’t like about Quake was solved by Quake 2 and the original Unreal (I wish Epic would remake this) blew me away.
Final version. Unfortunately surface detail is something I have no experience with. I would like to add some detail with normal maps, but this is beyond my capabilities at the moment.