Here’s a neat little toy: PanzerChasm, a reverse-engineered source port for Chasm: The Rift. Not nearly perfect yet, but fun to twiddle with.
Kinsie
What a coincidence, I replayed Chasm last week. It’s crying out for a decent source port.
It’s Done! It’s submitted and up on itch for the public! Wow I’m tired! I never want to look or think about or make games ever again, yaaaay!
Grab it here for Windows, supports Controllers and Keyboard+Mouse
(As originally posted on Tumblr by Shewhedd)
Just a little extra to the Chasm review.
If you’ve followed the download link in the previous post, you’ll have access to the special 3 level download for Chasm. This was originally put up by the dev team after release along with some patches.
They’re pretty good, with more varied and ambitious environments, a wide variety of enemies, and nice open areas and wide corridors. They’ve clearly grown as level designers but there’s still some niggling flaws.
Some of the level design is obscure – level 1 requires you to find a secret corridor entrance hidden behind the trees in the start area. Some of the monster placement needs work – the designer seems too fond of putting the alien commander enemy behind doors which causes bullshit unavoidable health loss. However, level 2 is definitely some of the best level design in the entire game.
They’re going for a Quake-style Lovecraftian look, but it’s merged with dark industrial technology. Mix that with the eclectic mix of mutants, soldiers and undead found inside, and the mutant wizard boss at the end, I can’t help but think of my Mutant Chronicles campaign. It feels a lot like I’m storming a Dark Legion Citadel to fight Valpurgis.
So that’s cool. It’s worth playing the add-on after you finish the game.
I replayed this today for the first time in easily 18 years.
Chasm the Rift is an ‘also ran’ from the late 90s. It came out after Quake and just a few months before Quake 2. It looked dated when it arrived but the models have a lot of detail (for the time) and the textures are interesting enough that the graphics have aged surprisingly well. It’s a good first impression and I like this game a lot but no make mistake, Chasm is not an unfairly ignored cult classic.
Chasm plays like a cross between Wolfenstein 3D and Quake. If you’d thought that would be Doom, you were wrong. It’s Chasm. Polygonal mutants stalk dark industrial outposts, ancient tombs, and medieval castles… most of which are flat and maze-like like Wolfenstein 3D. It has a 2.5D engine like Doom but with 3D models are used for items, enemies, and decoration.
For the most part, Chasm feels good to play. Enemies take a few shots to kill like in Quake, but they’re not bullet sponges and they’re decently designed even if few of them actually stand out. The guns aren’t original but they feel good to use and the game has a satisfying dismemberment system that was (at the time) revolutionary. Popping off a joker’s head with a well-placed laser bolt feels great.
What doesn’t feel great are at times cheap monster placements (episode 3 is quite bad for this, with poorly placed ambushes and cramped ‘arena’ fights) and confusing level layouts. While episode 1 and episode 4 have an OK flow, episodes 2 and 3 can be very confusing, with almost non-functional platforming thrown in for good measure.
The levels are also really cramped, which limits your weapon choice and makes some fights very frustrating. In episode 4 the hallways widen and there are even some open areas, which hugely improves the gameplay. These sections are great and it’s a shame that as it is, you rarely feel like you can let loose.
Not only are the levels sometimes confusing, they’re also unambitious. This is downright infuriating because the game shows that it’s capable of much more. The game plays with heights in places but for the most part everything is flat like in Wolfenstein 3D. Similarly, lighting effects are used well in some places while other areas stick to a dull default lighting level.
Chasm is extremely short. It is 16 levels long, split into 4 episodes with 4 levels each. It feels like the team ran out of time as some gameplay elements are under utilized. One cutscene mentions an advanced security network with cameras and gun turrets, but I only encountered a single gun turret enemy in the entire game. In the second to last level you’re introduced to an explosive barrel – they’re sitting by a corridor corner and they are never seen again after that (note: some barrels are seen in level 1, but I don’t recall them being destructible). Episode 1 starts with some interesting weather and wind effects, with a flapping window and paper on a desk – very impressive for the time. I didn’t see that flapping paper effect anywhere else.
The ending also leaves a lot to be desired. The final boss is boring, anticlimatic, and gives no closure to the story. It’s straight out of the Quake play book, but at least Shub-Niggurath’s Pit was large enough to walk around.
Chasm does a lot of things right as well. It’s a fun game (mostly). Most enemies are easy to tell apart and are nicely detailed. I’d even say that they look better than the monsters in Quake. The levels are also grouped into distinctive themes, helped by the time travel plot, and the game uses these themes to deliver solid concepts for it’s levels. You feel like you’re making progress. Sound design is also quite decent, the ambient music works well and gives the game a nice creepy atmosphere.
To conclude: I had a blast playing it. I just wish it lasted longer and let itself flex it’s muscles. It’s a shame the devs never made a sequel – with more confidence with their engine and increases in computer power, they could have cut loose a little and made something really awesome. It’s too bad that could never have happened in the post-Quake 2 arms race.
Honestly I had a blast playing Chasm, but it was three hours long and left me feeling like it could have been a lot more.
The game has never been re-released or remade, which is a shame. The company has also disbanded, so there’s no moral dilemma in looking for a download. I recommend the one linked at the bottom, which has all the patches needed to get it running on modern systems already applied.
Wins:
Satisfying combat, varied enemy design, clear themes for each episode, generally good art design, and good ambient sound.
Sins:
Poor level design, poor monster placement, very short length, underwhelming puzzle bosses.
Conclusion:
Decent but flawed shooter.If you are a retro FPS fan, give it a try. If you’re not that invested in the genre, don’t rush to it.
Get it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B29kL7cygjVuTWh0LW9XX2xLTlE/view
JCPC for Doom has a tricky Map 10 and a sadistic Map 11.
It’s inevitable in any creative project that things will fail and you’ll have to redo them.
After a long & busy period at work, I found time to load up my WIP megawad and get reacquainted with the levels. I found out that tweaks to gzdoom’s lighting engine have made the experience inconsistent and sometimes unplayable. All of these screenshots are set to the same level of brightness, they’re just using different light rendering modes.
Luckily DECORATE has a function that allows you to force a certain light modes. Sector lighting is now set to dark all the time but I’m not having much luck getting the levels back to their old aesthetic.
Here’s some screenshots of a long-term wad/megawad project I’ve been working on that’s tentatively being called The Other Realm. It’s an atmospheric / horror themed wad that celebrates the concept of Quake 1.
After playing Quake I really felt like there was a lot of unused potential. The atmosphere was fantastic and the textures, despite the limited palette, really brought out the Lovecraftian gothic atmosphere. The next time I was in Doombuilder, I decided to load up the Quake texture set to build a Quake room. I’d only ever made original Doom map format maps, so I went a little more ambitious and made a UDMF format map. That let me add some slopes, and then I decided that I needed one or two sprite replacements to suit the mood. Before I knew it, I was knee deep in a project that existed partly to celebrate Quake but mostly to teach myself DECORATE. It’s been a slow journey. I’m still inexperienced and learning as I go. It’s currently a gzdoom-exclusive level pack, 3 levels in so far.
The lighting has been a problem. Quake textures don’t look good in Doom’s normal bright lighting, and every gzdoom sourceport update that tweaks the rendering completely messes the visuals. It hasn’t helped that I didn’t discover dynamic lights until I was 3 levels in (and to be honest, my experiences with mods with lots of DL isn’t great). Everything is carefully crafted sector-based lighting. To help ensure the mod looks the same for everyone, I’ve set it to force dark sector lighting but there’s still plenty of graphical work to get done.
A wonderful take on Basilissa as done by my friend Fran. He likes the idea of her having a human form to disguise herself on Earth, alongside her actual demon form.
As always, his art is magnificent in every way. The linework is crisp, the designs are awesome, and I love the way he did the fire hair! Thank you very much!
(As originally posted on Tumblr by TerminusEst13) I’m continually blown away by the amazing creativity in fan communities.
I finally got round to playing High Noon Drifter for Doom. Cowboys are awesome so it stands to reason that a weird west cowboy mod should kick a lot of ass.
I initially loaded it up with Strange Aeons (hoping to emulate the creator’s very cool gameplay footage) but at first the mod didn’t gel for me. Maybe it was just that some SA weapons like the crossbow and AK47 remained in the game, or maybe it was just the need to get used to the quirks of the new items, but I just didn’t get into it (I’ve since learned that a compatibility patch is needed for Strange Aeons).
I then tried it with JCPC, the Japanese Community Project, and that time it turned out quite awesomely. I had a lot of fun and will be going back to it later today. The weapons feel good to use, but the movement is where it’s at. It’s pretty satisfying to slide all over the place and let loose with dual SMGs or a quad-coach gun. I’m already a third of the way through JCPC and I think that High Noon + JCPC is going to be one of those really memorable playthroughs, like my D4D + Scythe game.
High Noon Drifter is one of, or maybe the first, Zscript enabled gameplay mods for Doom. This allows it to do some extra cool stuff not usually possible in existing modding languages for Doom. It also makes HND a gzdoom only mod for the foreseeable future. So what has this incredible scripting potential been used for? Well, in High Noon Drifter, the power and potential of Zscript has been used to let you take off and throw your hat at enemies. Yes. It really has that TerminusEst feel to it.
Of course there’s other Zscript shennigans going on – you can also throw a boomerang to pull items to you and use a cursed skull to transform into a giant fire-breathing demon waifu. Very fitting for JCPC.
Basically, after some initial stumbling, High Noon Drifter turned out to be pretty satisfying to play.
A pathetic creature of MEAT and BONE
The Nephrite Games Blog 