Tool for converting Ultima Underworld and Shock 1 Levels into Unity.

[6744860124662Kolya]

You got me. Porting usually refers to rewriting a program for another system or framework. There is no porting required to play quake maps on the engine they were written for.

[6744860124782Kolya]

The porting would happen before, to get System Shock into id tech 4.

[67448601248b4Primitive Primate]

Imagine Goggles in the vast deserts of Rage, or the concrete steel jungle of Wolfenstein

[6744860124ad5Briareos H]

Great as usual. How difficult does idtech4 make it to create custom, complex interfaces with mouse interaction?

I know this is done using only open source tools, which is great, so pardon my blasphemy but I suppose a viable path to rebuild System Shock from your project might be to export the whole geometry from *radiant to UE4 as .obj -- though I don't know if you can take the textures along.
Asking this because I'm not too fond of idtech4 as it looks like a pain in the ass for implementing some important features like the mouse interface, upgrades and inventory -- plus it would be a bit limited when later trying to expand on the simple geometry remake, with the need to visportalize everything and a lack of the latest nifty shaders.

Don't get me wrong, I love The Dark Mod but it seems like every mapper is spending an unhealthy amount of their time optimizing their levels, sometimes changing whole segments to keep the draw calls low and be able to place visportals.

[6744860124c33icemann]

Why would anyone want to port Quake maps into SS? Seems pointless to me.

If it was Doom maps, that would be kinda cool.

[67448601252ebhank morgan]

Great as usual. How difficult does idtech4 make it to create custom, complex interfaces with mouse interaction?

I know this is done using only open source tools, which is great, so pardon my blasphemy but I suppose a viable path to rebuild System Shock from your project might be to export the whole geometry from *radiant to UE4 as .obj -- though I don't know if you can take the textures along.
Asking this because I'm not too fond of idtech4 as it looks like a pain in the ass for implementing some important features like the mouse interface, upgrades and inventory -- plus it would be a bit limited when later trying to expand on the simple geometry remake, with the need to visportalize everything and a lack of the latest nifty shaders.

Don't get me wrong, I love The Dark Mod but it seems like every mapper is spending an unhealthy amount of their time optimizing their levels, sometimes changing whole segments to keep the draw calls low and be able to place visportals.

DarkRadiant has obj export (although it failed to work when I quickly tried it) and  an .ase export which did work when I just tried to export a whole level. If any one is interested I can upload some sample files.

Choice of platform is an interesting question and there certainly are pros and cons to my choice. I developed mainly on the Dark Mod branch of IDTech simply for three reasons. 1)It was what I had installed at the time I started toying with this (my original experiment was converting from an old UW mapviewer into blender and then into TDM) and 2)there were a lot of fantasy themed assets and simple things like keys that I was able to leverage at the time when the focus was purely Underworld, 3) the community is fairly vibrant and active with a easy to use editor.

Obviously there are long term risks with TDM in terms of suitability of that engine branch. I have tried to limit my usage of TDM only entities where possible so if ended up in the situation where I had to switch to the Doom3/Quake 4 branch or whatever other branches may exist I won't lose too much progress in converting or adapting new entity types to fill in games.

And I may as well be honest here. The biggest problem the project will face is persistence, i.e. what happens when I travel back and forth through levels. I suspect that this will require work on the engine source code to support it to the extent the project requires. I'm not worried about it at this stage though since my attitude to that is that it will be someone else who is better at coding then I am will solve it. My efforts are better spent on the conversion process at this point rather than getting bogged down in things I have limited understanding of.

Hopefully IDTech will support all I need it to do. It certainly has a powerful GUI system which I've only dipped my toes into. I already use it for System Shock switch animations, log entry display, signs, readables.  I don't expect to implement HUDs and interfaces as they were originally  (the System Shock Hud comprises of a shit ton of art files) but I would hope to do something in the same spirit further down the line.

[6744860125590hank morgan]

So I still consider Source engine support a bit of a skunk-works side project for the summer months but I have got it to the point where I have the original textures convert to valve's format and properly assigned to brushes without alignment. The files open up okay in Hammer and I can launch Half Life 2 without errors and wander around levels without any objects or scripting ported.

I also have it running in Dark Messiah*.
Image: http://i.imgur.com/DMrURmQ.jpg
Image: http://i.imgur.com/qdjAcyR.jpg
*Goblin and sword manually added.

Here's a recent video of UW1 in the Dark Mod engine. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6hf-M9o4vc  I'd show off SS1 with a similar object system as that shown except I've yet to get around to fixing up and matching the assets.

[67448601259cfJoin2]

So I still consider Source engine support a bit of a skunk-works side project for the summer months but I have got it to the point where I have the original textures convert to valve's format and properly assigned to brushes without alignment. The files open up okay in Hammer and I can launch Half Life 2 without errors and wander around levels without any objects or scripting ported.

I also have it running in Dark Messiah*.

Where can I get me these steroids of supreme intellect +2?

That said, I do question why you are porting to 3 engines simultaneously instead of focusing all efforts on IDTech4 but I predict the answer would be "because I can", or something of the sort.
Keep it up, you're doing God's work  

[6744860125ae5icemann]

It could also be procrastination. In many of my game programming related projects in the past, I would often devote large amounts of time to minor non essential things, just to length the time till I was to work on the far harder essential stuff.

[6744860125be3Join2]

Good practice I suppose, refining your skills doing that. I need to challenge myself some more but I don't have the passion required for it. I much prefer level design and game design, but when coding and everything comes together the feeling of accomplishment is ace.

[6744860125f18hank morgan]

It could also be procrastination. In many of my game programming related projects in the past, I would often devote large amounts of time to minor non essential things, just to length the time till I was to work on the far harder essential stuff.

Definitely there is some procrastination at the moment. Source engine support is just for fun. It's something I don't intend spending much further at beyond importing some simple objects and doors. Most of my time when spent on the tool at the moment is object research which just isn't as flashy.

[6744860126037Carrot]

Hey Hank,

Since we're talking about ports to various other engines, have you ever considered Legend of Grimrock?  Seems like it would be a great fit for the UWs (since it's inspired by them), and that way you'd be able to leverage some of the engines innate RPG functions, instead of having to shoe horn them in to another engine.

[67448601263f6Marvin]

Hey Hank,

Since we're talking about ports to various other engines, have you ever considered Legend of Grimrock?  Seems like it would be a great fit for the UWs (since it's inspired by them), and that way you'd be able to leverage some of the engines innate RPG functions, instead of having to shoe horn them in to another engine.

... and instead shoehorn them into a limited, grid-based 2D environment which has nothing to do with UW's then new approach of a fully immsersive, freely explorable 3D world - an advantage over games such as Dungeon Master or Might and Magic which LoG was actually based upon.

[67448601264d8Carrot]

Congrats Marvin on your metamorphosis into the German version of ZylonBane

[67448601266acOlfred]

It's evolution

[674486012684aSystem Shocked]

It's evolution

No, it's revolution !

[6744860126949icemann]

I'd love to see the levels ported over to Doom. That'd be something. Especially considering how far long Doom has come with all the source port / code improvements since the source code release many years back.

Play the RTC-3057 mod for an indication.

[6744860126a40Kolya]

@Marvin and Carrot: It sounded a bit snappy which probably wasn't intended. Can't really tell before I've had my second coffee.

[6744860126ce9Marvin]

Congrats Marvin on your metamorphosis into the German version of ZylonBane

I think you're in need of a thicker skin while browsing the internet if that little quip offended you. ;-)

[6744860126f73hank morgan]

Hey Hank,

Since we're talking about ports to various other engines, have you ever considered Legend of Grimrock?  Seems like it would be a great fit for the UWs (since it's inspired by them), and that way you'd be able to leverage some of the engines innate RPG functions, instead of having to shoe horn them in to another engine.

I actually tried this as a side experiment early on in the project by just copying and pasting an ASCII tile map into a grimrock map file. It works to an extent but apart from the restricted movement and flatness that Grimrock has there is one really major flaw that gets in the way. Grimrock only support 32x32 sized maps, UW and Shock are 64x64.

[6744860127212hank morgan]

I'd love to see the levels ported over to Doom. That'd be something. Especially considering how far long Doom has come with all the source port / code improvements since the source code release many years back.

Play the RTC-3057 mod for an indication.

Doom is an interesting case. A lot of cool weird stuff is being churned out for it still. I'm not overly interested in tackling it any time soon though it is in the back of my head as something to attempt and just bang out a quick and dirty wad for the hell of it. I'm not up to speed on the capabilities of the Doom engine but as far as I know Vanilla doom doesn't support floor or ceiling slopes which is a big part of UW/SS maps. I think some of the source ports support slopes?

[6744860127563Join2]

I think some of the source ports support slopes?

Yes. But there are other limitations not suitable for Shock. No multi-layered brushes or texture panning for ceiling and floor tiles for example. People have to make bridges through advanced trickery and such. Porting to idTech1/it's source ports is quite frankly a terrible idea, not only because of the limitations, but because the whole point in porting to another engine is the amazing possibilities for System Shock 1/Ultima Underworld, which there will be less of in engines that support Doom compared to Id Tech 4 or any other more advanced engines.

System Shock's engine may have had those limitations too, it's very likely judging by the level design, but what's the point in porting to an engine that even after much work by the community isn't actually a whole lot better?

Oh...I'm responding to Hank. Do what you must do man, as long as Shock ends up on an open engine I'll be very grateful.

[6744860127777icemann]

Amazing things have been done in the zdoom engine over the years such as:

* Allowance for completely new enemies
* Dynamic lighting
* Conversation system
* Inventory system
* Mouse look,
* Jumping and crouching
* Scripting
* Support for hub-based level structures with the progress within saved as part of support for Hexen and Strife

All but multi-layered textures I know could be done + possibly toggable player special abilities.

If you compare the state of the engine prior to the sourcecode release to what the game is like today, the difference is night and day.

That said I don't think a conversion on the scale of a SS1 port over would be possible. Yet. But ports of Quake 1 (with new replacement levels) and Doom 64 have already been accomplished successfully, so would be very interesting to see.

[6744860127909Judicator]

Don't want to abuse of Hank time and patience, just asking.
What about idTech2 (Quake Engine)?
It could be further enhanced by Darkplaces (http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/screenshots.html) and honestly the results are very good.
Quake and DP have a great community with lots of mods, projects, enhancements, just go to Quakeone and see it there're some incredibly good projects.