FAQ

[Blzut3]

Wow isn't this poor use of the Doom engine?

Excellent observation, but that would be because it uses the Wolfenstein 3D engine not the Doom engine.

Isn't this game illegal?

First off it's important to note that this is based off the PC version of the game from 1995. Wisdom Tree bought the license to the Wolfenstein 3D engine just like everyone else that used the engine did, so regardless of your feelings regarding the SNES version, this version is 100% licensed.

As for the SNES version, Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree (the same company) were very careful to ensure that they were operating within the law. The games were created entirely through reverse engineering, which is to say they did not use Nintendo's SDK to develop their games. One of the great things about the early consoles is that they didn't have an operating system, so once you rule the SDK out, all copyright is avoided.

With that said, the only way Nintendo had only two means of stopping the distribution of unauthorized games. First, they could make it technically difficult to make third party cartridges, which is why there is a lock out chip which was bypassed by forwarding the chip's requests to an authorized cart. Secondly, they can prevent stores from carrying the games by withholding shipments of authorized titles. Wisdom Tree formed because of the second obstacle. Given that Nintendo didn't alllow religous content in their games the folks at Color Dreams realized that there was an untapped market which wouldn't care about not being able to order games from Nintendo.

In other words, as far as the SNES is concerned this is similar to modern day homebrew.

Isn't this just a reskin of Wolfenstein 3D? I hear the levels are the same.

You heard wrong. The game is 100% new content. The two games share a lot of coding similar to how Chex Quest is very similar to Doom. In the end there are some subtle changes that one would probably not notice unless I listed them out.

Not so subtlely though they backported features from the SNES code base including the different damage calculations and the automap. Additionally, they added general MIDI playback (although they never supported wavetable synthesis for some reason) and adding floor and ceiling texture mapping.

Didn't they get the code for free out of spite of Nintendo?

Wisdom Tree maintains that they paid the same licensing fee that everyone else did. The only reservation that id Software had was to ensure that everything was legal and no contracts were being violated.

There is some evidence to suggest that id Software wasn't willing to work with Nintendo after the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D, but from what I understand that was more due to the back and forth trying to get the game approved than any singular reason. In any case though, it didn't result in a free license and Wisdom Tree approached id Software for the license.

While at this point it's hard to track down exactly what happened I will note that they also licensed the engine for a Hellraiser tie in game. That game never made it past some concept art (and I think the "super" cart being prototyped) as the license for the Hellraiser IP lapsed, so there's nothing to see there.

Why would id Software allow a religious game to be made using their engine?

Why wouldn't they? id Software was a technology licensing company and they sold copies of the engine to anyone that could afford the asking price. This includes Wisdom Tree.

Why spread Christianity?

I guarantee no one is going to convert to Christianity because they played a game based on the Noah's Ark mythos. The "bible quiz" in the game only covers the story of Noah. The manual for this edition of the game comes with a complete guide to the quiz questions which contain only the relevant excerpts.

If you have zero interest in the mythos, then I will note that there is no penalty for getting the questions wrong. Instead of a sizable bonus you'll only get 4 points of health. The quiz is a pickup in the game and most of them can be avoided if you really want to, but why would you? (There are in fact numerous levels that don't contain any quiz pickups.)

Didn't you see the AVGN review? This sucks! Why bring it to Steam?

Didn't you see the AVGN FAQ? The AVGN is a character which represents the frustrated gamer. James likes some of the games which he reviews as the AVGN.

Am I saying this is a good game or that this is an example of a game he likes? That's not for me to decide. The game does have its fans though, and not just in the ironic way. I do think this game did some things better than Wolf3D, but going into detail isn't worth the space here since I would just be called biased.

What I recommend to you is to find videos on the PC version of the game (you can tell easily by the floor/ceiling textures) and form an opinion based on that. The reason being is that as of this writing I've yet to see someone make a video of the PC version predisposed into not liking the game. There's a pretty good let's play of the game on Youtube by WhamNinjaMolehill that I recommend if you want to see a full playthrough.

By the way, I am an AVGN fan.

How did the port come to be?/Why not release on GOG?

I've been working on a source port of Wolfenstein 3D since 2008. One of the goals of the port is to support every commercial game that used the engine. I reached out to Wisdom Tree to see if they would be willing to support the project and they were. They sent me a copy of the game on the condition that I could port the game on my own time schedule. I was quickly surprised that how good the game was compared to what the Internet was generally saying about it and instead of my original plan of throwing binaries at them and letting them distribute, I offered to pitch the game to GOG on their behalf. This was going to work out well for me as I had already had people requesting to donate to the source port monetarily, and entering a profit splitting agreement meant that I could give something in return to everyone that does.

GOG decided they were too cool for Noah. From there I got referred to itch.io where the game was released May 2014. (itch.io is cool since it allows people to leave a tip making the donation box aspect very realistic.) Piko Interactive, who earlier that year licensed the game for reissue on the SNES, contacted me about doing a Greenlight campaign. I thought there was no way it would succeed, but as you can see I was wrong. Very wrong in fact, as the game had an approval rating significantly above the average.

This needs a Brutal Doom mod LOL!!!

If you're trying to troll with this, keep in mind that I'm a regular contributor to ZDoom which powers Brutal Doom.

What about mod support?

Being the ECWolf engine which is partly based off ZDoom, mods are very much supported. This version of the game will get Steam workshop support at a later time.

[🌎Earth]

This may answer that first question for ya http://steamcommunity.com/app/371180/discussions/0/530645446308515815/#c530645446324565890

[NTI]

Thank you! even though the room layout was suspect, I wasn't sure about it ;D

Additionally, another oddity I found regarding the source port engine itself this time:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=573521186
The textures's horizontal borders are a bit strange, don't know how to explain, but they don't "close" together, a lot of times by just walking a room without interacting doors or anything the animals were waked up at the other side of the wall block.

I ended with this conclusion while using the ECWolf standalone executable, I could note that the horizontal borders are often filled with "blank", if you get what I mean.

[Blzut3]

That is known to happen in Wolf3D if the line traces through the corner. The issue might be worse than I thought though if you are noticing it here since most of the S3DNA levels don't join rooms diagonally (in fact, I can't think of one that does). I'll have to put that higher on my list of issues to look into.

[NTI]

Heck, "corner", that's the word I was looking for :P

Originally posted by Blzut3:

in fact, I can't think of one that does

I iniatially noted this issue in here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=573805766
Where it's possible to wake up a goat at the other side of the wall blocks, maybe this one is a good place to debug, though those two blocks connected by the corner make wonder now if once again Wisdom Tree did a trick with the engine =/

Nevertheless, while barely noticiable (the blank color seems to be very close to the textures, mostly), some corners do seem to broke apart.

Originally posted by Blzut3:

That is known to happen in Wolf3D if the line traces through the corner.

Indeed, I was aware of that too, as a matter of fact, that's why I quickly thought that the issue might be the corners not closing together, though because of this it's possible I'm suffering some sort of placebo effect, but that's unlikely, I hope.

[Blzut3]

Doesn't seem likely to be intended. Seems like it's harder to trigger in vanilla although I'm not sure why at this point since the sighting function is virtually unchanged from vanilla. Just learned that melee attacks can go through corners though (which seems obvious now that I know about it).

[NTI]

If I had to guess, maybe it's something of the same kind as the rocket speed in Wolf3d, bringing the game to modern standards may have unfolded oddities which weren't too much apparently in the teens

[Lunch]

GOG REFUSED THIS GAME? WTF?

I would have thought the opposite, but who knows now the game has been out a while.

[Ikagura]

i just want to say thank you to have the courage of porting a Wolf3D game into the modern days, i'm more of a Doom and Half life fan of FPS but i liked doing Wolf3D very much! So i just hope this game will open a door to a lot of Wolf3D fangame for the apprentice level designer (it's a shame that the steam version of Wolf3D/SoD hasn't a sourceport built-in)

[c704710 [🐧 #LinuxOnly]]

Originally posted by Blzut3:

Why would id Software allow a religious game to be made using their engine?

Why spread Christianity?

People buy Doom and Quake yet they are freaked about this. Do they not realize Sandy Peterson is a Mormon <ref name="Masters of Doom">{{cite book|title=[[Masters of Doom|Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture]]|author=Kushner, David|year=2003|pages=144}} and that he join id and designed all those levels and monsters in the Doom and Quake series to convert people to Mormonism?


:)

Originally posted by Blzut3:

I will say that I make more money than Wisdom Tree does off each sale. Even more so if purchased through itch.io.

I purchased at itch.io. I'm glad to know this. Not because I have anything against Wisdom Tree, heavens no, they get cooler every day (as does any company involved with Linux gaming), I just like the idea of developers getting a bigger cut than the publishers. We've come a long way since Atari, where devs were paid less than their own secretaries and couldn't claim credit for their work.

[c704710 [🐧 #LinuxOnly]]

Originally posted by Lunchboxguy:

GOG REFUSED THIS GAME? WTF?

They refuse a lot of games people want and carry a lot of games people don't. I'd love to see their reasoning for each game. On the other hand, they might be senseless reasons and that would probably make things worse. For instance, people are willing to pay for Inner Worlds from GOG. The copyright holder is willing to forgo payment. GOG is not interested because they do not wish to carry additional free games on their service. They ignored customers willing to pay. They subsequently added additional free games. Given their favoring for classic games, the very first boxed and sold in stores Linux game, acquired free and sold for profit seems like a reasonable choice.

[Blzut3]

Yep. It will be a part of the 1.4 release. As always when talking about the multiplayer I must reiterate that the target is LAN play. It will work over the Internet but won't be optimized for high latency connections.

[Blzut3]

Nope. LAN means in the same room and more specifically sub-14ms ping.

Don't have a date set yet.

[Ikagura]

i really think that no game can convert someone to a religion

[Gekkibi]

Originally posted by jman✔:

Originally posted by Blzut3:

Nope. LAN means in the same room and more specifically sub-14ms ping.

Don't have a date set yet.

i can use hamachi then i can play with hongkong yes???

Absolutely - assuming you can manage to have sub-14 ms ping...
If you can then you should also patent whatever dark magick allows you to have such ping.

[Gekkibi]

Originally posted by jman✔:

Originally posted by Gekkibi:

Absolutely - assuming you can manage to have sub-14 ms ping...
If you can then you should also patent whatever dark magick allows you to have such ping.

:D awesome

...Just in case you didn't spot it, I was being sarcastic.
It's simply not possible to get that kind of ping over the internet. VPN or not, it's irrelevant.