Rebecca Heineman talks about 3DO's Doom development (60+ minutes stream)

[Barone]

Related: http://3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewt...p=39416#p39416

[negative chill]

Interesting video, I never even knew that there was a 3DO port of Doom until I saw this

[Soulis]

Im interested to hear about it's problems and bad frame rate but the video is too long... is there any mention of those?

[negative chill]

Im interested to hear about it's problems and bad frame rate but the video is too long... is there any mention of those?

Long story short, she was lied to about how far along the game was (pretty much not at all) and the CEO who gave her the project in the first place was an incompetent dumbass who new absolutely nothing about programming or how it worked. To save time (she was only given three months to complete the project), she ported over the Jaguar version, but created an entirely new remixed soundtrack of the Doom I OST

Also, according to her, Id couldn't have cared less about quality of the port after the huge royalty check cleared

In regards to the frame rate with a normal aspect-ratio sized screen, she could only get it to do 3-10 fps tops, so she had to drastically shrink it down

[Soulis]

Long story short, she was lied to about how far along the game was (pretty much not at all) and the CEO who gave her the project in the first place was an incompetent dumbass who new absolutely nothing about programming or how it worked. To save time (she was only given three months to complete the project), she ported over the Jaguar version, but created an entirely new remixed soundtrack of the Doom I OST

Also, according to her, Id couldn't have cared less about quality of the port after the huge royalty check cleared

In regards to the frame rate with a normal aspect-ratio sized screen, she could only get it to do 3-10 fps tops, so she had to drastically shrink it down

Thank you for this. I will watch the video for more details.

[Phantar]

She also released the Source files for this port on Github a while back. Along with a rather interesting Readme-File (which should sum up the above video in a bit more detail):

Yes, this is the infamous port of DOOM for the 3DO. Firstly, this was the product of ten intense weeks of work due to the fact that I was misled about the state of the port when I was offered the project. I was told that there was a version in existance with new levels, weapons and features and it only needed "polishing" and optimization to hit the market. After numerous requests for this version, I found out that there was no such thing and that Art Data Interactive was under the false impression that all anyone needed to do to port a game from one platform to another was just to compile the code and adding weapons was as simple as dropping in the art.

Uh... No...

My friends at 3DO were begging for DOOM to be on their platform and with christmas 1995 coming soon (I took this job in August of 1995, with a mid October golden master date), I literally lived in my office, only taking breaks to take a nap and got this port completed.
Shortcuts made...

I had no time to port the music driver, so I had a band that Art Data hired to redo the music so all I needed to do is call a streaming audio function to play the music. This turned out to be an excellent call because while the graphics were lackluster, the music got rave reviews.

3DO's operating system was designed around running an app and purging, there was numerous bugs caused by memory leaks. So when I wanted to load the Logicware and id software logos on startup, the 3DO leaked the memory so to solve that, I created two apps, one to draw the 3do logo and the other to show the logicware logo. After they executed, they were purged from memory and the main game could run without loss of memory.

There was a Electronic Arts logo movie in the data, because there was a time that EA was going to be distributing the game, however the deal fell through.

The vertical walls were drawn with strips using the cell engine. However, the cell engine can't handle 3D perspective so the floors and ceilings were drawn with software rendering. I simply ran out of time to translate the code to use the cell engine because the implementation I had caused texture tearing.

I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.

This game used Burgerlib 2. My first "C" version of Burgerlib because Burgerlib was originally written in 65816 for the SNES and the Apple IIgs. If you check out Burgerlib 5 (The current version, also on github), you'd notice that some code is still in use.

I hope that everyone who looks at this code, learns something from it, and I'd be happy to answer questions about the hell I went through to make this game. I only wished I had more time to actually polish this back in 1995 so instead of being the worst port of DOOM, it would have been the best one.
And one more thing...

The intellectual property of DOOM is the exclusive property of ZeniMax. No transfer of the intellectual property of DOOM or any transfer of the ownership of the sounds, art or other game assets are given nor implied. If anyone wishes to release a version of DOOM 3DO commercially, contact ZeniMax for a license.

The source code... Go for it.

Rebecca Ann Heineman

Olde Skuul

Seattle, WA

Still, if she talks 60+ minutes about the development, it seems to have been even more of a development hell than the text statement insinuates. I'll have to watch it as well once I find the time.

[Barone]

Hopefully the brave 3DO homebrew developers will be able to optimized the 3DO's Doom.
If it could have a reasonable and consistent frame rate it would be really awesome; the music is superb and the fact it offer analog controls using the CH Products Flightstick is also a plus in my book.

[Mad Moham]

I remember hearing about "Burger" Hieneman in the audiobook Masters of Doom (Great book, I recommend it to everyone). I had no idea she was still in the industry, and I really enjoyed watching that video. Now I gotta watch the rest of her videos.

[BladeJunker]

Hopefully the brave 3DO homebrew developers will be able to optimized the 3DO's Doom.
If it could have a reasonable and consistent frame rate it would be really awesome; the music is superb and the fact it offer analog controls using the CH Products Flightstick is also a plus in my book.

I hope so, 3DO owners got screwed with Doom, I heard it was one of the most returned games to appear on the platform, most people wanted their money back after trying it. It should be possible some how to get Doom1 to run well enough on the 3DO. Not sure about using the original code as a base but I guess it's a start.

[Blades]

Here's our game development guru, the CEO of Art Data himself. Also responsible for the soundtrack.



The man who thought adding weapons to a game was copying and pasting photoshopped JPEGs. Oh the '90s.