Wolfenstein Sextilogy 3 RELEASED

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I'm proud to present the Wolfenstein Sextilogy Original Missions, comprising the first three episodes of a planned 6. This release is a quantum leap over the previous edition, with a new Windows engine with many new features such as additional digitized sounds, floor/ceiling textures, and improved controls. The Wolfenstein Sextilogy is a recreation of the original game with advanced features and larger, more complex levels. The old DOS executable, based on Wolf4GW, is still available to those seeking a more old-fashioned experience, and is compatible with the original 1.4 VSWAP.WL6. The Windows executable is based on an improved version of Wolf4SDL called ECWolf and is not compatible with the original registered VSWAP.

Known issues:
* F8/F9 quicksave/quickload keys are rather unreliable. Blzut3's new save code seems to have affected them and I don't have any solutions as he plans to rewrite the save code for future versions of ECWolf (which will not be possible to backport to Wolfenstein Sextilogy due to massive structural changes in ECWolf). Use F2/F3 for saving and loading games.
* Music change during boss encounters is not available in the Windows version. This feature proved to be too difficult to implement in the SDL codebase.

Credits are contained in a text file in the zip. Thanks to everyone who has helped me with this.

Beta testers:
Brian Lowe
WolfForever
Wildweasel
Blzut3
Bashe

Addendum: Blzut3 is working on a patching/version matching utility for Wolfenstein, so if anyone has more than one version of Wolfenstein, please contact admin@maniacsvault.net for details.

F8 seems to work fine.

F9 is EXTREMELY unreliable though, at least in SDL. Use F8/F3 if you're a quicksaver, but do not use F9.

Also I did not test with the Dos version, so I'm not sure if it's stable or not. Use SDL, it's MUCH better, and the original "feel" is still there, only enhanced.

Anyways this is a great game (at least in SDL), very good job.

Those are my two cents.

And now that E3 is done, here are the first shots of E4:

Wow...maybe it won't be four years between releases this time. I honestly had thought this project was long dead, before you made the announcement last week. I'm so glad things turned out to still be alive, well, and better than before! (better than before = SDL and new features)

And the E4 screenies already have me looking forward to more!

ps Even if there's more to come, this EASILY deserves a Dome award IMO.

DOS mode screenshots demonstrating legacy VSWAP support for the most retro experience possible:

Wow, the game itself is great. Nice work! Certainly worth the wait.

I have some questions and concerns though.

I'd like to know more about this ECWolf engine. Will it be open source, like Wolf4SDL itself, or is it someone's personal project? What are all of the new features, or did you list them all in your first post? I read between the lines that there are many more. Is there a website or spec somewhere? And who is Blzut3? Sounds like he is a coding whiz. If he's a Wolf3d fan, he should join our forums too!

When I saw the YouTube video, I was excited by how the original gameplay feel was preserved. I was a bit disappointed when playing the download that the gun bobbing has been increased from what is seen in the video, where it was nice and subtle. Now it is a bit fast and jerky, like Corridor 7 on faster machines. Can it be turned off with a key combo? Or at least returned to how it is in the video?

Lastly, the message that pops up after you are done should be done away with. It merely states what is presumably written into the config file, is the same as the message in the stdout.txt file, and is useful only to someone debugging the code, IMO.

Andy

Wow, the game itself is great. Nice work! Certainly worth the wait.

Thanks! Sure took me long enough. Sometimes I can be a mapping machine (I made Episode 2 in two weeks in 2007), sometimes I can be extremely slow. It's weird.

I'd like to know more about this ECWolf engine. Will it be open source, like Wolf4SDL itself, or is it someone's personal project?

It will be open source, but probably not this version. It's way behind the current version of ECWolf, which itself is a long way from being a full release. But eventually, yes, ECWolf will be open source.

What are all of the new features, or did you list them all in your first post? I read between the lines that there are many more. Is there a website or spec somewhere?

As for the features, I listed most of them in the text file, however ECWolf will eventually have a hell of a lot more. Essentially ECWolf is planned to be a ZDoom for Wolfenstein. It will hopefully make TCs obsolete by making almost all aspects of game behavior controllable by text lumps in the assets, and by allowing resources to be added in the form of PK3 or WAD files instead of WL6 files, eliminating the need for hardcoded indexes.

Here is everything in the cards for ECWolf that I know of:

Features that are implemented in the current code (more advanced than mine):
* ZDoom's texture code (you can use textures of any format ZDoom supports, including PNG, BMP, and Doom texture format), allowing for textures of arbitrary size that can be assigned an index number using a special textures lump.
* Always-on shading
* Game version is selected by the data files you have (i.e. if you install it over SOD it will run Spear without the need to compile it for Spear, the same for 1.1 and foreign versions)
* Rudimentary console

Features to be implemented before first official release:
* DECORATE (basically like ZDoom's, allowing you to define actors, objects, weapons, etc. without touching the code)
* Full widescreen support with aspect correction
* SBARINFO (custom status bars)
* New sound engine with support for MIDI, MOD, and OGG music
* Video mode menu that will remove the need to run the game with the --res flag.
* Always-on third plane

Features that may be implemented:
* ACS scripting like ZDoom (this opens up an almost unimaginable array of modding options)
* Portals (stack sections of level atop each other)
* Doom-style skies (a single large bitmap instead of the multi-part parallax skies, of any size desired)
* New map format with customizable map size, tile sizes, etc.

And who is Blzut3? Sounds like he is a coding whiz. If he's a Wolf3d fan, he should join our forums too!

He is one of ZDoom's primary coders (the others being Randy Heit and Graf Zahl). I'm not sure how much he's interested in joining the forums though, as he wants me to be an intermediary for his patching project.

When I saw the YouTube video, I was excited by how the original gameplay feel was preserved. I was a bit disappointed when playing the download that the gun bobbing has been increased from what is seen in the video, where it was nice and subtle. Now it is a bit fast and jerky, like Corridor 7 on faster machines. Can it be turned off with a key combo? Or at least returned to how it is in the video?

Probably not. I altered BrotherTank's bobbing routine (with Blzut3's help) to behave in all resolutions like it does in 320x200. A more natural Planet Strike-type bobbing might have been better, but I don't know how to do that.

Lastly, the message that pops up after you are done should be done away with. It merely states what is presumably written into the config file, is the same as the message in the stdout.txt file, and is useful only to someone debugging the code, IMO.

I'll have to ask Blzut3 about that. I'm just a tutorial monkey, not a real coder.

Question. What makes your ECWolf better than SDL? Will download soon. If it is very heavily modded, I might write a long review as I did for The Lost Relic.

I already explained what sort of improvements ECWolf will have, and it is being made by Blzut3, not me.

The version used in Wolfenstein Sextilogy doesn't do a whole lot that SDL doesn't do because it's a very early version.

ECWolf website: http://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/

Balames87 just did a fresh Youtube commentary video on this:

https://www.youtube.com/user/Balames87#p/u

I have to admit that I haven't been playing many sets lately (like three in the past year - lol), but I did give this a run through. Very nice work! Looking forward to the nocturnal missions.

I'm unsure as to whether anybody here is interested in this sort of thing, but I've been playing through this and uploading my progress to Youtube. So far I've nearly finished it, with only two levels to go before it's "completed" (at least, until the other three episodes are done).

Fair warning: I actually start talking, starting in level 5 of episode 1. Also, on (most) levels with unchanged music, I turned the in-game music off and dubbed in my own. =P

I did see mentioned on Blzut3's website that multiplayer is one other intended feature. I actually emailed him about this. No word yet on what kind of modes will be supported but this definitely opens up many new doors.