After I started getting into romhacking I stopped using zdoom or visiting the zdoom fourms (actually between zdoom and romhacking, I was involved with something called verge, which I also was involved with before getting into zdoom too). But lately, maybe because my hack isn't really going anywhere at the moment, I have every once and a while found myself fiddling with zdoom again.
I guess a recurring problem for me is I always seem to want to do ridiculously ambitious projects, which cause me to reach a point where I am basically stuck because I have neither the talent nor the patience to do any more. I think my hack may be the project I have stuck to the longest, but it isn't the only one I deeply wanted to do. In verge I was making a platformer of my own, but ran into problems after a while. I did abuse verge's scripting language to hell and back, but they are not even using that language anymore, so eh. For zdoom, I admit I never had a good idea of what I wanted to do really. But I did have a basic outline.
In my last blog post I briefly mentioned Ultima Underworld, which is one of the best first person games ever. A long long time ago, before I even knew zdoom existed, I attempted to make a Ultima Underworld clone I called Underrealm using the half-life engine. I actually managed to get a ton of stuff done, including a inventory system, but my progress was hindered when the SDK was almost completely rewritten and my code suddenly became almost useless. By the time I managed to fix it, it happened again, and I just gave up because I didn't understand the new code at all. And that was the last time I really fiddled around with much C++.
In any case I found map editing in half-life somewhat cumbersome and hard to do. I always preferred doom-style 2d maps for there ease of use. I had messed around with editing doom 2, heretic and hexen, but found them inflexible due to the fact that you could only really edit the maps and graphics, and not the behavior of the things in it. There was a tool called dehacked that allowed some editing of things and weapons by changing the exe, but I still found it too limited in the long run.
Zdoom changed all that. It had built-in dehacked, and ton of other interesting features. As I started to work with it, more and more features were added, and now dehacked became obsolete in favor of a new feature called decorate, which quickly expanded past anything someone using dehacked even dreamed possible. New ideas and possibility opened up, and I worked long into the night on this or that. It seemed anything was possible, or would soon be possible. But it still wasn't enough if I wanted to restart my Underrealm project. Custom inventory was a huge step forward (most of it's features in zdoom are actually a lot like what I was doing for half-life, probably because I had a lot of the same design goals in mind back then).
But even today there are still things I want to do which I can't without changing the source code. Honestly I probably could change the source code and make my own version, as all the code is free. I didn't want to make my own version just for one or two changes, but unlike half-life's code I do understand a fair bit of it from what I have seen. Either way, if I were to make a game that way I would still need levels and such, and I would still need to do a lot of work. It would honestly be better if I found a free 3D engine or API and did it all my self, or maybe even hack half-life 2's source engine which has a lot of awesome features, but I haven't touched either half-life 2, or steam in years.
In any case, after a while, my interest shifted away from first person 3D games, into platformers and such, and then into romhacking and ASM. Maybe I am still making all the same mistakes I did back then. I was never very good at level design, and always focused on other things first. I never had the fortitude to continue working after I hit a roadblock of some kind, but at least I am determined not to give up quite yet. What can I really do?
I guess it really comes down to effort, talent, and community support. Back in my zdoom days I never really had that much community support because everyone was focused more on other things. Not that I didn't have some fun with people there, just that no one was really rooting for me, and I doubt anyone remembers me now. Same with verge really. With half-life I never even joined a community. With my hack though, while I wouldn't say the whole community is behind me, I think I have a good number of people who at least notice me and my work.
Talent I really couldn't say. I think I have gotten way way better at almost everything, but I am not sure if I really have a knack for making games, even if I really want to. It just doesn't flow out like I would like it to, and I end up wasting time on silly things. About half my work on my hack has been silly graphics and asm experiments.
Effort is the killer though. I just can't make myself do anything I don't like, and there are tons and tons of tedious annoying things I always find myself needing to do. Like with my hack and levels. If I could sit down and focus on it for a few hours each day, I think I would have my hack mostly done by now. But I simply can't. It's tedious annoying busy work. It might not be if I had a talent for it but I don't. Oh well.
Really this has been more of a introspective look at my loserdom then talking about zdoom, but oh well.
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