The BLOOD Port

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N0t_mINe
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The BLOOD Port

Post by N0t_mINe »

The source code for Blood is out of reach and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This thread has been posted to explore what could be done, if anything, with Blood as is. In the past such an idea has been rejected out of hand and rightly so. 15 years after Blood's release however, technology has become powerful enough to hypothetically get around many of the limitations of the past. So is it even feasible from a technical stand point to make a working port of Blood? I'm asking.

DosBox is open source. I'm guessing if someone wanted to include (hide?) DB in an .exe they could. To be of any use such an application would have to do away with DB's configuring, I'm not sure that would be possible.

The glide gl layer has been modified commercially many times andwhat it's license situation is is something I'd like to research. I'm guessing wrappers were used in the past to get this little driver functional. Can more be done with a modern wrapper?


What do you think?
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by dosgamer000 »

N0t_mINe wrote:The source code for Blood is out of reach and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This thread has been posted to explore what could be done, if anything, with Blood as is. In the past such an idea has been rejected out of hand and rightly so. 15 years after Blood's release however, technology has become powerful enough to hypothetically get around many of the limitations of the past. So is it even feasible from a technical stand point to make a working port of Blood? I'm asking.

DosBox is open source. I'm guessing if someone wanted to include (hide?) DB in an .exe they could. To be of any use such an application would have to do away with DB's configuring, I'm not sure that would be possible.

The glide gl layer has been modified commercially many times andwhat it's license situation is is something I'd like to research. I'm guessing wrappers were used in the past to get this little driver functional. Can more be done with a modern wrapper?


What do you think?
The closet thing to a Blood port I've personal experience with is ZBlood using GZDoom a few years back. Now, that mod was not intended to be a Blood port as much as it was a TC but at the time I couldn't run Blood on my computer and it served as a nice replacement (also, the new or modified levels were refreshing).

I'm not too sure about how to go about a decent port for Blood what with all the copyright locks and all. The problem I see with DosBox is that being an emulator, it requires a decent CPU compared to something like eDuke32 which plays pretty flawlessly (on my computer at least). If I am not mistaken, ZDoom/eDuke32/SWP work differently than DosBox. You could re-create the game using a different engine like ZBlood or that one mod I saw for eDuke32 but it would be near impossible to replicate the game perfectly (then there's the copyright stuff again).

I can't speak on Glide because I never used it. Does it give Blood OpenGL capabilities? Because I saw a gameplay video with it and the textures were smoothed out. If I had a choice to start a "pseudo-Blood source port project" I'd pick up where ZBlood left off and use the ever advancing ZDoom and GZDoom engine (which supports room over room I heard). I think there is enough modding capabilities there to re-create the gameplay faithfully with enough work. Also, there's DECORATE for those who want to create new monsters and weapons.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by N0t_mINe »

dosgamer000 said:
The closet thing to a Blood port I've personal experience with is ZBlood using GZDoom a few years back. Now, that mod was not intended to be a Blood port as much as it was a TC
And therein lies our problem. Without the source there isn't really a way to get a true recreation of blood. Otherwise we wouldn't trifle with emulators, wrappers and such. Doing so is costly even with a modern system. In fact the only reason for trying this thought experiment was the eventuality of all 64 bit systems one day, ensuring well over 4 gigs of ram, multicore CPUs and GPUs, along with maybe better emulators to boot. The only advantage, and I cannot stress this enough, the only advantage to a true port of blood is a nearly perfect replication.

dosgamer000 said:
I can't speak on Glide because I never used it. Does it give Blood OpenGL capabilities? Because I saw a gameplay video with it and the textures were smoothed out.
That and some overly ambitious dynamic lighting is pretty much all it does. Modern ports for Doom and Duke all render the scenery with brushes just like quake does. I'm not sure about the glide wrapper, glidos made a commercial port of it to opengl, and there are other free products as well. More importantly, the amount of open source code out there is highly advantageous if some coder started a new glide wrapper for blood, qeffects comes to mind.

https://code.google.com/p/qeffects-gl/
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Re: The BLOOD Port

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What's wrong with just waiting for BloodXL?
http://xlengine.com/
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Re: The BLOOD Port

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@N0t_mINe

Ah, I see...thank you for the clarification about Glide. I saw those screenshots you linked and it was pretty snazzy. Alice support surprised me.

It's amazing just how hard a community tries to bring Blood to modern systems without a usable source code. So many attempts have been made to maybe try and compensate for an invaluable piece of data that has been (and probably still will be) denied releasement for I believe over 15+ years. I watch in envy when I run ZDoom or eDuke32 and wonder why Blood can't have this kind of treatment. Simply amazing.
Tchernobog wrote:What's wrong with just waiting for BloodXL?
http://xlengine.com/
Quite interesting, I think I heard of this somewhere in the Zandronum forums. The only thing I fear is that copyrights might get in the way.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

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dosgamer000 said:
Ah, I see...thank you for the clarification about Glide. I saw those screenshots you linked and it was pretty snazzy. Alice support surprised me.

links- wut?

Glide is an ancient hardware renderer that only worked with 3dfx voodoo cards. Games like the original unreal and tomb raider were supposed to use it exclusively. There are so many wrappers out there for it now that you can play those retro titles with little difficulty.

Tchernobog said:
What's wrong with just waiting for BloodXL?

Do you think lucius can manage a exact or even a close replica? How? I know he said his port would read blood map data but does that equal replication?
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Re: The BLOOD Port

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N0t_mINe wrote:Do you think lucius can manage a exact or even a close replica? How? I know he said his port would read blood map data but does that equal replication?
But he is not replicating the game, just the engine. As far as I am aware, he is just trying to reverse engineer the engine so that he can make a free drop-in replacement that can read Blood's data just like the original can. Assuming he can do this, and if anyone can it is him despite the effort still being a quite tall task, then there should not be a huge difference between the two. It is not specifically Build that makes Blood the game it is but Monolith's additions on top of it.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by N0t_mINe »

Tchernobog said:
It is not specifically Build that makes Blood the game it is but Monolith's additions on top of it.
True enough. I think it was something BON posted a year(s) ago, something about Blood having a great many dependencies within its main directory that has me worried.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by Tchernobog »

Well, I admit to being ignorant on the specifics, and I would not be confident on this, if it were not for the fact that the BloodXL guy himself is confident.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by dosgamer000 »

@N0t_mINe

I meant the screenshots on the qeffects page. I apologize if I wasn't clear.
Tchernobog wrote:Well, I admit to being ignorant on the specifics, and I would not be confident on this, if it were not for the fact that the BloodXL guy himself is confident.
Being confident is a very good thing but try not to get your hopes too high. I only say this because I myself suffered the disappointing discontinuing of someone's project for one reason or another. Still, it's good to see another Blood project in the works.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by N0t_mINe »

By the same token, I wouldn't short change Lucius either. He had DarkXL reading Blood map data 2 years ago. Sector stacking, portals, it all works apparently. It's just specific tags he has to work on now. The ai end of it is a different matter but it's still good to see him finishing up daggerxl.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

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dosgamer000 wrote:The only thing I fear is that copyrights might get in the way.
An extremely unlikely scenario though but it seems that this particular forum (which is a product of a fiasco that should have never existed in the first place) not only still holds a bad influence for those who come here and also it's decreasing the chances of people posting their projects here hence less visitors unlike things used to be here while centering around a project that has been dead with it's team disbanded a long time ago.

Of course there's reasons why people port Blood into other engines because of a lack of a source code which is infact Transfusion exists as the same reason regardless of legal backing or not, it's rather hypocritical to not allow projects with the same goal especially the state that Transfusion is in. To be honest, that's why this forum is rather dead as you can see.
N0t_mINe wrote:Tchernobog said:
It is not specifically Build that makes Blood the game it is but Monolith's additions on top of it.
True enough. I think it was something BON posted a year(s) ago, something about Blood having a great many dependencies within its main directory that has me worried.
Trying to remember what I posted years ago...hmmm...

Well if I remember correctly, I was explaining about why Blood mods at this point 'don't work' without the source code because they override what's in the main directory which forces you to reinstall the game unless you keep putting them into separate folders which is a tedious process that you have to have a backup folder for Blood which you copy & paste them into the folder and put the modded material afterwords.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by Tchernobog »

Blood of Nightmares wrote:An extremely unlikely scenario though but it seems that this particular forum (which is a product of a fiasco that should have never existed in the first place) not only still holds a bad influence for those who come here and also it's decreasing the chances of people posting their projects here hence less visitors unlike things used to be here while centering around a project that has been dead with it's team disbanded a long time ago.

Of course there's reasons why people port Blood into other engines because of a lack of a source code which is infact Transfusion exists as the same reason regardless of legal backing or not, it's rather hypocritical to not allow projects with the same goal especially the state that Transfusion is in. To be honest, that's why this forum is rather dead as you can see.
You done howling at the moon BoN?

In case you did not notice, no one criticized BloodXL or forbade us from talking about it, and the person you are mocking has nothing to do with the Transfusion project. Your rant really has no substance to it other than the existence of the xenoBlood section of the forum, which is a product of a past administrator who was essentially bullied into creating it due to the incessant flamewars generated by the opposition to a different Blood related project, which you were heavily involved in igniting.

If you want to dismiss this forum and the Transfusion project that is your prerogative, but at least try and show a little decorum. Although, I do have to wonder why you even bother to post here, considering your opinions on the matter.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by N0t_mINe »

*Skipping the editorial section, heading strieght for the news*
Blood of Nightmares wrote:
Trying to remember what I posted years ago...hmmm...

Well if I remember correctly, I was explaining about why Blood mods at this point 'don't work' without the source code because they override what's in the main directory which forces you to reinstall the game unless you keep putting them into separate folders which is a tedious process that you have to have a backup folder for Blood which you copy & paste them into the folder and put the modded material afterwords.
An elaborate wrapper/front loader combo might make blood user map friendly again. I was spying the doom port Risen 3d and its front loader when I first contemplated this thread. R3D's front end even has a drag and drop field where the end user can deal with pk3 packed maps almost as easily as GZdoom, -almost. The "wrapper would consist of a prepackaged dosbox, not unlike some of the tweaked gog versions out there. Now that lithrez is open source, copyright issues involving zip, pk3 and other formats can be avoided.
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Re: The BLOOD Port

Post by Blood of Nightmares »

Tchernobog wrote:You done howling at the moon BoN?

In case you did not notice, no one criticized BloodXL or forbade us from talking about it, and the person you are mocking has nothing to do with the Transfusion project. Your rant really has no substance to it other than the existence of the xenoBlood section of the forum, which is a product of a past administrator who was essentially bullied into creating it due to the incessant flamewars generated by the opposition to a different Blood related project, which you were heavily involved in igniting.

If you want to dismiss this forum and the Transfusion project that is your prerogative, but at least try and show a little decorum. Although, I do have to wonder why you even bother to post here, considering your opinions on the matter.
If you read my posts carefully, I think everyone here including dosgamer000 has seen the xenoBlood forum which made him say about copyrights getting in a way, and actually while I'm aware nobody criticized BloodXL, but what I'm saying that the xenoBlood forum might be still active or used as a deterrent that prevents anyone for example luciusDXL coming in here to talk about BloodXL due to the fear of it being thrown into the xenoBlood forum since the current administrator Wills refuses to delete it which hints he might still use it much like Post Hell from Doomworld. So yes the latter is most likely true that we're forbade to talk about it as the main thread here as long the xenoBlood forum still exists.

Of course only if the xenoBlood forum is deleted then things would be repaired until then it exists as a gashing wound here and it's simply a product that I now regret taking part of and a big mistake for Kurt stirring up more tensions and adding more fuel to the fire in the first place which was all about.
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