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sirjuddington / SLADE

It's a Doom editor
https://slade.mancubus.net
GNU General Public License v2.0
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ACKNEX 3 Engine Support #616

Open IsaiahKelly opened 7 years ago

IsaiahKelly commented 7 years ago

The old 3D GameStudio ACKNEX 3 engine is a super obscure doom-like engine released in 1996.

Since it's a mostly forgotten engine not a lot of effort has been made in porting it to modern operating systems. However, it's so similar to Doom that I've wonder just how hard it might be to convert content created with it over. Allowing you to then take advantage of the many Doom source ports already in existence.

The engine already has a few features to help facilitate such an effort:

  1. Map structure is extremely similar to that of Doom.
  2. Map & script data is all stored in plain text files.
  3. The engine is well documented thanks to an official user manual.

Although assets for the engine are stored in standard file formats such as TXT, PCX, and WAV. The professional version usually stored these assets inside compressed WRS resource files, but they're probably not too different from a doom WAD file, and you can already exact the assets using Quickbms.

The biggest hurdle I see to conversion to Doom is the engine's custom scripting language (WDL) which would probably require a lot of specialized work to get functioning and would be far outside the scope of most Doom editing tools. However, being able to just covert maps, sprites and textures over to Doom would be very helpful in itself.

You can download the ACKNEX 3 engine SDK from here.

jmickle66666666 commented 7 years ago

Is there a list of games and where to get them available anywhere? I'm interested in experimenting with this but I'd need more resources to be able to start any work. I found out that one game is called "Saints of Virtue", which I will try and get first, but any more information regards games using the engine would be incredibly helpful.

IsaiahKelly commented 7 years ago

Unfortunately being as obscure as it is there isn't a lot of info out there on games that have been built with it. So far these are the most notable games I've been able to find:

Most of these are "abandonware" now, so the only legal way to obtain a lot of them would be by physical media from ebay or some other third-party. However, the engine's SDK provides two sample projects and a detailed user manual which describes the map format and engine features in great detail. So that alone should be more than sufficient for learning the engine's inner workings.

jmickle66666666 commented 7 years ago

Thanks for the info! This is really helpful.