Dread - WIP Doom clone on the Amiga 500 & Atari ST gets a BIG Map remake via Tsak!

We've been featuring the upcoming Doom clone of 'Dread' for some time now, as with every new update, the Amiga 500 and Atari ST version just keeps on getting better and better. Well if you're looking for some more Amiga news on this upcoming game, then we have just been contacted by Saberman via Facebook, that he has told us that the in-development project by KK/Altair has been teased with a brand new look at the overhauled map remake by none other than Tsak!

Doom is an FPS game made by id Software and originally released in 1993 for DOS. It was ported the following year for the Jaguar, Linux, PC-98 and the Sega 32X. It was again ported in 1995 for the 3DO and Windows (aka Doom95). In 1996, it was ported for the SNES/Super Nintendo and in 2001, it was ported for the Gameboy Advance. As for the Amiga and ST it was of course never released for those systems, but going by all the news stories we've done of this Doom clone called 'Dread' so far, it may look like the next best thing for any Doom fans out there with an Amiga!

Here is what was said about this latest update :

Finally, we are ready to present - the Big Map remake. In a version that finally runs on any Amiga 500 1MB. As you might remember, John has really gone through the roof with his reimagining of this map and ended up over 200kB over the A500 memory limit. Which pushed me to optimize and invent stuff to make this map working. Which happened just now.

Things I had to do to make this map running "as is" included:

- writing custom bootloader to kick the system out,

- loading raw tracks from the FDD (because system is out now),

- implementing a way to get rid of stuff not used in the map (because John added lots of new objects),

- implementing visibility list compression (by grouping)

- shaking the memory allocation a bit to make this specific map finally load (the RAM usage was just right, but Chip/Slow segmentation prevented loading on A500)

The next to last part was the blocker for the last month or two, because it was really buggy, up to the point of crashing the system. Well... it is working now, so you can enjoy the John's version  of this map yourself! The map is quite challenging on Hard difficulty, especially since I made the Head monster a bit more aggressive (it was a big bullet sponge before that). I still didn't manage to finish this map on Hard, so I hope you'll do better.

I didn't have the chance to test this map on a real Amiga, so please let me know if anything goes totally wrong. It never did before, but you know...

Have fun! 🙂

Links :1) Patreon (ADF available via Patreon)

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