Ground Zero is an in-depth, post-apocalyptic RPG inspired strongly by the Fallout series. Leveraging Doom 3's scripting engine and real-time graphic capabilities, we are creating a highly generative and dynamic game framework by placing the RPG within the context of a simple high-level strategy game. Factions, cities, and organizations, are networked with each other and the player such that the world evolves over time with or without the player's intervention. By creatively applying a range of skills and abilities, the player carves a niche for him or herself that may help shape the world after the bomb!

Report RSS Ground Zero Interview

The Ground Zero team attempt to take the Doom 3 engine into new territory with this post nuclear-apocalypse RPG total conversion inspired by the Fallout universe.

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[page=Introduction]
The Doom 3 engine has recieved alot of criticism for it's general inability to render large, varied environments. However the Ground Zero team are here to quash this mis-conception, by bringing Doom 3 into a brave new world of light, space, and interaction.

[page=Interview]
Just a few mandatory formalities I’m afraid, could you please introduce yourself(ves), giving us your responsibilities on the mod, and a brief overview of what Ground Zero is all about.

Jonathan : I’m Jonathan Lamb, acting as project manager and lead designer on Ground Zero. I am currently a junior at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Science program called Visualization, focusing on game and experience design.

Paul : I’m Paul Reed and I’m currently working as the lead coder on Ground Zero. I recently graduated from the University of South Dakota with a computer science degree and plan on attending graduate school to study A.I.

We have a wonderfully talented crew along with us, including: Jennifer, Jayme, Kimmo, Reto, Andrew, Owen, and Blaise.

The Doom 3 modding community has had a somewhat rocky childhood. Doom 3: Jedi, Doom 3 Team Fortress and Doom 3 : Hell on Earth are just a few of the mods that seemed extremely promising but have since died or switched engines. I’ve found the two most common reasons dilapidated teams have given for this, are recruiting problems and criticisms of ID’s technology. Do you feel that such reasons/issues are justified, and have they effected your team aswell?

Jonathan : It has definitely been difficult finding quality help. Most of our talent has come from outside the Doom 3 community, and only as a result of me directly soliciting people. At first we were discouraged by how the Ground Zero announcements and help wanted threads were received, but I found there are a surprising number of skilled people eager to join a project like this—you just need to actually ASK.

I think the other main issue is that all strong mod communities flourish around multiplayer games. A pure multiplayer conversion is logistically much less complex than a single player game. I also think there is also something to the experience of sharing and playing with modifications in a communal way, which is why you see stuff like Gary’s Mod for HL2, and a lot of other multiplayer mods.

Because of this, it seems the promise of robust network code in Quake 4 has kind of overshadowed Doom 3 as a viable mod platform. It isn’t really a technical problem for us since we haven’t even decided what kind of multiplayer to include… this IS a primarily single player experience.

Paul : Admittedly the Doom3 code has been a bit difficult to work with, however, I find the majority of the problem is simply a lack of available references dealing with the organization of the SDK and associated script files. Given enough time and effort upon the part of the Doom3 modding community this is certainly something that can be changed and I think would help tremendously in encouraging mod teams to use the Doom3 Engine.

From what I gather a necessary foundation for any mod is having strong concepts, but its always an entirely different matter getting them and all their factors into the game. Have you found Dooms tools have really allowed you to do this or has it been a struggle?

Paul : So far the SDK has been a little lacking in the comments area, and the .script files are upon first sight rather ambiguous about what they can and can't do, but the more I (we) work with both of them the easier it becomes.

Jonathan : It’s of course easiest to choose a game as a platform that has most of your mod’s features implemented already, and we’re trying to make a role playing game with one of the most straightforward shootem-ups out there! I think everyone digging deep enough is finding Doom 3 to be unexpectedly flexible, it’s just that the development tools are streamlined to make… well… Doom 3. So it’s a struggle on the front-end, but the capability is there.

From what I've seen of your ingame screenshots, you seem to be taking a very different approach to your level design to what we're used to seeing in Doom mods. Has this thus far given you any problems in terms of performance or research (in that it's a design style we've not seen put to use in Doom before)?

Jonathan : We’re really stepping onto the shoulders of a myriad of group and individual experiments with the engine, most notably the Doom Can Do It Too project, Hexen, 5.56 FMJ… these people were all proving that Doom 3 is capable of producing things far different from claustrophobic cubic hallways with more flashing lights and steam than a Ridley Scott fantasy. I think a lot of the grunt work is done, now it’s a matter of seeing how far we can push it, which is something we will certainly be doing.

I remember that Doom 3 ran better on my Athlon 1600/Ti4400 system than pretty much any other game in its generation (and had fewer glitches). On my new hardware I’m continually impressed by what we can throw at the engine without it batting an eye. So far it has scaled with technology very impressively, and we’re targeting the systems that will be out a year from now.

Also, since this is a single player RPG and not a fast-paced online shooter, we don’t have to be as concerned with squeezing out every extra bit of performance from the game as most teams. Atmosphere and detail is priority over frame rate for us. Of course, part of maintaining a suspension of disbelief is maintaining at least a consistent and reasonable frame rate, and our design is going to make even this much optimization a pain…

Whereas Half Life 2 mods are generally quite varied in style/gameplay, the vast majority of mods for the Doom 3 engine basically seem to be expanding on the Doom Universe/storylines (the whole space meets hell saga). Do you feel this is in anyway a reflection on the accessibility/potential of the two games engines?

Paul : I believe the real issue with Half-Life 2 and it's popularity is due to the vast success of Half Life total conversion mods (CS and DOD among others) and so many mod teams decide to go with what is familiar and already known to work. I believe the Doom3 engine has an amazing potential to be modded, but it's going to take some effort to get things going.

Jonathan: Perhaps a reflection of accessibility more than potential… the engine is just as capable as HL2 but maybe the tools aren’t as open-ended. Honestly, I think it has to do with what I saw as a split response to Doom 3 amongst the fan base. With so many expectations, the final product sits on a fence between doing what the original did best, and embracing a slow paced but intense story-driven approach. Most of the released mods seem to push it one way or the other (usually more classic Doom), or otherwise try to augment components of the game that fans felt were lacking. Half Life 2 simply built on what Half Life did so well, and in contrast those mods end up seeing how different they could make the game instead of “fixing” it.

I really wonder how the Doom mod community would be if Id had simply and unabashedly recreated classic Doom in modern form, and left the more atmospheric space opera feel to another game… I personally like the direction Doom 3 was taking things, but would have preferred to see it go all the way in one direction or the other.

Again, with reference to the engine, is there a specific reason you've opted to go with Doom tech? It's a general perception that Half Life 2 or unreal's engine is the way to go for more open, 'varied style' mods, but you seem quite keen on sticking with Doom (and for this we respect you lol) but why is this?

Jonathan : We have a number of reasons for doing so. Aesthetically it was kind of a toss-up especially coming to model/texture support, but we find Doom 3 much more elegant in several ways.

We’ll miss the radiosity/soft shadows (and now HDR), but these capabilities of HL2’s lighting also create some issues. For one, it is important to us that we implement a convincing night/day cycle which would be a huge pain to work out in Source, where in Doom 3 we can simply move the sun around. Also, and this is largely subjective, Doom 3’s unified lighting model creates a more convincing sense of continuous space, since ALL lights and object interact the same way. In Half-Life 2, you have this beautiful but static light mapping for the world, and all the characters and objects inside it seem to obey completely different light physics, like they exist in a different plane. There was a great article (on Gamasutra I believe) that discussed something like this, and it made me realize how I can find even crude and abstract graphics more immersive than some modern CGI.

Doom 3’s robust GUI support will be excellent for all the essential RPG functionality. The fact that mini-games can essentially be programmed into the user interface, in addition to its direct control of the scripting engine, holds some great potential in regard to our feature wish-list.

I also really respect John Carmack’s independence and embrace of the open source community, including the use of OpenGL over DirectX. The fact that he kept virtually everything proprietary to ease the eventual public source release really impresses me, and that attitude is simply something I want to support and be a part of.

Paul : We found that the Half-Life 2 engine just wasn’t capable of producing the tense claustrophobic and eerily desolate environments that we want to see in Ground Zero. The Doom3 engine's ability to create incredible lighting and amazingly detailed surfaces (via awesome texturing) is simple unmatched at this point in time and so we feel that to truly draw the player into the game world the Doom3 engine is the way to go.

In general how would you say developed has been in this, the early stages of the mods progress? I guess that with something as ambitious as you're planning, it's fair to expect there maybe some growing pains from the word go?

Paul : The development of any project in its infancy is slow. I find it difficult to take what has been for a long time only a dream and turn it into something tangible; just as it’s hard to see your baby start to grow up without knit-picking every detail. We are starting to take all the ideas we had sketched out on paper and put them into practice, and that can be a slow process, but as we progress further along I expect development to pick up rapidly.

Jonathan : Growing pains is a good term for it! This is by far the most ambitious project I’ve been involved with, and the largest team I’ve managed. Documentation that was effective for a couple people working together in person definitely does not translate to a large group spread across the world with vastly different schedules. The biggest growing pain has been creating a production framework which contributors can plug their work into while maintaining a consistent style. This has been slow going, but I’m pretty satisfied so far considering we’ve been functioning without any kind of group forum or central repository for game assets.

Hopefully when we get our website launched (which will hopefully launched very soon) and communication between team members improves, production will speed up a bit. But the whole team consists of students doing this as a side project, so we’re being realistic about the timeframe and workload.

What do you have planned in terms of music? Are there plans for any new
scores or are you going to use music from Doom 3?

Paul : We recently started working with an excellent musician who I think will be able to tailor a musical score that fits well with what we are aiming for. If you are interested, our biggest influence has been the Fallout games, but I wouldn’t say that is our sole inspiration.

Jonathan : Ground Zero will feature an all original score thanks to Blaise Douros and possibly other contributors. We’re going for a blend of live and synthesized recording to create a soundtrack closely linked to the visuals, a relationship we’ll play with to keep the player immersed but emotionally on-edge. This is something I admire about movie composer Jeff Rona’s scores. Some other major influences of my own include Godspeed You Black Emperor, Moby’s more ambient tracks, Savage Aural Hotbed for their creative use of found objects as instruments, to name a few. Blaise has been busy with an orchestral score lately, so we’ll have to see what he cooks up later this fall.

GY!BE!!! Respect! Any chance of a release date or is it still a case of When it’s Done?

Paul : When it's done, but hopefully prior to the release of Duke Nuke'm forever.

Jonathan : Yes.

As totally irrelevant as it is, have you seen any of the recently released Doom movie footage? If so what are your thoughts?

Paul : *vomits violently*

Jonathan : *wipes himself off* I’ll just say I haven’t seen it.

Thanks to the Ground Zero team! I'm sure I'm not the only one eagerly waiting to see how this mod turns out. For now you can view some all new art the team have released on the next page, or check out this thread on Doom3world to view some ingame shots

[page=Screenshots]

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Post comment Comments
jlambvo Creator
jlambvo

Developer note: we actually have work here from every artist on the team so far. The first image is a character model WIP by Andrew, the car model is by Owen, the car sketch is by Reto, the environment sketch is a Kimmo piece, the fat guy in boots as a new character from Jennifer, and the nifty metal armored dude is by Jayme. Just to give credit where its due :)

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Koroshiya_Ichi Author
Koroshiya_Ichi

dude you guys need to set up a moddb account :D :P

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methy
methy

Yeah. Looks nice though. I love Fallout.

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