News an extremely early build of the "Rise of The Triad" Wolfenstein 3D expansion has leaked online (also includes internal ID Software tools)

[Krvavi Abadas]

(confirmed by Scott Miller himself.)

as the story goes, ID eventually lost interest in having the team at Apogee make an expansion. and so the team drastically retooled the game, turning it into an original title using a heavily modified version of the base engine.

Right. We had a deal with id to make a sequel. We had the whole story laid out. We hired Tom Hall, who was an original founder of id -- he was running that project.

We were about six months into it, and we had done tons of art, levels, you name it. Then I got call from John Romero saying, "Hey, you guys need to know that we're canceling that project." He never really gave me a reason why. I suspect it's because he didn't want that project being released around the same time that Doom was coming out.

So we were stuck with all these assets that we had done. It was a pretty cold-blooded move on his part, to be honest with you. We basically had to come up with a story that would allow us to use as much of these assets as possible. And so Tom Hall came up with a story that eventually became Rise of the Triad, and a lot of what is seen in that game was actually developed originally for the Wolfenstein version of Rise of the Triad.

the build at this current stage is actually the least interesting part, mostly being an experiment with integrating floor and ceiling textures into Wolf3D. pretty much any wall texture can be used here, with the "F" key swapping the floor texture in particular.
while there's a few modified/new assets matching with it's intention of being an expansion. most of it is pretty much identical to the base game.
Apogee had previously published the original design document for the game many years ago, and several of the assets shown are used in this build.

on the other hand, there's the internal tools bundled in.

the TED5 map editor is included, originally created for Commander Keen. John Romero was somehow able to retool it into being able to create levels for Wolfenstein. and Apogee would further improve it to work with the finalized version of ROTT.
a modified version of this build (with edited graphical tiles) previously resurfaced in the official release of the Super 3D Noah's Ark Source Code. while an even earlier build was bundled with the "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement" tech demo shared by John Romero in 2009. and Apogee's own final version was officially released by them at some point in the late 90s.

IGRAB is even more notable, as it was an internal compression tool designed to shrink game data sizes. from what i can tell, this has not managed to resurface anywhere up until this point. aside from some brief mentions in the Wolf 3D source.

there's also a selection of .bat files for converting assets, intended to be combined with those tools.

---

i'm not too sure if this was the "last" build Apogee made prior to it's retool, but it's likely this was secretly leaked for the same reason as the previous (E.G., the numerous Duke Nukem builds, that early DOS version of Prey.) major releases. the current rights holders for most of the Apogee/3D Realms IPs being unable to contact Bethesda for permission to share the unmodified Wolf 3D assets.
the upcoming "Ludicrous Edition" remaster is supposed to add back in a bunch of unused content, but it's rather tellingly been all stuff made after the retool.

oh, and there's one other fun detail worth noting.
while ROTT's engine was drastically modified in it's final form, that initial baseline of "just" adding floors and ceilings to the renderer would eventually make it's way to another Apogee title, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold.

while there's no explicit confirmation yet, it's likely JAM Productions was using a similar if not identical technique to what's shown in the ROTT proto.

 

[Yamanoi]

Love older ID stuff.

 

[Tangerine_Cookie]

This is incredibly cool. I'm a fangirl of the Wolf3D/Doom-like raycasting engines and their look, and learning more about how those came to be and the tools they developed to make them, and this kind of story, is always amazing.

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

• Runs at a very high framerate (not locked?)
• Uses WAD file for graphics.
• DOS/4G built-in
• No audio
• Masked walls
• Animated walls
• Animated sprites
• Sprites have shifted pixel patterns (torch especially). Similar to the pixel column drawing in Blake Stone (except AoG 1.0)
• Shading (Only floors and walls. Sprites aren't affected)
• Floor/Ceiling Textures (Inaccurately shifting around in 320x240. Bit like in Operation Bodycount)
• Simple movement physics
• The player can walk through doors, but cannot open them.
• Guards open doors, but walk through before they finish opening.
• Quits to DOS if the player enters NEWGAME while being ingame and prints a few values (fps, player angle, foc).

yes, it's that WAD format.
however it's an older version that was similarly used in various prototypes of DOOM (publicly released with ID's approval). so you'll need tools specfically designed to extract those older versions.

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

this would be about 5 months before the shareware release.
notable features include the usage of the alternate guard designs (the game was originally meant to use both randomly, but this was taken out due to it eating too much RAM.) a drastically different menu system, and a wholly new unused music track likely composed by Lee Jackson himself.

i get the feeling this was meant to be officially posted online by Apogee (since it lacks the Bethesda infringing Wolf 3d assets) to promote the new remaster, but it got out a bit earlier than intended.