Welcome to the official homepage of The 9th Gate!
The 9th Gate is a 9-level replacement for Episode 4 of The Ultimate Doom. The levels will be themed like the original episode 4 maps, but with hellish stuff and some technology thrown in for a fresh new look. All levels will be made using only the original Doom graphics, and will be totally compatible with the original Doom (?)! There will also be a new soundtrack, featuring some great original music.
February 28th, 2002 - Project Status Update
Karthik first posted this status update at Doomworld and later on his homepage.
Status of maps
E4M1 (Karthik) - completed
E4M2 (Tobias) - in-progress (pics 1, 2, 3 in Doom Center's Gallery)
E4M3 (Karthik) - it's being worked on and it's getting closer and closer to being finished (pics 4, 5, 6, 7 in Doom Center's Gallery)
E4M4 (Damian) - the map itself is built, but changes need to be made (improving existing areas, monster
placement, stuff like that)
E4M5 (Pablo) - completed
E4M6 (Pablo) - completed
E4M7 (Varun) - in the beginning stages (pics 8, 9, 10 in Doom Center's Gallery)
E4M8 (Tobias) - completed, but Tobias was thinking of making a new map in it's place
E4M9 (Damian) - this is the only map we haven't started working on yet
Other resources - A lot of the required music tracks have been finished already, Damian's music is very cool! Varun's made an AWESOME titlepic. Some of the other graphics have been made. Varun will make most of the remaining graphics necessary, Karthik will be doing the level names.
Status of the team
Karthik - busy with college work, not finding time to update this site or his personal page, but no matter
what, he's going to work on his maps (both E4M3 and his recently announced e1map) whenever he finds some time! :)
Tobias - his job keeps him occupied. He is also doing some serious mapping for Visions of Eternity. He
has also kept updating The 9th Gate site now and then.
Damian - his computer was mean to him and crashed a couple of times. Fortunately all of us keep
sending copies of our maps back and forth, so Damian didn't lose too much of what he had done on his level.
Everything's back on track now.
Varun - will be finishing school next month! His Final Exams begin on 14 March, once they are over, he
will have lots of time to work on the project.
Joel will come back to beta test the maps once we have everything done.
As you can see, there HAS been progress, but not as much as we'd like it to be :(. Anyway, we are definitely not going to rush things - we'll be patient and spend as much time on The 9th Gate as we have to. We want these levels to be really good and enjoyable for everyone.
February 16th, 2002 - New Image Gallery
Doomcenter has set up a new image gallery about The 9th Gate. You can see 10 new screenshots there. These shots are of E4M2 by Tobias, E4M3 by Karthik and the new E4M7 map by Varun (which is a different map than that of the screenshots on this site). All these are new maps, and we haven't shown any shots of them before, so make sure to check out the gallery here.
December 18th, 2001 - Some sad news...
Perhaps you have already read it on Karthik's homepage: Our team gets smaller. Pablo left the project some weeks
ago when he became bored of the project, which is taking too much time to get finished in his opinion. Of course we will still use his
two maps, while he has switched to "sleep mode". But we cannot change the
fact that all of us are busy with Real Life™, and so is Varun.
He is in his final year at school and thus he is facing a hard time with lots of exams, and he
won't have any time to work on the 9th Gate until next March, which is really :-(
Joel has a lot of work to do with the other projects that he's participating in, and thus he won't be able to do any progress-testing.
He will be available as beta tester once the project is done, though.
The one's that are left are Karthik, Damian and Tobias, and of course we will continue working on our maps. We won't be working
full speed, because it would be quite useless, but we will keep doing our stuff. Karthik's E4M3 is just a pretty basic map right now
(as far as he has shown us, but that was already some time ago), and Damian still needs to finish his E4M4 and will then start
working on the secret level.
Btw, we were thinking about making Damian's E4M4 one of the later levels, maybe E4M6, because it's so freaking huge. I was
playing it without monsters and it took around 25 minutes to finish it even though I've already played it before and knew my
way through the map. So it might end up at a different place in the final episode.
November 22nd, 2001 - Daddy, look! It's an update!
Wow, count the months...more than four months since the last update! Sorry for the lack of updates, this is surely not the purpose of this site. So now here's an update to sum up all the stuff that happened.
Sadly, progress on The 9th Gate is rather slow, because all of us have got a lot stuff to do in real-life. But still there is
some progress:
- Damians E4M4 is coming together nicely and it's a HUGE level. We talked about changing positions and make this one map 6 or so, since it is so big. Damian is going to tune the gameplay (puzzles) and then add monsters and it will be finished. Since this map is very detailed, it produces VPO's. Another thing that this map caused was a discussion about whether we should make the project require a sourceport for greater detail. We still have not made a decision on this topic, athough a use of sourceports would be useful.
- Karthik recently came up with a first impression on his E4M3, and it looked very interesting. Definitely different from our other maps.
- Varun sent in a new E4M7. It's just a room right now, but it looks awesome.
- Tobias still struggles with his E4M2, he is not quite sure about the layout of the ending part of the map, but otherwise this pomises to be a nice map, too.
- Pablo sits around eating bananas, since he has finished all his maps. He will however do the level title graphics and various other stuff that noone else wants to do. :-)
Some time ago, Doomcenter made a feature about 9th Gate with an interview. In case you haven't read it yet, here's the link: [Click]
Also, some of us have been featured as Wadster of the Week at Doomcenter, each one giving
an interview, and we are speaking a bit about 9th Gate there, too. Check them out:
Karthik: [Click]
Pablo: [Click]
Tobias: [Click]
There might be another Doomcenter feature soon, a new gallery of updated, brandnew screenshots. Stay tuned!
July 2001 - Project Status
4 maps, E4M1, E4M5, E4M6, E4M8 are completed! You can check out screenshots from these levels on the Screenshots page.