MY FIRST EXPERIENCES WITH FPS CREATOR
So then, FPS Creator... I knew about it back in the day, but for some reason I never actually got it. I still harboured dreams of making a GTA, and you can't make a GTA with something intended for only making FPS games! Though I still could have crapped out a game about shooting zombies in the fens, I suppose...
Anyway, a few years later I was at university, and saw an ad for FPS Creator X10, which had physics!! The buzzword in gaming at the time (there was even talk of future computers having a dedicated "physics card" alongside the graphics card), and also changeable water levels, so you could flood a level. The computer I had at the time only had DirectX 9, and Windows XP. I was briefly considering getting a cheap Netbook with Vista, in the hope of Running FPS Creator X10... though it would have run like crap on such a machine, if it even opened at all!
So, I didn't actually get FPS Creator "at the time". In 2026 I was playing about with The 3D Game Maker, and that reminded me that Darkbasic Software also made FPS Creator. By that time DirectX10 was old hat, so of course I could grab X10 for cheap / free now and play about with it, right?
Well, actually, no! X10 was kind of locked-in to Windows Vista only, and now considered an evolutionary dead end. The old FPS Creator "Classic" or "X9" had, however, been modded to backport the X10 features, and several others besides. There were several mods, building on one another, culminating in FPS Creator Black Ice, so off I went to download that.
I checked out the instructions (you can't "just" run it, Darkbasic's famous jank interferes with it, so you have to make "special" preparations) and fired it up...
Now, I am running this on an old, second-hand Microsoft Surface from 2019. But it's got 8gb of RAM. The original FPS creator's recommended requirements were 1gb of RAM (and in 2006, that was a beast of a machine), so of course it'll work fine, right? It dutifully "checked some files for me"... for about 10 minutes. Getting rather annoyed, I fired off a printscreen... and this somehow "woke it up", and I was in!
I chucked down a quick room with a player start, and gave it a go... complete darkness! Turns out FPS Creator only has lightmapping, there's no "ambient" light, like you'd get in Doom or something*. Everything is complete blackness. So, it's time to place some lights, I quickly exit out of the game aaaand...
*-Actually, I much later found out you set the ambient light for your level in the graphics options while you play it! Yes, that's right, you set 'your' ambient light during a playtest, and that's the ambient light your whole project 'bakes' with when you make it. Hope you aren't working on more than one project at once! That sun-baked Wild West canyon and zombie-infested deep crypt are going to have exactly the same light level, if you aren't careful. Oh Darkbasic!
Yep, after playtesting, it just doesn't go back to the editor, complete emptiness and unresponsiveness. Can't even close it via the "three fingers". A quick log out and log in, and I re-open the file...
Now it's just completely unresponsive and un-closable while "loading map data...". That whole one, unlit room I made! A complete re-start later, to ensure it's "cleared" from memory, and I get...
Yep, very informative...
Two minutes later, while I'm farting about doing something else, I get a flash of false hope... the blank box changed colour!
And, while going to do some colouring while I waited, it finally sees fit to give me this extremely helpful error message.
Another full restart, and faff with the permissions of the folders (every single file and folder FPS Creator belonged to now had full admin access to everything) and what's this? It actually OPENED! ...and froze for ages on the "checking files for you" screen. Dare I hope???
Another printscreen "woke it up" and... I'm in! Quick, build something before it realises it's working properly, and fucks up! Making absolutely sure I'd saved, I dared to try a test play.........
WE HAVE GAME!!!
Aaaand then, when I exited the game, up it was to it's old tricks again, lock-up and do nothing!
I took a break (by doing my actual job), and came back to it later, deciding to try such things as door-making, outside areas, and so on. A quick test play and guess what happened....?
I got sent to the warehouse for a long weight
So, much later, I give it another go, appreciating that I'll have to be patient with the file checking. Then I get hit with this...
The level I HAVEN'T EVEN MADE YET is "too large"!
And also on a future occasion, I made some rooms and saved. Even saving overwhelmed it and caused a blank-map-no-response.
If it's that bad, why is there even a section on this blog for FPS Creator? Well, because later I bought a Dell mini-desktop with sixteen gigs of RAM, and it ran fine on that! Sixteen gigs... in 2006 that was still a reasonable hard drive, let alone RAM. I know Black Ice have added some improved graphical trickery, but that much? Anyway, the mini-desktop later abruptly died (tried to plug a portable DVD drive into it, that was too much, apparently), and I got exactly the same model of Dell, only as a full-size desktop this time, to replace it. Hey, the budget was extremely tight, had to take what I could get. This one has 16gb of RAM and 8gb of graphics card, so I can develop Black Ice games just fine.
I also compiled a game into an .exe and put it on the Surface, it ran fine on that, so it can play the games, just not make them!