The DWmegawad Club plays: Sunlust

Cheers for the extensive write-ups Demon. Glad we see eye-to-eye with the Maelstrom secret battle being the best encounter in the set (which is a damn tall order considering how awesome and fun the whole thing was)!

indeed, cheers for all the colorful commentary. A pleasure to read, and I'll reiterate my appreciation for detailing your observations on the map design. Glad you enjoyed it!

re: story: text-screens are a horrendous way to convey story in doom imo. I find them cringey to write and generally uncomfortable to read (sunlust has them completely disabled in zdoom). That said, you managed to pickup the general idea we had in mind for the last episode very accurately: alien techno-temple stationed at the core of some giant cavern. The original plan for 29/30 was to have a sky that indicated you were in a cave somewhere, but simple void looked too good :D

re: the cl-1 thing: a known issue, deemed minor. I'm not sure how cl-1 even works exactly, does "default" complevel imply it just uses whatever values are currently in your config file? if so, would this issue be solved by just changing some default compat option? if if so so, would that cause any sync issues with other people's different config files? If I wasn't lazy I could just look in the source to find the answer myself, but yeah.. lazy.

re: stuck nobles: yup, I suck. a last minute change to that area (making it completely nonexistent on <=hmp in response to a surprising amount of "this map is too long" complaints) resulted in the goat-party. not pretty, not also not worth desyncing existing demos to fix. plus, I mentally checked out from ever editing this thing again :p, so unfortunately no bug-fixed GOTY edition, it's onwards to Sunlust 2: Solar Erotica.

re: sunder comparison: pretty much inevitable. large-scale + surreal/oppressive tone + monochromatic theme + set-piece slaughter = no question it'll come up. Of the similar design principles we use, I'd like to think we took them far enough in certain directions as to be noteworthy on their own. I'd argue in defense of our fight designs, general layouts, stylistic flairs, regardless. Certainly speaks to the iconic-ness of sunder though, that certain textures or designs (e.g. 64/32-grid macro-structures, bright highlight textures + focused structural texture selection) are pretty much "owned" by that mapset now.

congratulations for valiantly going on and finishing this megawad in fda mode. it's interesting to see how you manage to find the right strategy, mostly - not flashy maneuvers, but solid, efficient play, and the comments are probably the most detailed ones you'll ever find for some doom maps.

I've been secretly reading up on your venture through this WAD DotW and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much for an enterntaining playthrough!

Thanks guys, glad you got some enjoyment out of my rambling. And I know you're reading this Steve, don't think we've forgotten about you--you still owe us all a detailed recounting of your relaxing stay in the pits of Blood, Devastation, Death, War, and Horror that comprise the second half of the WAD!

Ribbiks said:

...it's onwards to Sunlust 2: Solar Erotica.

Be still, mine heart....

Here's my playthrough I started for Sunlust!:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgS1ZoidySwNIX8OC49H3UJrkgegCRUVf

I hope it's not too late to join now! :)

fdas for sunlust (with saves, im not mad)

started in January 2018 finished in January 2019 lol

full disclosure ive watched lots of uv-maxes for some of these maps so theyre not really fdas, more like category 2 (if you have participated in the Ironman threads).

apologies for the bump but i checked with dobu if posts like this would be ok so blame him

i think some area could see some changes to make it more challenging, like the pink/hellnight area in map 15, all the little cracks/fissure in the cave should be closed with bars(when the combat start) to prevent player to stall easily and killing all the pink without exposing too much himself to the hellnight

5 hours ago, Amph said:

i think some area could see some changes to make it more challenging, like the pink/hellnight area in map 15, all the little cracks/fissure in the cave should be closed with bars(when the combat start) to prevent player to stall easily and killing all the pink without exposing too much himself to the hellnight

Ribbiks, please implement this immediately.

19 hours ago, Amph said:

i think some area could see some changes to make it more challenging, like the pink/hellnight area in map 15, all the little cracks/fissure in the cave should be closed with bars(when the combat start) to prevent player to stall easily and killing all the pink without exposing too much himself to the hellnight

This is a megawad released in 2015, way past the point where any changes are going to be made...

sssh Horus :p

is this even possible on nightmare?