Paradise [v2.1 multiplayer release || 10/11/2020]

The kerning between the P and the A of the logo hurts me. P    ARADISE.

Otherwise, looks cool. I want to finish my max playthrough of Hell Forged first but I'll take on this probably tomorrow.

Very excited to try this out! Screenshots look great, gameplay changes sound interesting, etc.! Will take a couple of days for me though.

I like

I finished playing through the whole thing and I have to say that I'm very impressed. All maps are very well designed, and leave me scratching my head how it's possible to make levels that are complex and simple at the same time. I never felt like I know where I am in a map, but found my way every time anyway. I guess they are pretty linear, but don't feel like it at all.

Visually, they're also top notch. Wherever you look, there are some gorgeous views to behold. Though after a while it is noticeable that many textures repeat a lot. So some places may lack distinctness. Other than that, amazing job.

Despite the fact that the wad is made for GZDoom, all maps feel very much like Boom. That may be due to features such as dynamic lights or 3d floors being nowhere in sight.

Gameplay-wise I'd say that it's very enjoyable. Most encounters are superbly designed and the combat is fun. The addition of new weapons and enemies really enriches the whole experience. It adds a unique flavour and personality to the wad, which I greatly respect. I have no issue with the new enemies, but weapons are a different thing. Most of them are good, but the assault rifle is really unsatisfying to use and stands out as the worst weapon in the mod to me. I love the idea of the Scrap Gun, but with the quad shotgun sprite I was kind of expecting it to be a lot stronger. I got the hang of it quickly, and it was a lot of fun, but I still feel like it's a bit underpowered. It's probably my favorite weapon so I'd like for it to be more useful, but it may be just a stupid bias.

I have one thing to say about the archvile fight in map05 (I think). I love the idea of hiding below the ground and coming back up to shoot, but I don't think it's executed very well. Mainly due to the fact that the holes are too small to get in them quickly enough. It's really hard not to run over them mid-combat, and I got blasted by the archviles more than I can count in the process. I didn't want to bother with that fight anymore, so I just cheated my way through.

The very last fight in the wad shared the same fate. It was really annoying to be forced to run on acid while not having any rad suits for such a long time. I also felt like there wasn't enough BFG ammo. It had a pretty interesting gimmick though. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for slaughter.

One last thing. After including so many custom features into the wad, for the love of god, why didn't you change the invulnerability effect? Being blinded by a literal white screen is not my idea of a fun powerup. It's just my personal opinion, but any fight that uses a vanilla invulnerability sphere is automatically ten times worse.

But that's it from me. Great job Tango! This is an amazing wad and I'm really curious to see the continuation of this project, especially after that cliffhanger ;)

This mapset is made of awesome.

The only thing that threw me was the Scrapgun, which from the graphic I assumed would an actual quad-shotgun, rather than a rapid fire weapon. So I don't know if it's worth replacing the graphic with some sort of rotary shotgun. Eriance did a Streetsweeper some years ago.

10 hours ago, Gez said:

The kerning between the P and the A of the logo hurts me. P    ARADISE.

looool ok that's fair, how about n    ow?

@Lorenz0 cheers mate, thanks so much for giving it a go and for all the kind words and criticism :D

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Though after a while it is noticeable that many textures repeat a lot. So some places may lack distinctness.

for sure. one of my biggest weaknesses as a mapper is definitely creating visual variety D: that's a skill I'll try to develop more after this mapset is finalized. I'm in awe of all the other mappers nowadays that are able to simultaneously keep their designs feeling neat and clean, while also making things hugely varied, as it seems like a really tough balance to handle.

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Most of them are good, but the assault rifle is really unsatisfying to use and stands out as the worst weapon in the mod to me.

I feel that :( I really struggled coming up with a solution to make a rapid-fire hitscan weapon feel as satisfying as the punch of all the shotties. did you feel it was unsatisfying because of something more topical like its sprites or sounds, or was it the underlying mechanics that felt unsatisfying to you?

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I love the idea of the Scrap Gun, but with the quad shotgun sprite I was kind of expecting it to be a lot stronger. I got the hang of it quickly, and it was a lot of fun, but I still feel like it's a bit underpowered. It's probably my favorite weapon so I'd like for it to be more useful, but it may be just a stupid bias.

haha not stupid at all! maybe the sprites do play a big part in making it seem less powerful than it is (or at least, I think it is). I haven't done an actual DPS calculation for the weapon vs the SSG for example, but I think 1 full shot of the scrap gun does 150 damage vs the SSG's 210 per shot, so that's 600 damage vs 210 for a single "clip," but that is obviously offset a lot by the slow reload of the scrap gun, and its spread.

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I have one thing to say about the archvile fight in map05 (I think). I love the idea of hiding below the ground and coming back up to shoot, but I don't think it's executed very well. Mainly due to the fact that the holes are too small to get in them quickly enough. It's really hard not to run over them mid-combat, and I got blasted by the archviles more than I can count in the process.

I can definitely see how that would be frustrating, I'm not sure how best to adjust it though :( I added these little raised walls on each pit to give you a sort of backboard that you could run into to prevent overstepping, and I've adapted pretty well to those backboards, but it is another thing the player kind of needs to learn about the fight. if the holes were much bigger I think viles on the edge would be able to target you even when you're at the bottom, which is why they are their current size. maybe the half-walls should all be the full 128px wide instead of just 64px?

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The very last fight in the wad shared the same fate. It was really annoying to be forced to run on acid while not having any rad suits for such a long time. I also felt like there wasn't enough BFG ammo. It had a pretty interesting gimmick though. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for slaughter.

definitely noted. I'll consider adding another rad suit and some more BFG ammo on non-extreme difficulties for that fight.

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One last thing. After including so many custom features into the wad, for the love of god, why didn't you change the invulnerability effect?

hahah good point, I'll change this in the next beta :D

@Urthar thanks so much :D when I was first making the scrap gun I spent a while browsing around for other sprites to use, but I didn't feel like anything I saw (including all the old Demon Eclipse sprites) fit my two criteria of 1) visually meshing well with the other weapon sprites and 2) having sufficiently dynamic reload frames that weren't just the weapon lowering out of sight for a second while an implied reload happened. I probably won't get to changing the sprites at this point in this set, but I'll definitely do some exploration for alternatives afterward, as I intend to release and maintain the gameplay mod separately soon. rotating barrels sound perfect though, that would really be ideal. if we had any top-notch sprite artists in the community that did commissions I would totally jump on that

9 hours ago, Tango said:

one of my biggest weaknesses as a mapper is definitely creating visual variety

You did pretty well with the secret maps though

9 hours ago, Tango said:

did you feel it was unsatisfying because of something more topical like its sprites or sounds, or was it the underlying mechanics that felt unsatisfying to you?

I'm not sure, it just felt weak as hell, like a peashooter. I guess it's all of the above. I'm not sure how to change that for the better without remaking the weapon completely. But on the other hand I don't think you have to, since it's the least used weapon in the wad anyway.

9 hours ago, Tango said:

I added these little raised walls on each pit to give you a sort of backboard that you could run into to prevent overstepping

That's a great idea.

Played the first few levels, I've reached the yellow key of Emerald Babylon so far, and did go through the secret levels. Continuous,  default skill (tough). Gameplay is very, very tight -- perhaps a bit too tight for my tastes, in most encounters there's very little margin for error and I'm quite often overwhelmed by the mobs. Lots of reloading to get through an encounter. It's not unfair, though, there's always a way to get out of a fight largely unscathed if you maneuver well and have a bit of luck.

15 hours ago, Tango said:

looool ok that's fair, how about n    ow?

Better but they could still be brought closer to each other. The A and the R practically touch, so the same thing should be done with the P and the A.

Same for the in-game font, I noticed a "FA" pair somewhere, I wonder if it's possible to address this, perhaps (since the font is all-caps) a lower-case A could have a kerning value allowing it to glue itself to the previous letter while the upper case wouldn't? Anyway it's very very minor.

18 hours ago, Lorenz0 said:

Despite the fact that the wad is made for GZDoom, all maps feel very much like Boom. That may be due to features such as dynamic lights or 3d floors being nowhere in sight.

Haha, don't click this spoiler then:

I guess I'm blind

thanks so much for the feedback @Gez, it is greatly appreciated :D if you plan on finishing things out and playing map05 too, I think you would probably have a much better time playing that map on Casual, since the margin for error should be a bit wider in general, and map05 isn't super forgiving in the first place haha.

yeah good points about the kerning, I'll revisit the title pic in this post and do the same for the in game graphics too, since most all of the bigfont graphics are actual images I could pretty easily edit

MAP04 end fight: my strategy ended up being to run to the start once the enemies start flooding in and hoping an archvile blast helps me back to the teleporter. Then I can escape and let the enemies work out their anger issues among themselves. And honestly, I needed this cheesing tactic because when some poison clouds appear in the dense crowd, my FPS drop enough to make the fight unmanageable otherwise. Yeah, my compy is getting old.

I'm handling MAP05 okay so far, skipped out on most of the fight for the yellow key in order to rush to the escape teleporter, then I can go back to the entrance to taunt the crowd with a game of peekaboo until only a few cybies remained. Then they could be disposed of by peekaboo SSG and the monsters stuck in alcoves moped up.

Currently at 300/523 kills, 83/91 items, 2/3 secrets, getting psyched to trigger the next big fight.

Update: arch-viles love to make me jump. My strategy for the penultimate fight ended up being running all the way to the end with BFG, get rid of archies and pyros ASAP, preferably before they can even hurt me, and then get a relatively safe place from which to bombard the caco horde with the rocket launcher. However, during one my attempts, an archie blasted me beyond the bars. Thanks for the sequence break buddy, but that wasn't what I wanted, so reload. Now on to the ultimate fight, however, a friendly neighborhood arch-vile just spawned very close to me after hitting the switch, and long story short I got sent back up to the previous location. My priority was then to hammer away the diabolists with the rocket launcher so that I could stay longer on the ledge to incite infighting and just get a sense of what's happening. The bulk of the last onslaught could then be safely cheesed, now I just need to jump back down and mop up the remaining turret mobs.

Thanks to these cheesing techniques, I felt MAP04 and MAP05 ended up being overall easier than MAP03/MAP31/MAP32.

Suggestion: tag your weapons and enemies. Weapon names are shown when cycling through them if you've enabled the feature; monster names are shown when they're in the crosshairs in some HUD mods.

Really sick wad. Hopefully more people get to play this one. Don't really have much negative stuff to say about it to be honest.. wish there was more. Really dig the red vile especially.

I wish there was a more traditional style hud. That is my one complaint. The hud which is included has really small numbers and doesn't show me the statistics for all of my weapons' ammo supplies.

Will be using this as a baseline for pretty much any zdoom stuff I play in the future. Definitely my favorite thing to come out so far since the last cacoward season.

Looking forward to more.

hahah I really appreciate you detailing your escapades Gez, I'd say the cheese was well-earned in this case. glad you were able to finish it out!

On 5/4/2019 at 3:39 AM, Gez said:

And honestly, I needed this cheesing tactic because when some poison clouds appear in the dense crowd, my FPS drop enough to make the fight unmanageable otherwise.

I didn't realize until recently that it's the ripper property of the poison clouds that's causing the performance issues in this fight. I'm considering changing them from rippers into passthru projectiles with A_Explode calls every few frames to help with performance, but I'd have to test out whether that would change their balance drastically or anything.

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Suggestion: tag your weapons and enemies. Weapon names are shown when cycling through them if you've enabled the feature; monster names are shown when they're in the crosshairs in some HUD mods.

aha great call, I will definitely do that. I really ought to do some testing with some HUD mods too to make sure nothing else is severely broken if it can be prevented. thanks again Gez :D

On 5/4/2019 at 12:16 PM, Killer5 said:

Really sick wad. Hopefully more people get to play this one. Don't really have much negative stuff to say about it to be honest.. wish there was more. Really dig the red vile especially.

cheers mate, it was fantastic watching you blast through it on stream yesterday. I went back last night and watched the rest of the VOD for map04 and map05, since I wasn't able to fully catch those live. it was pretty awesome watching you figure out all the fights quite quickly - at times you made it look too easy haha.

I'll definitely be looking into adding an alternative, more traditional HUD too! I've toyed with the idea lately but never really started working on one, but you've given me good cause to.

thanks so much for playing and for all the kind words, you are a gem :D

p.s. Benjogami after rewatching the vod of the stream I see that I completely ignored you when you said hi, my bad D:

32 minutes ago, Tango said:

glad you were able to finish it out!

Loved the unexpected Daggerfall snow theme in MAP06.

27 minutes ago, Tango said:

I'm considering changing them from rippers into passthru projectiles with A_Explode calls every few frames to help with performance

I'm not entirely sure if that'd help, there are fire grids in the last episode of Hocus Doom that are made with actors calling A_Explode on a very short radius constantly and it really tanked my FPS too. It's still worth testing to check.

This was really enjoyable until the end. I played it last on my stream. It felt like a Skillsaw wad almost. But with some surprise slaughter elements like BTSX. Also, this is a great example of how music should be done in a WAD. It almost felt like Sega or Sonic music. Also on map two, I swear I heard a little bit of the OLD DBZ theme. Though I just gave up on the end. I will say that was my fault more than the wad's. 

I thought there was an update that stated this was 5 maps. But I think I may have been wrong. So yeah, my bad on the misinformation. 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/420720364

There are five main maps (MAP01-MAP05), two secret maps (MAP31-MAP32, accessed from MAP03), and one game over map (MAP06) that's there just to prevent getting into the vanilla Doom II levels. And a TITLEMAP if you want to count that.

13 minutes ago, Gez said:

There are five main maps (MAP01-MAP05), two secret maps (MAP31-MAP32, accessed from MAP03), and one game over map (MAP06) that's there just to prevent getting into the vanilla Doom II levels. And a TITLEMAP if you want to count that.

Ahh that makes sense. I gotta give this a re-through then. Try to UV-max it. 

8 hours ago, Odorousbag87 said:

This was really enjoyable until the end. I played it last on my stream. It felt like a Skillsaw wad almost. But with some surprise slaughter elements like BTSX. Also, this is a great example of how music should be done in a WAD. It almost felt like Sega or Sonic music. Also on map two, I swear I heard a little bit of the OLD DBZ theme. Though I just gave up on the end. I will say that was my fault more than the wad's.

this is awesome, thanks so much for streaming this mate :D can't wait to go through the VOD today! yeah others have definitely noted that the music sounds like Sonic too haha. the music all comes from 90s arcade shoot-em-up games, which seem to often have a similar upbeat-ness about them like Sonic tracks often do. very glad that you enjoyed the wad though! I'll be making some small changes to that fight you ended up in map05 to make dodging the AVs a wee bit easier

edit: also, pretty funny seeing TracexDump in your chat say "We played a clan of mapmakers called the Jetsons lol" because I was on Jetsons lol

1 hour ago, Tango said:

 

this is awesome, thanks so much for streaming this mate :D can't wait to go through the VOD today! yeah others have definitely noted that the music sounds like Sonic too haha. the music all comes from 90s arcade shoot-em-up games, which seem to often have a similar upbeat-ness about them like Sonic tracks often do. very glad that you enjoyed the wad though! I'll be making some small changes to that fight you ended up in map05 to make dodging the AVs a wee bit easier

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that fight. In the VOD I do say, typically I am not accustomed to this level of difficulty, this was especially true for Map04 when I had the two cybies to contend with. That was UV blind for me as well. One thing I did note that if you have always run on then you clear the holes. So it forced me to utilize a function not many other wads do and that is walk. Shocking, Doom guy has a walk. I found this to be interesting if intended. 

2 minutes ago, Odorousbag87 said:

One thing I did note that if you have always run on then you clear the holes. So it forced me to utilize a function not many other wads do and that is walk. Shocking, Doom guy has a walk. I found this to be interesting if intended. 

hah I didn't even consider one might do that, that's a pretty clever usage of walking. the intended strategy is using those little 32px tall walls behind each pit as a "backboard" that you can run into to prevent yourself from overstepping the holes, so it requires the player to be careful about and sort of plan their positioning throughout the fight so that they are always lined up with the next backboard. but I'm going to make the backboards a bit wider in the next beta so that it requires a bit less precision to use them

1 minute ago, Tango said:

 

hah I didn't even consider one might do that, that's a pretty clever usage of walking. the intended strategy is using those little 32px tall walls behind each pit as a "backboard" that you can run into to prevent yourself from overstepping the holes, so it requires the player to be careful about and sort of plan their positioning throughout the fight so that they are always lined up with the next backboard. but I'm going to make the backboards a bit wider in the next beta so that it requires a bit less precision to use them

If that's the case, the manc makes that strat extremely difficult. he gets rezed about 30% of the time if you don't stun lock the archies as they come out. Which means trying to hit that backboard while dodging the archie and his rapid-fire make it difficult. I also noticed mancs in this wad have one more fire animation than the vanilla mancs.  While this wasn't a problem in early maps, for this section your moving way too much for the backboards. But again, I didn't find it to be a problem as I have seen some wads use a similar sort of set up. Again, I think back to Valiant in the don't kill the manc level. But in this case, it's encouraged to kill him. 

Really great set of levels here, much improved from v1, which was a little too harshly balanced IMO. I remember the two vile  and rev pit on map03 in particular being near impossible to hold without being overwhelmed by teleporting revs.

I did a mostly non-blind stream on extreme difficulty yesterday if you are interested, but honestly it won't be that informative:

I also felt inspired to make a demo for map05, after figuring out how to handle some of the nastier traps.

One small question: did you increase the base health of arch viles? For some reason I was completely incapable of killing them with four ssg blasts in my playthroughs. A minor point, but it threw off my rhythm a bit and combined with the rocket damage nerf it made them feel strangely tanky.

51 minutes ago, koren said:

Really great set of levels here, much improved from v1, which was a little too harshly balanced IMO. I remember the two vile  and rev pit on map03 in particular being near impossible to hold without being overwhelmed by teleporting revs.

thanks so much koren :D yeah in hindsight I don't know what the hell possessed me to balance that fight that way in v1, it was bananas.

informative or not, it never gets old watching folks play your maps on stream, so I will very happily start making my way through the VOD today, thanks so much for recording it! also very much looking forward to watching the map05 demo; it'll be a lot of fun to see someone run it on Extreme with full knowledge.

58 minutes ago, koren said:

One small question: did you increase the base health of arch viles?

hmm I don't believe that I did, but I'll double check later today when I have an opportunity

23 hours ago, Odorousbag87 said:

Which means trying to hit that backboard while dodging the archie and his rapid-fire make it difficult. I also noticed mancs in this wad have one more fire animation than the vanilla mancs.

bit of a late response here, but yeah you make some good points about the manc there, I am considering removing him from Tough and maybe putting another hell knight there instead or something. the mancs should have the same # of volleys as vanilla (3), but they fire a few frames faster I think, and the fact that the projectiles come from their cannons rather than the center of their body makes the projectiles somewhat harder to dodge

On 5/6/2019 at 11:30 AM, koren said:

One small question: did you increase the base health of arch viles?

just following up on this... ok apparently I did. I don't remember when or why I made this change; I imagine it must have been quite a while ago, because I've been working on this gameplay mod steadily for over a year. but looks like the viles are at 850hp instead of the vanilla 700. if I hadn't already balanced these maps to this point, I would go back and change it, because I can't think of a good justification for this change haha. I intend to keep making maps for this gameplay mod though, so I will most certainly revert that post-Paradise

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• Normalized damage across the board! Each player and monster attack now does a set, non-random amount of damage. The non-random values are generally what the average random version would be. A projectile formerly dealing between 10 and 20 damage would now do 15, for example.

This. So much this. I'm going to have to play this even if it doesn't support gameplay and monster mods simply because of guaranteed damage.
Few things get me fuming like bad RNG rolls in most other doom mods.

Also, once I have a working mouse and keyboard again in a week and don't have to rely on a controller, that instant weapon switching is going to make my jiggly bits wiggle.

Awesome stuff. I thought it was balanced a little on the difficult side, you might want to consider scaling down the 2 lower difficulties a bit to make it more accessible (especially since it's a gameplay mod, I'm sure there are less skilled players out there who might want to enjoy all the delicious new gameplay elements without hitting a brick wall).

Are you planning a full campaign? I'm not a mapper but I have to imagine that mappers out there might want to collaborate with you on this. IMO this is really good and deserves a full campaign.

As it stands even in beta form this is tremendous. Thanks for all your hard work.

Hey Tango, I gave Paradise a try to test a freshly installed GZDoom and wow its gorgeous! I love how colorful it is and how green is so heavily used.

I've been liking the music as well, the arcadey sound suits the fast paced combat. The gameplay gives off a Valiant esque vibe which I really dig.

And like Valiant, it's a pretty challenging set of levels. I started out on tough with pistol starts but I had to lower it to casual by map 02.

If there's anything I'd like to say about the guns it's that I'd like an autoreload when empty and the ability to start a reload in the middle of firing.

While the whole thing plays and looks great I could only make it to level 3 because Paradise isn't especially friendly to my sad Intel HD laptop. I didn't really see anything below 60 frames in the first level, but I start seeing more of it in map 2, and by level 3 it was consistently under 60 fps. Which is a shame because by the time I was getting into Paradise, I was getting some pretty bad performance. Oh the pain of gaming with an integrated GPU.

All that said, best of luck finishing Paradise! It looks stunning and plays great and I hope to play its final release with a better setup soon!

21 hours ago, AschTheConjurer said:

This. So much this. I'm going to have to play this even if it doesn't support gameplay and monster mods simply because of guaranteed damage.

haha I'm glad you share my enthusiasm for de-randomized damage. I do like the game a lot more when I know I'm not going to possibly instadie from a random rev rocket D:

@Fatalis @chowbar thank you both so much for playing and for the kind words :D

4 hours ago, Fatalis said:

I thought it was balanced a little on the difficult side, you might want to consider scaling down the 2 lower difficulties a bit to make it more accessible

noted! did you have any specific situations in mind on Casual/Light that you felt were too harshly balanced? or was it more across the board? I'm definitely open to making more adjustments on the lower difficulties though, as yeah I would like this to be as accessible as possible. I think a lot of the more in-depth feedback I've gotten so far has been from folks that tend to play on higher difficulties, so I would definitely not be surprised if the target audience for Light/Casual is not as well catered to as they should be.

4 hours ago, Fatalis said:

Are you planning a full campaign? I'm not a mapper but I have to imagine that mappers out there might want to collaborate with you on this. IMO this is really good and deserves a full campaign.

haha you are much too kind, thank you. I really appreciate the feedback :D it would be awesome someday for Paradise to just be one episode of many in a larger megawad or something - but I'm going to just sort of see where my inspiration takes me and go from there. but in any case, I do intend to keep building similar GZDoom mapsets with this gameplay mod, whether it's more ambitious episodes like this, or some smaller ones that don't take me so goddamn long to produce. some sort of collab would be awesome too! hopefully after I release the standalone gameplay mod from Paradise in a few weeks, other folks might start to show some interest in building stuff for it, so we'll see where that goes.

3 hours ago, chowbar said:

Hey Tango, I gave Paradise a try to test a freshly installed GZDoom and wow its gorgeous! I love how colorful it is and how green is so heavily used. 

thank you so much :D

3 hours ago, chowbar said:

If there's anything I'd like to say about the guns it's that I'd like an autoreload when empty and the ability to start a reload in the middle of firing.

ahh autoreload is a great idea. I'll try to make that an option. would you be able to elaborate on what exactly you mean by "ability to start a reload in the middle of firing"?

as for your performance woes... yeah, I can definitely see that happening :( even with all the post-processing settings (like bloom and ambient occlusion) turned off, it's probably going to be tough to avoid those issues on an integrated GPU. map03 is probably the least performant map, as it's really one big giant open space. map04 and map05 have some pretty heavy areas too in a few places, but nothing as extreme as map03 I think. I do intend to be a lot more mindful of performance in the future when making outdoor maps like this, but I really kind of designed myself into a corner on these maps haha. on the bright side, map31 and map32 probably wouldn't give you any performance issues, as they don't have the same giant, tree-filled vistas of the main maps

28 minutes ago, Tango said:

would you be able to elaborate on what exactly you mean by "ability to start a reload in the middle of firing"?

 

as for your performance woes... yeah, I can definitely see that happening :( even with all the post-processing settings (like bloom and ambient occlusion) turned off, it's probably going to be tough to avoid those issues on an integrated GRU. map03 is probably the least performant map, as it's really one big giant open space. map04 and map05 have some pretty heavy areas too in a few places, but nothing as extreme as map03 I think. I do intend to be a lot more mindful of performance in the future when making outdoor maps like this, but I really kind of designed myself into a corner on these maps haha. on the bright side, map31 and map32 probably wouldn't give you any performance issues, as they don't have the same giant, tree-filled vistas of the main maps

Oh right of course! I worded it a bit strangely but I think in a previous version of Brutal Doom you could reload the shotgun immediately after the pump animation by pressing reload as the animation was happening. That's what I was trying to describe. But I just downloaded the latest Brutal Doom to jog my memory and of course it's gone. I swear it was there before lol

Oh right I should have mentioned that I played Paradise without bloom or SSAO too.

That said, don't let that compromise your vision of Paradise. It's really cool and I'd hate to see it hamstrung by catering to poor hardware.

Thank you for being more mindful of performance in future releases though my iGPU appreciates it