Hell Renaissance (WIP v0.25.62)

Hell Renaissance : The Great Mindsucking Machine (v0.25.62) - Sep 9, 2024 is a mapset for GZDoom and derivatives in making since May 8 2018. I wanted to express my artistic vision on what Doom 2 could continue like - big maps with dynamics skyboxes to expand it even further. The development is still in progress.

A short WADINFO:

The plot:

System Requirements:

Installation:

DOWNLOAD THE MAPSET HERE:
The latest version, v0.25.62 (800.2mb):

download mirror #1,

download mirror #2,

Please use a 7-Zip archiver to unpack the files.

Screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/GBknYQZ

September 6, 2023.

The first public release downloads:

holy smokes

your mapset nearly kill my GT1030 Dell rubbish

and because of that, no screenshot for this review

anyway here's the review

• GOOD: crazy structures of mountains and undergrounds, the bloody mountain is even bigger than Elementalism's mountain
• BAD: while the farside seems astonishing, the close up don't, the architecture suffers, plain texture usage and endless cage hallway in some level. and not to mention the combat, I think you misunderstood something, Doom was all about combat, and i think it's not a crazy, explosive gameplay experience as the name and the song advertised. sure, Brutal Doom might fix it, but I'm the Vanilla kids.
• UGLY: One thing that bug me a lot it's your usage of HD texture side by side with OG low res textures, it's ghastly. Another thing is the music, I'm not a huge fan of Distortion guitar riffing in both channels at full volume, I mean I already turn my bloody headphone at lowest volume and I can still hear the sound a metre away from my headphone, I ain't joking.

sentence: O' my GT1030 Dell rubbish

Grade:

• With My First Map^TM Standard: B
• With Modern Map Standard: C
• With Rose-Tinted Glasses Standard: D+
• With GZDoom Megawad Standard: D-

^{ok both my graphic card and my ears are burning}

That's exactly what I needed to know, thanks. While the mapset is still in the development some things can be enhanced.

Looks impressive!

These maps are truly spectacular to behold, staggering in their scale, and even if the texturing and detailing is crude at the near scale that largely gets lost in the epic vastness of it all. MAP15 reminds me so much of a map I once dreamed about it’s uncanny, and of the ones I’ve tried in the set so far it’s undoubtedly my favorite. I love how far you’ve gone with this aesthetic and mood.

All this being said, these maps aptly demonstrate the downside that comes of such spacious maps. For the most part, in the later epic-size maps I find I have so much space against so few monsters that I can just run right through without even bothering to engage anyone, and in fact fighting becomes a chore when I have to stop and course-correct to dispatch a couple impotent pinkies and imps in a vast open arena. It’s also that many areas are so large that merely walking from one side of the area to the other becomes a chore; there’s no navigation challenge, it’s just such a vast distance with nothing happening. MAP13 is quintessential of this: it would’ve taken me 5 minutes or more to walk a circle around the outer wall, and then again around the wall itself, and then again around the overhanging rings on either side of the wall, each just a slow dawdle with no clear sign there would be any payoff on the other end. I love big, exploratory maps, but the exploration part gets lost when I’m just running in a giant circle seeing more of the same (very cool) scenery. It also makes it a lot more annoying when I don’t know where to go next, because it could take me a half hour just to revisit every part of the map I’ve already seen, again with nothing new to look at or fight.

I love the hell out of the environments you’ve created, and don’t know how to suggest making the gameplay a bit more exciting and less wandery without compromising that. Enormous maps like these often become slaughtermaps since lots of enemies is the obvious solution to “too much space and not enough action”, but I’m not sure that’s what you want to make. I normally don’t like to wall off bits of maps and encourage adding more exploration, but if whole areas really have literally nothing to see or do it may be worth making some of them inaccessible.

11 hours ago, fai1025 said:

holy smokes

your mapset nearly kill my GT1030 Dell rubbish

 

^{ok both my graphic card and my ears are burning}

Well, I have an idea on optimization and closest match here is what LZDoom does with distance and sprites culling, I'd also add polygon culling to that and then generate cubemaps all across the map dimension, like a grid but 3D, apparently GTA V has something similar but for reflections. That way it would speed up the graphics a lot but I'm pretty sure GZDoom and LZDoom developers will send me off into a far far galaxy...

It needs a good computer unfortunately. If it was only the GPU that would make it difficult but actually, it's much easier and cheaper to go with a decent GPU like GTX 1060 or RX470 than it would with a CPU usage that GZDoom still suffer to multithread, so the CPU becomes a huge bottleneck. A CPU like 12600K could be the only one to handle hell renaissance at the moment thanks to it massive single core performance.

In overall what I do is not what everyone else should do with a 2.5D doom engine. It's getting extremely hard to go for room over room geometry that way and increases CPU load, also increasing editing time and forces the mapper to do everything with those dummy control sectors and scripts. That's why "architecture" sucks.

I believe a mod like this would run on a different engine like Unreal much better due to its natural ability to handle 3D but it would get extremely hard to recreate original Doom game behaviour with it.

1 hour ago, Stupid Bunny said:

These maps are truly spectacular to behold, staggering in their scale, and even if the texturing and detailing is crude at the near scale that largely gets lost in the epic vastness of it all. MAP15 reminds me so much of a map I once dreamed about it’s uncanny, and of the ones I’ve tried in the set so far it’s undoubtedly my favorite. I love how far you’ve gone with this aesthetic and mood.

Thank you for trying my stuff! I would go even further if not for the technial issues. It's getting tedious to place all those 3D models and make structures out of 3D floors and so far, the game doesn't have ready solutions to do it so it also becomes a scripting game which I'm really begginner at. What the game has instead here is bugs and limitations.

1 hour ago, Stupid Bunny said:

All this being said, these maps aptly demonstrate the downside that comes of such spacious maps. For the most part, in the later epic-size maps I find I have so much space against so few monsters that I can just run right through without even bothering to engage anyone, and in fact fighting becomes a chore when I have to stop and course-correct to dispatch a couple impotent pinkies and imps in a vast open arena. It’s also that many areas are so large that merely walking from one side of the area to the other becomes a chore; there’s no navigation challenge, it’s just such a vast distance with nothing happening. MAP13 is quintessential of this: it would’ve taken me 5 minutes or more to walk a circle around the outer wall, and then again around the wall itself, and then again around the overhanging rings on either side of the wall, each just a slow dawdle with no clear sign there would be any payoff on the other end. I love big, exploratory maps, but the exploration part gets lost when I’m just running in a giant circle seeing more of the same (very cool) scenery. It also makes it a lot more annoying when I don’t know where to go next, because it could take me a half hour just to revisit every part of the map I’ve already seen, again with nothing new to look at or fight.

The maps are almost gameplay empty, that's right. I really thought to keep it for the polishing time, I'll have to think on how to saturate the maps with life. Perhaps Doom2016/Eternal styled waypoints will do it at some point.

1 hour ago, Stupid Bunny said:

I love the hell out of the environments you’ve created, and don’t know how to suggest making the gameplay a bit more exciting and less wandery without compromising that. Enormous maps like these often become slaughtermaps since lots of enemies is the obvious solution to “too much space and not enough action”, but I’m not sure that’s what you want to make. I normally don’t like to wall off bits of maps and encourage adding more exploration, but if whole areas really have literally nothing to see or do it may be worth making some of them inaccessible.

Until up the recent times I didn't know and didn't play Plutonia that much and it turned out how much I lost! Somehow Casali brothers brought doom to a whole lot new level which still holds the mark, then I really enjoyed Plutonia 2.

I used to play some Eviternity and seems like it suffers from the same big map problems like it was needed to fill them with monsters and grind. That's what I wouldn't want to do. Maybe some Plutonia level thinking would allow to bring some life in there like more monster closets, archviles, archviles behind an invisible wall resurrecting dead monsters. It's really something that needs to force you to move aside from just need to get from point A to B I think. Perhaps more traps and fenced areas, teleporting monsters will also do the trick. Now there is no even difficulty selection.

I can see now that people generally like the outdoors graphics and I like the reaction, then I will be doing more maps. I still have some ideas left.

What's about music, maybe this issue can be solved by providing different music packs with the mapset.

Hey, I played through some of these (up to map 06).  I really like the atmosphere of the maps.  And the grand scale is really good.  As others have pointed out, it's a bit empty in those large scale areas.  Try adding something for players to look at or explore so they're not just running in one direction forever with nothing to do. 

    On the gameplay side, you've got stuck monsters (baron on the right in "The Fall" in that underground area) and monsters that don't respond (former humans in the beginning of "The Cave").  Also, maps 04 and 05 have A LOT of chaingunners that you offer no cover from.  Pretty universally this is going to piss people off.  I'm not saying you didn't, but make sure you playtest your maps a bit before putting them here on the forum.  Attention to detail goes a long way here.  I'll play the next group of maps and get back to you.  But this is a good start to what could be come an amazing mapping feat.  

5 hours ago, General Rainbow Bacon said:

Hey, I played through some of these (up to map 06).  I really like the atmosphere of the maps.  And the grand scale is really good.  As others have pointed out, it's a bit empty in those large scale areas.  Try adding something for players to look at or explore so they're not just running in one direction forever with nothing to do.

Thank you for trying my episode out! I actually think MAP01-MAP06 being quite easy to point out where to go first, no?

Quote

    On the gameplay side, you've got stuck monsters (baron on the right in "The Fall" in that underground area) and monsters that don't respond (former humans in the beginning of "The Cave").  Also, maps 04 and 05 have A LOT of chaingunners that you offer no cover from.  Pretty universally this is going to piss people off.  I'm not saying you didn't, but make sure you playtest your maps a bit before putting them here on the forum.  Attention to detail goes a long way here.  I'll play the next group of maps and get back to you.  But this is a good start to what could be come an amazing mapping feat.

It's been playtested million times, perhaps I just couldn't wait anymore to share the game to get some response, so some mistakes are going to show surely, every level except for MAP17, MAP20 and MAP31 are playable.

What's about chaingunners I thought it was really cool to force the player to run for the cover and maybe collect some health not to die, my favorite kind of ambush so it's an expected behavior in MAP04, you could snipe those chaingunners off quite easily with a pistol, chaingun, rocket launcher or plasmagun in MAP05.

Pretty much it's going to get hottter when I'll get to gameplay saturation stage and you'll see some more shit like that not to make the game "empty" in the big places, I simply haven't got to it yet.

I'm targeting some bits of Plutonia feel here. At first you hate it and maybe feel a bit nervous, later you're in love with it as it adds some bit of spicy unpredictability to the game, am I doing it wrong maybe or simply I should show a bit more mercy to the player? That's why your opinion matters here, thank you again for your patience.

well, having chaingunners is fine, but making the player run such long distances to find cover just isn't going to be fun for most people.  Maybe add more cover in the next iteration. 

Actually, I would leave some of the emptiness.  It's really cool to just chill and look at scenery sometimes and then just when the player is convinced they're not going to get attacked, BAM!   But definitely consider making some cool structures to explore and figure out some way to make those super long halls less boring.  

So with maps this size, you're just not going to be able to get the Plutonia feel unless you put a ton of monsters and stuff in.  I'm definitely not suggesting you show mercy.  Look at some of DobuGabuMaru's maps for some ideas on making relatively empty maps seem more interesting.  

I'm interested to see where you take this, and most of all make sure having fun with this.   

On 10/10/2022 at 5:29 PM, Vadim said:

Awesome wad! I loved the music and the map design

Some work is going on it still! I really try to keep the things optimizied, so it shoudln't burn laptop gt 1030s more than it used to. As for desktop, this can still look and play on 2011's AMD HD6770, it's like this card shouldn't really cost a fortune to get and todays laptops APUs like vega8/11, or Intel Iris Xe finally are getting there.

In case anyone wondered on if the project is still in the works, yes it is.

Some video on Map17 progress, it's been a big leap forward lately for it though, here is how it started: 

There is some progress, of course it is slow but it's still there. I've already made lots of work on enhancing MAP01, MAP02, MAP03, MAP04, MAP15, MAP16 and MAP17.
 

The main issue to me is optimizing it but I was able to gain huge speed up for MAP04 thanks to converting 3D floors based decorations to 3D models greatly unloading CPU. Besides, since this time it's also another special PK3 that contains way lower poly count and texture size graphics that allows it to run even faster.

So, please watch comments I made to the screenshots attached, it's still being a bit too early to publish the update though.

https://imgur.com/a/FrP3ZKq

Well yes, it's me bogging you again. I'm slowly getting stuff sorted and optimized. MAP09 is now 17FPS 320x200 playable on my old config which is AMD Athlon dual x64 5000+ with ATI Radeon HD2400 PRO and 2gigs of ram, although gl2 mode only and lzdoom without fancy gldef "reflections".

Map17 is also progressing and growing with more playable places. Regarding the environment, water geometry is now animated and looks quite good and nice, I'm also going to add animated trees and godrays. Yes it has to be 3D model optimized because there's no other way to optimize super CPU heavy 3D floors in GZDoom, they are getting exported as 3D models and guarded with invisible geometry sometimes looking worse.

The music is also getting revised a lot, all of is going to come as MIDI to suit tastes better but in the end of it I'm going to provide my mixes too later.

The mapset optimization goes incredibly well. MAP15 now looks better, works with consistent 75+ FPS in Full HD on my modern rig (R5 1600, GTX 1063) and about 50 FPS on the old rig (Win7, Athlon x2 2.6ghz, ATI 2400 pro) in 640x360 resolution. The key to optimization here is indeed dumping the whole map into the series of 3D models and placing occluders so that GZDoom wouldn't start losing its mind and slow down the performance. Really pitty GZDoom doesn't have wall cull distance as LZDoom as it would allow it to go even further performance wise on such maps. What I really need now is a way to define culling distances in specific areas or maps while having separate distance cull settings for the skybox sectors as we don't need to cull them at all. For sure, that obligates the mapper to optimize skyboxes even more and this is another pain that I'm going to kill on some maps soon.

https://imgur.com/a/BFFZgEW

version 0.2 has been released:

- trying to get the stuff sorted;

- better performance optimizations;

- potato graphical assets introduced;

- chances it runs on old computers are higher;

- some graphical enhacements;

- some new shaders of mine;

- a bit better gameplay and maps;

- more consistent work on music;

- MAP17 introduced, yet very infant;

- thousands of micro tweaks and fixes here and there and yet to come;

- bad music is no more present, really sorry about that.

Unfortunately, there are mountains of work to be done yet, so please don't spit too much.

v 0.2 hotfix - reuploaded.

- MAP15 visual glitches fixed.

- geometry still pops up in the dish and pathway to the exit unless this will be implemented.

v 0.21 has been uploaded

- a bit better music handling;

- changes to Map17 made in such a way it has more visual contrast;

- foliage visual appearance is more consistent now across more assets;

- more consistency between regular and potato assets;

- ultrapotato assets introduced - to reduce graphics complexity even further for even older systems.

Here is some bit of a video on how Map15 was optimized:

- all static geometry surfaces exported into a set of 3D models, one model per texture;

- all "dynamic" 3D floors geometry like switches was kept unchanged. I had to group these control sectors in one area to the bottom-left corner of the map for convenience and better visibility.

Hell Renaissance version has been updated to 0.22:

- better potato and ultrapotato detail files;

- some more work done on the maps, a bit more details, some minor visual bugs fixed;

- some new models like tall tech pillar introduced;

- the high-res pack of onscreen weapons for smooth doom has been compressed by SuperPNG;

- and other minor changes;

I've got to say that I have acknowledged the issue of mixing high-res and low-res and some work is also going in this regard, stay tuned.

The next release is getting some file sizes shrink, I found good PNG compression tools like pngquant and ken's pngout. Hell Renassaince besides, I could manage to compress Project Brutality 3.0 file size from 400mb something to 155mb by converting all contents to modern formats like png, jpg and ogg and compress them all a lot, not a much of a quality loss, the same goes to smooth doom hi-res pack. Brutal Doom v21 is also getting the same kind of treat, maybe this way I can finally merge all of them into one pack.

If I could ask someone to fork this wonderful PNG batch compression tool so that it could keep the sprite offsets untouched (kgrAb chunk). That way it's possible to go even smaller file sizes for mods and maps.

The slow progress on the wad is still going:

- I'm fixing some doors that don't retrigger;
- high resolution pack is in works but it's more like universal HD project for dooms;

- an alternative tall tech pillar model is in works;

- minor visual bugs on maps like doors are being fixed;

- more midi music to be added;

- some maps are being pro-longed;

- map17 is being worked on further.
 

I'm also considering on enhacing and saturating the gameplay. I know the maps are more like "environments" now but it's better to be done like this before gameplay saturation comes in place later.

Some other vid I made on editing Map16

This is the best I've ever played!!! I'll keep on playing!!!

I updated Hell Renaissance to v0.23a and even had to reupload it a few times in a row fixing some bugs:

- fog sprites now are based on the low-res and then enlarged in a map editor to a desired value, hi-res are still provided for sure;

- metallic fence on map 16 was not being rendered from the back side now fixed;

- some new music presented and more planned to be added;

- an alternative tall tech pillar model presented;
- doors on map08 are now of standard size;

- doors now retrigger most of the time;

- finally, a wadinfo txt file added;

So far, it's getting clearer to me on how I'd like to work on Map17 further.

v0.24 has been uploaded, key changes:

* integration of 3rd party mods like Smooth Doom, Brutal Doom, Project Brutality 3.0 -

  - all thanks to new compression techniques, the process is described and compression

    tools provided in an encrypted file with a password supplied, if needed (PNGQuant).

    PNGOut by Ken Silverman is not included due to the licensing limitations. All sounds

    were converte to OGG ABR 48kbps, all 48,44kHz ones resampled to 32kHz and also

    converted OGG.

* integration of my carefully upscaled and redrawn onscreen animations of guns for

   Vanilla and Smooth Doom;

* a custom *.bat file launcher that allows choosing 12 options to play the mapset.

v0.24a update, it's pretty minor:

* some unused music added to the main game archive, not used mostly, except for interepisode;

* brutal doom v21 being replaced with v22 beta 2, also compressed and repacked (4mb more than v21);

* launcher update to depict playing options as brutal doom v22 b2 

v0.24c update:

* batch file launcher fixed - option "c" didn't load low graphical settings files;
* brutal doom v22 updated to beta 3 - also optimized and it's much better than beta 2 but occupies 10 mb more.

I'm feeling exhausted and burnt out but some work on the wad is still going.

v0.25 update:

- my new high-res pack has been integrated and runs with high settings from the launcher options.