Looking for a challenge...

[doom_is_great]

I am having a blast replaying this classic. I am looking for a way to make it more challenging. Is there a way to have the same damage level of nightmare mode while playing Veteran? I would just like to the monsters to do the same level of damage, but without having the constantly draining health and not starting out with the Soul Cube.

[Lippeth]

One way to tweak Nightmare skill would be to set g_healthTakeLimit from 25 to 100 in either the console or DoomConfig.cfg so that instead of ticking down until your health is 25, it won't take any health. And then to remove the soulcube from your starting weapons you can remove it from line 774 in player.def located in pak000.pk4 inside the base folder of your Doom 3 directory. The cleanest way would be to create a new folder in your base folder and call it "def", then copy player.def into it and make it so that instead of:

"weapon_nightmare"					"weapon_fists,weapon_pistol,weapon_flashlight,weapon_pda,weapon_soulcube"

it reads:

"weapon_nightmare"					"weapon_fists,weapon_pistol,weapon_flashlight,weapon_pda"

 

Another way to do the whole thing would be to play on Veteran skill and change g_damageScale to 2.4, though you'd have to do this at the start of every level because it will always go back to the default of 1, unless you make a script to set it every cycle (overkill, but that's the only way I know how to do it). According to what I've found in the source code, the internal damage scaling (or at least that's what I think it is) of Veteran is 1.7, whereas on Nightmare it's 3.5, but setting g_damageScale to 2.0588235 etc. is kind of silly and also doesn't seem to be accurate in practice (the damage info I found was more to do with saving throws and survival chance anyway). On Veteran skill, a zsec with a pistol consistently does 6 points of damage to the player with no armor, and does 14 points of damage on Nightmare, so that's how I derived at setting g_damageScale to 2.4, as that's what allowed me to have the zsec pistol guy do 14 points on Veteran.

 

I would still recommend playing on Nightmare, setting the take health limit to 100 and removing the soulcube from starting weapons, but if you want to play on Veteran without having to change g_damageScale every time, let me know because it would be much simpler to just make and send than to bloat this post even more than it already is.

[doom_is_great]

Appreciate the info, I'll see what I can do. I'll try and modify the nightmare mode as you said in the DoomConfig.cfg and also in the pak000.pk4. Sounds really interesting. I've always wanted to try to mod the game myself. I'll let you know if I need any help. Thanks!