DVII Second Edition underway. It's time!

[Touchdown]

Holy shit, best news in a long while!

[Devalaous]

I had forgotten all about this. Nice to see it still lives.

[Doom Marine]

Here's a cool sounding NIN soundtrack.

... Oh, and it comes with a preview of my new hell map too.

[Touchdown]

Those skull / teleporter chambers look pretty cool in motion. Based on that video I assume we start Hell without any weapons at all?

[Doom Marine]

You'll have your weapons. That video above is the second new hell level. The first new hell level, which is the first welcoming to hell, has a much more dramatic entrance than that. You'll literally descend miles from space into hell.

Some of the old levels have gotten architectural and gameplay facelifts. If anyone's ever played that level where you run from the Balrogs, here it is with new architecture and much more demo-worthy gameplay, observe:

1. I removed a lot of grindy fights in that level, in more favor of clever fights that require good reflexes and thinking on your feet.

2. The architecture is much more integrated and exciting, it's conducive to smooth, fast movement.

3. Explosive rocks pack exactly twice the punch of an explosive barrel. Notice how fun they are to pop in the videos, and makes a hell lot more sense than radioactive barrels in hell, don't you think?

[mouldy]

It lives! Now I am wondering if I am still asleep and dreaming this...

[Touchdown]

I have managed to beat You Shall Not Pass! eventually (UV-Max I mean) but it took some time.

I love the upgraded, more open architecture. It adds the sense of scale to an already epic underground Hellhole. Looking back at the original version, it did miss it.

[Ribo Zurai]

That looks absolutely amazing. It's great to see that DVII is giving signs of life again.

[Justince]

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Edited July 28, 2017 by Justince

[tempun]

Justince said:

That looks alright. Could use some more creative hell textures other than red red red. Gets a little old on the eyes. Looking forward to the upgrade, since Sunder has eclipsed this project in almost every way.

I wonder if Insane_Gazebo is colorblind.
My first thought upon seeing Sunder maps was "wow this is ugly and monotonous". (Except the first two levels, which are alright.) As a result of reading some Sunder hype, my opinion of some of the maps improved somewhat, but copypasted detail, lack of texture variation (in particular, color variation) and switch hunts make it look much worse to me. There's some nice looking areas but they drown in incredible amount of filler Sunder has. Can't comment on the gameplay of Sunder as it's way beyond my abilities.

[Ribbiks]

looks awesome!

on a side note I always thought it would be cool to see time-lapse videos of such massive maps as they were constructed

[mouldy]

I don't think sunder and dv have that much in common that its worth comparing them really. They are very different creatures in terms of design and gameplay

[40oz]

the orchestrated music, new weapons, monsters, and other unusual gameplay tweaks are a little much for my tastes. The level design is still really artistic as usual. The extreme height variation and light contrast really make for some awesome sights.

[esselfortium]

The exploding rocks look kind of goofy and out-of-place, since they all look exactly the same as each other and are often the only rocks in the area.

The scenery and cinematics look fantastic, though, for sure. The jumps and moving platforms in the Balrog map are sweet :)

I noticed a couple things in the DB video that might speed up your mapping process:

If you don't know this already, you can save time doing texture alignments by holding shift to align in increments of 8. It's easier to avoid mistakes this way, using the more precise alignment only when it's actually needed. You can also use the spacebar to select multiple lines and then shift their alignments all at the same time.

Vertical autoalign is also a useful time-saver for situations like where you were aligning startan panels to line up with each other across different sector heights. If needed, you can also select the lines you want to affect beforehand, and the autoalign will be contained only to your selection.

In the browngrn room where you had a lighting gradient fading its sides into darkness, it might be worth looking into how Doom's "fake contrast", which makes straight horizontal lines darker by 16, and straight vertical lines brighter by 16, would affect the edges of it. You might want to brighten or darken the gradient by 16 to make it more seamless, depending.

[Obsidian]

Agreeing with Essel on the rocks: they just look like they were plonked there instead of actually looking naturalistic. Making the sprites with a flat bottom would be a good start, I think.

Also, I thought Sauron's Gauntlets were in the super secret level? I dunno.

[Phml]

tempun said:

I wonder if Insane_Gazebo is colorblind.

An odd thing to say. If there's one thing Sunder does undoubtedly better than any other wad, it's colors.

[Pure Hellspawn]

hell maps are my favorite map type, and these are some of the best i've ever seen

[tempun]

Phml said:

An odd thing to say. If there's one thing Sunder does undoubtedly better than any other wad, it's colors.

Care to elaborate?

[Mechadon]

I think the exploding rocks might look a bit better if you had a few visual variants. Personally I find the current sprite ok, but I think it looks odd because its the same sprites lumped together. Usually you think rocks wouldn't look exactly the same.

I love the idea of exploding brimstone for hell levels though. I'm doing something similar in one of my projects :)

[Ribbiks]

tempun said:

Care to elaborate?

I can't speak for phml, but I can agree that I_G had a great knack for taking a set of textures and creating an entire world out of it. This isn't the first time the lack of texture diversity per map has been brought up, but I see that almost as a strength. the author created very engrossing and thematically consistent environments that seemed plausible and realistic for each 'world' the player was planted in.

but this is a dvII thread, and this argument will probably just reflect personal design preferences, so why bother -.-

[Phml]

tempun said:

Care to elaborate?

We have such drastically opposite opinions trying to talk about this is meaningless. You've made a very decisive statement and I wanted to point out this perspective wasn't universally shared, best to leave it at that for an offtopic tangent.

[Doom Marine]

Mechadon said:

I think the exploding rocks might look a bit better if you had a few visual variants. Personally I find the current sprite ok, but I think it looks odd because its the same sprites lumped together. Usually you think rocks wouldn't look exactly the same.

I love the idea of exploding brimstone for hell levels though. I'm doing something similar in one of my projects :)

What kind of exploding objects are you trying to create? We can both benefit one another if we mutually varietize the other's art assets...

[Touchdown]

I actually really like how Hell looks in DV/DVII. Red and hellish, that's what I'd expect from it. I think the only Hell level I didn't like was Hell's Vendetta but everything else is great and I'm glad that there's an abundance of red all over the place. Maybe I'm in the minority but it really caters to my taste.

On another note, how's the project coming along, overally? Would be cool to hear something about it. Is a full 32map Megawad still a goal? How many maps are in the pipeline?

[Justince]

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Edited August 1, 2017 by Justince

[Tango]

tango approves of liberal barrel usage

[Mechadon]

Doom Marine said:

What kind of exploding objects are you trying to create? We can both benefit one another if we mutually varietize the other's art assets...

They are essentially just reskinned barrels, though I'm experimenting with A_Mushroom (a codepointer introduced in MBF) to make them a bit more chaotic and dangerous.

Unfortunately I don't have the room to create visual variants of my brimstone sprites since everything is done in dehacked (and I've squeezed out as much free space as I can at this point). I can send you the sprites if you want to see if they'll work for you. But they might stand out a bit against your current set of graphics.

[Doom Marine]

Mechadon said:

They are essentially just reskinned barrels, though I'm experimenting with A_Mushroom (a codepointer introduced in MBF) to make them a bit more chaotic and dangerous.

Unfortunately I don't have the room to create visual variants of my brimstone sprites since everything is done in dehacked (and I've squeezed out as much free space as I can at this point). I can send you the sprites if you want to see if they'll work for you. But they might stand out a bit against your current set of graphics.

I have squeezed the living life out of dehacked to get four new monsters from it, including the balrog, cleric, and two other ones in the current DVII. Some ways that I managed to squeeze extra frames out:

- Taking away health and armor bonus animations (that liberates 3 frames each).
- Taking away animation redundancies (there are quite a bit of redundant frames in normal enemies).
- Taking away icon of sin's attack.

I'll take a look at your sprites if you'd PM me it, or start a correspondance via busybeaverhp@gmail.com.

Check your PM, I've shared with you my brimstone sprites. I drew them from scratch. Use it as you'd like, just give credit where due.

[Mechadon]

I got your PM, perhaps those sprites will help you in some way :)

Anyways, I'm at the point with the dehacked where I don't have any free thing slots lefts. I've replaced just about every decoration thing as well as many monsters objects. I've got plenty of free frames to play with, but no things slots left :(

At any rate, I appreciate you sharing your sprites with me!

[Doom Marine]

I got your sprites as well. I'll have to edit it to make it more stylistically similar to my brimstones.

If I end up using, you'll be credited. Thanks!

[40oz]

In perkristian's smooth weapon animations, I changed the item respawn fog to plasma shrapnel to free up those extra frames. It's a little different but the effect is still there