Caru

These suggestions are fantastic guys, thanks so much :D

Ah, I should probably clarify, I'm not looking to combine Tyson and slaughter, certainly not in terms of monster count -- rather, I'm more or less hypothesizing that the lack of firepower relative to how many enemies there are might incentivize similar behaviors for dealing with "crowds" (which in the case of a Tyson map might mean something as little as 5 monsters in the same room). "Smaller scale challenge map" is a lot closer to what I had in mind, actually :P I like the "puzzle" idea, breaking up that monotony will be important -- I'm also really glad you mentioned that specific thing with the arachnotrons because I probably wouldn't have thought to look out for that xD it occurs to me that most of the memory I'm drawing on wrt berserk-fist-centered gameplay was in gzdoom, I should probably spend some time just berserk-punching through various maps in the other engines just to get a sense of how different it feels in each one -- for all I know it's really unsatisfying outside of zdoom, in which case I guess this turns into a zdoom-only project (I guess the benefit of that is I'd have a lot more control over the roster)

I've been away for a bit, and now that I'm playing around with UDB again I find myself returning to an old concept I thought of back when I was first learning the basics, and that is a map/WAD built entirely around the berserk fist -- not only is the pistol not a viable option, I'm DeHacking it out of existence altogether, along with all the other non-fist weapons (that includes things like zombie weapon/ammo drops, starting ammo, etc.). One thing I had found when I was first exploring this idea was that it was a perfect intro to slaughter gameplay, in that completely dispensing with the notion that I could shoot my way through crowds of monsters forced me to pay attention to things like movement and crowd shaping, things I had never really gotten a handle on before. Anyway, I've spent a while looking around for other Tyson-style maps to get an idea of what a level built around such gameplay might look like, but I've been having a surprisingly hard time finding any. Sure, there's the occasional Scythe Map21, but even those seem to be more exercises in attrition and ammo conservation, and a far cry from the kinetic, almost slaughter-like gameplay I'm aiming for. The berserk pack has a ton of potential for a frenetic style of play that I've never really seen utilized before -- there's always some concession to players wanting to shoot things already -- but then again I'm still relatively new to the Doom scene and I've only just scratched the surface of what's out there. So I have two questions: 1) Does anyone have any general advice for making this kind of map? (e.g. are there any things I should be paying special attention to; what kinds of monsters and monster placements work well with Tyson gameplay and which do not; what would be some good ways to incentivize riskier playstyles over more careful, conservative, hide-behind-a-wall-until-the-monster-comes-to-you playstyles; etc.) and 2) Are there some good maps out there that I would benefit from studying for this kind of project? Has something like this been done before and I've just missed it somehow? EDIT: I'm also getting this nagging feeling in the back of my head like I've already asked this same question before, so apologies to the mods if I'm being redundant here. xD

Aww, thanks :D I can try to make it work (though I should note that I honestly can't tell how long it would take, I've never actually finished a map before xD), but if someone else with more Boom experience wants to take a crack at it I have no objections.

This is a bit of an odd one. I'm working on a map which may or may not be a bit of an homage to Doom II's MAP11, and I had the idea of a little gag where every time you open the automap (or at least every time you play the level) it gives you a slightly different name (a la "Circle of Death", "'O' of Destruction", etc.). I'm going to assume this sort of thing is off the table for Boom compatibility (unless DeHackEd has some special options I don't know about), but is it possible to at least do this in zdoom/gzdoom? Some trickery involving the LANGUAGES lump, perhaps? I vaguely remember reading about a project (I think it was Freedoom-related but I might be completely wrong about that) doing something similar to this, but I've had no luck finding that information again.

I like to have a lot of tabs open in SLADE, often for the purposes of comparing the ways different texture packs go about representing similar things (see the bzillion variations on SUPPORT3 out there, for example). Problem is, SLADE has some . . . shall we say, bizarre behavior when it comes to displaying textures when multiple files are open. Namely, it likes to inherit patches from other files that happen to be open at the time, regardless of whether or not the file I'm working on is supposed to rely on that other file for any of its resources. Now, I understand how this could be useful in certain situations (having OTEX open in one tab and another project that relies on OTEX in another tab, for example), but more often than not this is really annoying and, worse, frequently I won't notice what it's doing and I'll assume a texture looks one way when it really looks another way because SLADE is showing me a bizarro-world version of what my texture would theoretically look like if it drew from a completely different set of patches. Is there a way to configure this behavior? To tell SLADE: hey, this project is supposed to inherit resources from X, Y, and Z.wad and ONLY those files? Can I get it to stop doing this altogether, and only inherit patches from the specified base resource file (and why is this not the default behavior . . . grumble grumble)?

That's effectively what it is -- just with a much longer wait time at the beginning (probably too long, but I guess I always knew I'd have to abandon syncing everything up with the music eventually; it just isn't a viable option with the way Doom handles its music). Perhaps I might do something like this before the day's over: rather than the whole launch thing, a simple timer-based elevator like what you're describing would be enough to make it work, and then the wave-based play to keep it interesting in terms of gameplay.

So, uh... this got slightly out of hand. I'm gonna say it right up front: this map is nowhere near finished. It's not really even playable in its current state. I bit off way more than I could chew with this one; what started as a Desert (/Revenant) Bus-inspired borderline-joke map escalated into an IoS monstrosity with a Boom launch pad gimmick that I could never quite get to work the way I wanted it to (I've left in the launchpad from Eviternity's MAP29 that I had shamelessly copied over for reference just to demonstrate what I was going for; fitting it into the map proper meant introducing a lot more moving parts, and this is probably what killed the map in the end). I'm posting what I have done here anyway for a few reasons: 1) because I believe in documenting my failures as well as my successes; 2) because I still believe some of the ideas I was exploring were good ideas and someone else may benefit from seeing them even in their undeveloped state; 3) because it might still be worth retooling as a sort of post-credits epilogue where the IoS never appears and you just drift through the ocean indefinitely; 4) I think the MIDI is still a good laugh; and 5) all else failing, I think this screenshot would make for a good bit of humorous in-WAD art (title screen, intermission, bosspic, what have you): It frankly hurts just to type this because it means I'm admitting defeat, but I've definitely learned some valuable lessons about project planning along the way (not to mention all the mapping techniques I learned in the process; I'd never even worked outside of UDMF before but now I might even prefer Boom). Perhaps I'll come back and finish this one someday, but for now I'm putting it down. BOATEX.zip

YES. YES, literally exactly this moment with the Quake 2 fish. I have no idea why, they absolutely freaked me out for the longest time. I don't really have that much issue with them now, but I think it had something to do with the fact that they were (relatively) small, fast, and could come at you from any direction (including up and down). I think they traumatized me for other video game fish too, because I remember being scared to death of the slaughterfish in Oblivion and they're hilariously inept and nonthreatening (the Skyrim version, on the other hand, can go get fucked).

My god... that's brilliant. I know how I'm spending my evening. xD

No Sectors Community Project

I really hope @Mikolah sees this thread because there is a prime opportunity for a Mikoportals joke here.

You know what . . . this could work. Like a tower defense game only instead of fending off waves of enemies it's one guy (sort of like in IMPatience) and instead of placing towers you're throwing monsters onto the map to try to stop him before he rockets your face. Would take some heavy rebalancing to make sure you don't just spam archviles, but in the right hands . . . yeah, I could actually see myself playing this. EDIT: A cursory glance at some of the earlier pages has revealed to me that apparently this exact idea has been proposed in this thread on at least two separate occasions. And here I thought I was being clever. :P

That's interesting, I'm already using a white fog. Fade is set to #FFFFFF, I've even turned up the fog density to 50. EDIT: Oh wait, I think I see what you're getting at. Just as an experiment, I changed the in-game settings to force vanilla-style transparency, and it made all the difference. You might have the right idea with replacing the projectiles, maybe I can use a specific imp variant on this one map that's identical save for throwing opaque projectiles -- or maybe there's a compatibility setting I can adjust that forces vanilla transparency, idk. EDIT EDIT: Okay, no compatibility setting, but maybe I can do it with scripting. Incidentally, all my failed attempts to make this work have given me wonderful ideas for unique lighting setups. xD

Thanks Gez, I was worried the sheer size of the linedefs would make it unfeasible performance-wise, but it seems to run fine so far. There isn't something I can set in MAPINFO that could disable fullbright by any chance, is there? That's the main problem I just can't seem to get past: projectiles being virtually invisible because they're at fullbright against a white background.