OBLIGE 3.43 Released

Heh yeah E2M8.

I don't know about secrets yet, probably have both: little niches in a wall with an nice item in it, and secrets rooms or areas.

phil108 said
It's off by default.

The wrong default (in my kinda purist opinion).

Speaking of the Weak/Medium/Strong/Very Strong strength options that is in development, how will Oblige determine custom monsters in it? If you need the details on the Bestiary and Skulltag badguys, I can provide a list since I've been battered around by them enough to know.

Are they determined by the damage they do, their hit points or both factors?

What about a "Progressive" option for the monsters, or is there one already?

I made a huge map with nothing but Episode one monsters and Berserk packs. my rip-and-tear skills are not so hot.

Mr. Chris said:

Speaking of the Weak/Medium/Strong/Very Strong strength options that is in development, how will Oblige determine custom monsters in it?

Just using their health and damage.

Monster strength is always progressive (except for Crazy mode). Medium gives you a good mix (like in the IWADs). Weak gives less big monsters, and Tough gives less small monsters.

There is a new Progressive option for the amount of monsters too.

I think I'm gonna go with Hordes + Medium on the next release :)

From browing the Sourceforge project page, I definitely agree that using multiple choices per room theme will save on making multiple entries for each texture theme (IE BASEALL using all the STAR* textures for example) rather than an individual entry for each texture.

Also from checking the "basic hell theme" part, ASHWALL is not a valid floor texture for non-ZDoom engines, the floor equalavent is FLOOR6_2. Also, MARBGRAY is a Doom2 only texture mind you. :P

How is the super shotgun being implemented into Doom 1, judging by the supershotgunner parameters not being present in the part that Oblige removes Doom2 things? You may want to add the Megasphere to the list below as well.

One last thing, I could help you with the themes (TECH, HELL, URBAN) for Doom and Doom2 if you want, since it would give a varied experience straight off a new install of the next version. (If you've checked my version 2 theme modifications, something like that but it will be easier since of the mentioned on top).

Mr. Chris said:

Also from checking the "basic hell theme" part, ASHWALL is not a valid floor texture for non-ZDoom engines, the floor equalavent is FLOOR6_2.

You're still not getting it. ASHWALL is a material, and OBLIGE will always put the material's flat on floors and ceilings, and the material's texture on walls.

The materials are defined like this, where 't' is the wall texture and 'f' is the flat:

DOOM1_MATERIALS =
{
  ASHWALL  = { t="ASHWALL",  f="FLOOR6_2" }
  ...
}

DOOM2_MATERIALS =
{
  ASHWALL  = { t="ASHWALL2", f="MFLR8_4" }
  ...
}

I guess it's confusing that material names are the same as texture and flats. They could have been called anything, e.g. GRAY_DIRT, but there are too many to just make up completely new names.

As for help, that would be great when the time comes, just not yet, because I am still developing the new texture system and this work needs to be finished first.

andrewj said:

I am still developing the new texture system and this work needs to be finished first.

If you don't mind sharing, what will the new texture system do compared to its current state?

40oz said:

If you don't mind sharing, what will the new texture system do compared to its current state?

Mainly allowing things to be theme-specific which are currently hard-coded, like: doors, stairs, pillars, wall pictures, ceiling lights, and whatever else might be needed later (prefab stuff).

That makes a lot of sense. In Heretic, for example, E1 and E3 use more or less the same textures, but E3 uses them somewhat differently so having themes that can change the style of rooms is useful.

Also, it allows us to have a "Castle" theme for Heretic.

Speaking of which, I know Andrew has mumbled about Quake support. Is this something still on the plate?

Judging by the Sourceforge activity, it appears he is doing some Quake support as well.

This project has a lot of potential. I have one small suggestion: decouple the front-end from the actual generator, so that it's possible to launch it from a CLI or shell script. Ideally it would be possible to access the entire functionality of the program from GUI or CLI (or any other interface for that matter). You might believe that the GUI is best for everyone, but trust me it's not easy to compile those gfx libs on some OS's. I'm running OpenBSD and very little compiles out-of-the-box, so rather than waste time with dependencies I just hacked the LUA code in v0.97, which worked okay, although isn't as ideal as a completely interface-agnostic application. However, with the latest release the LUA code changed a lot, and not being a LUA programmer it was difficult for me to make sense out of the whole.

The GUI is what most people want to use, I'd be surprised if more than 1% of potential users wanted to use a CLI interface. For this reason alone a CLI or "batch" interface is low priority, though it is mentioned in the WISHLIST, so it might get done eventually.

BTW, OBLIGE now has a proper forum for discussions. You will need an account on SourceForge to access it. Here is the link:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/oblige/

Egads, yet another web account... I really miss the olde days of Usenet, when all you needed was a single login account to your ISP. This web thing ain't all that great IMO. I think I'm going to setup a Doom gopher page just for the hell of it. :D

Heh, gopher was cool, then this thing came along which allowed pictures inline in the pages and everybody forgot about gopher. Nice to see that Debian still has a gopher client.

andrewj said:

You will need an account on SourceForge to access it.

Drop the s in https and you don't.

leileilol said:

Drop the s in https and you don't.

Yeah dunno what's going on there. Hmmm might be a permission thing, checking...

YEP was a permission thing. Cheers.

hawt ^_^

Stuff is progressing nicely for those who follow the Sourceforge page.