The /newstuff Chronicles #166

barsela's wads are the best I played. ever. deadbase, mountain of fire... and NOW this baby I read something about in the last .txt by alberto but never got to play. great!! I'm going to wait for that baby till tonight

Hyena said:

Well, the purpose of the newstuff chronicles (as I understand it) is to give people an idea of whether a wad is worth their time downloading and playing. The only people here who haven't played Batman Doom are either new, or hellbent on never playing it.

Well, I heard about a couple times, it is on my "to try" list. But I never found time to play it. In fact I spent more time playing classic wads like scythe, rebirth or HR2. But sonner or later I'll try it. Maybe in coop ? But I haven't checked if it has Coop support though.

PS for Hyena : u like to handle mice with high sensibility or sensitivity ? :) (sorry for the bad sense of humor)

hahaha
Batman Doom is a very different kind of DOOM experience. It is described very accurately here: http://www.doomworld.com/10years/bestwads/1999.php

Yeah, Batman Doom has co-op support. I'm not sure if it's tested extensively, though. Many of the boom effects might be reliant on single-play.

And yes, everything you need to know about Batman Doom is right on that review DEMOn was nice enough to provide the link to.

uh, batman doom has no boom effects, it's built for (and works with) doom2.exe

and I tried co-op over the summer with it in ZDoom on a LAN and none of the things appeared on the map for some odd reason. I'm not sure if that was a ZDoom or Batman Doom bug but I assume Batman Doom because we played a bunch of other doom2.exe mapsets in co-op with no problems. We also had co-op issues with Arctic Wolf, which was also developed on Mac (as was Batman Doom) which might have been the problem. I dunno if they issues have been resolved or what though.

Yeah, you might want to change the review, why the hell does it say "Boom and/or Zdoom"?? Even if it was for Boom shouldn't it say "Boom-compatible ports"? Those are hardly the only Boom-compatible ports available.

sargebaldy said:

Yeah, you might want to change the review, why the hell does it say "Boom and/or Zdoom"?? Even if it was for Boom shouldn't it say "Boom-compatible ports"? Those are hardly the only Boom-compatible ports available.

It was designed for the boom engine, but the team included a custom DEH patch so it would run perfectly with zdoom.

Maybe you're trying to come across as being cool or something, and I realize that the quality of every PWAD submitted isn't at the level of GothicDM or Memento Mori II, but your comments really aren't condusive to keeping this community together, or to announce new content (regardless of quality) to the community to KEEP it together.

The /Newstuff Chronicles is what I look forward to the most; besides being a music guy, I'm also a level designer (you'll have my first map in 8 years within the next 1.5 weeks). And I can tell you that constructive criticism is what makes /newstuff valuable.

Many new fans are making their way into Doom editing, or are (in my case) making their way BACK into Doom editing. We still have a great community that is making and supporting new utilities for this great game. With the advent of Ports, Doom has fresh life.

I'm not trying to sound like I'm on a soap box, but keep the attitude to yourself. No one wants to read this article to hear you bash the stuff coming out.

I assume you're talking about ohgr.wad. Well, believe it or not, the last thing I want to come off as is insensitive, but at the same time I really want to give the readers a clear view of what's worth playing and what isn't. When it's their first wad, I usually go a little easier on them because mapping is a difficult process to master.
But if there's anything I'm going to criticize it's lack of testing. The difference between a good first try and an awful one in this case was the icon of sin. The author meant to put it in to give it function as a single-player map, but even with the -nomonsters flag, it will be there in deathmatch. Therefore, there is no semblance of playability. If it had been tested, this problem wouldn't be there.

On a seperate note, I have to say that I'm not trying to be malicious when I review wads. Yes, I like to poke fun and it often comes off as cruel, but it's not meant to be. I've gotten into trouble over this in the past and as an attempt to show my true intentions I even made my own terrible wad and gave it a bad review (G-onahd.wad). But the fact is, I can't just sugar-coat every review. I want to give the readers a clear idea of what they should spend their time downloading and if I just say every wad is good then I'm not really doing any service to anyone.
New mappers should not be dissuaded from mapping by one bad review, just like new writers shouldn't be dissuaded from rejection slips. It's part of the process. Learn from it, move on.

While your points are not invalid, I have to admit you took me by surprise. I'm actually a big fan of yours, and it was kind of offsetting that your first comments towards me were so negative. Ouch.
Hope we understand each other a little bit . . .

It was not designed for Boom, it uses no Boom effects whatsoever. no bex, no extended linedefs, no colormaps, no nothing.

Hyena said:

It was designed for the boom engine, but the team included a custom DEH patch so it would run perfectly with zdoom.

uh, pretty sure it's for vanilla, considering it doesn't mention boom anywhere in the text file or on the webpage. the new deh seemed to have just been because zdoom had a compatibility problem with some of the original dehacked code. i imagine if you used the old dehacked code now zdoom would handle it just fine.

also, zdoom is a boom-compatible port, so if you just say "boom compatible ports" you don't need to say zdoom as well. i happened to play it on eternity myself, which, if you didn't know better, you might think couldn't run it because you said "Boom or ZDoom".

Wow. My bad. I guess this page is what mislead me.

As for the DEH, I think it's that you can pass over things in zdoom, and several effects in batman doom are intended for you not to be able to pass over them (such as pylons). So the DEH file modifies their height properties so that they're super-tall.

This is just a guess, however. I really don't know what the real problem was.

Hyena said:

I assume you're talking about ohgr.wad. Well, believe it or not

Nah. It's all good. I was kinda in a rotten mood last night to begin with, and to be perfectly honest, the last place I should have been is a forum.

I just was slightly reminded of the garbage that happens on the GameSpy affiliate sites and their forums and stuff, and just got my panties in a bunch over all the negativity thrown around when people are contributing to the very communities that they themselves depend on.

The /newstuff Chronicles is a feature of Doomworld. If it's quasi satire in nature, then that's fine. I think I was just, like I said, in a crappy mood. Sorry 'bout that. Hope it wasn't taken personally, as it wasn't meant to be directed at you personally. I'm just ranting a bit. ;)

Hyena said:

Wow. My bad. I guess this page is what mislead me.

heh that very page says it runs with vanilla doom

as for the deh the fixed version is no longer necessary to run with zdoom, all the issues present in 1.17 (which was, I believe, the version out when batman doom was released) are fixed and the one in the zip works just fine. I don't remember the exact problem with the patch, it was some kind of frame issue somewhere that caused zdoom to bomb out on certain maps

Tolwyn said:

All that stuff

Thanks. That means a lot.
Well, the internet wouldn't be the internet if we didn't disagree every so often, right? :)

The 90's called. They want their WADs back.

I think he meant "...BESIDES being a music guy, I'm also a level designer..."