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Reisal

Oblige 4.28 released

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I think that instead of supporting 150 different games I'd rather like to see some design improvements. It sometimes generates pretty cool stuff, but always ends up doing these huge halls at some point, no matter what I set, and it's a bit annoying.

It would be cool to see, for example, a secret that instead of a powerup would contain a switch that lowers a pillar randomly generated somewhere else.

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Andrew noted that Oblige v4 will still be worked on and that there will less large empty areas/halls.

If you need some solid random maps, check version 3 in the Oldies section and Obhack.

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Cheers geo for the feedback.

No plans for any modern-ish games (like TF2), I don't play them.

Scypek2 said:

I think that instead of supporting 150 different games I'd rather like to see some design improvements.

I will be concentrating on DOOM for the next 6-12 months, and will be looking at improving the gameplay -- though at the moment I am still working on really basic things like how to layout a room, and the WAD-based prefab system.

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The WAD prefab thing is my most anticipated feature for this. Can't wrap my head around code, but DB2 is easy. With some gameplay mods, Oblige levels as is can already be pretty fun, the only glaring flaw is repetitiveness. Being able to throw your own rooms into the mix would go a long way towards alleviating the issue.

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The WAD prefab feature could mean anyone can make extra rooms and submit them, thus reducing the occasional repetition in maps generated by Oblige.

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I'd be happy to play anyone's new extra rooms :-)

The twisting staircase up is VERY nice. The 4 way intersection feels nice too with some good detail especially the hanging wall faces. There is some giant wide dual staircase on the outside that looks nice and plays nice.

There are nice smooth curved rock hallways that were in the last major version. Those are always a very nice detail.

Actually here's a new way to shuffle the rooms so you don't see the same ones as often. Once a prefab is used, prevent it from being used again until they're all used up? Or prevent it from being used for the next 30 rooms (if there are 60 prefabs).

Perhaps a switch that slowly lowers the items from a tall pillar. Because I can really just run into a room grab the item and be gone before anything attacks me. And again when you get an item have monster closets open and the room door close until you find a switch in the monster closet :-)

There's also the monsters teleporting in trick that Scythe uses, but that might be too complex. Imagine a big empty room... that suddenly has enemies teleporting in.

Empty hallways can benefit from supports as I've told you before, but maybe that's a line restriction problem. Even putting torch objects would be good. Or suddenly putting a secret hidden hell room inside of a nazi theme.

After a while I just found the areas to be too wide and spaced out so even if there's a flood of enemies I could just run right past them all. Maybe I can't do that on a higher difficulty though.

I think Doom is finally showing its age for me.

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printz said:

Who are the authors of Oblige?


Andrewj is the author, I am one of several contributors if you see the credits page on the Sourceforge page.

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I've been using both version 357 and the new version 428.

428 allows for better/smoother gameplay, I think...especially with "hordes" of monsters.

357 is definitely more interesting in terms of the rooms, and feeling. My favorite thing to do is to find shortcuts through jumping... Since the random generation doesn't check for that sort of thing, it creates a cool dynamic in the levels where you can sometimes parkour your way past doors. Sometimes, its really easy, but sometimes it can be very tricky and satisfying.

I like both, and I feel you should be able to select the older version when generating levels in current versions of Oblige.

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Got a question: When I choose Hexen, Full Game, it made 35 maps. Shouldn't it create 40?

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Cire said:

Got a question: When I choose Hexen, Full Game, it made 35 maps. Shouldn't it create 40?

Oblige doesn't follow Hexen's layout of maps and hubs, it creates its own, currently making 7 maps for each episode.

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odysseyofnoises said:

I just discovered this program. It's very interesting! =D How did you get it to generate level names??

Some level names are completely made by a human.

The rest are made by placing random words in a certain sentence pattern, e.g. "the" followed by an adjective like "spooky" (or "dark" or "alpha"), followed by a noun like "station" (or "refinery" etc). There are heaps of words, so it rarely makes the same level name.

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The funny thing though is that the actual level often works with the map title, heh. Like I have this level called "The Ghostly Crypt" and the map actually looks like a crypt =P

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It's usually just coincidence when a level matches it's name :)

Job said:

Is Doom 64 EX support possible?

Possible, but difficult on a technical level, because:
(1) different map format -- that's the least difficult part though

(2) having each level in its own WAD file (as a lump in the final WAD) -- that's a real pain, and I don't know why Kaiser chose that system apart from "it seemed like a cool idea at the time".

(3) needing to invoke the custom node builder, which means I need to supply a binary for each platform which Oblige supports (Linux and Win32 atm, maybe OS/X one day).

On the aesthetic side, I'm not sure how do colored lighting well, the Absolution TC support in Oblige 4.28 just gave each room and hallway a random color. Doom64 really needs good colored lighting, as the textures themselves are very bland without it.

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andrewj said:

It's usually just coincidence when a level matches it's name :)


Possible, but difficult on a technical level, because:
(1) different map format -- that's the least difficult part though

(2) having each level in its own WAD file (as a lump in the final WAD) -- that's a real pain, and I don't know why Kaiser chose that system apart from "it seemed like a cool idea at the time".

(3) needing to invoke the custom node builder, which means I need to supply a binary for each platform which Oblige supports (Linux and Win32 atm, maybe OS/X one day).

On the aesthetic side, I'm not sure how do colored lighting well, the Absolution TC support in Oblige 4.28 just gave each room and hallway a random color. Doom64 really needs good colored lighting, as the textures themselves are very bland without it.

Ouch. That does sound challenging. That already tells me how different EX is from Absolution.

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