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Ribbiks

Slaughterfest 3 [Beta_C released, 05/08/2017]

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I've been having one thought regarding all this sf idea for some time. To me it literally feels that this project is wearing out. While sf11 was some kind of a fresh experiment, sf12 was a strange mix of quality and soullessness (and I really think so) - this one looks like it's being made under torture, some kind of job to get something done. The pace has decreased, and so did the quality of the maps. Only some of them are entertaining and memorable. I start to think that making sf megawads every year is too much, maybe it would be a much better idea to take a long break and 'generate' some inspiration before starting the next one.
You may disagree, but that's how I see it. Never meant neither to abuse nor to offend, just a contemplation coming out of observation, comparison etc.

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Since you got at dw all you did was complaining. Not a single positive thing. You know what? Go play in traffic.

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I think for the start room, change the chaingunners for sergeants and place a chaingun in that room to tease the player in. Should mean that less health is lost.

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@ j4rio: if you see all my thoughts as complaints - I'm okay with that. I just write what I want to, and I also don't make the bringer of the supreme justice out of myself. So far your post makes me think you got offended.
Oh, and it's quite pleasant to know that someone observes my activity here. Cool you care about me.

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Not really, the funny thing is that I actually partly agree with you. I did bring out the thought that a yearly pause wouldn't hurt in sf12 thread. It's just slightly notable that you can't enjoy anything, so you might as well save yourself the trouble of bothering to notify anybody about it.

P.S - I played just 4 maps from sf13

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Let me rearrange it a bit: my demands have grown high over time, that's true, so it gets progressively harder to find something really appealing to me. But as long as it doesn't prevent me from being at least partly objective and as long as I don't start being rude and impolite for whatever reason (and I don't intend to) - let's just put my personal issues aside, shall we? There's little interesting in them to you. As well as anyone else.
And I assure you: if I post something, even though you might see it as another 'complaint of a life-tired downer' - then I actually do care about the subject. Otherwise I prefer to remain silent. If that hurts - well, I'm sorry, but I won't stop posting because of that.
Sadly I've read sf12 thread only partly and thus didn't see your point on said matter, so I felt like posting myself.

P.S. Oh, okay, let's count 'em... 17. But few actually beaten.

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I really thought people were going to tell me it was too easy :/

Phml said:
I didn't like the start, couldn't find a way to get through those 4 chaingunners except plain luck.

cannonball said:
I think for the start room, change the chaingunners for sergeants and place a chaingun in that room to tease the player in. Should mean that less health is lost.

What I'd like to do with the chaingunner room is put a new section before it, so it's no longer at the beginning. What I'm thinking is -- when playing casually, when you get to that point you'd have the SSG, or possibly chaingun, and you'd have a certain amount of armour, so it would involve the same gameplay but wouldn't be as much of a make or break thing as it is now.

But also, perhaps to get an optimally fast time for the map you will have to skip all or part of the new opening section, and thereby end up facing the chaingunner room in more-or-less the state it is now? It's really not such a painful room when you get used to it.

Besides that, perhaps you should get a soulsphere instead of a medikit in the 3d floor room? (And probably the later soulsphere in the arachnotron part would become something else)

Phml said:
Beyond that it always felt as if I was missing some ammo to play it my way, and was instead meant to play it in a very specific way I wasn't privy to; and as a result I fell back to super defensive play. I don't think this is as bad as the above, or even that this is necessarily bad.

I see what you mean. I just found it tricky in this layout to give the player enough ammo to make play comfortable without making it trivial -- IE, since there's so much space and cover, if you have enough rockets or SSG shells you can just wait at one end of the map and kill everything as it comes to you without really being threatened. Having to regroup to get new rockets made playing the map interesting for me, but I can see it needs a bit of work still.

But then, every one monster out of two seems to be an arch-vile, and two thirds of the time that arch-vile will pop up out of sight (those ratios are entirely accurate. fact!). So not only you can ruin your chances early on by taking too much damage, not only you can screw yourself by missing a few shots, but you can also mess your run simply by being at the wrong place for too long.

Do you think this would be less of an issue if you had a better supply of ammo/health/whatever? Or are there actually too many archviles for this layout?

Don't get me wrong, it was still fun to play. I liked the final fight with the spiderMM and 4 revs, too. As is, it could fit as a late map kind of thing, breaking up the horde gameplay with something just as hard (if not harder) but different.

That part's almost certainly going to change, but I'm not sure how. It is interesting to fight the spider mastermind by provoking infighting (as both you and j4rio did), but there's no real incentive to do that, and you can just as easily just kill it with the SSG or rockets, and then move onto the revenants, which means there's not necessarily any interaction between those monster groups in terms of gameplay. So if they stay, they'll probably be joined by new monsters, or the layout will have to change slightly I guess (I could lock the player in the section after the yellow/blue door for one thing...)

Demonologist said:
Remix of "Exodus". I could have sworn Ribbiks has done that.

Ribbiks worked on the old version of Exodus a bit, but I don't think anyone saw that as a "remix", or whatever?

My first constant thought was 'where's the fucking ammo?!'. The second one was a little bit more constructive, something like 'too route-dependent'. The directions chosen by player determine everything, yet mistakes are hardly forgiven.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "too route-dependent". Could you elaborate? The map is supposed to be quite open-ended in terms of monster movement, player reactions, etc, but I didn't think the ensuing chaos was particularly unforgiving compared to most slaughtermaps.

The pace has decreased, and so did the quality of the maps. Only some of them are entertaining and memorable.

I felt similarly about the material we had for sf2012 at this point last year, but as it turned out most of the best maps from that collection appeared towards the end of the year.

Edit: 666th post. hooray.

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Grain of Salt said:

I really thought people were going to tell me it was too easy :/

Heh, easier here, Doomgod...

Grain of Salt said:

Ribbiks worked on the old version of Exodus a bit, but I don't think anyone saw that as a "remix", or whatever?

That's an irony aimed at him directly. I'm sure he'll understand.

Grain of Salt said:

I'm not really sure what you mean by "too route-dependent". Could you elaborate? The map is supposed to be quite open-ended in terms of monster movement, player reactions, etc, but I didn't think the ensuing chaos was particularly unforgiving compared to most slaughtermaps.

Okay, see what happens from my pov (I deleted my FDA in rage - and I frequently do so - so I'll have to use words now): if you take the left (to the street) - you'll most likely run out of ammo quickly since there are many of shot-consuming guys over there. And considering the fact that you awaken some revs and AVs - you may run in awkward situation. If you rush inside the door to the stairs with ssg and such - you may run into an even more awkward situation, especially if it follows the events described above. But if you choose the right to PG and the key - you'll be able to retaliate for some time (though you still have to rely on infighting heavily). In other words - it's better for you to actually know what you are doing, i.e. prior knowledge would make everything much more comfortable, without it things go much more chaotic and uncontrollable, at least for me with my aggressive and slightly random playstyle.
And it seems I'm the only one who doesn't care much about chaingunners. Never had much trouble with them.

Grain of Salt said:

I felt similarly about the material we had for sf2012 at this point last year, but as it turned out most of the best maps from that collection appeared towards the end of the year.

I sincerely hope this happens again, but so far I'm in doubt.

Grain of Salt said:

666th post. hooray.

Satan approves.

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It's really not such a painful room when you get used to it.


I'm honestly at a loss as to what to do in this room! And that's after playing this fight more than a dozen times.

But yeah, if I had a SSG or some armor before getting in... It'd be no trouble. For that matter, I think if you had a chaingun pick right at start it wouldn't be such a problem. Having a weapon switch midway through the fight killed me more than once (and, of course, the chaingun is a much better weapon to fight those chaingunners than the single shotgun).

Do you think this would be less of an issue if you had a better supply of ammo/health/whatever? Or are there actually too many archviles for this layout?


More ammo and/or health could definitely help.

There's definitely a feel of... "Hey, I wonder what's going to happen next? Arch-viles. Oh, and what now? Arch-viles. Now I've picked up a key, hmm, lemme guess... Arch-viles!" as you play through the map. Whether it's overly repetitive or not is probably a matter of taste. In such a short map it seems like at best it can work fine, at worst it remains tolerable.

I just found it tricky in this layout to give the player enough ammo to make play comfortable without making it trivial


Yeah, while playing I could tell you were getting at something, I just felt like I lacked the information (or the wits to get that information!) to make informed decisions.

It is interesting to fight the spider mastermind by provoking infighting (as both you and j4rio did), but there's no real incentive to do that


Not getting shredded to bits by chaingun fire is a pretty good incentive! :)

Granted, there's the option to back away and use cover, but it's more time-consuming and doesn't give you the same opportunities for perfect SSG shots.

Not to say I have any issue with you changing this part, just wanted to react on the particular quoted point.

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Looks like Phml started a tradition of remixing a map from the previous SF. :)

About SF wearing out, I still think it's fun and I'll always like these kind of maps. I've had fun making maps for this and it doesn't feel like torture. Thanks to GRB for starting it!

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Krispy said:

Last update for Gut Buster before I leave for Germany for a year. Really only slight aesthetic touches. Nothing major.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/5ixgeb5v388ppm4/GUTBUSTER%284%29.wad


cool map. where's the music from? i definitely know it, but i can't remember for the life of me.

edit: tested with zdoom.
- no idea how to fix this

- the outer sector is too dark i guess (might not be a problem if people don't have free mouse look on anyway)


...also, if you end up in frankfurt by any chance, drop me a pm or something, i'm a student at the university there.

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Right! 2nd version of Shanghai Massacre.

Changes are as following:

1. Delete the 2 crosses in outdoor area.
2. Delete both long corridors in the RK room.
3. Move imps from the 2 crosses to the outdoor part.
4. Reduce number of teleporting chaingunnies in RK room, also ad 4 teleporters.

Total monsters count: 840(UV), 743(HMP), 554(ITTYD)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/civ3cs

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I tried phml's 3 lines, died a lot and removed the demo. The start with imps and demons is quite fun to play. I lost interest at the point where the revs get through the pe's and I had to go back to start to get rid of the rev balls and kill them from insane range with rocketlauncher. I just didn't have the patience that jongo had, a few revs remained and I had to go all the way back to dodge the 53789 balls that came 'out of nowhere', but I was stubborn, didn't go back and eventually died by it. Despite the revs, this map does prove that gameplay > layout, I didn't expect to enjoy the concept this much.

I just did an FDA on Grain's remix map. I liked the secret. It was intuitive to find and it contained a nice surprise. Most feedback has been mentioned by others already. Perhaps a solution for the chaingunners would be a beserk kit, instead of stimpacks? That way you 'solve' some ammo problems too. I've spent a lot of time provoking silly small infights, just because I felt I wouldn't have enough ammo for the viles at last door (especially if they would raise many monsters). Then there's 1 cacodemon stuck in a wall (?) at the outside area near soulsphere, so I couldn't max the map. :(

Regarding sf not being good anymore: I feel all of the sf series are great. Demonologist, what do you mean by soullessness? It's not new? You don't start every map with the right weapons? Maps contain wrong monsters? Too few/many monsters? Gameplay isn't slow/fast enough? It's all more of same? Too few/many arena's? Fights are not/too tense (which is basically a difficulty setting)?

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Daiyu: did everything except yellow door because I forgot to figure out how to get the yellow key before recording, then was too dumb to figure it out on the fly.
http://filesmelt.com/dl/sh2013afix-21-again.lmp
Cool map, I think the pictures make it unique.

In (red?) door there's 2 side lifts that go up to a small platform w/ a switch; you can hit the switch from below before going up, which is what I did, but that later realized the linedef to trigger cacos etc is by crossing through to fall off edge. They won't warp if you back out.
You can probably vile jump onto yellow key platform, but probably doesn't matter because the key is up high. Gameplay isn't super hard, but hard enough because it always becomes hard when trying to go as fast as possible. I didn't see the ssg on my first couple plays either, and the imps around the ring above vile at ssg would be tedious to kill so I skipped them.

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@ ToD: I never lost my confidence in you, if you stop liking and making slaughtermaps - my world would shatter. But I'd like to see more quality stuff from others as well, stuff that would be both entertaining and memorable (in a good meaning) to me.

__Lagger__ said:

what do you mean by soullessness?

Well, if you really want to know...

__Lagger__ said:

It's all more of same?

I think this is it, though it's more on a sensual level rather than rational. I think sf11 was more memorable even despite its flaws (and maybe even because of them; it's always easier to pick outstanding maps when garbage serves as a background for them), while sf12 looks good and polished but for the most part it just fuses itself into some homogeneous mass as you progress. That's how I see it.
I also feel cold for the maps that are very long and hard at once (this particularly applies to 25, 29 & 30 of sf12). You see, if I step down in difficulty - it becomes boring and too easy most of the time. I almost don't use savegames for the same reason. So when my hardcore/masochistic demeanor faces some extremely sadistic intentions - that's when my wall of misunderstanding towards author's controversial effort starts to build itself up. But that's more of an issue of particular maps, not the whole megawad (as long as it's not comprised of such maps entirely, but then there's still a possibility that it could attract me in some other ways, like Stardate does... or Skepland did, for instance; and thus I continue submerging myself into this guilty pleasure of shouting in anger and retrying again and again for tens of times, but don't want to put an end to my torment).
I hope this explains my attitude well enough.

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I do kinda miss the fun shorter personalized maps like tom19/phmlspeed/etc, and slaughterfest is kind of a gravitational well sucking them all in with less playful guidelines, revisions, a delay until the whole thing is finished, and longer maps because those seem superficially more epic. The maps are being churned out faster than they can be demoed probably (unless TOD/okuplok/etc just does them all on the first try). But I don't care that much; anyone can still make individual maps.

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Demonologist, perhaps you like the maps that are rough at start and once you're done with that the map is actually finished? Many sf1 maps are a single tense fight right from the start. I think this is one of the major gameplay differences between sf1 and sf2, where sf2 felt more sunderish: a cascade of (trap) rooms.

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AtTheGates said:

cool map. where's the music from?


TNT I think.


edit: tested with zdoom.
- no idea how to fix this

Neither do I. I assume you're referring to the sky thing. Looks fine in PRBoom+.


- the outer sector is too dark i guess (might not be a problem if people don't have free mouse look on anyway)

Fixed.


...also, if you end up in frankfurt by any chance, drop me a pm or something, i'm a student at the university there.

Will do.

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So ggg if I'm interpreting correctly, you'd argue that these megawads are a more attractive outlet for slaughtermappers in that they'd rather contribute grandiose maps here instead of working on smaller/more-experimental releases of their own?

there might be something to that, but indeed there's nothing inherently stopping people from doing whatever they want with their mapping.


@discussion-of-superlong-maps:


I'd definitely encourage more smaller-scale map submissions for this project, I'm working on one or two of my own. j4 pretty much nailed it somewhere earlier in the thread: they're easier to map and often more fun to play/record-maxes because they're not a monstrous investment of time. Seeing as these wads are prone to generating demos, it is almost a shame that the huge maps will likely go untouched by most, save for the wandering doomgod who may decide to steamroll it on a whim one day. Personally I enjoy the monster maps, but they do typically require something 'extra' to keep me plowing through, usually visuals.

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Looking fantastic so far! I'll get some FDA's done for some of the new maps if anyone wants them.

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[smaller-scale maps are] easier to map


To me they feel harder to make, because everything has to be so meticulously crafted to work well. With huge maps there's more leeway with dimensions and... everything, really. Going big makes it easier to go abstract. On smaller maps you really need that extra level of attention and polish to make it great rather than good. To this day I still don't feel I've managed to make anything that can compare with Stardate 20X6, Scythe 2's jungle episode or Grain of Salt's maps; but if I could, I definitely would.

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__Lagger__ said:

Demonologist, perhaps you like the maps that are rough at start and once you're done with that the map is actually finished? Many sf1 maps are a single tense fight right from the start. I think this is one of the major gameplay differences between sf1 and sf2, where sf2 felt more sunderish: a cascade of (trap) rooms.

Heh, looks like you're trying really hard to understand my logic (crazy Russian fuck, yes I am), so I'll elaborate furthermore then: I do prefer smaller and shorter maps, but that doesn't mean I deny bigger ones completely. It's a combination of both length and over-the-top difficulty that makes me sad. Imagine how you play difficult and vicious map for an hour, surviving miraclously in countless traps and mean encounters, and after that you die in an utterly unfair one which requires prior knowledge, developed strategy and a portion of luck to beat it. After an hour of gameplay. I guess you could understand then why I'd like to murder someone in case like this, preferrably the map's author. And it's no wonder that after several occasions of the same type my initial interest - if it ever existed - vains rapidly. And if you wanna know my preferences - I adore quite a bunch of skillsaw's maps, especially Vanguard, Lunatic and Hanging Gardens. Pretty much ideal for me gameplay-wise, dynamic and beautiful yet far from being frustrating.
Are we done yet?

Ribbiks said:

they're easier to map and often more fun to play/record-maxes because they're not a monstrous investment of time.

Bingo.

Ribbiks said:

but they do typically require something 'extra' to keep me plowing through, usually visuals.

True as well.

Phml said:

To this day I still don't feel I've managed to make anything that can compare with Stardate 20X6, Scythe 2's jungle episode or Grain of Salt's maps; but if I could, I definitely would.

You stop that. Your stuff is cool nevertheless, and in my eyes it's perfectly competitive.

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Thanks, but don't worry, if anything my ego is too big :) What I meant to say is, there's this particular kind of map that relies on extremely clever layout and tight thing placement, and manages to offer slaughterish challenge despite minimal monster count; and the people mentioned also make it look good aesthetically. I'm having a hard time doing that sort of map.

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Here we go: Desecration - V3

- Removed large arena at the end. Drags out the map too much I thought.
- Yellow key teleporter area fortified. Fight to the exit or stay to survive. Not really sure if it's beatable, need feedback.
- Rearranged things in the now-final arena.
- STILL no difficulty. Usually the last thing I bother with.

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@ Phml: okay, I don't think it's that hard to make GoS-style maps gameplay-wise if you really want to; Scythe2... honestly I don't remember, haven't played it in years; and Stardate... please don't, have some sympathy.

Seriously though, I find your initial mapping style to be much more appealing. It may be not as challenging as the ones you mentioned, but at the same time it offers pure fun most of the time and not a goddamn pain in the ass and the necessity to tear through it rather than just playing for enjoyment. Can't say for others, but for myself I prefer this approach much, much more and really appreciate that. Consider this lame and boring, but then we both are, haha.
[And I think I already told everything I wanted about tight ammo balance as well.]

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desecration v3:
fda:
http://filesmelt.com/dl/desecration-v3-1.lmp
I rarely like invulnerabilities, which was basically skipping a whole fight in this case. In a room with lots of pillars, a cyber and cacos, the medikits were hard to avoid in the corners if you didn't want to waste them. I never played it before and found it pretty easy even though I usually suck at fda. Died a couple times at start, then did the rest in 1 try. But its probably better for mappers to make maps according to their own skill level than guesstimate gamepley for a harder skill level than they can test themselves.

Ribbiks said:

So ggg if I'm interpreting correctly, you'd argue that these megawads are a more attractive outlet for slaughtermappers in that they'd rather contribute grandiose maps here instead of working on smaller/more-experimental releases of their own?


I think I'm just grasping at straws so I can have something to complain about; ignore me.

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damn tod, extremely epic map. imposing architecture, and I really like the use of black to create midtex structures.

I thought I was recording when I played through but apparently I didn't, I got about 2000 monsters in before dying, think I fell into some lava which turned out to be inescapable (the lava in that screenshot actually :p)

Extremely fun so far, I'll give it another go and record a pseudo-fda. Only thing I'm not terribly fond of is all the super steep stairs, doomguy slidin' around like a slip'n'slide, but that's sort of your shtick so I can tolerate it :) Also gotta give ya props on the revenant placement, sniping bastards!

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