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Snakes

Unholy Realms Public Release Thread (/idgames link posted)

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There is some pretty good stuff in this, were actually playing through it right now on survival mode. One of the complaints a lot of us have is the traps tend to become overused but that isn't a big deal the game play is still pretty good and the maps are well crafted.

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Suddenly stuff!

Okay, I'll throw in my thoughts here for a moment:

Firstly, in regards to episodic themes, I'll admit it - they've been done before. In many isntances, they've been done better. That's fine by me - when I started the project I was kind of instilled with a sense of tradition and deliberately chose to go with ye ol' standard. The only thing that changed was that I originally intended for some icy-hell maps along the way but never really got the theme to click the way I wanted it too.

As to the discussion re: theme variation. I'll say this: I tried very hard to take each theme and make a few unique looks. Not saying that they're different from all maps ever, but rather that the individual maps in the wad itself are distinguishable. Now, this didn't quite work out the way I wanted, especially in the second episode's Brick-o-mania, but I eventually got the concept to work in Ep 3. Many of the maps have an identifiable concept behind them - ash, marble, gstone, gothic, wooden, redrock, and the eventual concluding map. Joshy and skillsaw also went with unique looks making the only episode where each map is completely distinguishable from the other. It also features some of the best maps design-wise.

Now, gameplay variation - I have two responses. Firstly, it's a one-man megawad that was intended to have consistent gameplay ideals. Secondly, I did try and mix it up on occasionally. There's linear maps, there's sandbox maps, and there's nonlinear, non-sandbox maps. I do repeat a number of traps throughout the wad, and I very clearly believe in certain concepts (mixture of monsters, when and when not to use them, etc.).

If you didn't enjoy the wad, that's cool. Not everyone will. I do appreciate the fact that it's being used in the same sentences as Scythe and Vanguard as they're two of my favorite wads (I'd top-5 them both).

Now that being said, let us please get back to bug-reports and that sort of goodness.

EDIT: Also thank you everyone for playing and commenting. You guys are the coolest.

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Going by the episode 1 race yesterday, everyone really enjoyed it.

Has some good flow and some new encounters that I have not seen before. My favorite section was the lowering of the 6 hell knights while the cacodemons from the far side are starting to spill over into the blood arena.

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Map 23- what's with that hall with the crushing ceilings? I'm sure there's some reason it's there, but I can't figure out what it's doing; just holding forward will keep you safe through it. Also, the platforming across those redrock ledges to the blue key was a tiny bit annoying, although I'm a card-carrying member of the "shitty at Doom platforming" club.

Other than that, some good fun Dooming. I'm still kinda wondering how the text file descriptions of "difficulty" were decided on, given that they don't seem to match my experiences at all, heh (I thought this level was WAAAAY easier than most anything since episode 1).

EDIT: Map 21's automap name is "Limbo", but in the text file, it's called "Purgatory".

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Bizarrely enough, I based them off of my own experiences. I honestly think part of it has to do with the fact that certain maps get easier with pre-knowledge and some maps are basically equally difficult regardless of how much you know beforehand. Map23 is the latter, whereas I found Map21 to be a good deal easier when you know what weapon to use when. It was built with a certain strategy in mind (the small scale allowed me to go very exact with the gameplay).

That being said, some people will have harder times with certain maps for one reason or another. Map21 awards careful play. You *can't* be careful in Map23 from a certain perspective.

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Out of curiosity, what's the "expected" way of dealing with map 21?

My method was:

Spoiler

Sprint to the Berserk room, hit the switch, grab the 'Serk, run. Go up the bridge, grab the Soulsphere and the Shotgun; kill the Chaingunner, upper-ledge Revenant, and Mancubus with the Shotgun, kill the Imps with the pistol, punch out the HK, the 2 Spectres, and any Pinkies that are wandering around up here- make sure to do it on the opposite side of where the Vile is going to spawn in. Grab the box of bullets, hit the switch. Enter the cave, punch out the Pinkie, HK, Spectre, and Cacodemon. Grab the chaingun, hit the switch. Punch out the Revenants, carefully baiting them across the bridge one-at-a-time if possible. Take the teleporter, hit the switch. Carefully snipe at the Vile with the Chaingun, using the candle-pillar as cover from him and the rock pillar as cover from the Arachno. Finish him with the Shotgun after running out of bullets. Run through the rest of the level without killing anything else unless you have to punch out an Imp or two that's directly in your way (the guys in the Berserk room, the Arachno, and the final spawn-in on that ledge survive.)

Finding no secrets probably didn't help things any.

Also, Map 24- I haven't finished this one yet (best attempt yet was killed by the Cyberdemon), but the enemy placement in the Yellow Key area is bizarre. A few Lost Souls that can't attack you through the impassible lines, then a trap of Pain Elementals that can't attack you because of those same impassible lines? What?

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Cynical said:

... the enemy placement in the Yellow Key area is bizarre. A few Lost Souls that can't attack you through the impassible lines, then a trap of Pain Elementals that can't attack you because of those same impassible lines? What?

That whole room is layout hell. It looks nice, but Snakes probably rues the moment he got the idea to make it, haha.

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Having good times so far!

I noticed that STONE2 and STONE3 on Map32 are out of vertical alignment as they have a replaced texture that changes the offset. Doing a find+replace for them and setting their vertical offset to "0" will fix this.

Heh, could probably also delete the radsuit I put in behind the blue bars on the same map as the nukage doesn't do damage. Whoopsie!

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Well, e3 is actually good. Yeah, yeah, you got me. Except map30 which I didn't bother beating for obvious reasons. IoS crap mixed with sandbox of that size and vague tasks for player to accomplish before laying down rockets in its brain for a hundredth time is far beyond my wishes.
But hey, them guest mappers blow everything up in here with their performance. Skillsaw once again showed that he is able to craft something that's not hard, but at the same time it neither rapes nor bores. Just ideal to sit back, grab your gun and relax. And this is one of the few levels where lava runs aren't that annoying (can't say such thing about next map though, oh well). Great looking, too.
And Joshy! Joshy fucking delivers full time, it's always cool to have a SoD shard in your megawad. Beating this map on my first try (yeah) wasn't an easy task for sure. No demo, sorry.
So all in all - maybe I was a little bit too harsh, and in case I offended someone - accept my apologies, I like arguing when I'm in the right mood. But still - techbase episodes suck big balls. No hard feelings Brian, they really do. Some Plutonia-like maps are also good enough, but still - e3 is better, so at least I'd like to say thank you for the last third.


Maybe I'm repeating things already said here, but - here's something regarding existing issues:

  • I've noticed significant ammo shortages on maps 19 & 24, at least without finding all the secrets (but I did pick up plasma in 24), so I was forced to ignore groups of enemies while rushing for the exit. I mean, the maps are still completable, but killing everyone requires some awareness and strict economy. I don't think that giving some more stuff in there would hurt. Other maps seemed fine as far as I can remember.
  • I've also noticed cosmetic issue with sky in map17. Not fatal of course, but I'm informing you anyway, it makes things look a little weird.
Anything else noticed by me is already covered it seems.

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30 players together tearing up your maps right now! Well, some maps are doing more of the tearing. Damn those cyber-archie teams!

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Some other stuff we noticed:
http://i.imgur.com/kutoLhG.png - look closely at the top, you might want to read TOD's response from this thread :)
http://i.imgur.com/3EkZDJt.png - hard to notice it on the pic but there is a nodebuilder error somewhere on the left, you can easily find it in prboom+.
http://i.imgur.com/xb5I4td.png - the lift here can get really buggy. The problem is that it consists of more than one sector, so a player can block one part but not the other and then that other part will go back up while the first part will remain on the ground. Hope this makes sense. :)
Also spider mastermind got stuck on map17, hard to explain how exactly but you can watch the demo here - http://144.76.43.136:10648/demos/20131003_185439_urbeta2_map17.zdd (happens near the end)
And all demos are available here btw - http://144.76.43.136:10648/demos/ (ignore the stuff on bottom, it's just us testing some stuff, the first demo of the session is " 20131003_180120_urbeta2_map01.zdd")

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I don't believe so, no. Alterations to that map's opening moves is on my "things to fix" list before the final release. There's a ZIMMER switch on one of the rev platforms and THEN you go to that switch.

In retrospect, that was a pretty stupid idea over all.

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Two bugs related to the Plasma secret in Map 24:
1. The teleporter can fail to work, leaving you trapped here: http://imgur.com/4gr5zp8

2. Sometimes, monsters will take the secret teleporters, leaving them stuck here: http://imgur.com/YJvnf2N

Also, this map's pacing is just... ugh. 75% dead easy to the point of tedium, then a ridiculous fight where you blow yourself up on your own rockets thanks to unmarked teleporter destinations in the middle of the room, there's mass hitscanners with little cover, and there's two Viles that teleport in at random times. Makes playing this level really annoying; too annoying to bother continuing trying for me, at least.

EDIT:
Map 25- this one could use some more ammo. Since it looks like the first Cyberdemon here is one of those special dehacked Cybies that has to be killed (when I tried running past him with the Invuln and hitting the switch, a Vile teleported in on the upper ledge, but the ledge didn't lower), ammo is very tight; on both runs where I killed him, I literally killed him with my very last bullet. I'm not a huge fan of the "must-kill" Cybie on general principle (there's absolutely nothing indicating which ones are mandatory), but if you're going to use it, ammo needs to be somewhat generous.

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Cynical said:

and there's two Viles that teleport in at random times

They tele in only when they step on the tele pad below, so with right positioning it's easy to evade this turn of events and to shoot them from above. But yeah, not very pleasant moment, especially considering ammo starvation.

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On map 8 you can get the red key from the berserk pack position by jumping on the pillary thing in the outside edge. Is that intended?

I really hate those arbitrary-wall-lowers-to-reveal-a-tiny-compartment-with-monsters-just-waiting-for-someone-to-pass-by traps which are all over the place. But then, I already hated them in vanilla Doom.
Besides that it seems really cool, at least what I've seen till now (finished map 8).

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Cynical said:

Two bugs related to the Plasma secret in Map 24:
1. The teleporter can fail to work, leaving you trapped here: http://imgur.com/4gr5zp8

2. Sometimes, monsters will take the secret teleporters, leaving them stuck here: http://imgur.com/YJvnf2N

Also, this map's pacing is just... ugh. 75% dead easy to the point of tedium, then a ridiculous fight where you blow yourself up on your own rockets thanks to unmarked teleporter destinations in the middle of the room, there's mass hitscanners with little cover, and there's two Viles that teleport in at random times. Makes playing this level really annoying; too annoying to bother continuing trying for me, at least.

EDIT:
Map 25- this one could use some more ammo. Since it looks like the first Cyberdemon here is one of those special dehacked Cybies that has to be killed (when I tried running past him with the Invuln and hitting the switch, a Vile teleported in on the upper ledge, but the ledge didn't lower), ammo is very tight; on both runs where I killed him, I literally killed him with my very last bullet. I'm not a huge fan of the "must-kill" Cybie on general principle (there's absolutely nothing indicating which ones are mandatory), but if you're going to use it, ammo needs to be somewhat generous.

Noted on the Map24 bug. That map has caused me no end of trouble. Map25's cyberdemons are not mandatory, and in the latest beta, the only mandatory cyberdemon kill is on Map11.

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Snakes said:

Map25's cyberdemons are not mandatory, and in the latest beta, the only mandatory cyberdemon kill is on Map11.

Weird; I wonder what caused what I saw? I wish I'd have recorded a demo, now.

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Bug in map 27:
Imps can somehow get stuck below/inside of the pathway here:
http://i.imgur.com/TLpmD7T.png (look at bottom, just left of my shotgun and you can see one; sadly, my shotgun covered most of them, my screenshot-fu failed- sorry about that)
and their infinitely tallness makes it impossible to walk across this pathway (you just get scratched if you try)
http://imgur.com/RXEKHSs (right here, if I walk forward, I just get stuck on an invisible imp wall and scratched).

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Okay, that's... one of the weirder bugs I've seen of late. I'll open that map and see if I can figure anything out about it. First glance has me completely clueless, though :/

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I think I may have seen it in other places near the central tower on the BFG side (as opposed to the Blue Key side, where I've never seen it), but I wasn't able to get pictures of the imps stuck in/beneath the cliffs anywhere else, and it only happened near the edges of the walkways, so it's hard to tell if it's just an imp getting knocked down into the lava and clawing me when I get near an edge in those cases.

But this screenshot, they were definitely "in" the cliff, and created a solid wall. I've never seen anything like it before.

(Also, how much longer does this level go after the BFG? This one is absolutely kicking my ass, to a completely ridiculous degree, and if it goes too much further than the furthest point I've seen [those mass-Revenant caves after the BFG where you hit the switches to raise the poles], it may be time for me to consider turning the difficulty down.)

Also, I'll second the cries for the lava to be reduced to 15%. Radsuit leakage really pisses me off sometimes here (and it's not just me getting hit by things I didn't see; when I had a quick look around the level with -nomonsters to locate exactly how to get to the megasphere, I leaked four times in the initial forced lava-run)

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The imps-in-the-ground seem like yet another nodebuilder error. Move vertices in that area and rebuild, hope for the best. Did I mention Doom utterly hates skillsaw? The way he builds those complex layouts leads to something that makes the nodebuilder cry, it seems.

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Map 28- Is there any way to change the start setup so that you don't hear a loud switch sound every time the player or an enemy fires through that opening?

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More on map 28:
Sectors 298 and 299 are marked damaging, even though they're just plain stone. Also, if you've exhausted the radsuits in the level when you get to this corridor (easy to do if you accidentally pick one up when fighting for the red key), you can't finish the level; add one to this hallway somewhere.

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Veinen said:

Question regarding map10: How do you get this Archie to teleport in? Twice I've tried to max this map and both times the Archie fails to teleport. Am I doing something wrong? A demo of the latest attempt if it helps: http://www.mediafire.com/?sf2s12knxvibocd


That archvile will never wake up because the sector its in isnt joined with another sector, so he wont be able to hear you

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