Countdown to Extinction - Now on IdGames!

Volia! After...*Counts on fingers*...3 weeks of bugfixing, compiling and procrastinating, Countdown to Extinction is finally complete! For those of you who don't know, CtE is a collection of 1 hour speedmaps made by yours truly over a period of 3 weeks. I'm honestly surprised I'm not burnt out. I work in mysterious ways.

Now on the IdGames Archive! Ignore the Terrywad comments, those'll be deleted soon enough.

In case you're interested, here's the link to the original thread where I stored my speedmaps.

holy sweet! Even though I already played most of these maps I'm super excited to go through the whole thing :)

Heh, finally! :p Now I wait and hope there aren't too many obvious problems I missed entirely.

Congratulations, man! A complete megawad in 3 weeks (bugfixing aside), that's an awesome output. And the maps are very quality even if they weren't created in one hour. I'm enjoying them now, currently I went through the first seven maps plus I've already known several others from your thread. They're fun and I'd say they even have good replay value, even the ones you've picked for early slots. I'm impressed, good job! ;)

EDIT: 3 weeks (bugfixing aside) correction

I had a virus on one of my older computers with the same name...

Anyway, gonna give it a try on the weekend.

INSTAFIVE EVEN ONLY FOR THE TITLE

EDIT: AND ANOTHER ONE FOR THE NAME OF THE ZIP FILE

Interesting. I'll try it on the weekend too. Now it's nightmare difficulty just to stay awake...

MAP12: You can still get stuck behind these rock steps:




MAP16: OK this is hilarious, the first time I play this level, the Spiderdemon wakes up early and teleports before he should. Attempting to open the grates just lifts him up into the ceiling.





I was only able to reproduce this once, by running around and shooting for several minutes. I guess he's maybe able to see the player from exactly the right angle? Don't know.

edit: Yeah I can get the spider to teleport pretty consistently now that I know where to go. Here's a hotfix that I think solves the problem - https://www.mediafire.com/?x8kdz58wj8v37p7


MAP18: Red Key still obtainable without hitting the switch.


MAP19: New (I think?) 3D floor effects cause HOM on the way back down. Change the linedef positions to lower the floor earlier?



Starting to feel like a drill sergeant, lol. "Not good enough private! Scrub these wads with a toothbrush until they're sparkling!"


MAP20: If the player is too fast, they can trigger one of the lowering gates before to the yellow key before another is finished, locking themselves out. Similar problem to MAP21, don't know if there's an adequate solution.


MAP27: Red key switch still broken on complevel 2. Pretty sure I sent you a fix, here it is again, applied to the current version of MAP27 - https://www.mediafire.com/?ujjb8wcwu3vullf . If you don't like that solution that's OK, but it needs changing somehow to work in vanilla or cl2.


Lastly it should be said somewhere that this requires wad merging to work with vanilla, with DeuSF or whatever. In Chocolate Doom you can use -merge instead of -file.

I've now been through the current version whole wad with Chocolate Doom (no VPOs! :p), we'll see if anyone catches any problems that I've missed though.

In MAP16 in Zandronum, I keep falling into an illusio pit with a mancubus, it's early on in the map. I have to say though, the ride continues to be very fun (not to sound confusing, I play from pistol starts). I appreciate the way how Obsidian shapes rooms and put monsters in a greatly functional way.

scifista42 said:

In MAP16 in Zandronum, I keep falling into an illusio pit with a mancubus, it's early on in the map.

What version/settings of Zan? I just tried it with 1.2 (default settings), and the manc appeared as he should. You're not jumping are you?

Heh, now I've managed to not trigger the error, suddenly! Weird. Zandronum 1.2, I believe default settings too, I've just quickly climbed up the stairs before, repeatedly ended up in a HOM filled pit and squashed by a fatso below me.

Well, I can't get it to happen and I can't see what would cause it in the map, so "lol Doom engine" I guess :p

Awesome! I missed a bunch of maps so ima have to go through this bad boy!! Great job obsidian!!

OP link updated: with luck that's gotten all the bugs Plums mentioned. I vote that Plums get the custom title "Bugfixer Extraordinaire".

EDIT: Oh, and while I remember: if anyone feels like submitting demos, I can add them to the wad. I'd prefer spectacularly failed ones over victorious ones if possible. :P

Obsidian said:

OP link updated: with luck that's gotten all the bugs Plums mentioned. I vote that Plums get the custom title "Bugfixer Extraordinaire".

That'll just make more work for me! :P
I'm joking of course, I actually like doing this kind of thing. Lets me feel productive without spending too much effort on making a level from scratch!

Here's a surprisingly-close attempt of a MAP10 pacifist run if you want. Recorded in Chocolate Doom without longtics, should be vanilla-compatible.

https://www.mediafire.com/?onduuz4cxbqnpkj

Once the final version is out I think I'm going to try pacifist runs for any map where it might be possible. A lot of them are I think.

Very cool stuff! I enjoyed all the maps, perfectly short and sweet, some of them very impressive for 1-hour-or-just-over endeavors. Certainly some of the later maps are extremely concept-driven and would take me hours to get right, but you've got some fairly complex setups throughout here. Very admirable work. :D

Tiny complaint: Once the archviles got introduced, there seemed to be one in every map. Not a fan, especially since the small maps made them hard to evade/avoid, so please try and pace your viles. Don't be that one guy we all know about. :P

Bugs I found:

MAP03: The grey walls are vertically misaligned in the yellow switch room. Easy-peasy fix.
MAP04: You can bump the secret armor without opening the panel - move it back about 8 or 16 units.
MAP05: The bridge seems to be buggy when the cacos are present.
MAP18: There's a pegging error on the cage window lips in the red skull room. Also, I got lost in this one - is AV-jumping required?
MAP19: I got lost here too.
MAP24: The red skull jumps to the top of the lowering skin wall. Move it further into the middle of the room, or just move it to the wall that lowers - wouldn't affect the map terribly.
MAP30: The boss is ludicrously easy if you just BFG him right from the start.
MAP32: Great concept for a map, but the first platform doesn't appear clearly enough. Maybe you could illuminate the platforms, or otherwise indicate them more clearly? I'm not too sold on the positions of the platforms either, I'd move them around so the first one is much closer to the entrance. Also dat non-lower unpegged door before the spider.

Didn't like MAP18 or 20 due to puzzles that didn't want to be solved (AV jumps for both, it seemed), plus MAP21 was intelligently irritating. Overall though, that was an enjoyable 50-odd minutes of play there. Considering each map only took an hour or so put together, that's quite an achievement. Nice to play speed maps by you that do have enough ammo, too :p

18 does require an AV jump, but 20 doesn't unless something went wrong. You have to walk over all four ledges to lower the gates to the yellow key. If you go over a ledge and then another too quickly, the gates won't lower all the way unfortunately.

Ahh... Yeah, that does make sense as I encountered the same problem in MAP21 a couple of times too. Could be easily solved with some control sectors.

Finished the whole thing, thank you for the experience once again! Aside from failing in MAP18 (killed an archvile before figuring out that I shouldn't had) and helping myself with "resurrect" cheat on many maps, I've had a really pleasurable ride. The final boss looks and works great, the level is very well playable for an ultimate fight IMO. You've managed to give this work a consistent spirit, as well as achieve quality, which is why I'm impressed a lot.

Wow this is quite an achievement. I just raced through the whole thing in under an hour and a half (playing continuously), great fun and really inventive little maps. Armour feels a bit thin on the ground in places, but then I play so haphazardly I probably need it more than most. With all the epic adventures out there its nice to see wads like this that can be blasted through in the time it takes to watch a film.

The only bugs I found (in zdoom) were a couple of cases of activating switch/walkover sequences too fast, this one on map 20 where the lowering door got stuck at this height so I couldn't get over it:


and this one on map 21 where the red key platform couldn't go all the way down:


I'm guessing these are due to lower-to-next-lowest-floor when the next lowest floor is still moving down. Also I must waggle my finger at the nessecary archvile jump on one of the maps (which I wouldn't have figured out if I hadn't seen someone mention it here) and the instant-death-from-pressing-the-wrong-switch gimmick on a couple of maps which is a bit below the belt (but not massively annoying on such short maps). But those minor points aside its a great set of maps and I'm amazed you could do all this in such a short space of time while keeping such a variety of ideas going. Very cool.

Yeah, I don't tend to use instant-death traps most of the time. There's a hint on which switch to press in both levels though, so it's not too much of a dick move. :)

I think with short maps like this you can get away with more dickish things than you otherwise might.

You could change the innermost sector on both 20 and 21 to also have a S1 (or even SR) lower to next lowest floor action maybe? It seems like a few people are getting caught with that.

Well, I played it, pistol started every level. I felt like there wasn't enough weapons, armor & powerups. I was able to complete about 60% of the levels.

Map25 and 26 were my favourites. Map10 and 11 were kinda fun with the rockets, but could have had some other weapons too.

Map24 mouth could do the ios wake up sound, so it would be more obvious to keep firing into the mouth after killing the revenants.

The invisibility in Map20 was useless. It was obvious the cyber would be released after jumping down, so I just waited for the invis go off and then... get hit by the cyberdemon's rockets anyway.

Map08 music made Crispy-Doom not start at all, so I removed the music from the wad after that...

Here's my demos: http://koti.mbnet.fi/jeejeeje/doom/ticktock_fda_jim.zip

Jimi said:

Map08 music made Crispy-Doom not start at all, so I removed the music from the wad after that...

Chocolate Doom (and thus Crispy Doom) has a known problem where some music causes problems with OPL playback. If you encounter this in the future, changing music playback to MIDI will allow you to play the map.

MAP16 music also has this problem, maybe others.

So I kind of got into doing pacifist runs for this wad, even though I know a few maps are likely to change. Hopefully it won't desync any of the hard ones... :>

Here's 21 of the maps done pacifist. A few more are definitely possible, notably MAP02, but kind of beyond my patience level at the moment.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1262939

uses the wad from https://www.mediafire.com/?1di993tivy4y4xl

Wad updated! I fixed the errors Jimmy mentioned and also added some demos for the title screen(1 from Plums, 2 from Jimi). 24 hours until this thing is finally done! =D

EDIT: Spelling.

Well, if you're ready to put it on the archives, consider submitting it for review at DWS - http://www.doomwadstation.net/submit/

:-)

I've noticed quite a few times now where I posted that we did a review and people have said that they wouldn't even have known about the map without the review. :-)

Thanks for that Brad, I might just do that in the near future.

Anyway, I'm going to take the lack of new posts here as a sign that CtE is relatively bug-free. IdGames link soon. :)

DONE! :D Countdown to Extinction is now on the archives! Link is in the OP.