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Little Faith

License to Spell Doom hints.

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Didn't Ultimate Doomer make a post with hints to his masterpiece License to Spell Doom?

I tried to search for it, but couldn't find anything.

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OK, what am I supposed to do with the blue lasers then?

I thought it had something to do with the reactors in the basement, but they seem resistant to all means of tampering (I have removed the battery already).

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Little Faith said:

OK, what am I supposed to do with the blue lasers then?

I thought it had something to do with the reactors in the basement, but they seem resistant to all means of tampering (I have removed the battery already).


sorry, can't help you there :/ haven't played it yet. Although Ult Doomer just requested that i review it.

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Little Faith said:

I thought it had something to do with the reactors in the basement, but they seem resistant to all means of tampering (I have removed the battery already).


In which case you'll need to reload your save - when the power goes down the lasers go down as well. For 20 seconds anyway.

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Yeah I found out.

Dead easy afterwards, but that countdown initially fooled me.

Now I know that the only thing you should make sure of before the time runs out is to grab the plasma gun (and some other ammo).


Isn't there something about that E4M9 is unsolvable because the present Zdoom nails voodoo dolls (or manikins to use the Ultimate Doomer term) to the floor?

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you know... it's a bit unprofessional to have puzzles where you can get stuck... I like the wad, and I’m all for puzzles, but some of them are a bit on the silly side (the voodoo doll secret level in particular)...

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They're not unprofessional - it's the bug that appeared in v38 (well after I released it) that caused you to get stuck, not the puzzle itself. The bug is fixed now. (and besides, what's wrong with puzzles that are different from all the others?)

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Well, the voodoo doll puzzle was a very good idea, but the problem was that if you suddenly realised that you didn’t have the health to survive completing the puzzle, your stuck. Your only option is to reload, however it took me a while to figure out the puzzle, and when I saw what I had to do, I realised that I couldn’t survive it. This was a problem, because I had saved a little to late to do anything but start the wad over from scratch. You have to get the BFG to finish the level. What I would have done was to make a second, easy to get to exit, so that if you stuffed up the puzzle, you could still leave the level, but you’d have to do without the BFG. The other thing you could have done was to make push able lamps/barrels or something instead of voodoo dolls.

As for the thing on e4m3, dose the fix mean that you don’t get stuck if you don’t get to the blue laser room after power comes back on? If so, good. I have to re-download it. I just kinda find puzzles where if you stuff up, you get stuck, Problematic. I love the wad other wise. And I found it worth redoing. But with just a few tweaks here and there, it could be better.

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Yeah, many of the levels of License to Spell Doom are not meant to be solved in the first go. Still, I can live with that when the puzzles are so fun.

Also Ultimate Doomer seems to be getting better with each wad he made.

Operation Lightning had n00b written all over it with a few really neat levels, but a lot of really boring one too.

Fragport was gameplay-wise really neat and had many interesting areas, though it was marred a bit by a lot of horrendously underdetailed areas too.

License to Spell Doom is darn near perfect in the design and architecture department.


Also Ultimate Doomer is one of the few wadsters that understands how to use the COMPOHSO texture properly. (Why is it that all train stations and public buildings is always draped in this texture?).

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I agree with Redpants on the voodoo doll puzzle. Kinda annoying when you had to start over because you didn't have enough health to do it. And I rarely have over 40 health, because I only really focus if I'm nearly dead.

Awesome wad though, really enjoyed it. I think the attention to detail with the ambient sound was what really did it for me, really enriched the mod in my opinion. The timed areas were really good too. Excellent stuff UD, you working on anything at the moment?

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Nope, a Sonic-inspired mod. (big difference)

Captain red: What I mean't by 'fix' was that the newest version of ZDoom fixed the bug that was screwing up the manikins by rooting them to the spot. However, the newest version also allows them to be moved when invincible (guess who requested that....) so I could now use invincibility powerups instead (which is what I wanted to do originally). The trouble with this is that it would make the episode work only with the newest version (it is 1.23b33 compatible at the moment) and I don't know when Randy will release the official ZDoom 2.1 (which would screw up the text file when a new beta is released).

But I might update it anyway (who uses 1.23b33 nowadays?), as I have one or two other things I'd like to fix. Any other suggestions let me know.

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Ultimate DooMer said:

But I might update it anyway (who uses 1.23b33 nowadays?), as I have one or two other things I'd like to fix. Any other suggestions let me know.



The one thing about LTSD that REALLY annoyed me is when the player suddenly freezes in the middle of a larger group of monsters (The worst examples are the reactor room(?, behind the green lasers) in E4M4 and the Baron-of-Hell-trap in the red-door area in E4M5. In both cases you are dead when you are in the wrong spot in the moment the player freezes and the camera changes. I want at least a chance to defend myself when I walk into a trap.
At least in the E4M4 case you should delay the script until the monsters are dead (or set the NOTARGET player property).
But aside from these issues this is certainly one of the best Doom WADs I have ever played!

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Graf Zahl said:

(The worst examples are the reactor room(?, behind the green lasers) in E4M4 and the Baron-of-Hell-trap in the red-door area in E4M5. In both cases you are dead when you are in the wrong spot in the moment the player freezes and the camera changes. I want at least a chance to defend myself when I walk into a trap.
At least in the E4M4 case you should delay the script until the monsters are dead (or set the NOTARGET player property).


E4M4 - the reason there is that you are infiltrating the reactor room (like Bond does in Dr.No) by putting on a rad suit from the green locked room (this sets the notarget on the monsters). Then once you screw up the reactor the monsters notice that you're not who they think you are and try to stop you.

(ah, I think you're going in there without a rad suit - that's why the monsters can see you. Maybe a slight tweak is needed there...)

E4M5 - This is Goldeneye based - the barons can't see you until after the messages have run and you shoot at the barrels.

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Ultimate DooMer said:

E4M4 - the reason there is that you are infiltrating the reactor room (like Bond does in Dr.No) by putting on a rad suit from the green locked room (this sets the notarget on the monsters). Then once you screw up the reactor the monsters notice that you're not who they think you are and try to stop you.

(ah, I think you're going in there without a rad suit - that's why the monsters can see you. Maybe a slight tweak is needed there...)

E4M5 - This is Goldeneye based - the barons can't see you until after the messages have run and you shoot at the barrels.



I checked the scripts and both of the events I described shouldn't happen at all! I played both spots again and all went well. The only cause I can think of is that in both cases I ran around in the entire level to collect some health (and in the process I also killed a few monsters, saved and reloaded) after I triggered the first part of the scripted sequence. I don't know whether that may have an effect.

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Hey, I am experiencing yet another problem:

It is in the storage room that you have to blow up in E4M5. After placing the charges I am trapped in the storage tank area until I have created the diversion.

After killing all the barons, however, I am still unable to leave the storage room.

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But I did shoot the barrels first.

I'm still stuck in the storage room unable to leave through the door after exterminating the barons.

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Little Faith said:

Hey, I am experiencing yet another problem:

It is in the storage room that you have to blow up in E4M5. After placing the charges I am trapped in the storage tank area until I have created the diversion.

After killing all the barons, however, I am still unable to leave the storage room.




The block is removed after you shoot the barrier in front of the barrels in the room above.

Unfortunately I have to say that the scripting in this particular area is quite messy and inconsistent. Due to my problems I have checked this particular part of the level over and over again and discovered some odd behavior:

The line block is set 2 seconds after the script is triggered so there are a lot possible situations that are not planned. Once I even got completely out of the room before the barons appeared!

My guess what should really happen here is the following:

The player gets trapped behind the blocked line, the barons appear and the player must release the barrels to create a diversion (as is mentioned in the script) and can then escape. But this works only when the player is doing EXACTLY what is expected of him. There are many ways to screw this up!

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Graf Zahl said:

I checked the scripts and both of the events I described shouldn't happen at all! I played both spots again and all went well. The only cause I can think of is that in both cases I ran around in the entire level to collect some health (and in the process I also killed a few monsters, saved and reloaded) after I triggered the first part of the scripted sequence. I don't know whether that may have an effect.


I found the problem... (This is REALLY stupid :-( )

I had the following line in my config:
'bind pgdn notarget'

No need to say that this perfectly screwed up these particular spots when I apparently hit that key...

Sorry for all the confusion!

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I still don't get it.

I do the diversion right after the baron dialogue is finished. I can run up and open the red door, but I still can't enter it. It is impassable.

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Just downloaded the latest Zdoom version and ran License to Spell Doom on it.

On E4M9 i experienced a weird bug (that had nothing to do with the manikins). Everytime a script spawns monsters, these monsters will be in an inactive invulnerable state.

Made the level a lot easier, but still.

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Those scripts are not spawning monsters, but teleporting them in from another sector (using TeleportGroup). I made them dormant to stop them from waking up when they shouldn't (having them out of position screws up the teleport) until they get teleported. Sounds like a bug in the new ZDoom, I'll have to check it out...

(and in E4M5, you escape on the conveyor, which blocks you until the barrels come down over the barons)

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I'm on the last level (E4M8), and haven't had much trouble so far. However, one thing that is bugging me now is that I have no idea what to do after I clear out the red door area and it says the countdown has started. Any help would be appreciated.

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