40oz
And who knows, maybe I'm wrong. But that's extremely unlikely because I'm always right.
Posts: 5069
Registered: 08-07 |
If you're into balancing your maps mathmatically, and want to save yourself a bunch of calculations, you might want to search for a program called WadWhat.
There are some levels on /idgames that come with wadwhat output text files. All it does is count all the monsters, types, weapons, health items, armor, ammo, secret areas, etc. and generates a text file with that information. In addition to that, it counts the minimum damage all the ammo in the map can do, and makes a ratio based on how much total hit points all the monsters have, and creates a difficulty ratio.
It also counts the number of damaging nukage sectors and average brightness of the entire map.
As others have said, I wouldn't use it to substitute playtesters. There are many ways to make WadWhat tell you a map is easy when it's evidently not. Also there are a bunch of situational things that can interfere with your formulas. A single sniping chaingunner can do a whole lot more damage to the player than a whole army of them in a big arena (since they'd probably all kill each other.) Also Slaughterfest mappers have told me that it's amazing how much ammo players will use up when staged against huge numbers of monsters. I found that wadwhat is a pretty good way to see how differently your skill levels contrast with each other, but I'd still use feedback from real players before trusting everything a formula will tell you.
Last edited by 40oz on 01-05-12 at 18:08
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01-05-12 05:00 
