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BlueFireZ88

Doom Expanded Beta 8-5

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Pottus:

I do thank you for your honesty. This mod was more meant to be built on top of an already great game more than anything, albeit not perfectly as you pointed out.

For me, there are real problems to doing this from scratch:
-I can't make new sprites from scratch (though I can at least edit them).
-I ain't a composer or sound maker (although some sounds are from messing around in Audacity).
-I'm ok with coding but not enough to do any of the great things that other people have.
-My motive to work on anything has all but run its course. I'm practically ready to stop anytime and just start playing Doom just because I held off playing it seriously for so long.

The reality is I'm more of a Doom player than a creator. And I started Expanded with that in mind, something I could put together even with my limited skills, and would appeal to others with a more similar mindset. I learned a great deal from everything I've had to do with the mod as a result of the time I spent with it. I became something I wanted to work on until it was finished. Could I do something like this from scratch? I honestly don't know, I don't think I'd even get nearly as far as I have with it now, as I've already put so much of my free time into this.

And while mapping may be a good alternative, my skills also a bit lacking there. I have made a level or two from scratch, it certainly wasn't easy to do as it was my first real learning experience with Doom Builder. I became decent enough at it that I'm not bad at editing levels, mainly vanilla style though. And probably the reality is, this might be what I end up doing next (provided first I actually play the Doom games from start to finish, rather than a bit here or there).

I'm probably going to try to get this done because I want to. It's what I wanted when I first started this. I've come too far to honestly stop, especially when I'm so close to the end now.

If your still willing to give suggestions, I'm listening. But you really don't have to.

BloodyAcid:
Thanks for the heads up.

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It's all good... nothing wrong with being a Doom player, or mapper for that matter. Mapping can be very frustrating at times (especially in vanilla) but if you keep knocking your head against the wall it will finally sink in.

About your mod: there's a lot in there that IS good, such as the projectiles, fire, episode 4 intermission. Some stuff is a bit over top for me personally, such as the extra gore and sounds. Maybe if you break it down into smaller pieces or categories? If people just want to run the visuals, you should give them that. Or just the sounds, give them that and etc and etc... players can always combine it together themselves if they want to use all of it.

BlueFireZ88 said:

My motive to work on anything has all but run its course. I'm practically ready to stop anytime and just start playing Doom just because I held off playing it seriously for so long.

This is a good sign, because if you don't suffer somewhat or hit the wall when you are being creative, chances are you are going about it wrong. This is the time when great learning comes about...

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I'd just like to offer a bit of realism for you: even my mods have not warranted a proper Cacoward yet. wwhc-diaz.wad did get a sidebar mention a couple years back, but not a full-on Cacoward, and that's one that I spent over a year on (probably a few hundred working hours, but I wasn't exactly counting).

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I think the bottom line here is that these days mods like this are generally frowned upon. In the wake of AoD, Beautiful Doom and the like anything else we do in this niche is just considered redundant. If we'd made these things years ago perhaps they would've been better received, but as things stand today we've simply come unfashionably late to the party.

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glenzinho said:

Not always, I really liked your mod Herculine.


Thanks.

Hence my usage of words like "generally". Nothing in these things is absolute, but as it is with most things in life in this the majority rules.

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glenzinho:

I read some of the previous posts again, and I want to be sure on the sound effects that really stood out as annoying or bad. Pointing out anything else of this nature that rubs you the wrong way might also help.

Here's what I've gathered:
-Footsteps
-switches
-The secret sound

I can see how these are a problem in some sense as switches are really the only thing that even has a place, but even then, I can see how the original switch sounds are important. I was wondering if going for a more simplistic route with sounds (in the vain of vanilla Doom) might work.

As you can tell, I'm still determined to get a 1.0 version out. Just finishing this would give me peace of mind and really, your opinion shouldn't be thrown to the side (along with Pottus').

I'm not sure if I can go the Beautiful Doom route at this point and split Expanded apart. There would be so many resources to go through, there's a good chance that will result in many broken resources. It would take even more time to fix those problems, and I really just want to be done with this.

On a side note: I'm sure you figured that the E4 map isn't mine either. It belongs to a ZDoom forum member named Skunk who worked a couple of map projects (E4 and one for Xaser's Lost Episode). He was working on an intermission map set for Doom 2, but he had to quit due to real life problems (although the resources are available to edit and the map for the first third of the game is fully usable).

WildWeasel:
I recently had a chance to play Diaz, and yes, I can see the amount of detail and work you put into the mod in just the first five minutes of it. And that's probably only scrapping the surface in terms of content. It's really a shame that this wasn't considered for an award (or was it?).

Still, wouldn't "NAZIS!" be something of a candidate for the Cacowards? It's certainly fun enough.

Herculine:
I supposed I missed the boat on gameplay mods like mine being a fresh and new idea. At this point I would at least be grateful for a reasonable sized audience. Did you have a gameplay mod? I'd be interested to see it.

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See, no one here is out to get you I'll admit I was a bit harsh but a lot of what I said was true at least in my view. Yes there is some good stuff in this MOD but for me and I think for most people the stuff that isn't so good kind of blinds players to the stuff that is good. I'm sure you've learned a few things here and in the end that is all that really matters.

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Indeed. Since then I have made some edits to Expanded (the development version). Footstep sounds are no longer a part of the mod. The most sounds you get is when you land in the water (like in Heretic/Hexen). I forgot how silent and ambient the levels were without the footsteps.

I'm just as determined now as I was to perfect this mod to the best of my abilities. If you have any more help to offer, I'm all ears. :)

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Ya, I'll try again next version and let you know how things are. Everyone here is willing to give you all the feedback you want it's up to you to utilize what people are saying and in the end your going to end up with a superior MOD had you turned a deaf ear. I'm sure you've learned a lot here and after all the hair pulling and frustrations of what other people think were not saying what we are to piss you off, were not saying what we are to troll you were speaking our minds. No one even said it "sucked" it's "terrible" that is not what people do here they will give you the exact reason why it "sucked" or is "terrible" without the need to resort to such mindless one word statements.

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BlueFireZ88 said:

Herculine:
I supposed I missed the boat on gameplay mods like mine being a fresh and new idea. At this point I would at least be grateful for a reasonable sized audience. Did you have a gameplay mod? I'd be interested to see it.


Yup.

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=16453

As you will see from the reviews, everyone loves it. I'm currently working on a revised edition which I'm sure will be equally well-received.

But as I've said, the most frequent complaints in those reviews seem to focus on the fact that it has all been done many times before, which I cannot refute. I just came to the party way too late, but I haven't let that stop me from working on it anyway.

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I played a bit of your mod, there are various aspects of it I do like about it. Of course it's not mind kind of mod, and really I think that's an interesting point to make.

Everyone wants to enjoy Doom in there own way, and maybe that's why there are so many gameplay mods out there. For me, Expanded is how I would want to enjoy Doom, something with a more "Vanilla" flavor. And I don't doubt that any gameplay mod made well will have a fair audience.
How's how you want to enjoy the game that matters most, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

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BlueFireZ88 said:

I played a bit of your mod, there are various aspects of it I do like about it. Of course it's not mind kind of mod, and really I think that's an interesting point to make.

Everyone wants to enjoy Doom in there own way, and maybe that's why there are so many gameplay mods out there. For me, Expanded is how I would want to enjoy Doom, something with a more "Vanilla" flavor. And I don't doubt that any gameplay mod made well will have a fair audience.
How's how you want to enjoy the game that matters most, and I wouldn't want it any other way.


True... but when egos become involved (which they invariably do since we create these things ourselves) arguments ensue over who's way is the best way (I've been guilty of that myself) and criticisms become less constructive and more like insults. That seems to be what happened at one point in this thread.

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Herculine said:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=16453

As you will see from the reviews, everyone loves it. I'm currently working on a revised edition which I'm sure will be equally well-received.

But as I've said, the most frequent complaints in those reviews seem to focus on the fact that it has all been done many times before, which I cannot refute. I just came to the party way too late, but I haven't let that stop me from working on it anyway.


The first sentence says that everybody loves it, yet has a 2.5 star rating? The complaints don't just have to do with people saying "it's been done before"; other complaints include balance issues for instance. You contracted yourself in this post when you said everybody loves, then talked about the frequent complaints later on in this post.

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Doomguy 2000 said:

The first sentence says that everybody loves it, yet has a 2.5 star rating? The complaints don't just have to do with people saying "it's been done before"; other complaints include balance issues for instance. You contracted yourself in this post when you said everybody loves, then talked about the frequent complaints later on in this post.


As Khorus said, I made use of a linguistic device widely known as sarcasm. Given the tone this thread took at one point, I thought it would have been obvious.

You saw my name and just had to jump on it, didn't you?

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Just wanted to say I enjoyed DE even though it was a tad generic. For what it's worth I played it with thief666's hi-res project and it's safe to say this kind of change up to Doom conventions really needs a TC to get more than a couple gaming hours out of it. Asking for an award was a little over the top :)

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Hey, I thought your mod was great. Of course, other than the thoughts already mentioned, I'm surprised no one has mentioned this little bugger:
REVENANTS. OH MY GOD. Your mod made me hate these things. Their new rocket is 100% homing, faster, smaller and blends with the map so you can barely see it, AND it has splash damage so it makes Revs immune to rockets.

I tried playing Scythe 2 with your mod today and map14 (or was it 13?) made me want to tear my hair apart.

In my opinion the revenants need a serious nerf. At least make their rockets slower and not constantly homing. What was wrong with the original sprite anyway? You could've easily changed it the way you changed the sprites of the Mancubus and Hellknight fireballs - These were beautiful.

The only thing keeping me away from booting up your mod with basically any vanilla megawad is the Revenants. Please fix them for the good of humanity, because not all maps are built in mind with the revs designed to shoot homing fireballs 100% of the time at you.

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Thanks for the heads up on the Revenant, I've been working on the rocket sprites as well as the rocket versus seeker probability (which is now at 50%, although this can change).

First off, Revenant's are immune to splash damage because it kept killing itself with it's own rockets, even though I set +DONTHARMCLASS. Direct rocket hits, however, do kill it.

I found a sprite similar to the default Rev missile (without the flame aspects), and simply added in the imp fireball trail. It's looks way better now which you can see below.

A normal Rocket:





Here's a Seeker:



I'm still ironing out the details, but it works way better now.

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Looks much better now. At least it can be visually seen, the rockets were so tiny and dark they made many levels broken.

Thank you for taking this into consideration and I can't wait for the full version :)

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BlueFireZ88 said:

First off, Revenant's are immune to splash damage because it kept killing itself with it's own rockets, even though I set +DONTHARMCLASS. Direct rocket hits, however, do kill it.

That's because you didn't tell A_Explode to not harm the shooter, which in this case the Revenant himself.

You have this line in the Revenant's missile code:

TNT1 A 0 A_Explode(40, 96)
Change it to this...
TNT1 A 0 A_Explode(40, 96, 0)

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Thanks man, that fixed it. I'll probably have more here soon.

Considering how this is progressing, I might have to release a Beta 9 so that everyone can look at the changes firsthand. Is everyone ok with this idea?

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Quick announcement:

For those of you keeping track of Expanded, the Final Version should be released before or by the end of this week.

If you have any complaints, feedback, suggestions, or bug finds, please let me know ASAP!

It's recommended that you download and use Beta 8-5 (on the first post) as the basis of any of your critiques, as it's the most up to date.

Thanks for everyone whose helped out on this project and enjoy it too!

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For those who are wondering what happened to this mod, it's not dead.

I know I promised the final version a while ago and I'm sorry that it never surfaced, but since I'm now back in college, development has slowed to a crawl and any hopes of finalizing it early just wasn't happening.

I'm planning to release a Beta 9 for Expanded (soon), but I hope that the version following Beta 9 will be the final one (with some bonuses).

Updates are coming.

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