3 heures d'agonie 2 RC1

2nd map out of 30: tons of Revenants, two Archviles popping out of the ground at the same time, almost every monster already present.

Thanks, but no thanks.

MAP12 - Another awesome compact layout by Memfis, enjoyable in every way. Strangely, it seems that I'll never be tired of them, but the opposite - I want more Memfis! :)
MAP13 + MAP14 - My kind of speedmaps. I mean, that's what I'd lean to make myself when speedmapping. Small violent exercise. Both maps looked nice and were well structured, both were above my skill to complete from UV pistol start. I liked MAP13 better, there was a cool intro setpiece and I was able to get rather far into the map. MAP14's beginning was much more unforgiving and made me give up early.
MAP15 - Another painful symmetry by Jambon, some fights were unnecessarily tedious again (encouraging camping etc.). Jambon, please get rid of these bad habits.

(skipping MAP31 for now, due to high monster count)
MAP32 - Easy, but I like it. Nice gimmick. But I have no idea why did I have to wait for such a long time below the exit.

Touchdown said:

2nd map out of 30: tons of Revenants, two Archviles popping out of the ground at the same time, almost every monster already present.

Thanks, but no thanks.

lol

We began to discuss in the team, but I think that it's necessary to reorganize the order of maps.

franckFRAG said:

We began to discuss in the team, but I think that it's necessary to reorganize the order of maps.

franck - i hope you guys figure it out. playing through it right now. only map i havent liked is JC's "Cendres Humaines", i probably didnt play it right but i dont want to throw myself at it to figure out what im doing wrong.

Hello, fellows. I watched a Doom stream today, put me in the mood to play something new, so I gave this WAD a shot. I've played half of the game thus far, results below.
Skill 4 FDAs #1, maps 01-31.

All of these demos are limited to one attempt. There's some ugly play on display here (including a long comedy of errors involving a ghost cacodemon in map 11), but I finish all but map 14, the only map where I've met my death thus far. Not sure I had the tools I needed to survive at the end of that one, perhaps because I squandered too many rockets earlier on.

Generally speaking, so far I'd say this is (naturally!) very similar to the original 3 Heures d'agonie, but the level of play quality is a bit higher. The original had a few maps that were so tiny I hesitate to even call them 'maps'--more like disconnected fragments than complete concepts. Naturally, a lot of these new entries are quite small as well, but I've yet to see anything that feels like it's just plain not done. A couple of the maps have been pretty poor (esp. map 08, which seems like it's supposed to be a joke of some sort) a few look like relatively inexperienced efforts (excessive symmetry, etc.), but most play in a more or less reasonable fashion, and a couple are quite good. I was sorry to see there are no maps by Necrotikflesh this time, as I rather liked his maps from the first edition, but nevertheless I look forward to carving a path through the second half of the WAD when I've got some time.

Didn't see any bugs so far, incidentally, other than some floating clips in map 15.

Touchdown said:

2nd map out of 30: tons of Revenants, two Archviles popping out of the ground at the same time, almost every monster already present.

Thanks, but no thanks.

That's a slaughter map for you.

Come now, map 02's not a slaughtermap by any stretch of the imagination or by any definition of that term. Dunno what he's on about regarding there being 'tons of revenants' either, there are something like 7 or 8 total in the map (out of 120 or so monsters).

Some people prefer starting slowly: a zombieman, a couple of imps, a shotgun in the corner... :)

Actually I've played up to map 07 so far, and map 02 is my favorite so far.

A mapset should have some kind of enemy progression. If by map02 I've seen essentially every monster type, it's boring. One of the ingredients for good pacing is already gone.

But whatever, that's an unpopular (or, according to some, invalid) opinion anyway. I only commented because I enjoyed the first 3ha.

@ Touchdown : We've actually had the same problem with the first 3ha. At first, the maps weren't sorted by difficulty / weapon progression and some work had to be done on this point.
3ha2 will hopefully benefit from the same treatment. To me the current map02 should be moved to at least slot 06 or 08 since it has many heavy Doom II stuff in it.
Same goes for map20.

I completely agree with you on the need of a relatively logical progression.

@ DotW : Many thanks for the FDAs :)
I'll make sure to watch them ASAP.

actually I can get behind ordering levels in some arrangement based on difficulty. that said i think that the curve is gonna be steep no matter how you mix it up based on the 22 maps I've played so far

map25 is broke in vanilla compat, i think. linedef tag 22 (which controls the lift into the easternmost area) won't activate because linedef tag 21 keeps eating the use function. i found it in zdoom and then looked it up in doombuilder to see what the problem was, then set compatibility flags to "default" (no vanilla emulation, i usually run in doom (strict) for vanilla) and the lift worked fine. i tested it in eternity to make sure and its broke there too.

Hmm, confirmed, I think. I ran into a dead end as well, using prBoom+ -cl 2. I suspect it has something to do with the way the impact trigger for the level's secret is positioned, as KMX surmised. I can post the stillborn FDA, if you like.

Just some minor stuff I noticed along the way in RC1:

-Map07: It is kinda counter-intuitive that water floor is damaging...

-Map22: Sector 92 should be secret, IMO.

-Map26: Sector 91 should be secret, IMO.

-Oh, and download link for 3ha1 is dead in the first post of its tread, somebody please edit it and replace it with /idgames one.

There is a poison sign on map07 iirc. Let's say monsters peed in the water.

finished playing this today. i think in a lot of ways its improved over the original 3ha, the authors that stuck around have definitely improved their speedmap-fu and it feels more polished. jambon has the weakest levels of the set i think but they're still well put together, just really really symmetric. i was expecting more 3HA-ish slaughter levels from jc but it looks like he took a back seat during development.

the map30 layout is really obnoxious to me, though. waiting blindly in the crater for the ios elevator and then having to ride it up is a pain in the ass. my first zdoom seed bombarded me with pain elementals which made things pretty much impossible. my second seed was more manageable but it was still feast or famine if a cacodemon spawned nearby while i was in the crater.

lots of fun, hard levels. a few of them felt pretty grindy (like MAP08). oxyde's "passage la vide" is i think the true #1kill as far as what is typical of the set; playing it from pistol start involved reasoning out a lot of the ambushes and doing some crazy platforming / baiting to carve out a little hole for myself. it felt insane. darkwave's "gutter grave" is the obvious standout and is a fantastic newschool slaughter level, and way more playable to me than his map from the original 3HA. i think the chaingunners and open space did me in on that one. also thanks to guest stars memfis and plut.

like i said the last time, i hope the newcomers stick around and develop their craft in your kickin rad stable of authors. maybe you guys can finally get off your duffs and grind out necromantic thirst lol

jambon has the weakest levels of the set

/o\

Just popping in to say Jambon's levels were my favorites.

Are there other maps of his floating around?

Edit: thanks!

Phml said:

/o\

Just popping in to say Jambon's levels were my favorites.

Are there other maps of his floating around?

he has one map in the 20 years of doom episode, which I really liked

Might make a LP series of this WAD if anyone's interested.

Oh, just one more thing... maybe sector 28 in Map16 could be secret, too?

Suuuuuuuuuuurpriiiiiiiise!

Thx everyone for your comments !

Final Release : http://82.66.133.154:85/Autre/3ha2.zip

Changelog (since rc1) :

new maplist (see 3ha2info)
Map03 - textures align
Map07 - Missing texture lift
Map10 - textures align
Map11 - texture changed, new music, add green armor
Map12 - textures align
Map14 - textures align
Map15 - wrong map name
Map21 - removed effect 5 from sector 68
Map22 - map update
Map24 - textures align
Map26 - add RL
Map28 - sector & flat fixed
Map29 - textures align
Map30 - add radsuit in final area
Map31 - % in name
Map32 - TP fixed + end map changed
credpic - SidZetMek! fixed
credpic - NilsTheRed! fixed
add Helpscreen
add dehacked strings for NS port
ENDDOOM : information fixed

Did you upload final version to /idgames/ yet?

Here comes the poison!
Well, I think that 3ha1 was better. I mean, the majority of maps here and there are far from being masterpieces (as to be expected from speedmaps and variety of authors, naturally), yet in part 1 one third of maps was really good, with great stuff coming mainly from JC and Wilou. Here, JC's maps were a huge disappointment, I don't know why he has decided to make something like this here instead of making maps in his usual high-octane action style with decent visual appearance. Map29 was slighlty better than the rest of his creations, but still far from what I'd like to see from him.
So, Wilou took the initiative this time (with some support from Oxyde), sadly his maps are too few to form a true backbone of this mapset.

Some random rants ahead.

Map07 - Damaging water sucks. I didn't even notice its effect in the beginning, thanks to being under fire all the time.

Map08 - Never picked up an ssg on my first playthrough... Whoops. Nice map otherwise.

Map11 - Is this some kind of joke?.. Ugly and not even remotely enjoyable. At least put some weapons in there.

Map19 - Great map, one of the best here, my only nitpick is that I'd prefer opening both rev horde and cyb duo at once, not one after another, as fighting them separately isn't that fun.

Map23 - Cool, somewhat funny with all of its attempts to intimidate the player being suddenly interrupted by block monster lines everywhere. Still, an interesting map.

Map26 - Mixed feelings about this one, the main reason for this being the absence of rocket launcher until pretty late, even counting the secret one. I would've given it much earlier, even the first fight would be more fun with it available (in blue switch alcove, for instance). Ssg/cg cleanup is really boring.

Map27 - Ugh... this one has driven me mad. In the very beginning I had to rely solely on luck, and after that pretty much every action leads to archvile spam, time after time after time, and they resurrect so much meat that running out of ammo really becomes an issue. Yeah, veeeery fun. I don't know, I'd revise many things in here. First thing to note - RL position is highly questionable, as weapon change mid-fight may have unpleasant consequences.

Map28 - ...Ouch. Aside from basically repeating the same scheme several times in a row, with only monster density progressively increasing with each iteration - the monster count in general is a bit too high. I've had enough of this endless carnage somewhere around the half of the map. I don't know what to say, this map is big and epic (even though it's pretty minimalistic), yet it's repetitive and exhausting in its meatgrinding.

Map31 - My favorite in this whole set, a map with cool gameplay and stylish modern appearance. Nothing I could really complain about, my only wish is to have more like this here. *sigh*


All in all, I admit that I was having a feeling of "quantity over quality" while playing, and the whole thing often felt somewhat rushed and unpolished. Yeah, I'm playing these solely for highlights, but highlights in 3ha2 are fever, and many of them have their problems.

Glaice said:

Did you upload final version to /idgames/ yet?

Yes, it is!

3HA2 is now in the /idgames/!

Thanks for your various feedbacks. And congratulation to the team for its work. :)

my review, tho i know the fdc has already seen it. i agree with demonologist about JCD's stuff but i think i see the rest of your community maturing and that gives something of a bright outlook for future projects. also, plz work on necromantic thirst!!!

Thanks for the review, comments, and poison. :)

Demonologist said:
Map19 - [...] my only nitpick is that I'd prefer opening both rev horde and cyb duo at once, not one after another, as fighting them separately isn't that fun.

Well, I can agree with that, but when making this map I thought speedrunners / maxrunners would bypass the skeletons and release the Cybers anyway. I believe it's better when the player has to put some kind of effort in order to provoke infight, instead of having these dumb demons instantly rip each other apart.
Had I released both threats at once, I'd probably have added more Revenants in order to make up for their dead / busy comrades and to still put a lot of pressure on the player, I guess. I'm not a fun guy, sorry. :p

Overall you definitely made good points here.

kmxexii said:
also, plz work on necromantic thirst!!!

oh no not this again

Considering the current crew, our totally-not-Blitzkrieg-level mapping speed, and what's been done so far vs. the remaining workload, it's safe to assume that you'll be able to review BtSX episodes 7 and 8 before the green thing gets done. But we'll see, who knows.