ZDoom Survival Concept

When I first played the survival mode on ZDaemon, I was highly disappointed that it was really just a Cooperative mode with lives, and not a true survival game like Nazi Zombies, for example. So I decided I wanted to make a ZDoom mod that played like the survival mode I had in mind.

I spent around 20 minutes creating a concept/prototype WAD sketching out the idea I had in mind, and it can be found here:

http://www.2shared.com/file/_48kvtG0/ZDoomSurvival.html

The idea is that enemies, weapons, ammo, and health all spawn in waves (in the example WAD, waves of 500 tics). In each wave, certain spawn points are assigned to specific thing types, and there is a random chance of each thing spawning once per wave. The idea would be to shell out a fun level that would spawn monsters at multiple players until they became too overwhelmed to continue. To survive as long as possible, players would have to cooperate, but some sort of a metric would force players to compete to have the best overall performance (the player that survives the longest or does the most damage, for example, would be the winner).

As of right now, my project has a few shortcomings, and I'm wondering if the lovely modders of Doomworld would be able to toss around a few ideas to help me implement this concept.

For one, I have a firm concept of what I want to achieve, but my ideas for implementation are weak. if there are mods that already implement these ideas in one way or another, could someone suggest a few to me to look at for inspirational and educational purposes?

In addition, if you take a look at the main script in the WAD, you can things are assigned to specific map spots and spawned if a random condition is proven true. This works small scale, but to create a large survival map with interesting enemy placement, the script becomes really messy really quickly, and I'm wondering if Zdoom has features that may be able to provide a more elegant implementation of what I am trying to achieve.

Also, do you think thing placement would need any serious replacement based on how many players are playing a "survival" session? I personally think as ammo gets spread thinner between more players it would help compensate for the fact that more players are available to fight the monsters.

Would a big enough map circumvent this issue to keep things interesting whether one person or eight were playing?

You know, I made a ZDoom-based survival map once. It had a day-night cycle, and the monsters would spawn during the "night", while the "day" would be spent stocking up. The spawn points weren't random as such, though.

Call of Dooty 2 has one.

this sounds like you're tweaking the Invasion mod, not Survival. Invasion-style wads are fairly common on Zandronum, but a few of them can be found on ZDaemon as well.

increasing item pickups with player count is usually a good thing to a certain degree, but you should ultimately balance ammo around opposition count rather than player count. maybe respawn items faster for more players instead.