Doom 2 In Name Only - Now (supsiciously) on a load of gaming articles

mouldy said:

24 and 29 appear to have almost the same enemies on easy and hard.

They probably have exactly the same enemies. Maybe there's a couple less but that's it, most likely. 04 as well but that's probably less obvious. Gameplay balance is my least favorite thing to tweak and work on by far, and I'd be fucked if I tried to do three times the work to make difficulties noticeably different for those maps. 24 still wouldn't be done by now in that case :X

Antroid said:

They probably have exactly the same enemies. Maybe there's a couple less but that's it, most likely. 04 as well but that's probably less obvious. Gameplay balance is my least favorite thing to tweak and work on by far, and I'd be fucked if I tried to do three times the work to make difficulties noticeably different for those maps. 24 still wouldn't be done by now in that case :X

I can sympathise with that, just when you think you have finished making your map you sudddenly have to make it a little bit shitter on lower difficulties :) Plus its impossible to test properly (i think i made some of mine too easy on easy).

My lazy method of doing the difficulties goes something like this..
For large groups of monsters, reduce by a quarter for medium, and a half for easy. For smaller groups, change a few of the problem monsters by dropping them down the difficullty chain: archvile -> revenant -> chaingunner -> shotgunner -> zombieman.

I've never looked into how the original iwads dealt with difficulty settings, I wonder if they had some kind of formula they worked to and how much they changed things.

So Eris, did you totally miss the 666 days deadline? Can we still pretend it came out then?

Actually it's only day 663, but we could have a problem if the easy-skill balancing needs to be implemented.
I suck at doing difficulties on my own maps, so I'm very wary of doing anything to other peoples maps. Especially yours, Antroid :P

Maybe relevant, the first death on my ITYTD playthrough was on MAP16, but then I also died on 17, 19 and 20 soon after.

maybe its not such a big deal after all? The difficulty on UV goes up and down quite a bit anyway...

Only 663? I could've sworn that you posted about 10 days being left at least two weeks ago...

In any case, I think easy skill balancing isn't as important as a fancy production period. It's like three maps, two of them mine, and I take full responsibility for anyone playing on skills 1 or 2 getting unbeliveably frustrated on my maps.

Well, to clear this up completely

http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=08&d1=17&y1=2012&m2=06&d2=14&y2=2014

I'll fix those teleports/keys now. As a precaution I'll go through the WAD in GZDB checking for stuff like that

EDIT: Okay that actually means this is the 664th day of development, but a stopwatch would be reading 663 days, X hours, blah blah

Monochrome Mapping Project came out half-baked and buggy, but hey, at least it has a fancy release date. :)

But it's not the same for D2INO, of course. It was in beta stage for much longer already.

Oh dear, something's possibly broken D:

Someone in the Doomworld Facebook group has reported that GZDoom is unable to open the WAD due to a bad syntax on MAPINFO line 5.
I have never seen this happen (obviously), so I'm curious as to how this can be happening, and if it's a problem on our end.

Here's the "offending" code. Line 5 is the "{"

map MAP01 "Entryway"
{
   cluster = 5
   levelnum = 1
   music  = "D_RUNNIN"
   sky1 = "SKY1"
   next = "MAP02"
   par = 120
   NoJump
   NoCrouch
}

Their version of GZDoom is really ancient and doesn't support this syntax.

I was able to run it in ZDoom 2.7.1, latest GZDoom devbuild, and Zandronum 1.2, so it's probably their fault.

That said you could look at D2TWID for an example of a more thorough set of MAPINFO definitions, there's a basic one for ZDaemon, a ZMAPINFO for ZDoom, and and EMAPINFO for Eternity. If an old GZDoom doesn't like that MAPINFO syntax, it's possible that other ports based on old ZDoom versions (ZDameon, Odamex, maybe others...) won't either.

The wad seems to be playable in ZDaemon and Odamex. If you don't mind AASHITTY or ASHWALL2 skies. :)

Seems that was the issue with the GZDoom user. Panic over!

Da Werecat said:

The wad seems to be playable in ZDaemon and Odamex. If you don't mind AASHITTY or ASHWALL2 skies. :)

Oh boy I don't remember that from TNS. Must have been before I wrote the MAPINFO.
Fortunately, old MAPINFO isn't too different from the new one, so it should be a simple copy-paste-edit task.

EDIT @ below: Oh I actually just did that, but was about to go and do the editing. nicely timed!

The new one could be just renamed to ZMAPINFO.

[edit]

Vanilla testing is gonna be productive.



Look at the ceiling.

Da Werecat said:

Look at the ceiling.

Funny I thought that bug was fixed before, I'm sure someone pointed it out ages ago. That ceiling trick only works if the raised ceiling sectors are surrounded on all sides by the same level brightness, so all you need is a 1 pixel wide sector next to the doorway like this:

then change the brightness of the thin sector to 128, and move the bright sector next to it up into the ceiling with the other ones.

yeah that will do it

I distinctly remember fixing that last time. I guess it reappeared because bruce uploaded a new version that didn't have the fix, and I put it in forgetting about the ceiling.

Fixed - took the easiest option.
My intention was to make that upper wall stand out although given that there aren't multiple routes to follow it was kinda overkill.

http://speedy.sh/ce2UT/Bruce-Map02.7z

Just wonder - if someone can make similar style megawad, but for Plutonia. You know, Plutonia have interested map names, like Odyssey of Noises or Well of Souls. I can imagine map with many monsters awakened but waiting for teleport and make many noises. Or Well filled with Lost Souls.

Still ugly.


And I'm not even trying that hard. Just goofing around on the lowest possible difficulty.


Still ugly.



Okay, I'll stop now, I don't really want to see all the old misaligments again.

I am actually really looking forward to this.

Great work Eris and all the contributors for seeing this thing through. :)

With maps like 27, we will never have resolved every texture misalignment. So with the conclusion of Werecat's testing (thanks a lot for your help), I think the time has finally come. I'll be compiling the final version over the coming hours.

Time elapsed as of this post
665 days, 21 hours, 34 minutes

"Ah, Geez!" Was instantly noticed during a quick run of this.

Here is the final version.
I will be uploading this to /idgames later today.

edit: yeah posting the link is often useful
https://www.mediafire.com/?87sgrjo9s1e8ase

woohoo! another big project gets done this year!

(unless something unexpected happens)

Good stuff! Cheers to all involved, time to uncork the bottle.

nice one :)

now nobody play it again so we don't find any more bugs

so proud of you guys for getting this done and thoroughly tested after i crapped out!!

mouldy said:

now nobody play it again so we don't find any more bugs

Don't say that, someone's bound to find something...

Also, I like to do more fixes for my maps.

I trust that by now a regular sort of playthrough (singleplayer, high difficulty setting, a random sourceport) should be pretty problem-free. But the most important thing of course is the development time, and we thankfully didn't fuck that up. Hooray!