Doom RPG thing I'm making

Hello. I'm new to the forums but I've been lurking for a long time. Anyways, I got this idea for a doom rpg type thing, heavily inspired by games like System Shock and Deus Ex. So this is what I have so far:

http://liambrocklehurst.com/uploader/files/275/Doom-thousand%20and%20one%20-%20A%20UAC%20Oddesy.wad
Here are some screenshots:





Unfortunately, I'm having a few problems in terms of scripting and doors. The first problem is that it seems I can only have one polyobj door at a time. Another problem is that I'm trying to make it so when I press use on the linedef in front of the person I talk to, but it won't work.

Feedback and answers would be appreciated.

Broken Pencil said:

The first problem is that it seems I can only have one polyobj door at a time. Another problem is that I'm trying to make it so when I press use on the linedef in front of the person I talk to, but it won't work.

1. Find a proper tutorial on PolyObject doors, there must be multiple ones. Remember that a PolyObject number is determined by the control thing's angle and not its tag.
2. The line must have checked a flag "When player presses use" and maybe "Repeatable" if you need it to be repeatable, also the linedef's front side must face the player in order to be pressable.

This project looks really amateurish and action-less, with minimum zero eye-candy or appealing gameplay, and therefore entertaining only if it was a jokewad, to be honest. Anyway, you're just starting. Good luck.

It's, um, a little hard to say anything about it based on what you have.

The map is basically two rooms plus one corridor in size, and just ends after the second "cutscene", both cutscenes being one line of dialogue and a single camera switch that the player terminates by moving.

There's a blatant mistexture in the first room which I thought was a secret door or something. The other texture choices are pretty bad, the silver floor and brown walls kind of clash, and all the rooms have a sector height of 120 which looks bad with the wall textures you've used.

Sorry that I basically just criticized every single thing about this, but there's so little else to say about what there is. The music's okay?

I strongly recommend working on this a great deal more, figuring out normal open-and-close doors first, as well as working on making good-looking rooms and easy, flowing layouts. You'll get there, just takes a bit of time and effort.

Cutscenes are definitely an advanced thing, I've done them before and they're a fine art, certainly a pain to get right, even more so if you plan on making a mapset multiplayer-compatible. Since you seem like a fledgling mapper, I recommend you get your mapping up to speed first - no one's going to enjoy a badly-crafted map filled with cutscenes. Please don't be the next Project 115.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been more of an action oriented doom mapper, so this is the first time trying something like this for me. As for the textures, alot of them are actually placeholders (Except for DOORTRAK and DOORSTOP). At first, I ment to make it so it's not token seriously, but then I wanted to make it a sort of.. Prelude to Doom.

Broken Pencil said:

I've been more of an action oriented doom mapper,

Really? Show us! :)

Broken Pencil said:

for the textures, alot of them are actually placeholders (Except for DOORTRAK and DOORSTOP).

Well, it's no convincing argument to view your mod any better than it looks now, not at all.

Broken Pencil said:

I wanted to make it a sort of.. Prelude to Doom.

You're certainly not the first one to think about it, I believe that a few such mods exist and I've also toyed with that idea in my mind, but that's irrelevant of course, because I haven't done a single thing about it. It's really needed to do and to show something impressive to make your ideas be considered any good. Anyway, again, good luck with the project.

I liked the sounds in the polyobj door. Where are they from?

Aside from that door, let's just take this as a prototype for the scripting/dialogue stuff. Jimmy and scifista42 are spot-on with their comments. I don't know what problem you had with the dialogue. It works exactly as you built it. It even plays the NPC's line when you kill him because you set his special to the same one as the linedefs.

If you really want to build complex systems in ACS for dialogue and missions you will have to spend a lot of time. There aren't many examples because people prefer to build those things in more modern or flexible games than ZDoom.

ZDoom has added some support for the conversation system from Strife. I know almost nothing about it because I've never tried using it, but it might be useful or interesting to you. It won't integrate with changing cameras, though. I don't think there's an elegant way to do that.

Aliotroph? said:

I liked the sounds in the polyobj door. Where are they from?

Aside from that door, let's just take this as a prototype for the scripting/dialogue stuff. Jimmy and scifista42 are spot-on with their comments. I don't know what problem you had with the dialogue. It works exactly as you built it. It even plays the NPC's line when you kill him because you set his special to the same one as the linedefs.

If you really want to build complex systems in ACS for dialogue and missions you will have to spend a lot of time. There aren't many examples because people prefer to build those things in more modern or flexible games than ZDoom.

ZDoom has added some support for the conversation system from Strife. I know almost nothing about it because I've never tried using it, but it might be useful or interesting to you. It won't integrate with changing cameras, though. I don't think there's an elegant way to do that.

1. They're from Deus Ex (original).

2. Oops. Screwed up there.

3. It seems so..

4.Really? Cool. How about GZDoom?

Broken Pencil said:

Cool. How about GZDoom?

GZDoom has everything that ZDoom has + more, it's practically ZDoom with OpenGL rendering. Their feature capabilities are well synchronized. In addition, both ports are actively maintained and developed and new versions / development builds are being released every now and then.

I tested it. Works OK if you want to do simple dialogues, quest givers, and vendors.

I made a hacked version of your wad. Activating the marine behind the counter will start a conversation like in Strife. I can't remember if I left my other test marines in, but they do nothing if I did. The dialogue itself is the example from the ZDoom wiki.

Documentation:
Universal Strife Dialog Format
ZDoom Strife Dialog Format

Each of those links to its respective specs on the ZDoom Github repo. Those were required reading for me because the wiki doesn't provide a working demo and doesn't describe all the features.

Most importantly, ZDoom uses actor classes to attach conversations to actors. This is ridiculous because it would mean, in your case, that every Fist Marine would get the same dialogue. ZDoom gets around this by adding an ID field to the format which you can attach to an actor's TID using action specials. This isn't described in the wiki, but it's what I did in the test wad (hence the other marines I added to the map).

The StartConversation special looks useful too.