Q4 Lightning Fast Mod: Doom Edition

Q4LFM:DE
Quake 4 Lightning Fast Mod: Doom Edition

What is it?
Q4LFM:DE is a single and multiplayer gameplay mod for Doom2.

Description:
Quake 4 was a great game, however it suffered from the "slow space marine syndrome", which made the game unnecessarily slow. By greatly increasing speed of the player and removing weapon reloading, the gameplay morphed into a extremely fun and frantic bloodbath. The only downside was that it made the single player campaign feel quite short. Due to the lack of mapsets for Q4, I decided to bring what I could of the gameplay into a game that has thousands of maps to play with: Doom.

This mod brings pretty much all the monsters and weapons from quake 4, rebalanced them to be a fair game when injected into doom's maps, and just like that, we have a whole different experience.


========================Single player=======================

The changes to monsters, weapons, ammo, armor, health and powerups spawners bring a difficult but (mostly) fair gameplay.

Given the large amount of weapons that Q4 has (each with it's unique ammo type) the spawning system tends to give you a lot of ammo, which is good, since this mod is NOT about taking a lot of cover or counting bullets, much less about reloading weapons. It's about running in maps at lightning fast speed, using the powerful arsenal at your disposal, while obliterating everything in sight.

This has been tested in UV in several mapsets, including Plutonia 2 & Requiem. Definitely beatable, but it can get quite hectic. However, I do not recommend to try total slaughtermaps (ala sunder.wad) since it will make it absolutely impossible. I was able to beat a good portion of swideath.wad in baby skill.


-- Weapon descriptions (for the unfamiliar) --

Blaster: Weak hitscan attack. Will fire as quick as you can tap the fire button. After shooting, if you hold the fire button, it will charge. When released, it fires a high speed projectile which will deal some fair damage. Be careful though, as the charged shot has a small amount of splash damage. No ammo required. Slot 1.

• ArmSaw: Really fast melee attack. No ammo required. Slot 1.
  
• Machinegun: Rapid fire hitscan. Alt fire triggers the scope. When firing in scope mode, the weapon will fire slower, but just as accurate. Uses Q4Clips. Slot 2.
  
• Shotgun: Good ol' hitscan. Will deal a good amount of damage up close. Damage is between Doom's Shotgun and the SuperShotgun. Uses Q4Shells. Slot 3.
  
• HyperBlaster: Rapid fire projectile based weapon. Projectiles are fast, but the weapon is fairly innacurate over distance. Uses Q4Cells (yep, I didn't name them "batteries"). Slot 4.
  
• Grenade Launcher: You know how grenade launchers work. Projectile is affected by gravity. Splash damage upon explosion. Uses Q4Grenades. Slot 5.
  
• NailGun: Rapid fire projectile based weapon. Slightly slower than the HyperBlaster, but the projectiles deal a really good amount of damage. Also innacurate. Nails have the ability to pierce through Gladiator's shields. Uses Q4Nails. Slot 6.
  
• RocketLauncher: Projectile, explosion, gibs. You know. Uses Q4Rockets. Slot 7.
  
• Railgun: Strong, perfectly accurate hitscan attack. Pierces through monsters and shields alike. Uses Q4Slugs. Slot 8
  
• LightningGun: Electricity "beam". Incredibly fast rate of fire and ammo consumption. Great damage. Limited range. Uses Q4LGCoils. Slot 9
  
• Dark Matter Gun: Shoots an extremely slow projectile that will "suck in" monsters and deal constant damage to anything near it until it crashes with a surface, dealing a massive amount of splash damage, some of it also hurts the player. Uses Q4DarkMatter. Slot 0

-- Weapon Upgrades --

Throughout the game, monsters might rarely drop weapon upgrades in the form of colored boxes. All weapons have 1 upgrade, except the Blaster, Gauntlet and Dark Matter Gun

• Machinegun: Makes the weapon slightly stronger and allows full automatic firing speed and perfect accuracy while zoomed
  
• Shotgun: Makes the weapon considerably stronger
  
• Hyperblaster: Makes the weapon slightly stronger and projectiles bounce off of walls and monsters (while still dealing damage)
  
• Grenade Launcher: Slightly increases damage radius and also increases damage
  
• NailGun: Allows to use the scope, which makes the nails automatically target nearby enemies in your line of sight
  
• Rocket Launcher: Medium damage increase
  
• RailGun: Sharp damage increase
  
• Lightning Gun: Increases weapon damage slighly, and randomly shoot bolts of lightning when the main beam hits anything that is "shootable", dealing a good amount of damage.

After a weapon has been upgraded, if another "upgrade box" of the same weapon is found, it will give a generous amount of ammo for that weapon.

-- Skills / Difficulties --

There's in total 6 skill levels (0-5) to toy with. Im adding a description since it might be a bit confusing and counter intuitive at first.

• Skill 0 "Private: It doesnt even hurt" : This is the easiest of them all. Monsters deal half damage. It spawns monsters that spawn in "very easy" and "easy" (spawnfilter = easy)
  
• Skill 1 "Corporal: Too many, too weak" : This one is like "Private" except that spawns monsters that appear usually on "hard / Nightmare" (spawnfilter = hard). This and the above skills are recommended if playing the mod in a cellphone (through DoomTouch), since it only alters the damage received (controlling the thing in the phone can be tricky). Ammo and everything else is normal. Other than that, these two skills are waaay too easy for PC playing.
  
• Skill 2 "Sergeant: This feels fair" : This is basically "hurt me plenty", the default medium skill in vanilla doom.
  
• Skill 3 "Lieutenant: Too many, fair" : This is the equivalent to vanilla's "Ultra violence". Spawnfilter = hard.
  
• Skill 4 "Colonel: Sometimes I miss my arm" : Harder than UV. Monsters are as aggressive as they get, and you take 50% more damage from everything.
  
• Skill 5 "General: Drowning in my own blood" : Hardest skill. Monsters are also as aggressive as they get, but deal less damage than skill 4, however, monsters respawn, limited to 4 times max per monsters. Ammo is doubled.

===================== Multiplayer: =========================

----------Coop----------

In coop, the game is basically the same as in single player, except for your buddies racking some extra mess while you're not looking.

----------Deathmatch----------

First of all, the deathmatch mode was completely rebalanced for a very competitive-styled quake experience.

- Player is fullbright all the time. There's no hiding in this game.
- All weapons deal specific amounts of damage, no randomization. See Table 1
- All weapon pickups are bright and colored for easy recognition, colors matching their ammo pickups and HUD ammo counter.
- Players play basic footstep sounds when running, specifically added for any type of "duel" where sound does matter.
- Akin to Q4, health and armor decrease 1 unit per second when over 100 points
- Health pickups heal different amounts compared to their SP counterpart, also having a different pickup sprite for extra visibility and easy recognition. See table 2
- Health, armor, weapons and ammo respawn times tweaked. See Table 2


Weapon changes from Single player:
* All weapons have simpler effects in Deatmatch for visibility and performance purposes *

• Gauntlet: Instead of dealing constant damage every few tics, it hits only every 0.4 secs, dealing one big hit of 50 points.
  
• Blaster: Not present in Deathmatch
  
• Machinegun: When zoomed, the weapon fires at full speed (like SP's upgraded one). Damage changed.
  
• Shotgun: Damage changed.
  
• Hyperblaster: Perfectly accurate. Projectile speed increased. Damage changed. Deals a tiny amount of splash damage.
  
• Grenade Launcher: Damage changed
  
• Nailgun: Wind up animation greatly shortened. Slower rate of fire. Faster nails. Damage changed. Deals an small amount of splash damage.
  
• RocketLauncher: Damage changed. Enhanced to allow "safe" rocketjumping
  
• Railgun: When zoomed in, after shooting it will automatically zoom out (for visibility). Damage changed.
  
• LightningGun: Damage changed.
  
• Dark Matter Gun: Damage Changed.

Table 1: Deathmatch Weapon Damage



(a) Shotgun: Fires 10 pellets, 10dmg each
(b) Hyperblaster: Each projectile deals 15dmg on impact + 5dmg of explosion damage
(c) Nailgun: Each nail deals 20dmg on impact + 10dmg of explosion damage
(d) Rocketlauncher: 16dmg on impact + 84dmg of explosion. Max self damage of explosion is 42
(e) LightningGun: Actually the weapon fires in pairs. First shot deals 3dmg, second shot deals 4. The damage showing in the chart is just an average of the two. This was to keep it as close as possible to Quake Live's, since Doom cannot accurately divide a second in an even number, therefore it was impossible to replicate the exact damage formula. QL's LG is 6dmg x 20 att per second= 120 DPS. Q4LFMDE is 3.5dmg x 35 att per second = 122.5 DPS
(f) DarkMatter Gun: Upon explosion of the projectile, it will deal 256dmg in a 256 MU radius. However, when projectile is traveling, it will deal 3dmg per tic. If the target stays perfectly still as the projectile approaches (ignoring the inherent "suck in" effect of the projectile), it will manage to deal 25.6dmg before it explodes on the target. Speed is 15 MU per tic, 3 dmg per tic, 128 MU radius, it gives us (128rad/15speed)*3dmg = 25.6dmg. However, the final damage received will of course vary with the target's movement and whatnot.
(g) While the total amount of time for the weapon to shoot again is 151tics, the weapon can be switched at any point after 57 tics post fire. Even if it's in the middle of the reload animation. However, when the weapon is selected once again, it will resume from the 57 tics mark, meaning it will still take 94 tics for it to be ready to shoot again. All this is very visible in the ammo bar.


Table 2: Health armor amounts/respaw times



Items marked with a "+" sign, signifies that it can go over 100 pts to a max of 200.
All powerups respawn after 120 seconds

Extra info:
If you are curious about DoomED nums and the list of actors, you can follow this link for the google doc data sheet with that info.

Google doc spreadsheet