Ancient Aliens - final version on idgames

Major thanks for taking the time to put together aa-tex, I will definitely have my eyes on it for future projects :D

I ran into an issue on Map06 that others might have suffered, which for me took all the fun out of the gameplay.

When the Archie fight started, I soon found myself faced with 2 Pain Elementals that I simply could not take out expeditiously. The result was a cloud of Lost Souls in a map that's a bit tight on ammo. This turned a hectic but relatively straightforward fight into an absolute nightmare. Again and again I had almost beaten the fight, albeit with low health and little ammo, only to have a Lost Soul zoom in from somewhere and bite me to death. At the time, I thought the PEs had been released as part of the monster horde, but after watching other UV playthroughs and doing a God Mode run to confirm the findings, I realized these were the PEs that were released after I found the Soulsphere secret.

As it happened, after grabbing the Soulsphere, I wandered over to where the SSG is found and was alerted to the presence of PEs when a Lost Soul went flying past my head. I immediately killed them, as luck would have it, right in front of the closet where an Archie would later emerge. So the PEs in the Archie fight were rezzed, not an integral part of the fight design.

Now, that may be a feature, not a bug in the overall vision of the map, and you may even hope that some hapless player does exactly what I did. Once you know the map, you won't make that mistake and killing the PEs in their hidey-hole is pretty rote. It's also the case that the odds of someone plunking PE corpses right in front of future Archie territory is remote. But . . . it happened! :D For me, it made the gameplay, if not technically unfair, at least remarkably unpleasant. So I'd ask if maybe those PEs could be replaced with an equal or greater number of Cacos. Killing them in the hidey-hole is also rote, but if the player kills them in the open, then at least if Archies rez them it won't lead to utter catastrophe. :D

Just played the last two maps (29 and 30)... It gave me an unbelievable sense of discomfort (in a good way with the environment and set up), and the chills too.

Amazing job well done!

I'm running this with Brutal doom and their gun mods but for some reason after the last rc the dual plasma guns don't work anymore. They just clicks like they are out of ammo but they are not. Also, I can't seem to get some of the button mappings to work anymore, jump, reload, crouch etc. I don't know what I did to get them working in RC1 but after moving to RC3a they no long work. i went through all the setting. Thoughts?

crackerjacc said:

Thoughts?

I should work out a bit before the swimsuit season.

SteveD said:

So the PEs in the Archie fight were rezzed, not an integral part of the fight design.

Wait what? How could they be rezzed if they don't leave a corpse behind. I know some mods screw with that and give PE's a corpse but that's not something the designer should worry about.

crackerjacc said:

I'm running this with Brutal doom and their gun mods but for some reason after the last rc the dual plasma guns don't work anymore. They just clicks like they are out of ammo but they are not. Also, I can't seem to get some of the button mappings to work anymore, jump, reload, crouch etc. I don't know what I did to get them working in RC1 but after moving to RC3a they no long work. i went through all the setting. Thoughts?

I just tested RC3a with BD20b and the dual Plasma Guns worked fine on my end. Did you load the AA.wad before the BD20b.pk3? I didn't check jump and crouch but you may want to check the gameplay settings and see if they are turned off there. A lot of wads set them off by default as to not confuse players whether they should be jumping or not in the maps.

rileymartin said:

Wait what? How could they be rezzed if they don't leave a corpse behind. I know some mods screw with that and give PE's a corpse but that's not something the designer should worry about.

Ah, the plot thickens! You make a very good point about the lack of a PE corpse. This makes it even more mystifying because I never run gameplay mods, though I was running, much to my surprise, an older 1.8.x version of GZDoom, so I just updated to 2.1.1, though I have no plan to try and recreate the effect. ;)

So maybe there was an issue with that version of GZDoom. The only other possible explanation I can think of is that somehow I mixed up my saves, and grabbed the secret Soulsphere without killing the PEs or walking in front of their hidey-hole to alert them, but when the Archie fight started, they either saw or heard me and came out. That would be my fault, of course, but it seems a remote possibility. I know I killed them, so why would I revert to an earlier save to grab the Soulsphere without killing them again?

The one thing I know is this -- the PEs were there! I was neither drunk nor under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. :D The good news is that it wasn't a planned part of the encounter. With luck, no one else will have to go through that, and I did eventually win through to the end on sheer stubbornness.

On to the next map.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVOD4D3dtCCLQcG9w3eLoXfYL2zS2lMVc

I guess this is relevant to the club hehe. Will update the playlist as fast as I can :D

rileymartin said:

Wait what? How could they be rezzed if they don't leave a corpse behind. I know some mods screw with that and give PE's a corpse but that's not something the designer should worry about.

It can happen if the dying pain elemental is crushed before its death animation finishes. When a dead monster is crushed, it is directly placed into the pool of blood state. Now a monster in its dying animation is already considered dead -- the function that kills the monster both sets the flag that says "yep, this monster sure is dead" and make it start its death animation, so the game doesn't wait for the animation to complete before considering the monster dead.

So if you have the proper circumstances for it, a pain elemental can leave a corpse behind for an arch-vile to raise. In vanilla Doom, the risen elemental will always be a ghost monster.

The_Trigger said:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVOD4D3dtCCLQcG9w3eLoXfYL2zS2lMVc

I guess this is relevant to the club hehe. Will update the playlist as fast as I can :D

Can this message be transfered to the dwmw club thread? (For ancient aliens). I didn't really pay attention this morning cause i was in a rush hehe.

Thank you.

I would like to report a bug(?) in RC3a on map 09 near the long river with the Cyber at the end. I was able to squeeze by one of the torches to get in there, skipping the whole upper section with the raising platform and Imp horde from where I assume you're supposed to make the jump to that area. I think I remember trying the same in RC1 and it didn't work, although I may be mistaken.

http://imgur.com/syVwcye

It was the right torch in this image and I was running Zandronum 3.0.

I don't think anything has changed, there, so it was probably passable in RC1 as well. I can fix it.

Belated TNS #252 post, hope to see you there.

What's teh point of spamming annoying spawning sound every 5 seconds on Map18? Are you afraid that the player might forget about monsters appearing?

kuchitsu said:

What's teh point of spamming annoying spawning sound every 5 seconds on Map18? Are you afraid that the player might forget about monsters appearing?

It's just a DSSPIT substitute or whatever isn't it? You get that on vanilla MAP30.

Yes, it's just a boss spawner.

Could make it silent, imo we don't need that earrape. We understand that the monsters are spawning.

Any idea why this would happen? (Seen in ZDaemon and Odamex.)



...and the other side...

kuchitsu said:

Could make it silent, imo we don't need that earrape. We understand that the monsters are spawning.

The sound effect is also used for the revenant cube alert. So either both are silent or both make a sound. Besides, I like the sound effect.

rhinoduck said:

Any idea why this would happen? (Seen in ZDaemon and Odamex.)

Nope, no idea!

skillsaw said:

Nope, no idea!

That makes two of us now. Here's to hoping that someone else with more in-depth engine knowledge can shed some light on this...

Is the texture's width not a power of 2?

92x128... I changed the dimensions in the TEXTURE1 lump to 128x128 and it works fine now. Thanks essel!

I'm on map28... what do i do here? The platforms activate and move just once, I can't get to the lift because they're static.

That's odd, I'm pretty sure they are supposed to move continuously.

Using a few months old gzdoom build, btw.

Are you using RC3a? The platforms raise and lower continuously on my copy using GZDoom.

Try a newer build?

http://devbuilds.drdteam.org/gzdoom/

rhinoduck said:

Any idea why this would happen? (Seen in ZDaemon and Odamex.)

http://rhinoduck.mooo.com/downloads/temp/aaliens/aaliens_map24_arch_1_small.png

...and the other side...

http://rhinoduck.mooo.com/downloads/temp/aaliens/aaliens_map24_arch_2_small.png

Whoops! Yes, I totally forgot about this (twice in fact). Fixed and sent the updated textures for the next version.

EDIT: Also found a few of the cloud textures had a similar issue. Should be fixed as well.

skillsaw said:

Are you using RC3a? The platforms raise and lower continuously on my copy using GZDoom.

Try a newer build?

http://devbuilds.drdteam.org/gzdoom/

It's RC3a, yes. Will try a newer gzdoom tomorrow.

Thanks. Let me know if there's still an issue.

Also: here's an updated aa-tex, including some missing entries for the menus and Boom status bars in certain ports. Thanks to Altazimuth for pointing these out to me.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/c71t16kb499omq5/aa-tex_v2.zip

The voodoo doll script for those map28 platforms got broken during fixing other issues for rc3. It's a confirmed critical mapbreaker that popped up during TNS as well. Also skillsaw fixed it for the next RC.