Blighted Moonbase IV - 100% this map for 200 bucks

As you know, Blighted Moonbase has seen three previous installments. Memfis won Blighted Moonbase 1 & 2 and Player 177 won Blighted Moonbase 3.

 

You can follow that journey here; 

 

 

BUT THAT'S ANCIENT HISTORY NOW!

 

I am now running a competition for the final Blighted Moonbase.

 

BLIGHTED MOONBASE IV

This Blighted Moonbase is longer, harder and scarier than the previous 3 Blighted Moons combined. This map is full of surprises and, unfortunately, Memfis and Player 177 don't stand a chance. T-T 

 

The winner of Blighted Moonbase IV will have their winning run uploaded to youtube as a memorial, and the prize of 150 AUD.

I welcome challengers uploading their attempts as it will be interesting to see what levels of Doom talent this forum can produce :)

RULES OF THE CHALLENGE;

 

- No jumping

- No cheating 

- Must be completed on Ultra Violence with a standard pistol start without custom weapons or monsters mods

- Must be completed in 2 hours or less

- Deadline for challenge completion is the first day of 2019.

- Must complete the level with 100% kills and 100% items (don't worry, I have not put items in obscure places)

- Must be completed in one continuous sitting with no saves or deaths

 

COMPATIBILITY;

 

- Map has been tested with the latest version of GZ Doom. Drag wad into GZ Doom and use with Doom 2 source wad.

 

MAP;

 

- Map made with Slade and GZ Doom Builder using doom 2 wad file + custom music and some custom sprites from Realm 667

 

STORY;

 

Your star ship is running low on fuel and you desperately need to find a refueling station. You have arrived at a water-covered moon that has suddenly emerged from the darkness of space. You dock your ship at the landing port of a base built on the watery moon's surface. It is eerily quiet as you climb out of your starship and onto the landing pad. You approach the entrance of this gloomy base with your rifle drawn...

 

TIPS;

 

Keep moving through the base or the hordes will overwhelm you.

SCREENSHOTS (no spoilers);

 

 

 

 

DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/file/97xmkokv2m3j3f5/Blighted_Moonbase_IV-_Remastered.wad

 

(Update: At the behest of the doomworld community I have remastered the original map so that a higher frame rate is possible on lower-end computers. The link above has been replaced and prize increased from $150 to $200 AUD. This link to Blighted Moonbase IV - Remastered is the only accepted map submission in the competition.). 

 

Good Luck (you'll need it!)

 

Edited September 7, 2018 by Pan

Your idea of presenting a challenge to other players was right, but is 100% map competition worth it? Rather than giving everyone 100 bucks for finishing the map, create a challenge on who can complete your map in fastest time, giving said 100 bucks to 1st place winner, 50 bucks for 2nd place and 25 buck for 3rd place (for example). What your target audience needs is motivation.

 

You can also create a map with specific goals for winning the competition (such as going Tyson, not killing monsters at all, or just simply completing it without picking "that rocket launcher" or without killing "that cyberdemon. Make your maps "easy" on normal 100% UV playthrough, but at the same time extremely challenging upon defining a new condition. I'll let you figure the rest by yourself.

1 minute ago, Fragos said:

Your idea of presenting a challenge to other players was right, but is 100% map competition worth it? Rather than giving everyone 100 bucks for finishing the map, create a challenge on who can complete your map in fastest time, giving said 100 bucks to 1st place winner, 50 bucks for 2nd place and 25 buck for 3rd place (for example). What your target audience needs is motivation.

 

You can also create a map with specific goals for winning the competition (such as going Tyson, not killing monsters at all, or just simply completing it without picking "that rocket launcher" or without killing "that cyberdemon. Make your maps "easy" on normal 100% UV playthrough, but at the same time extremely challenging upon defining a new condition. I'll let you figure the rest by yourself.

I appreciate your advice, but I want to keep this challenge as simple as possible. There's already so many rules. My previous 3 blighted moons were beaten within a day by Memfis and Player 177 so I've completely underestimated the Doom community and player's motivation to beat my maps.

 

I feel I have come up with the ultimate challenge now. I think this map is impossible to beat without multiple attempts.

 

The only thing that may change about this challenge in time is I might increase the prize money if nobody has beaten it after a month. 

Hem...

 

Not to brag on this, but I'm not playing a map if I can't have a minimum of 35FPS. I HAVE 6 FPS 90% OF THE TIME. It's just literally UNPLAYABLE despite my high-end machine here.

What are your settings when you played this map ? Have you at least finished it ?

 

Also, the mapping quality is near zero, it's truly atrocious. You jump in the water ==> ESCAPE, NEW GAME, the ammunition here is non-existant at all.

 

Tell me. I appreciate those challenges, but this is plainly ridiculous here. What did you honestly try to achieve while doing this ?

 

Also, 100% items is just 100% stupid compared to 100% secrets. Just my 2 cents here. Also, as crouching is allowed, I'll abuse that.

Edited August 30, 2018 by Ch0wW

I thought that you will kindly take away most of the things such as blood puddles and replace them with blood floor textures or whatever. I thought that in bmb4 would be a slight optimization and there would be less lines. But again, lags are wild futhermore monster count increased. Well, let it be. I'll try it later when I get the notebook.

6 hours ago, Pan said:

I've completely underestimated the Doom community and player's motivation to beat my maps.

Yeah, I have to say I was very lucky to notice your challenges while they were still relatively simple. :D This one looks truly ridiculous. I'm not sure if I can find the motivation to try it for the fourth time, especially since now it's a lot harder and also previous time the item hunting left a bad taste in my mouth (these tiny bottles will appear in my nightmares, I'm sure), but I'll certainly be following this thread.

No.

  

12 hours ago, Pan said:

This Blighted Moonbase is longer, harder and scarier than the previous 3 Blighted Moons combined. This map is full of surprises and, unfortunately, Memfis and Player 177 don't stand a chance

You must have second sight :)

 

   I myself am ready to pay for the show! I can not even imagine how can one go through this. Moreover, I think that this is impossible under any scenarion. Maybe it's not so, that's just my opinion and I do not consider myself as a really good player. I judge by the fact that there are some following difficulties (in addition to severe deficit of ammo, health...):
- one route, that don't leave you much room to maneuver.
- hard to control safety of the barrels that hold archies. Break out will mean gameover.
- custom monsters. There are many and some are pretty hardcore. I'm definately not a fan and before I saw only a couple of these. From those that I met here especially I remembered the stonepinky.  
- some barricades are open. This leads to there always be someone behind your back.
- simply no rad suit. The BK area will be your point of no return.

   Extremely cautious play will stretch the suffering for couple hours. Pure agony. I mean, I'm very dissapointed from what I saw. Some sort of poorly made setting oversaturated with monsters and it sucks that some of them are stuck in walls. Kind of inspection revealed serious disbalance and unfinishedness.
   It seemed to me that the emphasis in the moonbase was done initially on roaming monsters but in this version number 4 we have deaf masses in every location. I once wrote in previous thread that some monsters (assuming viles surrounded by barrels) may have a deaf flag. Anyway, it was a small remark.
   I don't even know how would you hadle this complaints if they will seem important. I need to take a break from all this experimental trials

16 minutes ago, Player177 said:

I do not consider myself as a really good player.

You're a really good player, no doubt.

 

Right now, it seems OP just want to make something unbeatable, so he can say his map is unbeatable by the DW community.

It's just a big maze made without any real thinking about encounters or how monsters work, at least there should be berserk pack or chainsaw at the start. If I would remove all those walls, there will be only nuts-lite map. Anyway, seems software mode and some screen changes do map more playable than open-gl environment. 

19 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

Right now, it seems OP just want to make something unbeatable, so he can say his map is unbeatable by the DW community.

Framerate surely makes it unbeatable for me.

I get zero lag playing this map and my rig is very average. I have an Asus laptop from 2016.

This map is beatable if you take the direction that Memfis likes to take. This maze only has one root of success, but you must follow a very specific path if you want to replenish your ammo and health. 

 

After the deadline for the competition expires in 2019 then I will record a playthrough to show that it is beatable. I'm confident that I could beat this map, eventually. I can already progress quite far in it and I'm certainly no Doom God. Sunlust kicks my ass.

if you are getting lag then make sure you run it through the latest version of GZ Doom. I haven't tested Blighted Moonbase IV on any other platform.

I can manage a halfway playable framerate with everything awake at 320x200 resolution in ZDoom32, but I don't think you're being entirely honest with us. Give us the exact specs of your machine so we can compare what those of us who played it saw against what you claim.

I have a brand new Lenovo ideapad 330 with a 2.2 GHz AMD CPU, integrated graphics, and 4 GB RAM, and there's no chance of me even wanting to fight the framerate to try to complete it at all.

I will record a video of me playing this map smoothly and post it here. Easy :) give me a few minutes..

20 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

I can manage a halfway playable framerate with everything awake at 320x200 resolution in ZDoom32, but I don't think you're being entirely honest with us. Give us the exact specs of your machine so we can compare what those of us who played it saw against what you claim.

I have a brand new Lenovo ideapad 330 with a 2.2 GHz AMD CPU, integrated graphics, and 4 GB RAM, and there's no chance of me even wanting to fight the framerate to try to complete it at all.

My ASUS laptop is Intel Core i7 with 3.1 GHZ and nvidia geforce 930mx

That's anything but average.

That said, now we can get at the root of the problem here, because it looks like the others here have machines roughly equivalent to mine or better and I'm suspecting, like was pointed out on the previous thread, that you're doing this deliberately to make the map "unbeatable" by virtue of being unplayable by the majority of us. A map with 2,500 monsters is fine until they're all awake, and that's the point at which the framerate becomes a problem because ZDoom is running sight checks and actions for 2,500 monsters at one time.

I wouldn't be very well inclined to expect anyone else to want to try this.

1 hour ago, Ancalagon said:

Framerate surely makes it unbeatable for me.

GZDoom being required makes it unbeatable for me ;P

10 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

That's anything but average.

That said, now we can get at the root of the problem here, because it looks like the others here have machines roughly equivalent to mine or better and I'm suspecting, like was pointed out on the previous thread, that you're doing this deliberately to make the map "unbeatable" by virtue of being unplayable by the majority of us. A map with 2,500 monsters is fine until they're all awake, and that's the point at which the framerate becomes a problem because ZDoom is running sight checks and actions for 2,500 monsters at one time.

I wouldn't be very well inclined to expect anyone else to want to try this.

most of the 2500 monsters are 'deaf' and only awaken when you come into their line of sight. I found I was able to control monster placement much better this way. I wasn't aware of the 'deaf' function when making my previous maps. I'm a very embarrassed noob. I guess that there are about 1000 monsters who will awaken after you fire the first shot. The rest remain asleep until you enter their section of the maze.

There are actually less monsters 'free roaming' in Blighted Moonbase IV than in previous blighted moons. If you can survive and hold out the for the onslaught of free roaming monsters then you are able to take the maze more slowly. That's why I had to instigate a 2 hour time limit this time.

Here's the amount of lag I get...

 

Also, I'm playing doom with 1 hand while recording with my phone. It makes this map even more challenging! Maybe I will create a 'one-hand' doom contest soon.
 

So this is how you need to verify a probably suspicious demo :)

10 hours ago, Ch0wW said:

Hem...

 

Not to brag on this, but I'm not playing a map if I can't have a minimum of 35FPS. I HAVE 6 FPS 90% OF THE TIME. It's just literally UNPLAYABLE despite my high-end machine here.

What are your settings when you played this map ? Have you at least finished it ?

 

Also, the mapping quality is near zero, it's truly atrocious. You jump in the water ==> ESCAPE, NEW GAME, the ammunition here is non-existant at all.

 

Tell me. I appreciate those challenges, but this is plainly ridiculous here. What did you honestly try to achieve while doing this ?

 

Also, 100% items is just 100% stupid compared to 100% secrets. Just my 2 cents here. Also, as crouching is allowed, I'll abuse that.

You're not meant to jump in the water. You're meant to be searching for fuel for your starship. You can read the back story for your objectives. Of course, you can stay in the water if you want, but you'll be stuck there and you will have to idclip out. This will be breaking my No Cheating rules.

I might run a second prize for someone who beats this map with 100% kills only. Let's see. But it should be easy to 100% the items in this map. If you watch Player177's playthrough of blighted moonbase 3 you will see that he finds all the items. There is almost no change to item placement in blighted moonbase IV, so I really don't think it's difficult for someone who studies the map.

10 hours ago, Ch0wW said:

Hem...

 

Not to brag on this, but I'm not playing a map if I can't have a minimum of 35FPS. I HAVE 6 FPS 90% OF THE TIME. It's just literally UNPLAYABLE despite my high-end machine here.

What are your settings when you played this map ? Have you at least finished it ?

 

Also, the mapping quality is near zero, it's truly atrocious. You jump in the water ==> ESCAPE, NEW GAME, the ammunition here is non-existant at all.

 

Tell me. I appreciate those challenges, but this is plainly ridiculous here. What did you honestly try to achieve while doing this ?

 

Also, 100% items is just 100% stupid compared to 100% secrets. Just my 2 cents here. Also, as crouching is allowed, I'll abuse that.

 P.S. If you beat this map using crouch I'll give you a 100 dollar runners-up prize. Crouching is not in the spirit of the competition. The idea is to keep it as vanilla as possible. 

I've noticed two major flaws with this release:

 

1) Why is there a 27 MB song in here taking up 2/3 of the file size? Why not a MIDI that is similar?

 

2) The reason why people are having major frame rate issues is because of this:

 

 

NEARLY THE ENTIRE MAP IS MADE OF TWO SIDED LINEDEFS!! That is why users like @Ch0wW are complaining about frame rate. I am betting the number of active monsters is also contributing to the frame rate problems for some as well.

Probably the biggest issue is that pretty much the whole map is visible from any point, which means that all that stuff needs to be calculated constantly.

 i appreciate the feedback guys, but this is Doom and not Crysis. Most average rigs should be able to handle it.

It goes without saying that people should definitely NOT attempt to play blighted moonbase IV on their Casio calculators...

This might seem counterintuitive, but actually Doom can be more laggy than Crisis. The thing is, Doom's engine wasn't optimized for huge maps with insane monster counts. It handles small levels excellently, but doesn't scale well to this kind of wads. You can maybe try NUTS3 for an extreme example. Or does it run smoothly for you too? :O

Edited August 30, 2018 by Memfis

^^^ Basically this.

Pick up a map by @Mechadon and 90% of the time, you'll get a beastly map that runs poorly in GZDoom solely because of how much the engine has to render. We would lack this issue if you built this map in Boom format, because then we could run it in PRBoom+, which is amazingly optimized and can handle maps ten times larger than this with over one hundred thousand monsters in them all awake at once.

In fact, I mention Mechadon because he's very likely to have insight on this situation and why your map might be so hard on our machines.

7 minutes ago, Memfis said:

This might seem counterintuitive, but actually Doom can be more laggy than Crisis. The thing is, Doom's engine wasn't optimized for huge maps with insane monster counts. It handles small levels excellently, but doesn't scale well to this kind of wads. You can maybe try NUTS3 for an extreme example. Or does it run smoothly for you too? :O

Yes I understand what you mean. But unless I'm mistaken, I don't think blighted moonbase's monster count is anywhere near nuts-level monster counts. 

Looks like nuts has been 100%'d anyway;
 

 

16 minutes ago, Pan said:

 i appreciate the feedback guys, but this is Doom and not Crysis. Most average rigs should be able to handle it.

It goes without saying that people should definitely NOT attempt to play blighted moonbase IV on their Casio calculators...

 

Planisphere 2 has much more detail yet it can still maintain some semblance of frame rate stability in some areas due to the use of one sided linedefs being used so it's not a slide show. Use this to your advantage, Pan.