Enjoyable Pistol

Many have attempted using dehacked to make the starting weapon ever so slightly less useless. Some of the attempts were fairly successful, others less so, but invariably, the player would immediately discard the thing for a chaingun immediately. But now, I think I managed the impossible task of making the pistol enjoyable. In fact, it was enjoyable enough that it inspired me to do a spontaneous low-effort E1 speedrun! Will anyone else find my small mod similarly inspiring?

EnjoyablePistol.zip

Can you include a simple video demonstrating the power of this handgun? I'm currently online on my phone.

The pistol is the most underappreciated of all the Doom weapons. I like it just the way it is.

Quick look: pistol does bfg shots instead? Yeah no.

A serious look on the pistol: it gets replaced by the chaingun, because it's much easier and faster to achieve simple accurate 'sniper' shots by staccato firing of the chaingun. You need to take this ability away from the chaingun, and let accurate shots be the sole domain of the pistol.

You could do this by giving the chaingun a windup and/or a winddown animation. First two shots can still be accurate, but staccato firing is now much harder to pull off. Add in a tiny boost in pistol animation, and the pistol is now the preferred weapon of choice for long distance sniper shots.

Another idea is removing the Refire codepointer from the pistol so it is always accurate.

This, of course, throws off the rate of fire, so some frame tweaking is required.

5 minutes ago, Mordeth said:

Quick look: pistol does bfg shots instead? Yeah no.

My new pistol design may not be a very complex change, but that's still a big oversimplification... it's different from a BFG in multiple ways. I made this pistol to try out a gameplay mechanic idea I intend to use in a more serious project, but I have no idea when I'm gonna release that one, so I wanted to release my cool invention earlier.

But if we're having a serious conversation about balancing the pistol, I agree with both @Mordeth and @EarthQuake. Basically, there are three ways to give the pistol a degree of advantage over the chaingun:

1. Make the chaingun use up more ammo at once. That's how the machine gun stays relevant in wolf3d even after picking up the gatling gun. But in vanilla doom dehacked, this can be a double-edged sword, as every bullet of that first burst is going to be 100% accurate!
2. Make the chaingun wind down after releasing fire (there's no way to make an automatic weapon with wind-up in vanilla), so that the player will be forced to fire those inaccurate shots if they want a decent fire rate.
3. Make the pistol replacement 100% accurate even when holding fire, by removing the Refire codepointer. It's a cool idea, but vanilla doom also uses Refire codepoint for other stuff such as switching the weapon away after running out of ammo, so that doesn't come without side effects.

Ultimately, adding wind-down is probably the best idea, otherwise a seasoned chaingun-tapper could render the other two tweaks irrelevant.

i think the pistol should have an upgrade that requires no ammo - similar to the light blaster in quake 2.

the shotgun and the chaingun both technically render the pistol obsolete - the only time a player would use a pistol is if they were out of shells without a chaingun.

With BFG shots this should be called Cheapgun. Better pistol could shoot faster but slower than chaingun and cause 50~75% of total damage from shotgun (25-80).

1 hour ago, Scypek2 said:

 

My new pistol design may not be a very complex change, but that's still a big oversimplification... it's different from a BFG in multiple ways. I made this pistol to try out a gameplay mechanic idea I intend to use in a more serious project, but I have no idea when I'm gonna release that one, so I wanted to release my cool invention earlier.

 

But if we're having a serious conversation about balancing the pistol, I agree with both @Mordeth and @EarthQuake. Basically, there are three ways to give the pistol a degree of advantage over the chaingun:

1. Make the chaingun use up more ammo at once. That's how the machine gun stays relevant in wolf3d even after picking up the gatling gun. But in vanilla doom dehacked, this can be a double-edged sword, as every bullet of that first burst is going to be 100% accurate!
2. Make the chaingun wind down after releasing fire (there's no way to make an automatic weapon with wind-up in vanilla), so that the player will be forced to fire those inaccurate shots if they want a decent fire rate.
3. Make the pistol replacement 100% accurate even when holding fire, by removing the Refire codepointer. It's a cool idea, but vanilla doom also uses Refire codepoint for other stuff such as switching the weapon away after running out of ammo, so that doesn't come without side effects.

Ultimately, adding wind-down is probably the best idea, otherwise a seasoned chaingun-tapper could render the other two tweaks irrelevant.

Would be careful to not lose sight of the big picture: the weapon roster as a whole. To nerf the chaingun in order to boost the pistol's status is backwards. Now you have two poor weapons, rather than one.

If one insists on a change: The pistol does 25 dps. The single shotgun does 69 dps. So boost pistol fire rate by 1.5x or so and make it perfectly accurate. Still weak enough that the shotgun is a step up, without any sacrifices. 

That said, I think the pistol is good as is. The uselessness serves conveyance well: it tells you 'go find a stronger weapon'. It might still get light mileage as an occasional plinker in early-KDITD monster compositions, or as a finisher in tight ammo situations. But not every weapon needs to be used commonly. 

There is a Doom gameplay mod out there - unfortunately, I cannot remember its name nor its author - that took a rather bold approach to the pistol: instead of trying to "fix" it, it simply had Doomguy discard it from his inventory altogether once he acquires a better weapon using the same ammunition type.

for my own plays, i just replaced pistol with slightly modified assault rifle from brutal doom. 'cause 'cmon, Doomguy is freakin space marine, why shouldn't he have a REAL weapon?!

sure, it makes alot of levels easier. but meh, nobody is sticking with the pistol anyway (except for special competition rules).

p.s.: to somewhat balance things out, i removed chaingun. assault rifle is better anyway. ;-)

Intended as an EDF practice run, I've made a quick & dirty variation on Perkristian's 'Smooth Weapons' mod for the Eternity Engine earlier, which you can find linked somewhere in its forum here on Doomworld, with the modifications I described above. Chaingun has a windup and winddown mode, which passes quick enough not to feel that different while preventing tap-sniping (ok, how do we even call this quirk here?). Well, at least not that different to non-demo scene plebs like me. Pistol has accurate first shot, and less spread than normal on subsequent shots.

I've played around with it for a while and found myself switching back to pistol in some situation (fodder enemies, long distance sniping enemies, conserving ammo). Normally I would have continued using the chaingun and its tap-sniping ability instead.  And it's not like you can't use the chaingun anymore for this, it's just that you'll waste more ammo doing it.  And I kinda like the pistol getting a useful 'niche' use, just like you would occasionally revert to the chainsaw despite having better weaponry.

Then again, I don't feel strongly enough about this to consider making it the new default.

0/10 This is the best weapon mod I've ever seen

Seriously though, I feel like the pistol from Rowdy Rudy solves most of the issues - it makes it a better sniper for the lazy who just want to hold down fire, shoots 2 pellets rather than 1 and has a slightly increased rate of fire. I think with just a touch more speed, the Pistol/Chaingun relationship would be far more comparable to the tradeoff between, oh say, the SSG and SG, with one being more accurate but less powerful but both being viable weapons in their own right.

Top lulz. I certainly enjoyed myself.

Here's my little pistol tweak. Always accurate and is raised very fast. I feel that pistol doesn't need big changes, it needs to just be accurate to make it less frustrating to use and fast raise speed gives reasons to use it in some situations instead of chaingun.

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0
# Created with WhackEd4 1.2.0 BETA
# Note: Use the pound sign ('#') to start comment lines.

Doom version = 19
Patch format = 6


Frame 12
Duration = 0

Frame 15
Next frame = 10

Frame 17
Duration = 5

I think just making the thing semi-automatic is all that needs to be done. It doesn't make sense to have to wait so long between shots for a pistol.

Change both the pistol and chaingun to how Valiant.wad does it (increase rate of fire of both of them).

Pistol finally becomes more useful and viable for sniping whereas the chaingun becomes less viable for sniping but more viable for dealing stronger enemies and stunlocking