Doom But It's Harder Except It's Still Realistically Beatable™

Current version: 1.0

The No SS version does not include changes for the Wolfenstein SS enemies. This keeps compatibility with certain older mods that used DeHackEd to replace monsters, one of the popular ones being the SS.

Tested on: GZDoom 4.0.0

Originally named Enhanced Nightmare, I present to you the latest in gameplay AI enhancement mods: this thing.

Have you ever found yourself thinking Man, Nightmare! is becoming a snore fest. I sure wish someone could make a mod to fix that, preferably one with an incredibly lengthy name.

No. You haven't. But now that you have, you're stuck with this. Revisiting the way the game handles enemies and updating them to the modern standards of Quake 1, Doom But It's Harder Except It's Still Realistically Beatable™ does more than just decide that giving the Cyberdemon homing missiles is peak balance. Such amazing AI improvements include but are not limited to:

• Enemies no longer being blind and firing into their teammates
• Enemies not firing at you when you're clearly behind an indestructible torch
• Enemies no longer seeing through walls and deciding shooting at them is productive
• Patented Pinky Jumping™ technology has been added (can it even be a gameplay mod without it?)
• Cacodemon Strafing 2.0 has been deployed (it's the least annoying version you've seen yet!)

And so much more! I'm definitely not running out of features to talk about. For those of you who want something spicier but are too babby to play on Nightmare! difficulty, Ultra-violence has been beefed up as well. Sunlust? More like SaveScumlust.

Change log for v1.0:

Enhanced Nightmare.zip

Enhanced Nightmare - No SS.zip

The download link is borked. "download2260.mediafire.com took too long to respond"

It's been giving me weird issues for some reason. I tried reuploading it and it worked but if it's still broken I'll try reuploading it again

Edit: Yeah, if anyone has a suggestion for another hosting site, I'm all ears

Put the PK3 in a zip and attach it to your post.

Ok, it's up now. There's an actual mod here, I promise.

16 minutes ago, mistersector said:

Few tread this area, even fewer succeed. If this does what it claims, it is a welcome improvement. 

I wouldn't expect much. I found a lot of the checking to not be super fruitful compared to Quake simply because of the way projectiles are handled. In Quake precise checking works well since projectiles in that game don't actually have a hitbox (it just checks to see if the origin of the projectile hits something). This means that exact ray traces work really well for finding things blocking.

Doom uses fat as all hell hitboxes for its projectiles so precise checking really doesn't matter too much. It stops a lot of needless infighting and does stop enemies from stupidly firing at you while you're hiding, but ultimately they'll still hit each other quite a bit due to the projectiles being so wide. I did take a few other notes from Quake that work well, though, like Fiend jumping and Scrag strafing.

2 hours ago, Boondorl said:

Yeah, if anyone has a suggestion for another hosting site, I'm all ears

Google Drive, man. 15GB for free, no freemium nonsense.

this is really neat; lots of awesome QOL changes here too. @Boondorl are you open to others using some of what you've created here in their own mods?

On 4/10/2019 at 9:36 PM, Tango said:

this is really neat; lots of awesome QOL changes here too. @Boondorl are you open to others using some of what you've created here in their own mods?

Of course. That being said, I'd steer clear of using my beta stuff (and even some of my other stuff is questionable and needs a rewrite). There's usually a few bugs and lots of improvements to be had for the gameplay. I'm currently working on beta 2 which has some important fixes, optimizations, and a reworked monster alert system to make it much more similar to Quake (the current audio based solution is pretty janky).

awesome to hear mate, you are an angel. cant understate how much I appreciate it. looking forward to the next beta!

Speaking of beta 2, it's out right now! Lots of changes internally so if it crashes or there's any odd behavior be sure to let me know.

The code in this is impressive. The fact that you can't use monster replacing mods with it is a bummer though.

If there was a way to have these changes be scripted and not replace the monsters that would be awesome. If not maybe you could work with another modder and include the improvements to another mod.

15 hours ago, Bryan T said:

If there was a way to have these changes be scripted and not replace the monsters that would be awesome.

Unfortunately it can't be done on ZDoom for a very specific reason: DeHackEd support. The explanation is lengthy and technical, but essentially any default behavior in Doom can't be replaced or else errors would be incredibly likely when using a DeHackEd patch for a WAD. Graf has already given a full-stop "No" to the question of virtualizing default behavior so this is how enemies will have to have their AI updated in the mean time. I'm open to others implementing my code if they see fit, however.

This mod is sick, I've wanted to do something like this for years but never knew enough about Zscript to really make it work. Good job!

Beta 3 is out now. Not much new here so it's just a small update. I'm pretty happy with the set of features I have now so I've mostly just been doing optimizations where it's easy or makes sense. The Revenant got some more tweaks to its gameplay which concludes the saga of me trying to make enemies fully respect 3D when firing projectiles/dashing at you. Other than that it's just minor tweaks. Arch-vile fire and Cacodemon strafing are now a tad bit less expensive to calculate which should help out on slaughter maps, especially for the Arch-viles. The Revenant's extended hitbox, on the other hand, received a massive optimization fix that significantly lowered its cost.

If all goes well, this will likely be the build that transitions into 1.0.

Updated current version to 1.0 with no changes (outside of tweaking the change log, of course). Also included a version without the Wolfenstein SS for the few rare maps that replace them via DeHackEd.