Verdant Citadel

I love it.

Just now, 𝙳𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜 said:

I love it.

Can i marry it?

Good lord, that looks absolutely fantastic! Great mood, great light, I‘ll have to try this out asap.

So this caught my attention last night, and I checked VC today :D .

I really liked the visuals and design of the map, and the gameplay is pretty good too, fast combat but not too difficult. My only problem would be the area containing the yellow skull. It might be just me, but compared to the rest of the areas, I think it's rather easy to miss. Also the purple skull doesn't show in the status bar (this got me at first, when I thought it's glitched), was that intentional? And the music might be a bit too loud as well.

I just streamed VC too (there is a pause from 27:50 to 38:09 though, make sure to skip that):

Really great map so far. I am 33 minutes in on UV and taking my time to get the secrets. I like the difficulty curve so far and my first critique was that I was waking enemies up way to early. For one, I kept getting blindsided by lost souls in the sewer sections thinking I woke some pain elemental later in the map, or they just teleported somehow. However, I never knew I was only like 5 feet away from a cyber demon the whole time until I left the sewers from the other end to do the beach defense part. I also like how you discouraged saving by having an autosave powerup. However, giving me spawn protection on re-spawn, meh, I would like to think I am skilled enough to just get back to work. But that cyber fight oh man, that was a nice surprise, the first one anyway. Also, so far no slaughter moments but some difficult enemy placement. Good job! 8.5 our of 10 so far. I will also say, don't play this with infinite height, you will not get the red key. Okay, I don't want to spoil anything else. I have a purple key to find later. Thanks for the map! 

Edit: Just finished, turns out I had the purple key all along. Loved it. Definitely awesome. I had a good time at least. 

Thanks seed and Odorousbag87 for the tests and feedback! The stream especially is extremely useful to catch other things that did not go as I planned :)

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However, giving me spawn protection on re-spawn, meh, I would like to think I am skilled enough to just get back to work.

The altered color palette staying after death is a bug I had not yet noticed. There is no actual damage protection after respawning.

Edit: updated the first post with a link to a new test version. The changes are listed at the bottom of the post.

So, I wanted to try this one out today, but the whole image looks like this:

Using GzDoom 4.0 as recommended, what could be the issue?

Strange... What GPU do you have, and is this using a development build of GZDoom or the release build? And are your GPU drivers up to date?

In the meantime, disabling the color grading effect through the options > display options > hw renderer > postprocessing menu should get rid of it.

I will check those options out. I have a Nvidia GTX1050 and drivers should be up to date. 

I played through the map. Very enjoyable with beautiful layout and enjoyable encounters.

I did face a problem due to loading the game in 2 different ways, one by double clicking on the wad and the other by a shell script but I sorted out why so I heavily edited my post just now. No need to bore everyone with my own scripting issues here.

I managed to obtain max kills and items but only 9/12 secrets according to gzdoom. Gzdoombuilder is only reporting 9 secrets though so I'm confused about how many secrets are to find.

There are a few things marked as secret. 2 are in the large circular room with the red key (look for inconsistencies), one is in the river near the bridge.

1 hour ago, exl said:

There are a few things marked as secret.

Many thanks @exl. A comment spoilered below.

This is an excellent map. I hope the testing goes well so a final release is not far away. Cheers.

Yes, putting the secret flag on items that cannot be picked up all the time, such as ammo (if ammo is already full), health (if already 100%) or armor (if already with same or better armor) is generally a bad idea. Prefer items that can always be picked up, such as powerups, health and armor bonuses, berserk packs, backpacks, and computer area maps. You could also create a new dummy inventory item for this, too, some invisible thing you can put on top of your health/armor/whatever secrets, have the count secret flag instead of them, and so just serves to trigger the secret counter when touched. Something like this should be mostly enough:

Actor SecretInventory : Inventory 1337
{
	+COUNTSECRET
	+INVENTORY.ALWAYSPICKUP
	Inventory.PickupMessage "You found a secret item!"
	States
	{
	Spawn:
		TNT1 A -1
		Stop
	}
}

Anyway, I found one problem that can get the player stuck in an area which can then only be left by enabling jumping or by noclipping out:

Solution #1: remove decorative thing, solution #2: add something that allows to step out, like a boulder or something on the other side of the fence.

Gorgeous map. I love the music too. Only played for a few minutes but seems pretty fun. My only issue so far is the poor performance I'm experiencing. The beginning of the map is really bad, I was getting 30-40 fps. It improves later on though and feels more playable. It is a bit inconsistent though and being a gamer who uses a 144hz monitor, I can really feel the framerates jumping all over the place as I move around. It's a shame cause it does hurt the experience but Im not sure if there's anything that can be done to improve on that considering most large, detailed maps have similar issues. I'll still play through it though when I get the time. 

35 minutes ago, Gez said:

Yes, putting the secret flag on items that cannot be picked up all the time, such as ammo (if ammo is already full), health (if already 100%) or armor (if already with same or better armor) is generally a bad idea. Prefer items that can always be picked up, such as powerups, health and armor bonuses, berserk packs, backpacks, and computer area maps.

Good point. I've removed the remaining thing secrets and used nearby or containing sectors instead. I considered the actor solution, but I'd rather not introduce new actors at this point in the map's life.

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Anyway, I found one problem that can get the player stuck in an area which can then only be left by enabling jumping or by noclipping out:

Well spotted! I went with solution 3 and adjusted both the railinga s well as the decorative thing height. The barrels also allowed the player to step over it, so the railing had to be raised 8 units.

20 minutes ago, deathzero021 said:

My only issue so far is the poor performance I'm experiencing. The beginning of the map is really bad, I was getting 30-40 fps.

By the time I noticed this the map was already pretty much done architecturally. I tried remedying it but the only thing that helps is blocking off the majority of the view at the start of the map with solid architecture like a tower. Since it's only the start of the map that's the worst I've decided to leave it as-is, unless someone has a good idea about how to improve performance without getting rid of the vista.

Well I am at the bottom of a pit and I have no idea what to do. I even found the last secret there, so it's not because I'm unobservant I think, but now I've done my traditional "I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now" ritual which consists in frantically humping+punching every wall like I'm in Wolf 3D and still nothing. So I went and did my backup ritual which consists of map cheating and noclipping around. It became apparent the pit is supposed to lower further, but it didn't. Still no idea why, so I did my ultimate ritual which is "open the map in SLADE and try to figure out what's happening" so I got to look at the guts of script 100 and found out that I'm apparently stuck at the "WaitForDeadThings" stage. Command console "monster" tells me there's still one monster with TID 212 around, a chaingunner at -2752 8320 -696. Crosschecking with the editor, it's thing 3138 which appears in skills HMP/UV/NM, and it really should have TID 250 like its buddies from the same floor because there's no way I can kill it before the platform lowers again, and there's no way the platform lowers again before he's dead.

Got the same problem as Gez before me. Got stuck after lift descended for one floor with 39 monsters left. I tried 'kill monsters' in the console and that opens up the button for further descent.

@Gez and @AL-97. I had the same issue getting stuck in the annular lift at the end. I don't know if the cause for your problem is the same as mine but what fixed it for me is to make sure I didn't have any other mod's in use. You are supposed to have a red switch revealed on the central pillar but for some reason it wasn't showing. I had a save game at the stuck position and after I exited and restarted my game without the competing mod's, my save game worked perfectly after that with the magic switch magically appearing when I loaded.

I was indeed playing with mods, but I used none that would modify inventory or enemies. Either way, loading just the map without any mods don't seem to do anything. I still get stuck after descending for one floor and the button on the central column only shows up after doing 'kill monsters' in the console.

Yeah, I've been doing some more experiments. What I said earlier is correct but it doesn't nail the root cause. There is something else that stops that lift from working, I'm guessing it's something screwy with the ACS module, hopefully @exlcan sort it out soon.

Some monsters have been added to the lift section but in my carelessness I forgot to test those changes. It is as Gez said, they don't have the proper tid set for the lift to know that it can continue. I'll fix that later today when I have time.

16 minutes ago, exl said:

It is as Gez said, they don't have the proper tid set for the lift to know that it can continue. I'll fix that later today when I have time.

Well good work @Gez for being closest to the truth! I'd peeked at the ACS script in Slade but couldn't work out what was going on. I should have been suspicious with the TID attached to some monsters in the monster command output. I'm looking forward to the imminent patch.

So, I was checking if I can turn of color grading in the options menu under Hardwar Renderer - Post Processing, but my options only look like this:

Is there maybe something missing? I checked again, my Nvidia config is: Geforce GTX 1050 / PCIe / SSE2, version 4.6.0, whereas GzDoom is version g4.0 64-bit. Not sure what's wrong here, hope you can find a solution. Would love to play this map and especially see that color grading in action. :D

Nice map, those sewers look really good.

47 minutes ago, elend said:

So, I was checking if I can turn of color grading in the options menu under Hardwar Renderer - Post Processing, but my options only look like this:

  Hide contents

https://abload.de/img/options2qjck.png

 

Is there maybe something missing? I checked again, my Nvidia config is: Geforce GTX 1050 / PCIe / SSE2, version 4.6.0, whereas GzDoom is version g4.0 64-bit. Not sure what's wrong here, hope you can find a solution. Would love to play this map and especially see that color grading in action. :D

BTW are u using the new vulkan renderer by any chance. If so, I recommend changing back to OpenGL renderer. Vulkan renderer is in alpha state and has some bugs.

No Vulkan renderer either. I quickly also tried it with GzDoom 3.7.2 and can see the same effect.

2 hours ago, tmorrow said:

 

Well good work @Gez for being closest to the truth! I'd peeked at the ACS script in Slade but couldn't work out what was going on. I should have been suspicious with the TID attached to some monsters in the monster command output. I'm looking forward to the imminent patch.

I wasn't just closest, I had fully reached it.

For information, here's what I did to unstick my game:

• Used idmypos to see where I was and note the coordinates by warping to them
• freeze the game
• Warp to chaingunguy's position, telefragging it
• thanks to console memory, warp back to where I previously was
• unfreeze the game

The switch revealed itself and then I could continue with the fights as normal.

Played through the full map (mostly) but got stuck on the lift as well. I also could not get the keys to work either. only the purple key will work, the other keys don't so I had to clip through the doors. Despite being broken and incompletable, it's a nice looking map with plenty of gzdoom details that I appreciate. It's a bit on the easy side, I played on UV and did not die a single time. However, with fast monsters, that helps to boost the difficulty a bit. Overall good map, I never felt too lost either. Each area of the map was easy to recognize and was distinct from other parts of the map so I never felt confused. There's a lot of space to fight though which leads to the easy combat, as well as tons of ammo. I got to the lift section with 600 plasma and plenty of rockets. Anyway, hope you fix the issue with the lift.

I updated the first post with another test build of the map, with the lift problem among the fixed issues.

11 hours ago, elend said:

So, I was checking if I can turn of color grading in the options menu under Hardwar Renderer - Post Processing, but my options only look like this:

 

Is there maybe something missing? I checked again, my Nvidia config is: Geforce GTX 1050 / PCIe / SSE2, version 4.6.0, whereas GzDoom is version g4.0 64-bit. Not sure what's wrong here, hope you can find a solution. Would love to play this map and especially see that color grading in action. :D

Unfortunately I have not been able to figure out why that is happening to you. The menu item should be visible in the latest test build but if it not, you can input r_colorgrading 0 in the console to disable it from there. Looking at the picture again it looks like maybe something is modifying pixels at the edges between two colors, like some sort of sharpening filter. Is there any mod or third party software running that could cause this?