alternate death mechanics?

i'm recently playing a little more doom than usual and i've made a discovery about my playstyle. basically, i just quicksave very often. i'm currently playing the uac ultra map pack which can be quite difficult. so, i save very often, so i don't have to restart the level. at the same time, i don't like quicksaving all the time. it takes away a lot of tension.

so, i'm thinking of alternate death mechanics for doom. i think you can actually have auto save points baked into your map. i think that's a great tool for mappers but it's obviously not a universal solution. i think i would enjoy doom more with this though. design your level around autosave spots and disable saving altogether.

what i was also think about is a "reverse time" mechanic. everytime you die, the game would rewind (visually, with your actual gameplay) a couple of seconds, giving you another chance. that would be my main question here. would this be possible? there's a replay function, so, it should work somehow.

(as a sidenote: another cool way to circumvent the save spam is something the new game "wrath - aeon of ruin" came up with. basically, you have an item that you use that acts as a checkpoint. would be cool to have this in doom as well. but you'd have to design new maps around that. or possibly mod in some random drop chance for the monsters you kill.)

I mean, you can just manually save before big encounters. One thing I do sometimes is limit my saves to 1 or 2 per map. Savescumming is an issue the player needs to overcome, not the mapper. If people want to savescumming they should be able to, if you don't want you can just not. The rewind thing would be cool to see though.

Yeah I have wanted a rewind in Doom forever. I am wondering now, it's been a while since I've done a TAS demo, but could you record as you play and just do -recordfromto when you die and keep on going?

i'm not a programmer, so i don't know. first i would answer the question if you can actually play a demo backwards. if that's not possible, the entire idea dies. if it is in fact possible, i'd set-up an acs script (which would only be map specific though) that would start recording a demo at xx% of players health. if player dies, i would start the demo that was recorded, play it backwards for x seconds and let the player respawn. this transition may not be seamless which is another problem. maybe a programmer can implement that completely seamlessly, i don't know.

@zzzornbringer Doom demos are a recording of inputs pressed. If you played it backwards all that would happen is you would do the actions in reverse but the gamestate wouldn't roll back i.e monsters wouldn't come back to life etc.

13 hours ago, DuckReconMajor said:

Yeah I have wanted a rewind in Doom forever. I am wondering now, it's been a while since I've done a TAS demo, but could you record as you play and just do -recordfromto when you die and keep on going?

Yeah something like that is definitely possible.

To make a cool effect of rewinding, it would be easier to make a screenshot every few seconds during gameplay and store them in memory, and replay these backwards.

There was a port on the Xbox 360 of Duke Nukem 3D that had an awesome rewind feature whenever you died. I imagine if you took advantage of the demo system you could do it in Doom.

On 6/29/2019 at 7:36 AM, Death Egg said:

There was a port on the Xbox 360 of that had an awesome rewind feature whenever you died. I imagine if you took advantage of the demo system you could do it in Doom.

That's the 20. Anniversary edition.

On 7/2/2019 at 9:06 PM, eviltechno said:

 

That's the 20. Anniversary edition.

Nope. It was in the 360 port for sure. I played that one prior to the 20th Anniversary. 

19 hours ago, Salahmander2 said:

Nope. It was in the 360 port for sure. I played that one prior to the 20th Anniversary. 

However your 360 version not much relevant for people here. It's also present in the PC version currently available on steam. (As you should know after playing the 20th Anniversary as you said.) 

But it's a pain in the ass, as they replaced it for quicksaves. Luckily I bought the megaton edition long before they removed it from the stores.

15 hours ago, eviltechno said:

 

Luckily I bought the megaton edition long before they removed it from the stores.

i'd like to take this opportunity to remind people to not support fucking gearbox. they not only released duke nukem forever in the state that it was in, effectively killing the franchise. they also removed all prior duke nuken 3d versions from sale to sell their 20th anniversary version, that, mind you, is not compatible with eduke. so, if you want to play the bonus levels that were released in the 20th anniversary, you have to use their executable. also, they somehow fucked up the sound for that version as well.

fuck gearbox, fuck randy pitchford. fuck em for sitting on the duke franchise.

9 hours ago, zzzornbringer said:

 

i'd like to take this opportunity to remind people to not support fucking gearbox. they not only released duke nukem forever in the state that it was in, effectively killing the franchise. they also removed all prior duke nuken 3d versions from sale to sell their 20th anniversary version, that, mind you, is not compatible with eduke. so, if you want to play the bonus levels that were released in the 20th anniversary, you have to use their executable. also, they somehow fucked up the sound for that version as well.

 

fuck gearbox, fuck randy pitchford. fuck em for sitting on the duke franchise.

Yes I agree. Though releasing Borderlands 1 remastered and doing an awesome ~6 hrs  Borderlands 2 DLC for free kinda fixed it for me lately.  

(*with free I mean for fans who own the old games.)

Also, I doubt duke forever would be what people wanted, even if it was released slightly different from 3D realms or whatever.

Randy Pitchford is an overrated hack and Borderlands sucks deep wang, this coming from someone with like 100 hours in BLands 2. Borderlands makes me feel like my cells are dividing and dying at twice the normal rate while i hurtle inexorably towards the end of the human miracle of my existence. OP is right, don't support Gearbox.

Back to the topic at hand,

On 6/27/2019 at 2:57 PM, xvertigox said:

Savescumming is an issue the player needs to overcome, not the mapper.

The problem with constant and continued game saving is that it sucks out a lot of friction and challenge from the level. Inevitably, savescumming intensifies the feeling of grind that can occur when the player is low on health or ammo because they didn't do so well on the map so far, or botched a particular encounter. This is obviously subjective, but i often find even on larger and more challenging maps that saving less often can be beneficial because you can uncover new strategies through areas and fights you've been through before. At this point, when i replay the Doom/Heretic iwads or Quake, i don't save at all during a level, because being forced to go back to the start of the level for dying feels right to me, and hightens the sense of stake.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man. Do as thou wilst.

On 7/5/2019 at 9:13 PM, DagothKronk said:

Inevitably, savescumming intensifies the feeling of grind that can occur when the player is low on health or ammo because they didn't do so well on the map so far, or botched a particular encounter.

I know several Doomers (including myself) have admitted to a quick 'IDDQDx2' in times like these