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Insane_Gazebo

Sunder - Map20 Appears, finally.

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Yeah, I notice that chunk of missing texture when I was playing Map 04 the second time. It's subtle, but taking a closer look, it's a tiny crusher. 
Didn't notice that when first playing Metal Descendants.

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Also, I noticed that in Map 07: Hollow Icon, the one of ceiling crosses where the blue door is located is missing something. 
Rather trivial, but something I've noticed. Not sure what sector it is since I don't pay attention to them. 
Unless it's intentional.
image.png.3f8ae44d4dd77fdbf32f5bf86d313474.png

Edited by FlakTaryd

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It's a really good slaughter map , as always. I will continue my journey tomorrow maybe. Some remarks :

 

the trap with the "SSSHH" sign can be cheesed (after the blue key door). You can stay behind the door if you manage to escape the room while the door is opening. At 2:02:00

 

small texture error : doom77.png

 

 

- Outdoors areas should be more detailed imo.

 

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Yeah, I noticed that same trick with the SHHH fight. The door stays open several seconds longer than you need to hit the switch and fall back, to the point I wondered if that was the intended strategy or not.

 

Speaking of cheese, I was able to trigger the second big fight inside the library - the one with the barons, cybers and imps, and the mancubi on a few platforms above the player. If you stick out just so you can trigger the fight to begin without going down there. It was on GZdoom, in case it's that rather than any flaw in the map.

 

Finally, I found the way to get out of the last fight via a straferun back to the big caco arena. If I'm being honest, I liked doing that more than the intended way. Not out of a matter of challenge, but with how the level played and how you were going back and forth a lot, it felt like something that fit the level's design. It was one of those skips that yeah, was probably cheese but also one that felt really rewarding to find. On a related note, going back to the start where the BFG is results in all the cacos in that last fight coming through the big window. Gave me a chance to use the ammo I left there.

 

Great level overall. It's a different kind of feel and slaughter than map 16 or even 32.

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I played through map17 again today. I finally completed the last fight without the cheat of edging around the outside and boy, it was some fight! Definitely the highlight of the map for me. However the crusher fight I still feel needs more ammo, personally. Even with knowing what was ahead and backtracking a ton to pick up ammo during the initial stages, with the deaf monsters, I still almost ran fresh out of ammo. I'm really not sure what the intended strategy is, but mine was to rush back to the start and work my way through the hordes up to the final room.

 

I also found a missing texture:

imageedit_1_7445519786.png.9b18c4696c18b4232de05fa0ee67a4cd.png

 

Overall still a fantastic map!

Edited by Archie550 : got confused and said something inaccurate

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I've also noticed that the music in Map 13: Obsidian Nightmare has a long silent part after the music has finished. 
Can't help but it makes it feel empty. As if like the song as that several minute length of silence.

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Also want to add that 3 of the switches in the first fight area can be hit from the sides at an angle under them, thus allowing the player to bypass that fight completely as long as they don't go for the Plasma Gun and trip the teleport party to begin.

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I continue my journey on Sunder Map 17

 

 

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Some more bugs n' shit that I've come across, besides all the stuff I've already mentioned previously.

 

Map 1 - I would wrap chaingunner towers with blocklines so they can't get stuck on edges because of boom behavior. There is probably a bunch of instances of this throughout the wad, but blockade of flying monsters has to be kept in mind before applying anything.

 

Map 3 - RK locked door has multiple w1 close triggers, so there's a chance it locks up multiple times pointlessly when leaving that room. While you can repeatedly press the switch to open it up from the other side of room, there's no point in keeping it as is. The only benefit is causing occasional inconvenience to the player. The same applies to door leading to outer section of last room, but to a much less notable degree, as there's a switch opening them right there without the need to backtrack throughout the entire room.

 

Map 4 - You can trivially easily skip the first HK crusher room encounter in multiple ways. Run in through the door further from starting point, rush for the switch and make a run for it out of the room before that door closes, passage to chainers will now be open. Other possibility is not making any noise and no HK will teleport in while you just wait for switches to reveal. Also, the last room has one bugged untextured crusher, that has already been mentioned here though.

 

Map 6 - Sector 509 raises way too slowly, you can easily trigger linedefs that raise those columns, run back and cause a softlock. In that very same room, I'd remove thing 31 invulnerability. It would be otherwise perfectly manageable sudden-death kind of fight with just 1 av and 1 cyber, so I don't really see the point. Placing a megasphere there and removing one that is in front of exit room would make it more ... meaty. Up ahead, what's the point of switch linedef 3956? It lowers columns that are inaccessible at that point by normal means through singleplayer anyway. In the last room, I'd consider moving invulnerability from ground level onto sector 491, so both invulns are visible on display there, rather than keeping that one on the ground level and having obscurized vision of its placement by corpses and meat blocking your view. I would also dump a few barons or some meat on the exit bridge, because you can easily use up those invulns to just rush those switches and exit.

 

Map 8 - The cyber on upper platform instantly infighting with imps should imo not have any imps there at all, what's the point of them?

 

Map 11 - Barons on platforming cubes should be enveloped in blocklines, so they don't get stuck on edges from rocket spam.

 

Map 13 - I don't really get the fight with duo cybers and 24 PEs in that area covered mostly by damaging floor, sector 156. As it is, backing off and waiting until they all jam into the tunnel and infight into oblivion seems to be the only viable strategy.

 

Map 14 - You can still cheese that claustrophobic rape encounter near linedef 49768. Because there are 2 linedefs very close to each other, by very slowly approaching the first linedef, you may trigger just the switch revealing line and omit triggering the fight itself. Once the switch is revealed, you can rush for it and out of the room, thus basically skipping the fight.

 

Map 15 - You can hug the fence near the start to wake one deaf av below. It will probably follow you upstairs and make the fight much easier then once it's taken out. Once you press the switch down there, I would probably not have any mancs teleport in, because they just clog the stairs and prevent imps from following you down.

 

Map 16 - You can easily skip YK fight by rushing for switches and grabbing YK before there's an overload of monsters. At least one slowly revealing switch is probably necessary here. Also, maps 16 and 17 have somewhat unaesthetic forced shoot switch straight in your face at the start. Having them a little more concealed, like in map 3, would be better imo.

 

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On 8/28/2019 at 11:17 PM, j4rio said:

Map 13 - I don't really get the fight with duo cybers and 24 PEs in that area covered mostly by damaging floor, sector 156. As it is, backing off and waiting until they all jam into the tunnel and infight into oblivion seems to be the only viable strategy.

 

Someone better than me could do this without using up as many rockets as I did here.

 

EDIT doing this is twice as slow as speedrun strat and definitely less safe. You could force this fight as I showed above by locking the tunnel behind player at some point, but then you'd also need to provide extra ammo (a couple extra medkits wouldn't hurt, either). As a point of reference, Killer5 used 340 cells and 10 rockets to finish the survivors off in his demo.

 

On 8/28/2019 at 11:17 PM, j4rio said:

Map 6 - [...] I'd remove thing 31 invulnerability. It would be otherwise perfectly manageable sudden-death kind of fight with just 1 av and 1 cyber, so I don't really see the point.

You can beat Cyb+AV+Cacos without taking invul and instead take it afterwards and carry it over to the final fight, which makes a huge difference there.

 

Fully agreed on your MAP09 remarks.

Edited by tchkb

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8 hours ago, tchkb said:

EDIT doing this is twice as slow as speedrun strat and definitely less safe. You could force this fight as I showed above by locking the tunnel behind player at some point, but then you'd also need to provide extra ammo (a couple extra medkits wouldn't hurt, either). As a point of reference, Killer5 used 340 cells and 10 rockets to finish the survivors off in his demo.

So why would anybody employ a (just slightly) more dangerous strategy, when instead the unintended method is not only safer, but also potentially way faster? What matters in the context of maxing is what's faster, and it just so happens that the faster method is also the safer method of play there, hence it is the only maxrun viable way to go about it. If going in and blasting everything the intended way were in some way shape or form rewarding the player's willingness to use a more risky approach, it would be an entirely different story altogether. As it stands that fight is simply begging to get cheesed, and unfortunately the cheese strat also isn't particularly fun and engaging to pull off.

 

Also, what your napkin math ("twice as slow") fails to account for is that while all the PEs bunch up in the tunnel, the maxrunners can spend time on clearing something else in the map, so the time saved with the cheese strat is actually way more than just a minute and some change. The context matters a great deal here when talking about how viable something really is.

 

The problem with that fight never was that it wasn't doable the way it was intended, the problem with that fight always was that it isn't a good fight that is particularly rewarding to do. Everybody with half a functioning brain can get in there, circle strafe for close to all eternity, and take a few potshots here and there, which is also close to perfectly safe, but it's also perfectly boring and monotonous to do so. Just about anybody who's ever built a slaughtermap themselves knows that when you build a large circular area, and insert monsters, all you wind up with is a circlestrafe fest. It doesn't matter if you lock players in, and give them more health/ammo/footmassage/whatever, it will always be a circlestrafe fest unless it's being cheesed.

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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I played your new map and I enjoyed it a lot.

Took me nearly 3 hours and a half to reach the exit, which, in my opinion, is better than the +6h long previous map, which I gave up on half way through. But I ended with 1000 enemies more because of those damn PEs.

 

I did not have much trouble to go through it, I was even surprised that it went so well, apart from the crusher rooms/corridors as well as the last slaughter room where I did not expect to fight the remaining +2000 monsters and I quickly ran out of cell ammo.

I had a bit of trouble with platforming on top of the shelves before getting to BK, but nothing compared to the hellish part of MAP 15 where you have to run the tip of the star-shaped platform while getting sniped by Imps and HKs.

 

In the big library right after the "SSSH" room, I struggled a bit before finding out that you can safely hop on the lift near the blue armor and hide upwards from the heavy fire of enemies below and from Mancubi and HK from the opposite side if you did not fire a single shot after hitting the switch. I don't know whether this was intentional or not, but it was pretty handy.

 

I think this was said before, but the ammo spread is not balanced well as I left a ton of rocket and cell packs in a few rooms, like the first one and BK one but they were scarced in the 3 last rooms, starting from the PE/Caco/Spidermastermind one until the end, especially cell pack. But as it was my 1st blind run of the map, I probably wasted too much and my strat to shoot down enemy spammers was not that great to begin with.

Worst was the crusher area as I lost myself often searching for cell packs while having the revenants closing in my rear.

 

Back in the "SSSH" room, the AV/Cybies infighting did not work properly for me as AVs were retaliating against Cybie after getting shot, but Cybie kept firing rockets at me, not caring at all about AVs roasting him.

 

Last thing is about switches. Like @WH-Wilou84 said, it was not obvious what to do once you teleport back to the YK area, maybe a sign would help notice the lift switch near the 1st one. I lost quite some time wandering around to find it out.

 

Also, in the last room, I did not expect to have more than the usual 3 switches to activate and I thought placement was same as the ending room of MAP 12, hiding them inside the teleporting areas. Maybe it was intended to give a harder time to speedrunners, but given the insane amount of enemies to fight (more than 1/3 of total), I don't think that was necessary.

 

I think that's pretty much all about it.

But don't get me wrong, you did another awesome job there! :)

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1 hour ago, Kyoh1 said:

 

Back in the "SSSH" room, the AV/Cybies infighting did not work properly for me as AVs were retaliating against Cybie after getting shot, but Cybie kept firing rockets at me, not caring at all about AVs roasting him. 

 

This is the correct monster behavior. No monsters ever retaliate against arch-viles.

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1 minute ago, ukiro said:

This is the correct monster behavior. No monsters ever retaliate against arch-viles.

 

To expand on that: That's the expected behavior.

 

Arch-Viles have a "notarget" flag set, which prevents any enemy from attacking/infighting with them, however, they can target them back if they get hit.

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Interesting, I never noticed that since I usually try to take them down firsthand as fast as possible before they give me additional work or have them get caught in monsters swarm.

Feels like a cheating skill though.

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40 minutes ago, seed said:

Arch-Viles have a "notarget" flag set, which prevents any enemy from attacking/infighting with them, however, they can target them back if they get hit. 

ZDoom made it a flag so as to allow to use this behavior with other actors; however in vanilla it's hardcoded to the arch-vile mobj type. There's another vile-exclusive infighting behavior in that arch-viles will always, instantly, retarget whatever hurt them the most recently. Other monsters have a sort of threshold system so they only switch target when hurt if enough time has passed since last time they got hurt.

 

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/77735c3ff0772609e9c8d29e3ce2ab42ff54d20b/linuxdoom-1.10/p_inter.c#L904:L906

 

 if ( (!target->threshold || target->type == MT_VILE)
&& source && source != target
&& source->type != MT_VILE)

This is the condition that governs whether the damaged mobj (target) will want to retaliate against the mobj that dealt damage (source).

Condition on the first line: the target's threshold is down to zero or the target is an arch-vile.

Condition on the second line: damage actually comes from a mobj source (if the monster is damaged by, for example, a crusher, it's not going to be able to attack the crusher) and the target and the source are actually two different mobjs. (So that a monster will not infight against itself if it hurt itself by blowing up a barrel or something.)

Condition on the third line: the source isn't an arch-vile.

 

All conditions must be met.

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On 8/6/2019 at 6:37 AM, Khaoscythe said:

Also, please for the love of god stop having maps with seemingly no ceiling and cacodemons (Map fucking 16) that will get blown into the sky and NEVER come back down (and before anyone states otherwise I've waited about an hour for 6 cacos that decided to chill in heaven during the rev/caco/manc teleport trap area and just decided fuck the uv-max run).... it's extremely vexing to deal with, especially in regards to possible speedrunning. It's annoying (in general) to have your potential uv-max run get nullified because of that sort of stuff.. period! Either add some god damn ceilings or get rid of the cacos completely.

 

Oh, could be worse. Reminded me when I played Precarious blind, no ceiling issue there, but a single or multiple shots of SG would send the PE flying to the far end of the map, if not cornered and backed to a wall. And those bastards would still spit those lost souls even from afar, making strongly effective surprise attacks.

 

I had the exact same problem, but not as bad as yours. I will have to look for this Boom strict compatibility thing, but my version of GZDoom is a bit old.

I don't know whether it will help or not with this huge lag that's persistent in MAP 15. Otherwise, I'll have to try PrBoom or another compatible source port.

 

Another way to ruin a UV max run is to blow enemies off the ledge with rocket or BFG blast and it is often impossible to finish them off once they fell in the pit far below

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9 hours ago, Kyoh1 said:

Interesting, I never noticed that since I usually try to take them down firsthand as fast as possible before they give me additional work or have them get caught in monsters swarm.

Feels like a cheating skill though.

 

Not really, both the noretaliation and instant retarget are really important to how they tend to be used in maps. The retaliation is important both to prevent it from easily dying to something like a cyberdemon from infighting, and to prevent it from angering every other monster (the blast actually does splash damage). The instant retarget is also important in many maps, because you are expected to use it instead of cover. As an example of the top of my head, in Scythe 2 MAP26, there is a small room with very little cover, an archvile, and a couple lost souls. You are expected to use the lost souls to distract the vile, so that you can grab the key and get out of the room.

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On 8/15/2019 at 12:53 AM, WH-Wilou84 said:

I cheesed through the ending fight by jumping over here, it's possible (though risky) to hop around the entire zone and wait for the horde to thin itself through infighting.

 

Even worse than that, once you hop around from pillar to pillar, you can jump from one of them to land on the floor of the BK library room, thus you can take care of the cacos coming to you and troll run around to increase infighting.

 

Spoiler

Screenshot_Doom_20190909_205602.png.d18970c9267c06345d85a42543318368.png

 

Edited by Kyoh1 : Screenshot added

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This is so awesome. Well deserved, I just noticed that this is one of the most viewed posts of all time in the forums!!! Good job Insane Gazebo! You are a role model to us all!

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26 minutes ago, Insane_Gazebo said:

Expect some tough fights and one or two short, but disgusting platforming sections, reminiscent of Precarious. :)

Thanks, I hate it already 

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Looking forward to play your next release, The Singing Void!

But I will check out how difficult Map 17 fairs after your modifications.

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