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Omniplex

Haunting Outbreak Official Megawad Release!

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Just beat Episode 1. Love the classic-style gameplay combined with modern aesthetics which give off lots of good atmosphere! I know you say this is a final release but there were a few teleporter bugs I found (lower settings). I'll get back when I find more but for E1.

E1M6: A teleporter here did not work due to the destination (Thing 28) being only flagged for hard.
E1M7: Teleport destinations 362-366 not flagged for easy, prevents monsters from teleporting in.

EDIT: Episode 2 has no issues! I was alarmed at the slaughter gameplay but still found it easy.

Edited by NuMetalManiak

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Oh shoot, didn't even know about those teleport destinations being flagged for hard DX. Thanks for pointing them out @NuMetalManiak. Sometimes I don't even notice when I edit a group of monsters at once, I either edit other stuff by accident, or when I add certain things (Like teleport destinations) they will have other difficulty settings unchecked.

 

I know of certain wads I played that are finished but have other bugs as well, and those are old wads. Certain things, especially the small things can get away quite easily huh.

 

Next time, when I make another megawad, I need to make sure that I check every single thing on every level before I publish. Thanks again for pointing them out! :)

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Sorry for having two posts in a row, glad to hear that the second episode had no issues!

 

Sorry if you find some quite bland maps in the third and fourth episode, as those are the maps I made like seven years earlier. Be careful about E3M9 though, because it is very large and it's also the only map that exceeds the 128kb blockmap size (141kb).

 

If this megawad gets enough good reviews, I will continue working with the second installment. I will do my best to make it bugs free and more difficult. Thanks!

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Woah, congratz for the release! Finishing up a megawad is a really tough task!

 

Pics looks great, a nice combination of great detailing with stock textures!

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Oh, thank you very much @Rudolph about the suggestion, that way people can download more easily! I changed the link, so it should direct people to where you wanted it to go :)

 

Thanks for the compliment @Deadwing, yes it is a very tough task. A lot of brainstorming and planning, I even made the custom M_DOOM, M_SKULL and many more, as described in the top post of this topic. Plus I had college in the past, life issues (don't even want to think about them). Anyway, this is the reason why it took me about 9 years in total, but at least now I made it.

 

I was also planning to make a second megawad (Haunting Outbreak 2), also one-man-project, but hopefully it will be much better than this one :)

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Okay, I am four maps in. If I have one major complaint so far, it is that the levels feel too big for their amount of enemies (too much empty space) and everything looks too clean, too similar and too symmetrical. The monster encounters are all very predictable, usually all waiting in a neat square formation and as of yet, there has been little in terms of ambushes. I do not mean to sound harsh, but I feel like I am playing a series of maps generated with Oblige, right down to the generic-looking secret rooms, and as such I am currently not having much fun.

 

The ammunition quantity seems a bit tight but fair. However, the arsenal availability does not seem to scale with the bestiary: by E1M3, I am already encountering Barons of Hell, yet I am still stuck with the Pistol/Chaingun and the Shotgun, which makes fighting a horde of Pinkies or a group of Barons of Hell more tedious than fun. Even vanilla Doom had the decency to place higher-tier weaponry in its early levels to spice things up.

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Really glad you finally realease this megawad :)

I would really like to give it a try!

do you remember the mapping format you use to make the maps?

That would help deffining what source-ports are able to play it.

Hope it was made on Doom Format, that way, this mapset would be a limit removing mapset and thus being playable on almost all source-ports except Chocolate/vanilla :D

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1 minute ago, P41R47 said:

Really glad you finally realease this megawad :)

I would really like to give it a try!

do you remember the mapping format you use to make the maps?

That would help deffining what source-ports are able to play it.

Hope it was made on Doom Format, that way, this mapset would be a limit removing mapset :D

 

I was wondering the same.  Hoping Crispy works for this wad

 

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@P41R47 Yes I made this in doom format, and I also remember testing this wad with GZDoom and now even Skulltag but you may have to disable the "dynamic lighting" setting on the slaughter-fest maps, they slowed down the frame rate when I played one of those levels with that setting on.

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4 minutes ago, BlueThunder said:

 

I was wondering the same.  Hoping Crispy works for this wad

 

crispy can play it without problem as far as E1M3, didn't have much time to playtest it more.

 

PrBoom+ gives signal11 crash, unfortunatelly. So it wil probably crash or have map errors on Crispy, too. :/

Just now, Omniplex said:

@P41R47 Yes I made this in doom format, and I also remember testing this wad with GZDoom and now even Skulltag but you may have to disable the "dynamic lighting" setting on the slaughter-fest maps, they slowed down the frame rate when I played one of those levels with that setting on.

Don't worry, on other ports that doesn't have dynamics lights things like that doesn't happend at all.

Its really strange to have slowdowns on ports like Crispy or PrBoom+

 

Aside of that, its kinda unfortunate that you only tested it on those ports, it would be really awesome if, before you submit it to /idgames, you make a public release candidate, because testing with GZDoom and Skulltag let you go with a lot of little errors on the maps as they wasn't there.
I know that those are kinda the most popular source-ports out there, but well, they are not good for testing things unless the maps are made on UDMF.

With a public test, we could had helped you make your megawad reach all the possible players out there.

 

Please, don't take this as a critique, what i said is not common aknowledge, unfortunatelly.

You can still fix the problems it may had for working on other ports, but probably you are a little tired after nine years working on this.

Its no big deal, don't worry.

GZDoom players now have a new old school megawad to play :D

 

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It's perfectly fine what you have said there. On the contrary, that made me happy because I can take that as a new lesson and it would also be a lot more fun if I make public release to let anyone test it.

 

If I ever release the second installment; which is already 6 years old with 21 maps done, that's what I'm going to do first and foremost after having finished with all the maps. I do not know if I just post the entire megawad, since the total size of a post is limited to 25MB. Thank you lots!

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21 minutes ago, Omniplex said:

It's perfectly fine what you have said there. On the contrary, that made me happy because I can take that as a new lesson and it would also be a lot more fun if I make public release to let anyone test it.

 

If I ever release the second installment; which is already 6 years old with 21 maps done, that's what I'm going to do first and foremost after having finished with all the maps. I do not know if I just post the entire megawad, since the total size of a post is limited to 25MB. Thank you lots!

you can always use dropbox or other filesharing pages like mediafire.

People use dropbox generally, its easy and let you manage the files without adds convulting the download link.

I will be looking for play that, too :D

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Just finished the megawad. I'll echo off of what everything @Rudolph said as the biggest issue was certainly the large areas. Designed well, but very easy even the slaughter gameplay in some maps. I still had my fun with it though, even when things were linear and easy. Keep on trucking though.

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This Haunting Outbreak installment is no doubt the easiest one, I remember it was a breeze for me too, except E4M7 and E4M9. I was a bit disappointed about the difficulty (even on Ultra-Violence), I'll take my inspiration from Alien Vendetta and later on Deus Vult 2 when it comes to implementing the difficulty of the game play. I'm currently working on the second installment which I hopefully be like 4 times better than this one. This is only the first installment, and I planned on making this a 4 megawad installment; which I thought about at around like what, 8 years ago.

 

Anyway, If I could rate my own wads; I would rate this 5 or even 6/10.

 

EDIT: This wad has been mentioned on doom streams, and I was laughing XD

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Wow... Harsh, but fair, I guess. 

 

As I said, the levels themselves look good, albeit a bit too clean and symmetrical. I would suggest thinking of the gameplay first when designing your future maps so that the monster and item placement feel more organic and less predictable.

 

Unless you are going for a Serious Sam-type gameplay, I suppose.

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2 hours ago, Omniplex said:

Anyway, If I could rate my own wads; I would rate this 5 or even 6/10.

I’d probably rate mine even lower. This isn’t modesty speaking, this is the fact that I simply see each map as a precursor to the next. Constantly evolving through trial and error.

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Every critic should be taken as a life lesson, I actually like what @Rudolph said here. These are the things I still didn't even know, I would say thank you for spotting errors of this wad. This can certainly help me make the second installment better, even though it remained in my computer for 6 years already; it is still not yet finished. There are 21 maps at the moment. We are all learning new things continuously after all :D

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i played up to E1M5 (including E1M9), and i have a... mixed feeling on this wad. i love big maps with alot of open space, and i like what i've seen so far. the architecture is a bit monotonic, but i guess that's how people usually builds the real buildings. ;-)

 

but the fights... the fights are boring. sorry. monsters are usually lined up (and that cries for several rocket/bfg shots), mostly on the same height (with occasional support from cacos), and i also can safely retreat and play a shooting gallery.

 

my 2 cents on overal design: such mapstyle can greatly benefit from using 3D floors to add some height variations and "vertical pressure". otherwise you're mostly limited to groups of the same species to control infighting. also, big rooms are essentialy arenas, and they need something to stop player from running away and shoot incoming monsters one by one. seal the doors and then release monsters; teleport some monsters in previous rooms and corridors to make retreating more dangerous; and so on. also, repopulate previously visited areas after player picked up a key, for example.

 

i can't say that it is a bad mapset so far, but it can quickly become boring. sorry. there is alot of room (oops; pun is semi-intended ;-) for improvement. i will definetely watch for your next maps, and i'll play this one further. it is quite fun killing if played by 2-3 maps a day.

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Sorry for bumping this thread, I am yet to learn a lot of lessons. Thanks for pointing out more errors in this wad, in fact I'm writing notes about what to do in the second installment of this WAD, and I have included many notes. I have listed 13 kinds of levels (Like puzzle, timed levels, chasm-like levels albeit not having very thin walkways and more), even listed 17 kinds of how secrets are put and taking inspiration from other WADs (like seeing a crack on a wall as you go down a lift, secret sector that can be seen but players have to figure out how to get there etc...). Lots and lots of notes I included and the list goes on and on, all thanks to the critics (this WAD deserved it).

 

I'm using Zdoom (Doom in Hexen format) so there may be no 3D floors, sorry about that. But I can make use of 3d Bridges! (if they help out with the height variations), I can also make like large pillars or balconies, and even some monsters in windows if that applies.

 

I have written a list of things to avoid and things that can make levels more challenging:

 

1. Thin Hallways, 96 units or even less.

2. Excessive symmetry (double-sided or even four-sided) areas.

3. Inescapable damaging pits.

4. Do not implement maps for Ultra-Violence difficulty only.

5. Too much repetitive textures.

6. Four-walled square and rectangular areas.

7. Don't just give a player any way to run away from large rooms, they are in a form of arenas. Sealing the doors and making the monsters teleporting in the large area from all directions and different heights is one of the best things when implementing them.

8. When making monster groups, make different heights for them. This can include large balconies, pillars and 3D floors.

 

Credits goes to @Doomkid for tips number 1 to 5 and @ketmar for tips 7 and 8 :)

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1 hour ago, Omniplex said:

I'm using Zdoom (Doom in Hexen format) so there may be no 3D floors, sorry about that.

you can create 3d floors and slopes in any format, Doom-in-Hexen is ok for that. just look for some tutorials out there -- it is basically down to setting linedef specials, which are directly supported in Doom-in-Hexen. even Doom-in-Doom can do that, but you'll have to resort to using special things then.

 

this will limit your maps to advanced soureports, tho -- PRBoom can't render 3d floors and slopes, for example. but i guess you're ok with that -- Zandronum, GZDoom (and derivatives like LZDoom), k8vavoom all can be used. (and i'm almost sure that DelphiDoom can do 3d floors too; it certainly can do slopes)

 

p.s.: and as you're targeting advanced sourceports anyway, some simple ACS scripting may help too. it is much easier to create arenas and control fights with ACS scripts.

Edited by ketmar : added DelphiDoom

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Done, looks like I have managed. I even managed to make another sector IN the bridge quite easily. I found it surprisingly easy to make:

 

Screen_4.jpg.4cc1b60377bd299348a13bd29f6c9467.jpg

 

Screen_3.jpg.0f540172c903d43e8aa03b04372d7499.jpg

 

Thank you for letting me know about 3D floors!. I also had to upgrade from Doom builder 2 to GZDoom Builder (2017), I'm going to miss the other one though XD.

 

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great! can't wait to see what you will come up with with even more creative freedom!

 

also, if you switched the editor anyway, you may try UDB (Ultimate Doom Builder). GZDoom Builder development has stopped, and UDB is a continuation of it (i.e. it is basically "GZDB next version").

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I seem to be doing very well and got the hang of it quickly, thank you for telling me about the UDB as well, cheers! :)

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