[Megawad] Tarnsman's Projectile Hell - Now on idgames

Quick little hotfix due to Slade's pruning unused textures breaking some animated textures:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s88s96acsy526p9/TPH-Beta-HF2.zip?dl=0

Status update: This is TOO HARD for me.

This is a somewhat brutal set, Marisa. I'd highly recommend lowering the difficulty if necessary :P

Congrats on the release, by the way! Some really cool stuff in here.

On E1M9 I can't get the 4 Revenants to teleport into the map for some reason. I played the map multiple times in the latest GZDoom version and they refuse to teleport whatsoever. Is there something I'm missing?

Also if we're talking about GZDoom, what compatibility should I play this on? As of now I left it on Default.

i played e1m1 because you used my midi and hey i gotta say: that midi still whips. great job on that

wow! looks awfully wicked! definitely in my play list. congrats on the release :)

2 hours ago, AD_79 said:

This is a somewhat brutal set, Marisa. I'd highly recommend lowering the difficulty if necessary :P

Which is why I played on HMP

holy fuck, more tarnsman maps? lets goooooo

Amazing maps so far. Fun and challenging. Even on HMP, I'm getting my butt kicked. I like the Doomgal's design.

This is kicking my ass even on skill 2, goddamn. Very effective monster usage.

okay... when's the actual release?

Well....I just played the first 4 maps (E1M1 to E1M3 and the secret map found in M2), and I gotta say that's quite an experience in UV (yes....cuz I like testing myself sometimes).

The key to prevail, in my opinion, is to know which weapons you need to use against each monster and to know their advantages.

For example, the kick (fist replacement) hits five or six-fold harder than the old punch and it's quite OP. You can kill a spider with 5 kicks and never get damage thanks to the pain chance. The chaingun replacement is quite accurate, which I like that a lot and the seudo-SSG is hella powerful in most monsters. I also like that some monsters have different behavior. The cacodemon is what caught my attention immediately and, I consider that bastard to be the most dangerous of the lot.

It looks great, plays great and the inspiration from other mapsets are there. Solid work indeed.

Eternity users: Weapon switching will be good starting tomorrow's devbuild.

We took some turns playing the different episodes. Played e2. Didn't really have much fun with it tbh. Assuming the v69 is a joke wad.

Looked at the maps and thought they look cool at least.

It looks like this is the WAD that I'm gonna play next

The question is, was this mapset made after eating Kaboom or was it that Alfonzo had to eat Kaboom, the cereal of the defeated because he lost a bet that Tarnsman would not finish this.

Either way, I look forward to playing this.

Here's my experience with this so far, keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a beta even though the title says release, and I'll get to that in a bit...

I picked it up and checked out a couple maps in episode one, most of which gave me the impression that this was either going to be a somewhat slow crawl with relatively weak weapons against mid-tiers, or something borderlining an attempt to troll people who would pick UV right out the gate, because especially ammo was at such a premium, paired with a general lack of access to stronger weapons such as the RL - which I ended up looking for in the builder, just to see if there even was one at all in some of these maps... I got the sense that this was either some kind of joke, or that you uploaded the wrong wad, because nothing really seemed to come together. There is also no explanation in either the txt or the OP that could have clued me in on some of the more important nuances of the modifications made. So, when I ran out of ammo several times over my assumption was that I missed some important secret (which fits the bill because I suck at finding secrets), when in reality I just played it wrong due to having no idea what's been changed which way, and how that needed to be considered while playing...

Another contributor to my early confusion, albeit easier to get over, was that picking up dropped weapons would only give ammo, but it's a minor issue....

Anyway, I ended up opting to suspend my disbelief, skipped ahead, played through E3 yesterday and started E4 this morning. Speaking of E4M1, it seems to be representative of several other maps I've seen where I spent most of my time figuring out where not to go before I finally found a route through a map that would ensure I had enough resources and firepower to actually take on some of the key-ambushes in a manner that seemed less dependent on favourable dice rolls or slowly tenderizing meat. Despite finishing E4M1 in about 6 or so minutes as per map tally, it still felt somewhat slow to me. Come the blue key ambush, it was back to rifling down mancubi with a burst rifle, which was "low firepower versus low threat with comparatively high HP", and it just didn't feel gratifying to me personally, partially because it's not my cup of tea in general, but also because I've done that often in other maps in lieu of better alternatives.

What I've seen in the later episodes so far is about as scarce in terms of ammo as the earlier maps, but at least I felt a lot less punished for not knowing how powerful melee combat can be (which rubbed me the wrong way in the E1 maps I played, since I kept running out somewhat often) because maps didn't seem to be as dependent on that compared to earlier ones.

As for the changes to monsters, you're gonna have a hard time finding somebody who likes projectile spam more than I do due to my bullet hell affinity, however, the "drillers" or however they're called seem more like area denial on a delay-by-distance rather than something that lends itself to dodging by way of finesse. At least that's my impression so far based on the density of their patterns. I kinda wish their projectiles packed a bigger punch, but with a less dense "pattern" at medium range.

Another small gripe I have, and this one could be down to ZDoom's default settings, is that the pinkies are extremely hard to spot, which makes me wish they had a delay that was a bit more lenient. I recall several instances where I only noticed their presence when bumping into them and taking damage. The audio-cue when they chomp doesn't seem to leave enough in the way of time to react somewhat often, sometimes they even seemed to still "connect" while I was moving at nearly full speed while colliding with them, or brushing along them.

So far overall:

The punchy ambushes are something I feel rather indifferent about, even though I would prefer that at least some of the more lethal ones came with a weapon that people were supposed to have to begin with (but didn't happen to find because it's somewhere else in an unrelated place of the map).

The "beefyness" induced by mediocre firepower in some places is not my cup of tea, which makes me wish that some of the "high HP to low threat-level" ratio scenarios were either a bit less common or had something to make them feel less drawn out due to being "undergunned". This impression is also exacerbated by the general feel that it's preferable to use weaker weapons for as long as possible, to make sure the better ones are supplied and ready to go when they're really needed.

The overall more aggressive monsters in here are something I'm down with, because I'm all for less bulk but higher threat level. Maybe that's also why instances of chipping away at mid-tiers stick out like a sore thumb to me...

All in all, these maps are some of the most aesthetically pleasing ones I've played in recent past, despite the fact that they don't suffer from extensive "sector and linedef bloat". I am of the opinion that getting cool vistas with seemingly little in the way of "effort" linedef-wise is quite an accomplishment, and these maps offer plenty of this.

On 5/21/2021 at 7:13 AM, NuMetalManiak said:

Just beat it all now. Bugs here.

 

E4M6: Teleport destination 152 only flagged on Hard difficulty, many places to get stuck cause of this.

Thanks for the bug reports, I hope you enjoyed it.

Updated the hotfix to fix this since this makes E4M6 incompletable on Skills 1-3.

Quote

The "beefyness" induced by mediocre firepower in some places is not my cup of tea, which makes me wish that some of the "high HP to low threat-level" ratio scenarios were either a bit less common or had something to make them feel less drawn out due to being "undergunned". This impression is also exacerbated by the general feel that it's preferable to use weaker weapons for as long as possible, to make sure the better ones are supplied and ready to go when they're really needed.

If you have any specific instances you think were exceptionally beefy I'd like to look into making them less so. Pistol start is balanced around some secrets as an attempt to make continuous less unbalanced so that certainly could lead to some under gunned situations like you're describing. The manc one in E4M1 if you don't go grab the shotgun first and just plunked away at it with the rifle for sure. I might put a RL there to solve that.

If this is the actual version of the wad then find my feedback on e2 below:

- UV, continuous, gzdoom with freelook -

Most of my complaints are going to echo what Heels already posted. There are a loooot of mid tiers, a lack of strong weapons to kill them with, and a loooot of sniping monsters which I have to play slowly and kill from a distance. Any group of the cacodemons I found I wished I had rockets, groups of mancs on ledges I had to shotgun down individually. I was aware of the enhanced melee attack and used that as much as I could to conserve ammo so I never had grave ammo problems until e2m5. I ended up not picking up the rl at all on this map because there was no way I was going to have the ammo/patience to deal with the 16 flying monsters which were released after playing slowly through the previous maps. e2m6 was particularly egregious at the start. I sniped all of the mid tiers with bullets so I could save all of my big guns for any encounters which warranted that ammo (luckily I played it this way because there were multiple viles at the end of the map which I used my rockets to kill). Unfortunately my patience ran out on e2m8 and I just cheated to see what the slot 7 replacement was (I really didn't want to kill that amount of spiders without bfg).

I played looking for secrets and found quite a few of them. Blue armors, megas, etc. I have no problem requiring secrets on UV, this is something I really like actually, but the secrets didn't reward me with gobs of ammo or weird fights/areas for my troubles. It is possible I found the wrong ones however.

After watching bemused play most of e1 I was constantly wishing for an early secret rl but we didn't find one. Fighting groups of like 7 cacodemons with nothing but a shotgun and that burst firing weapon really wasn't fun looking at all.

I like the idea of the berserk giving a damage boost and this was basically the most fun I had during my entire playthrough. Whenever I found these it was cool because I finally felt like I could run around and kill stuff as opposed to slogging through mid tiers/sniping monsters with very methodical play.

The burst firing weapon is probably one of my least favorite guns in the mods I have played. I really like the look/feel of the pistol. The chaingun feels more like a side-grade to the burst firing weapon rather than an up-grade. It was nice when I had berserk but otherwise I would simply use it for a slight dps boost when I had to use it to deal with mid tiers in my way. Slot 7 ssg I don't really understand. It seems like it would be more fun to replace the ssg with it and keep bfg - I am assuming that is definitely possible with zdoom but no idea re: eternity engine.

As I said before the maps look great. Just didn't find it fun to play in this iteration.

In E2M3 I ran into a soft lock behind a tree sprite:
 

E3M3 texture misalignment near the exit:

This looks awesome!
I hope this gets a Cacoward.

Eternity users: I fucked up the EDF and this makes the kick nowhere near as useful (it's 64 units in reach instead of 128). This should be fixed in the next iteration of the WAD.

1 minute ago, Altazimuth said:

Eternity users: I fucked up the EDF and this makes the kick nowhere near as useful (it's 64 units in reach instead of 128). This should be fixed in the next iteration of the WAD.

That explains a bit. I was wondering why I was hearing that you could fight Arachnotrons with the kick when all my attempts to do it ended in sadness, haha.

If you want to fix it yourself crack open SLADE, go to the lump EWEAPONS, and replace lines 28 and 29 with:

		KICK EEEEEEEEE 0 A_CustomPlayerMelee(2, 10, 1, none, none, 96.0)
		KICK E 2 A_CustomPlayerMelee(2, 10, 1, none, none, 96.0)

So far I have played most of episode 1 (Around map06, secret level included) pistol start on UV. I've had some problems with the wad:

• Documentation detailing balance changes, additions and recommended difficulty are nowhere to be seen, which made the beginning really bothersome as I kept dying from unexpected enemy behavior and lack of knowledge about my guns. For instance I didn't even know the normal fist had berserk-like damage until someone pointed it out in this thread as a recommended way of dealing with arachnotrons.
• There's a severe lack of resources for what the maps throw at you. It looks as if the maps were given the literal bare minimum amount of ammo to be completed for a pistol start and with little room for error. Even weaponry in some cases, a rocket launcher shouldn't be as rare and optional as it is right now.
• Some secrets feel extremely underwhelming for how cryptic some of these are, and some even require finding the item in the secret room which isn't really obvious in some cases.
• The maps have a lot of hitscanners in open areas that hit you from across the room where you can barely see them, and with the added mobility and projectile speed of the demons makes some rooms a living hell to clear. Example: map01 has an open area where you are swarmed with high mobility cacos and you can barely process this new feature because you get ambushed by imps from behind and if you keep running you just get slaughtered by random chaingunners. Map05 is even worse because it is the entire map.
• I found the sexist gun joke kind of funny but it is really unintuitive. And in some maps they are even placed maliciously to trick you into going for them. The Map02 one was extremly dickish to me, as the two shotguns looks really similar in the world sprite (Seriously, they are really really difficult to tell in the heat of battle and it isn't fun for blind playthroughs)
• For the love of god, the freaking silent teleporters that tp shit right behind you. That's just extreme BS and not fun at all, a cheap shot all around for blind playthroughs.
• Take this one with a grain of salt, but I have to quit after playing a couple of maps because I get exhausted from just finishing one. It feels as if there was no breathing room in some of them (especially map02 and map05), as they have extremely accidental and chaotic setpieces imo (though to be honest I might just be playing it bad or it just doesn't fit my playstyle well).

The things I liked:

• Disregarding the lack of documentation, I do like the changes made to the roster, cacodemons feel really menacing and both caco and imps projectiles aren't a joke anymore. 
• I enjoyed the weapons so far, especially the minigun and the starting pistol.
• The maps look pretty nice, the btsx e2 inspiration is really noticeable.
• The music is pretty cool and fit the maps really nicely

My favorite level so far must have been the secret level as it gave you some breathing room between the normal ones.

I'll try playing the remaining maps and episodes and sorry that I've written this post before finishing it all but all the issues I've had have really been recurring for the whole episode so far.

Visuals like these make me feel a mix of positive emotions and since it's Saturday and I am gonna pull another all-nighter I might as well play a pretty looking megawad because it looks cool and epic.

That is way too many arachnotrons, put some of those back

Started playing this on UV like an idiot. BAD IDEA

Lowered it to hmp and actually had fun. It's still kicking my ass but, at least, it's less bullshit :D 

Cool stuff. 

Btw, on e1m1, it looks like you can strafe from the red key platform to the exit platform. I've not done it, but, it looks possible with some sr50 jump. 

These projectiles really are hellish.

Really cool map but I just keep running out of ammo on the first map by the time I get to the red door. :(